Category Archives: Email Marketing

Email Marketing will include topics about deliverability, copy, from line, subject lines, analytics, building email address list, and segmentation

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5 Tips to Create Relevant and Engaging Email Marketing Messages in this Week’s Email Marketing Topic

email click through rate source:http://www.egluu.com/blog/Once your email subscribers open your promotional emails, your email messages need to quickly tell them why they should click through to your website and fulfill your request.

Easier said then done!

First, congratulations on getting your email opened. Now, let’s focus on how you can craft engaging content for your email marketing messages.

According to an Email Benchmark Survey conducted by Marketing Sherpa, 68% of firms say delivering relevant content for their email messages is a top priority. However, only 28% of organizations report sending relevant email communications.

If you prepare email marketing messages with the tips discussed today, you will be able to create relevant and engaging email messages that will increase your click through rates and conversion rates.

Tips to Create Relevant and Engaging Email Marketing Messages

magnetic content to help email click through rates source:http://blog.mailigen.com/increase-email-delivery-of-relevant-content/

  1. Be Human
  2. Personalization
  3. Educational
  4. Entertaining
  5. Timely

1. Being Human

  • Write the content as if you are writing an email to a friend.
  • Make the content light and get rid of that corporate tone.
  • Make it conversational.
  • When applicable, empathize with your email subscribers.

2. Personalize your Email Message

  • Use your email subscriber’s name in the subject line or message.
  • Use dynamic content to insert blocks of content that is tailored to your email subscribers personas.
  • In The Definitive Guide to Engaging Email Marketing from Marketo, the guide provides an example where a company received a 175% lift in conversion rates when the company used dynamic content.

3. Educational

  • Teach your email subscribers about your brand’s benefits.
  • Include a testimonial from your customers.
  • Provide statistics about customers who used your brand.
  • For repeat purchases, provide tips in using your brand.
  • No Hard Sells – Hard selling will alienate your email subscribers.

4. Entertaining

  • Your email messages should leave your email subscribers with a smile or feeling good.
  • Even if your email subscriber does not respond to your email marketing message, leave them with something valuable.

5. Timely

  • Tie real-world events or industry news to what is going on in your email message. For B2B email messages, I’ve had success in tying industry news to the content of my email messages.
  • Any upcoming calendar events to mention in your email? For example, since many families travel during the summer, a luggage store may want to send an email marketing promotion with travel tips plus a discount on a purchase.
  • A Word of Caution – Be sensitive if real-world events negatively impact your email subscribers or if your email subscribers don’t participate in certain holidays.

Example of an Engaging Email Message

Recently, I received a promotional email from a colleague about purchasing her household organizational services. The email message discussed preparing tax documents for Tax Day, April 15th, and organizing tax and any other paperwork lying around the house.

The email mentioned the dreaded event and reminds you of something that you have to do. Her suggestion of taking the time to review and organize all your paperwork makes sense, so she plants the idea of organizing in your head. Then, she mentions the offer to hire her services in helping you organize the papers around your house.

How does the example compare to the 5 tips to create engaging email marketing messages?

relevant and engaging email marketing messages checklist Source: http://www.karencioffiwritingandmarketing.com/2013_07_01_archive.html#.UxhA6D-YZdg

  1. The email was human by empathizing with her email subscribers about April 15th.
  2. The email was personalized when it included my first name.
  3. The email educated me by mentioning the suggestion to organize my tax documents and my other paperwork.
  4. The email entertained me by making me happy with the thought of having a nicer home if I organized all my papers.
  5. Lastly, the email was timely by mentioning the preparation for April 15th.

Conclusion

After you write your next email marketing message, do a check like I just did. Identify the points in your email message that comply with all 5 tips to help you create engaging email marketing messages.

Now, you have what it takes to deliver compelling email messages. Just apply these tips when writing your email content.

When you create engaging content, not only will your content be relevant and timely, you will increase your click through rates and conversion rates.

Keep this blog post to to guide you through the writing process for your next email marketing promotion.

For tips on creating engaging subject lines, check out my email subject lines blog post.

