Email Marketing: A Prescription for Success
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Email marketing remains the single most effective strategy for communicating and selling. Getting into the inbox and having your email opened have a dramatic impact on marketing campaigns. Employing automation, solid best practices and bottom-line focused email marketing techniques are the surest prescriptions for success. Learn how to ensure your emails are delivered to the inbox rather than spam Find out why automation is your hidden superpower and how to use it effectively How to keep your audience engaged with your email marketing campaigns for optimal results
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Email Marketing: A Prescription for Success
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Editor's Notes
- Last week, when I got home, I started a discussion with my wife, Amy about some work stuff and the latest technology from Apple. As I got about three minutes in, I could see her eyes glaze over and she started to multitask. What made it worse was all the uh-huh’s she started mumble as I continued to speak. If I was to quiz her on the conversation, she would have failed. But the thing is, I failed to create an engaging conversation. Most marketers are ineffective when it comes to email marketing. They continue to send out messages that do not resonate with their audience, just like my conversations with my wife. We all want to be heard when we communicate, right? We want to be heard when we talk to friends, send emails, post on social media, and most importantly, when we try to sell something to someone. How do we become more effective email marketers? If you have an open mind, I would like to discuss what you can do to ensure that you can and will be effective when using email marketing.
- Why is email the best channel for marketing? Email marketing is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than other channels such as social media, PPC and direct mail. Pew Research: Six in ten (61%) American workers who use the internet say email is “very important” for doing their job 83% of B2B marketers use email newsletters for content marketing. – Content Marketing Institute Before I started working for iContact 7 years ago, I thought email marketing was easy. I mean, you just acquire a list and send emails right? I was totally wrong. I learned so much about email marketing over the years, both tactical and technical , and I am still learning more and more every day. And Marketing Automation is still new and now we see augmented reality starting to grow legs.
- Email Deliverability is one of the most overlooked aspects of email marketing. Experiment: throw ball in basket That exercise was to show you that getting your email in front of your subscribers can be as difficult as it was to get the ball in the basket. Most people think that when they send emails, they go to the inbox and they are read. Well, that assumption is wrong. The biggest challenge is ensuring that out emails land in the inbox and not spam. Think of it like this, the domain attached to the email address you are sending from had something akin to a credit score… Building your credit score takes patience, practice, and determination. Just like making three point shots, like our volunteers did. There are a few things you can do to improve your credit score, and we will discuss them. I will leave the three point shooting improvements to you.
- Legally, you should only be sending commercial emails to people that have given you permission to do so. There is legislation that has been enacted to protect email recipients. With GDPR, which goes into effect next month, you will see more stringent rules. It specifies that commercial email messages can only be sent to recipients who have provided explicit consent and can request to obtain data you hold about them and ask for it to be deleted. GDPR holds hefty fines. 10M Euro or 4% of company profits, whichever is greater. Even thought GDPR is for the European Union, many companies are adhering to the legislation because it email addresses are highly portable and global. You may not know the whereabouts of all of your subscribers. CAN-SPAM Act which was Enacted in 2003 and CASL (2014) - Canadian Anti-Spam Law were designed to reduce the amount of spam people receive. In reality, it really only means that you have to give recipients a way to opt out from your messages, Where the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR May 25th 2018) – specifies that commercial email messages can only be sent to recipients who have provided explicit consent and can request to obtain data you hold about them and ask for it to be deleted. GDPR holds hefty fines.
- There are some cures that we can review that will help you run more effective email campaigns. Let’s go through them.
- Another thing to know about is spam traps and black lists. The number of users that mark your message as spam in their email client divided by the number of users that were sent to. We measure this on a per ISP basis – why? The industry standard is 1 spam complaint per 1,000 users – 0.1%
- Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance I am not going to go over this in detail, because it would be like talking to my wife about tech products, she would glaze over. Just know that there are three technical items that you need to look into. You can check with your ESP or IT department. SPF – this server and others listed have permission Sender Policy Framework DKIM – Uses public and private encryption “keys” to show message was not altered during transmission- Domain Keys Identified Mail – Trusting the message DMARC – What to do if the message doesn’t pass SPF and/or DKIM - Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance – Last chance These are authentication methods that can be set up to optimize inbox placement.
- Believe it or not, what you put into your emails matters. Text To Image Ratio- You need to make sure that you have a good mix of images and text in your emails. Spammers are good at hiding text within images, thus email providers like Gmail and Microsoft score emails with a lot of image very low. They like to see some text. .When it comes to text to image ratio, aim to have a least one paragraph of text to every image. The general rule of thumb is to use a 60/40 split. This means you should have 40 percent images and 60 percent text. Mobile responsiveness Email Size Subject line Pre-header
- Again. I am not going to go over these diagrams, but know that there are complex filters and algorithms that check the content of your emails. There is more to spam filtering than keywords When it comes to sending to business email addresses, they are the hardest to get into the inbox. Corporations employ numerous methods of filtering. They use cloud based software as well as physical hardware to detect unwanted emails. The worst thing is that in this day and age, all of the filters talk to each other and share information. Your email can be blocked based on IP reputation, domain reputation, content, and blacklists. Rules can even be set to block emails that are send from a bulk sender or maybe when someone sends to more than 10 people in their organization. The possibilities are endless Look at reports of people that are not opening your emails. If you send to numerous people in one organization, see if you are having trouble getting emails delivered to the domain in general or if it is only individuals. This will tell you if you are being blocked before getting to the end user or if it is being filtered at the user level and being marked as spam. You can always ask to have your domain or your ESP to be whitelisted. Unfortunately, that is a reality for some recipients.