Source

Email Marketing Promotion News and Resources

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How To Improve your Email Marketing Deliverability from the Digital Marketer’s Weekly Email Marketing Topic

Get your email marketing messages delivered to your email subscribers inbox Source:http://www.inwise.com/features/send/high-deliverability.aspxSince only 82% of emails from our email marketing efforts reach the inboxes of our email subscribers, Digital Marketing Manager and Email Marketing Managers need to explore how to improve delivery of email marketing messages to email subscribers’ inboxes to obtain revenue goals. (Source: Return Path’s Email Intelligence Report Q3 2012)

Return Path’s report also indicates that 70% of the emails in SPAM folders are actually legitimate emails.

Given these statistics, let’s talk about how you can deploy email marketing deliverability best practices to boost your email marketing performance and prevent your email messages getting blocked or sent to SPAM folders.

Before diving into the details about best practices for email marketing deliverability below, I want to give you some background information to help you formulate a better email marketing deliverability strategy for your brand.

Definition of Email Marketing Deliverability

The percentage of your email messages delivered to your email subscribers’ inbox.

Email Marketing Deliverability Fundamentals

email marketing deliverability fundamentals source - http://blog.campaigner.com/2013/10/the-3-keys-to-great-email.html

  • Algorithmic Filters – If an incoming email contains similarities to an email already marked as junk, the incoming email will be marked as junk. These similarities include email sender, links, or content. Also, if an incoming email contains an URL that is blacklisted by an ISP’s (Internet Service Provider), the email will be marked as junk.
  • Spamtraps – An email address was set up but never receives email.  These email addresses are created by Spamtrappers and set up to catch spammers. Deploying secure opt-in technique prevents you from collecting spamtrap emails.
  • Blacklists – Reports IP and URL addresses that send unsolicited commercial email. ISPs use these reports to block emails sent from these IP and URL addresses.
  • Bounce Handling – Understand ISPs and your ESPs bounce codes to help you manage your email marketing efforts effectively.  Bounce codes are values assigned to email addresses that are not delivered, and different types of bounces are handled differently. Work with your ESP to better understand your bounces.
  • Authentication Protocols – Use protocols to help email receivers separate legitimate and non-legitimate messages. According to Marketo’s The Definitive Guide to Engaging Email Marketing, the most common email authentication protocols are DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), SPF (Sender Protection Framework), and SenderID.
  • Email Receiver and ISP Relations – Choose an ESP to help you manage your relationship with ISPs on your behalf and let them handle email messages that get marked as non-legitimate.

Now, let’s talk about best practices you can deploy to prevent getting labeled as a spammer.

10 Best Practices for Email Marketing Deliverability

Tips to precent SPAM complaints Source - https://econsultancy.com/blog/62852-five-tips-for-reducing-email-spam-complaints

  1. Include Unsubscribe Links in Email Messages – To comply with Anti-Spam regulation, you need to include an Unsubscribe link in all email marketing messages.
  2. Fulfill Your Promises – When you collect email addresses, you make a promise to provide them with timely, targeted, and relevant content that will meet their needs or solve their problems.
  3. Consistent From Email Addresses – By using the same from email address when you send email marketing messages, your email subscribers will recognize your emails and mark them as SPAM.
  4. Consistent Subject Line Wording and Tone – When the wording and tone of your email subject lines are consistent, your email subscribers will recognize your email messages and not mistake it for SPAM.
  5. Honor Your Email Subscribers Requests – Let your email subscribers manage their email subscriptions. If they only want to receive product informational emails, don’t send them promotional emails.
  6. Use Ethical Methods to Build Your Email Subscriber Lists – Verify all new email addresses through a double opt-in email address collection methodology, or you can send Welcome Emails to evaluate the validity of your email addresses.
  7. Regularly Remove Inactive Email Addresses – Review my 4 Ways to Reactivate Inactive Email Subscribers to Increase Deliverability blog post to learn about removing inactive email addresses.
  8. Choose a Reputable Email Service Provider (ESP) – Pick an ESP that have tools to handle email bounce codes, feedback loops, connection optimization, manage complaints, authenticate the quality of your IP addresses, and help you manage your relationship with ISPs.
  9. Manage Your Complaint Rate – If your ESP warns you about a lot of complaints take them seriously. According to Marketo’s Blog 7 Best Practices for Email Deliverability, set up an email address — abuse@your-domain.com — that your ESP can use to contact you with any complaints. Register that email address with www.abuse.net, an anti-spam advocacy group, to show that you take email abuse seriously.
  10. Be Proactive about Monitoring your Reputation – Work with your ESP to create relationships with ISPs to maintain a positive reputation and change whatever it takes to improve your reputation to get your email messages delivered to your email subscribers inboxes.  Both Return Path and SenderBase offer reputation monitoring services.

Call to Action to Improve your Email Marketing Deliverability

  • Develop your Email Marketing Deliverability Best Practices to increase your delivery rates and boost your email marketing results
  • Work with your ESP to deploy your Email Marketing Deliverability Best Practices
  • Visit Next Weeks Email Marketing Discussion: Always being Relevant with Your Email Subscribers
  • Visit the next Digital Marketer’s blog about Social Media including the latest news and updates from social media networks

Sources

Additional Email Marketing News and Resources

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4 Ways to Reactivate Inactive Email Subscribers to Increase Email Deliverability in Email Marketing Weekly Discussion

Inactive Email Subscribers and Active Email Subscribers Source: https://www.responsys.com/blogs/nsm/email-marketing/the-art-of-seduction-3-ways-to-re-engage-your-inactive-customers/To establish engagement with your email subscribers, Digital Marketing Managers and Email Marketing Managers need to maintain high quality email lists. By removing inactive email subscribers, you can maintain a high quality email list, increase deliverability, and establish engagement.

However, before removing inactive email subscribers, give them a chance to reactivate their email subscription, so they remain on your email subscription list.

To be considered an inactive email subscriber, an email subscriber has not opened, read, nor unsubscribed to your emails in a given period of time. Even if they opted-in or confirmed their email subscription, an email subscriber becomes inactive by not opening, reading, nor unsubscribing your emails.

According to Marketo’s Benchmark On Email Performance study, 26 to 50% of emails on marketers email subscription list are inactive.

Advantages to Removing Inactive Email Subscribers

Increase your email reputation with ISPs Source:www.cleansender.com

  • Higher deliverability
  • Lower SPAM complaint rate
  • Decreased costs
  • Increased reputation with ISPs
  • Increased engagement
  • Higher ROI

Currently, email marketers struggle to get their emails into their email subscribers’ inbox. Emails get delivered, but the emails go to to SPAM folders. This occurs when an organization has a low reputation with ISPs because they have a high amount of inactive email subscribers on their email subscriber list.

“In the end, removing inactive subscribers is often the action needed to get your mail back to the inbox and in front of your customers” according to Melinda Plemel of Return Path, an email service provider.

Given Melinda’s quote, it is worth the effort to remove your inactive email subscribers to increase your reputation with ISPs and increase the number of emails delivered to your email subscribers’ inbox.

Before removing inactive emails, give your inactive email subscribers a chance to reactivate their subscription.

4 Ways to Reactivate Inactive Email Subscribers

Example of a reactivate email subscribe effort to inactive email subscribers Source:http://openmoves.com/blog/email-reengagement/

  1. Series of Emails to Inactive Email Subscribers – Explain your email subscriber’s status and give them the option to activate their email subscription or Unsubscribe. You could give them free content or a discount on their next purchase. Make sure each email mentions the risk of being removed from your email subscription list.
  2. Mass Unsubscribe the Inactive Email Subscribers and Send a Final Email – Send one last email and give them one last chance to reactivate their email subscription.
  3. Perform a Telemarketing Campaign – Providing you have phone numbers for your inactive email subscribers, you may consider a more pro-active approach and call your inactive email subscribers.
  4. Deploy Direct Mail Effort – If you have mailing addresses for your inactive email subscribers, you could send them a direct mail piece.

You spend a lot of time and effort to build your email address list, and the idea of removing email addresses is scary and counter intuitive. However, by keeping inactive subscribers on your email list, it hinders your reputation with ISP’s, and ISP’s wont deliver your emails to your email subscribers’ inbox.

The idea of your emails NOT getting delivered to your email subscribers’ inbox is worse than removing inactive email addresses.  Therefore, take the time to identify and remove your inactive email subscribers.