- •Quality Content- make sure that you provide value and that your emails are engaging. This helps with your “credit score”. By having Consistent Engagement, you will be able to show the email providers and filters that you are sending relevant and engaging emails. Also stay away from words that can be considered spam. At times medical or drug related terms can trigger spam filters.
- •List Hygiene is another important item to help your emails have a better inbox rate. Make sure to look at reports of contacts that are not opening your emails and make a last ditch effort to gain their attention, then let go those that are not responding. Maybe you can call them if you have a phone number to see if they are receiving your emails. Once you know that there are certain contacts that are not opening any of your emails, removing them helps improve your deliverability.
- The US has the most lenient anti-spam laws of any developed country Inbox placement rates are falling in the US – only 73% of messages reached the inbox in 2016. Down from 87% in 2014. Canada has seen a large increase in inbox placement since enacting CASL – nearly 90% inbox placement in 2016 I can only hope that the US enacts similar legislation as other companies have.
- I recently spoke with an iContact client, her name was Gina. She would plan out her weekly and monthly emails, create them, send them, then analyze the data, rinse and repeat. I was able to show Gina how to use marketing automation to make her work easier while running better performing campaigns. After our initial discussion. Gina said: “This is way simpler!” I was intrigued by that statement and asked her to elaborate. She said that using automation is so much better than the way they were set up to deploy their campaigns. Gina had been using a shotgun approach to send out emails and would cross her fingers and hope for good results. By implementing triggered messaging (a message that is sent when a certain action or criteria is met), Gina will be able to schedule campaigns and automate follow-ups with their contacts. She was able to close more deals and make her life easier. Only now is Marketing automation starting to develop a good saturation rate. The technology is still young and there is more great stuff to come!
- Automation will help you convert more and meet the needs of an audience that is more empowered than ever! How many of you open every email you receive? I know that I don’t As a marketer, you need to send the right message, at the right person, at the right time. Marketing automation will help you do that.
- Don’t just listen to me about how great marketing automation is. 79% of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation for two or more years. -Pardot Companies using marketing automation generate twice as many leads as those using just email software. –Autopilot 91% of the most successful users agree that marketing automation is “very important” to the overall success of their marketing across channels. 88% of marketers said that reducing the time spent on preparing reports and analysis, thereby granting more time for strategy and focusing on customer interactions, would be valuable. 79% of leads never convert to sales because of lack of lead nurturing Yet, 65% of marketers have not established lead nurturing On average 51% of companies are currently using Marketing automation. Which means that it is very relevant. Lead nurturing, which is the most powerful feature of marketing automation allows you to personalize email experience, helps build trust, and increases the urge to buy
- Lead Nurturing and Drip Marketing are NOT the same thing. Can anyone tell me why? Make at least one person venture a guess. Which is the best medicine. Drip Marketing or nurturing? Drip Nurturing is the one-size fits all predecessor to lead nurturing. A drip marketing program sends (drips) communications (email, direct mail, etc.) at a specific cadence set by the marketer. But it does not take into account their activity and behavior, making it static and non-adaptive. Lead Nurturing allows you to send personalized communication that is triggered by actions or data. If I was given a choice, I would rather have an effective prescription rather than one that is old and stale! Look at the expiration dates folks!
- An activity could be completing a landing page, opening or not opening an email, making a purchase or visiting a website Date driven decisions are based on the length of time to wait or check for a trigger Automation can be triggered by data such as birthday, date of last purchase, or any other standard or custom data
- You can send an email Post to social media channels or monitor social media Segment your audience Add tags or descriptive information Add or remove audience members from lists or workflows Update or change information
- Most people that have not used marketing automation seem to be overwhelmed by the features and feel that it is too complex to use. The reality is that the benefits outweigh the risks and learning to use an automation platform is not that difficult. Whitepapers Non-openers Lead Scoring Promote webinars Topic Workflows Promote blog content Re-engagement Promote events Renewals or reorders Surveys
- Here is a workflow or automation example. I kept it simple on purpose. You have an audience that you want to nurture. You send am email. You then wait a couple of days and send another. Then you check to see who opened the email and send one version of your next email to people that opened and another for those that did not. You continue to send emails and then check to see if they have became a customer. Based on the determination, you then either add them to a customer workflow or to a re-engagement list to try and nurture them back into the fold.
- If you follow my prescription for success, you will be able to effectively use marketing automation to help you close more deals. The prescription is as follows: You need a strategy You need to plan your strategy You need content for your strategy You need to test your content and analyze your results Take this prescription weekly or as needed.
- Only the ones that love you can endure you. If I lost my wife in under three minutes of ineffective communication, and I like to think that she loves me, you will lose your prospects even faster because they do not have an emotional relationship with you. It is more transactional. Make sure that your message gets through, are timely and relevant. The road to recovery is in your grasp, so get out there and write your own prescription!