Call to Action in Reactivating your Inactive Email Subscribers to Increase Email Deliverability

  • Identify your criteria of an inactive email subscriber
  • Determine the length of time to be considered an active vs. inactive email subscriber i.e. 2 months or 4 months
  • Consider any web activity by your inactive email subscribers
  • Create and deploy your reactivation campaign
  • Remove inactive email subscribers
  • Marketing Sherpa suggests this process occur every 4 to 6 months
  • Come back for next week’s Email Marketing weekly discussion on Deliverability
  • Come back for the next Digital Marketer Post about getting your target audience to share on your social media networks

Sources

Case Studies

Additional Resources and News Updates

Next Week’s Email Marketing Discussion: Deliverability Best Practices to Improve Reputation with ISP’s and Get Your Emails Delivered to Your Email Subscribers’ Inbox.

Next Digital Marketer Post: Social Media – How to get your target audience to share with you on social media networks?

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29 Ways to Collect Email Addresses to Build Your Email Marketing List in this Weeks Email Marketing Update

collecting email addresses to build your email marketing list Source: http://jimijones.com/blogging/email-list-building-strategies/

Last week’s email marketing update talked about establishing a relationship with your email subscribers from the moment they give you their email address.  Today, we will talk about all the different ways to collect email addresses to build your email marketing list.

As a Digital Marketing Manager, one of your email marketing objectives is to increase your email marketing list with email addresses from your target audience.  There are many different tactics to obtain email addresses, and you want to use tactics that will attract your target audience.  Of the different methods that are available to obtain new email addresses, pick the ones that are relevant for your brand and your target audience.

77% of marketers ask for email addresses on their website according to Marketing Sherpa’s 2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Report.

Extremely Effective Method to Collect Email Addresses on your Website

My favorite way to collect email addresses on a website is to use a floater.  The image below is an example.

Example of Floater to obtain an email addresses From Mequoda Source:http://www.mequoda.com/articles/email-marketing/using-floater-order-forms-to-increase-landing-page-conversion-rates/

  • Looks like a pop-up. However, the floater does not function like a pop-up.
  • Floaters have seen a 20-50% lift in website conversions according to Mequoda
  • Floaters briefly interrupt the user experience, and the user can easily close out of the floater without affecting their experience on your website.
  • Benefit of a floater is that it can appear on any web page where a user enters your website
  • Finally, you can configure the floater to only appear on the user’s first visit to your site.
  • For more information about the floater please refer to Mequoda’s Use Website Floaters to Increase Email Conversion Rates.

Since the user can easily click out of the floater without providing their email address, you should provide additional methods on your website to collect email addresses. Depending on the layout of your website, find the best place where you can obtain the highest number of email addresses.

Different areas on a webpage to collect email addresses:

  • Sidebar
  • Header
  • Footer
  • Middle of Page
  • Bottom of Content
  • Welcome Gate – Instead of a floater, a welcome gate redirects visitors to a landing page before visitors enter your website.

Before moving on to other email address collection methods, one tip:

Find the best balance in placing the right number email address collection options on your website that will not hinder your target audience’s experience on your website.

As a Digital Marketing Manager or an Email Marketing Manager, you should go through all the different options of collecting email addresses and evaluate which options work best for you. It is important to maximize the number of ways to collect email addresses to help you reach your email marketing objectives.

29 Ways to Collect Email Addresses to Build Your Email Marketing List

Collect email address to build your email marketing list Source: http://www.businessonline2u.com/business-information/start-an-informational-product-business-%E2%80%94-step-by-step-guide

  1. Website registration page
  2. Social Media sharing buttons in email
  3. Registration during purchase
  4. Online events (webinars, podcasts, webcasts, virtual tradeshows)
  5. Facebook registration page
  6. Email to a friend for content on your website
  7. Paid search
  8. Blog registration pages
  9. Co-Registration programs
  10. When someone comments on your content
  11. When someone downloads content from your website
  12. When someone sends you a message on your contact us page
  13. Ask your current customers
  14. Via QR codes
  15. Using Twitter’s lead gen cards
  16. Place a link to your website registration page in your Social Media updates
  17. Forward to a friend link in your promotional emails
  18. When someone makes a purchase in your brick and motor store
  19. At the end of an online survey
  20. During tradeshows
  21. During presentations
  22. During offline events
  23. Put an offer on the back of your business cards
  24. Put a link to your website registration page in the signature of your emails
  25. Giveaways (See infographic under the additional resources for ideas)
  26. Incentivize your employees to collect email addresses during sales calls
  27. Ask Trade Associations or local Chamber of Commerce for space on their websites to promote your website registration
  28. Send a post card to your mailing list with a link to your website registration page
  29. Leave postage paid email sign-up cards behind when you visit clients

As you can see, there a lot of ways to collect email addresses to build your email marketing list. Not all of these options will be applicable to your brand, but it is worth taking the time to investigate these different options. Use email address collection methods that make sense for you, your brand, and your target audience.

Happy Email Address Collecting

Sources

Additional Resources

Next weeks Email Update: Maintaining a High Quality Email List

Learn More about Digital Marketing Manager, Cindy Plough

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Take 7 Steps to Start Building Relationships at the Moment an Email Subscriber Gives You their Email Address

Building Relationships that leads to successfull Email Marketing Source: http://www.infogroup.com/resources/blog/inbox-success-3-things-to-keep-in-mind-for-your-next-email-campaignFor Digital Marketing Managers, building your email subscription list is one of several email marketing goals within your overall digital marketing objectives, but keeping a high percentage of your email subscribers engaged with you is another subject. To increase your email subscribers engagement with you and prevent an unsubscribes, you need to start building relationships at the moment an email subscriber gives you their email address.

From the beginning of an email subscribers relationship with your brand, take these 7 steps to start building relationships:

  1. Answer “What’s in it for Me?”
  2. Tell Subscribers what Type of Content you will Send
  3. Let Subscribers know the Frequency of your Emails
  4. Reinforce their Privacy
  5. Inform them about their Welcome Email
  6. Send the Welcome Email
  7. Give Subscribers Choices at a Subscription Center

1. Answer “What’s in it for Me” – Tell them right up front how you will meet their needs if they give you their email address.  Make sure your potential email subscribers can answer the “What’s it for me?” before they give you their email address.  This will decrease the number of unsubscribes on the welcome email because they know you can fulfill their needs.

2. Tell Subscribers what Type of Content you will Send – Inform your subscribers what type of information will appear in their emails.  Will you send product updates, general information, coupons, etc? You may even want to show a thumbnail email example. If they know what to expect, you can increase your chances of them opening your emails.

3. Let Subscribers know the Frequency of your Emails – Indicate how many emails they should receive from you in a week or in a month.

4. Reinforce their Privacy – Let your subscribers become comfortable and build trust in you.  Reinforce that their information is safe with you, and you will not share their data with anyone.

5. Inform them about their Welcome Email – When subscribers first give Welcome Email Example Source:http://sendsmarter.co/13-examples-of-beautiful-welcome-emails/
you their email address tell them that they should receive a Welcome Email. This is a good time to monitor delivery of your Welcome emails.

6. Welcome Email – You should include the following:

  • Thank You
  • Remind them about what they should expect from you and when to expect it
  • Ask them to whitelist your email address
  • Link to the Subscription Center where they control their subscription

7. Give Subscribers Choices at a Subscription Center – When Example of an Email Subscriptions Center Source: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/1804/new-feature-let-your-subscribe/subscribers are logged into your website, give them access to a Subscription Center where they can edit their information, control what emails you send them, and control how frequently they receive emails from you.

By telling email subscribers what they should expect from you, they will start to build trust with you.  By allowing them to tell you what messages you send them and how often they receive your email messages, you give them control over your interaction with them.  Through these steps, you are starting a relationship at the very beginning. By creating a relationship, you create trust and can start conversations, and then, your email subscribers can start engaging with the emails you send and engage with your brands.

Experian Marketing Services just released it’s 2013 Email Marketing Study. Of the marketers included in the study, For Customer preferences, 60% of the companies do not give their customers an option in the types of emails they receive. If you start asking your customers what type of email they want to receive from you, you can separate yourself from everyone else and be unique.

Responses to the “Can your customers select the types of emails they want to receive?” from Experian Marketing Services 2013 Email Marketing Study.

Answers to Can your customers select the types of emails they want to receive? from Experians's 2013 email marketing study Source: http://marketingland.com/study-70-brands-personalizing-emails-missing-higher-transaction-rates-revenue-73241?goback=%2Egde_41352_member_5838131257690595331

If you establish a relationship in the beginning, you can increase your chances of engagement with your email subscribers and decrease the chance of unsubscribes.

Source:

Marketo‘s The Definitive Guide to Engaging Email Marketing

Experian Marketing Services 2013 Email Marketing Study

Additional Email Marketing Information

Learn More about Digital Marketing Manager, Cindy Plough

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Email Marketing Tuesay: 9 Tips on How to Segment your Email Marketing List

As mentioned in last week’s Email Marketing Tuesday, today’s blog post
Segment target audience into smaller groups that are things in common is all about tips on how to segment your email list to create engaging email marketing and help maximize your email marketing results.

As a Digital Marketing Manager, your email marketing efforts may be one of the top revenue generators. Therefore, you want to try and maximize your email marketing results, and one way to do this is segmentation.

First, let’s define what is segmenting. It means dividing your target market into smaller groups where each group have similarities.

Segmenting is near and dear to my heart, and segmenting a target market is one of my favorite things to do. In segmenting, you learn more about your past, current, and potential customers, which I’ll refer to as your target audience. The more you know about your target audience the easier it is to develop relevant content and create engaging experiences for your target audience.

Not sold on the segmenting idea, consider the following:

  • Personally, when I have segmented my email lists, the email marketing efforts received a 25% lift in response rate.
  • According to Monetate’s 2013 Intelligent Email Marketing that Drives Conversions, “Segmented email campaigns produce 30% more opens than undifferentiated messages.”
  • According to DMA’s 2013 National Client Email Report, “Email marketer estimate 30% of email revenue derives from targeting to specific segments.”

Now, I’m happy to share with you 9 tips on how to segment your email marketing list to make your email marketing efforts more relevant to your email subscribers.

Two Types of Segmenting

  • Who they are – segmenting by demographics
  • What they’ve done – segmenting by behaviors or transactions

Segmenting by Who They Are aka Demographics:

  1. Gender
  2. Age
  3. Job Title
  4. Industry
  5. Interests
  6. Company Size
  7. Geography

Segmenting by What They’ve Done:

  1. Collecting Behavior Data – track browsing and searches on your website that lead to purchases
  2. Past Transaction History – past transactions can predict what they might purchase in the future

Next, you are probably wondering where do you get all the information you need to segment your lists. You can collect the information you need to segment by:

  • Asking for information when you collect an email address on your website
  • Ask for additional information during repeat web visits
  • When you have an email address, invite them to answer some questions about them
  • Data Append Services – you can hire companies to provide demographic information or information about IP addresses
  • Keep track of click paths and transactions

Conclusion

Consumers are starting to expect marketers to know about them, so you should consider segmenting and creating personalized marketing messages to engage your target audience and create superior experiences with your brand.

Source: Marketo’s The Definitive Guide to Engaging Email Marketing

Additional Resources

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Email Marketing Tuesday: 5 Attributes to Achieve Engaging Email Marketing

Welcome back to Email Marketing Tuesdays, I have been on a quest to discover best practices for email marketing, and I want to share my findings with you.

What is engaging email? One of the many things I have read includes Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Engaging Email Marketing, and the guide covers 5 attributes that makes email marketing engaging, and the 5 attributes include:

  1. Trusted
  2. Always Relevant
  3. Conversational
  4. Coordinated Across Channels
  5. Strategic

However, before going into details about the 5 attributes that makes email marketing engaging, let’s define engagement.  According to Brian Solis author of  What’s the Future of Business? Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences, “engagement is defined as the interactions between a brand and a consumer, but it is in how it’s measured that counts.”

Now, as you read the details about the different attributes involved in engaging email marketing, think about the actions your brands and your consumers need to take, and then, think about how these actions can be measured.

1. Trusted – To create trust with your target audience, you need to develop and maintain the quality of your list; maintain your reputation to increase deliverability with ISP’s; be consistent in the timing, frequency, marketing messages, who emails are from, and subject lines; and finally, abide by CAN-SPAM regulations.

2. Always Relevant – Say the The crossover between what you what to say in your email message and what your audience wants your email message to say is relevancy
right thing to the right people at the right time.  To accomplish this, you need to segment your target audience and determine what is the most relevant content for each segment within your target audience.  The next Email Marketing Tuesday will talk more about how you can segment your list, so stay tuned!

Two-way communication3. Conversational – the content of your email marketing efforts should spark a two-way conversation between you and your target audience.  You can do this by listening to your audience, adapt to their changing needs, and tell engaging stories.  Segmenting your lists and using dynamic content will help you achieve this attribute.

4. Coordinated Across Channels – According to a recent study by Mckinsey & Company, “E-mail remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than Social Media — nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined.” However, social media extends your reach beyond your email marketing efforts. Therefore, Digital Marketing Managers need to include both email marketing and social media marking efforts in their digital marketing programs.  Tomorrow’s blog post, Social Media Wednesday, will talk more about social media efforts that you can coordinate with your email marketing efforts.

5. Strategic – First, make strategic marketing decisions that comply with your company’s goals.  Second, with the metrics that you are given, formulate a process to determine your Return on Investment (ROI) for your email marketing program.

Some of the above mentioned attributes are not surprising, but some the details and examples out-lined in Marketo’s guide are helpful.  In my opinion, Marketo put together an excellent guide that contains a majority of what you need to plan and deploy a top notch engaging email marketing program.

Remember: Tomorrow, check out the Digital Marketing Manager blog post, Social Media Wednesday, to find out more about the Coordinated Across Channels attribute mentioned above.

Learn More about Digital Marketing Manager, Cindy Plough

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Email Marketing Tuesday: Easy Way to Get Email Subject Lines Plus Tips in Writing Email Subject Lines

Email subject lines are the key deciding factor people take in opening emails that a digital marketing manager should take seriously -Source: http://digitalmarketer.com/infographic-subject-lines-that-command-reader-attention/

Image Source: Digital Marketer

The email subject line plays a large part if your email gets opened, so taking the time and effort to create intriguing subject lines is worth your time. The first thing your audience sees when you send them an email is the subject line, so discover what makes your audience open your email.

For me, writing the email subject line is the hardest part of the email marketing process, and crafting the email subject line is usually the last thing I do before deploying an email marketing effort. After writing the copy, a email subject line comes to mind. According to Mequoda, you can just steal someone else’s email subject line. As a Digital Marketing Manager, I receive many professional and promotional emails every day, and I may consider Mequoda’s suggestion one day.

Currently, when I receive a cleaver email, I file it away in my “Good Copy” folder as a reminder for something that I may want to test. Now, I will create a new folder called “Good Email Subject Lines” to file away emails with subject lines that might be worth testing. In the meantime, let’s talk about some tips to help you and me write compelling email subject lines that increase email open rates.

Tips to Help You Write Email Subject Lines:

  1. Offer a quick and easy way to do something
  2. Talk about the reader’s self-interest – something that is a benefit
  3. Give the reader some good news
  4. Arouse curiosity, preferably related to tips 1, ,2, or all of the above

Since email subject lines play a large factor in your email marketing messages getting opened, you, a Digital Marketing Manager, should take the necessary time to craft the appropriate email subject line that your audience will open. You may get inspiration for your email subject lines from your inbox, or use the tips above to craft a clever email subject line that will make your audience open your email. Whatever you decide, always test your subject lines to maximize your open rates.

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Email Marketing Tuesday: Taking Full Advantage of your Transactional Emails

Welcome to Email Marketing Tuesday: Taking full advantage of your transactional emails by communicating with your prospects and customers. Transactional emails are an opportunity to communicate with your audience via email messages triggered by an action they took or an action they need to take.

Since you only have a short period of time to attract and maintain your audience’s attention, inserting multiple messages in your transactional emails could be an opportunity get emails opened and call to actions taken.

What are Transactional Emails?

According to Mailchimp, transactional emails include messages with content tailored to a single recipient and only to them through a transaction that they made online. Others consider transactional emails as triggered, automated, real-time, or personalized emails.

Types of Transactional Email:

  • Welcome
  • Thank You
  • Bill
  • Renewal
  • Invoice
  • Receipt
  • Order Confirmation
  • Order Status
  • Post Purchase Review
  • Email Address Confirmations
  • Activation
  • Upsell/Cross Promotional
  • Re-activation
  • Website Behavior
  • Event Countdown
  • Shopping Cart Abandonment
  • Forget Username or Password
  • Notice for an update

According to MarketingSherpa, only 40% of  marketers use transactional emails. So, there may be an opportunity for digital marketing managers to benefit from transactional emails. However, I suggest you use transactional emails that make sense for your audience.

Thinking about the different types of transactional emails mentioned, transactional emails contain short messages to keep your audience aware of their relationship with your website. Some contain a call to action like renewal and invoice emails, and others are informational emails.

Even if you are currently using transactional email, your next step in taking full advantage of your transactional emails is including an additional call to action. Below are different examples you can do:

  • For Welcome emails, include a call to action for them to go to your website to check out some tailored content. If you manage a history website and someone registers on the website mentioning an interest in the American Civil Way, send them a welcome email with a link to an article on your website about the American Civil War.
  • For Order Confirmation and Order Update transactional emails, you can insert a “people that bought your item also bought these items” section.
  • For a Reactivation emails, the email message should contain new or updated content that is similar to the last piece of content they saw.

The key to your transactional email is to make the message about your audience and offering them something that is triggered by their action, personalized, and offering them something tailored/relevant to them  in real-time.

Keep in mind transactional emails don’t have an 100% open rate, so don’t expect transactional emails to be the only solution to increasing website traffic or engaging your audience. Transactional emails are just another tactic to keep in your digital marketing toolbox that have the potential to increasing traffic. Also, just like any other digital marketing and email marketing tactic, you should complete A/B testing to maximize the results of your transactional emails.

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Welcome to Email Marketing Tuesdays – Email Marketing is More Alive than Ever

Welcome to the 1st Email Marketing Tuesdays – Email Marketing is More Alive than Ever.

For a while now, the idea that email marketing is dead has been popping up. I beg to differ. You just have to re-think your Email Marketing practices by making them more personal and relevant.

In a survey from Act-On, 75% of the 19,464 marketers surveyed said Email Marketing is one of the top 3 most implemented campaigns, and 45% said Email Marketing activities are the top 2 marketing activities contributing to the sales pipeline. Given this information, it sounds like marketers use Email Marketing, and it sounds like Email Marketing activities are effective at getting customers to start the purchasing process.

In an article by Peter Yared called Email is Now Just Another Stream, he wrote, “Email has been especially important in e-commerce sales and customer re-engagement. For e-commerce in particular, email marketing exceeds the performance of social advertising.”

Also, if Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn deploy Email Marketing messages as a tactic to get you to their social media sites, I think it is safe to say that Digital Marketing Managers can use Email Marketing as one of their strategies to find customers and generate revenue.

With everything said and done, Email Marketing is still an effective digital marketing strategy. The new challenge is continuing to make Email Marketing effective today, tomorrow, and for the next following years.

One of my favorite Email Marketing Strategies is segmenting my customers and tailoring the content for each segment. By tailoring the content of emails, you can make your email messages personal and relevant. I’ve test this strategy several times, and it always performs better than a generic email message.  Don’t take my word for it, test it on your next email marketing effort. You can test tailoring the email message, the email subject line, or both.  Just look at your database and discover how you can segment your email list.

So, it is safe to say that Email Marketing Managers aren’t going any where.  Just like all other aspects of Digital Marketing, marketers need to adapt to their customers needs and deliver engaging, relevant, and personal Email Marketing campaigns to generate results. I look forward to delivering you strategies and ideas on how to deploy effective email marketing campaigns.

Topics you will see from Email Marketing Tuesdays include:

  • Ideas to Test
  • Email List
  • Content including subject lines, from lines, and email copy
  • Different types of Email Marketing efforts like reactivation, shopping cart abandonment, welcome, and thank you emails efforts
  • Deliverability
  • Automation
  • Segmentation

What’s next up on CindyPlough’s Digital Marketing Manager Blog

Weekday Topic
Tomorrow Social Media
Thursday Content Marketing
Friday Mobile Marketing
Next Monday SEO
Next Tuesday More Email Marketing

Have a great day.

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