Category: Email Marketing

Email has been in use for nearly four decades now. While it’s gone through various interpretations and numerous other forms of communication have arisen, there is still no communication method as strong as email marketing. Marketing teams nowadays are giving a lot of attention to social media, but they sometimes overlook the benefits that email provides. If you’re just getting started with email marketing, you should consider some of the following tips and advice along the way.

Why Email Marketing?

Still not convinced that email marketing is superior? Here are just a few reasons to implement an email strategy:

• Most everyone checks their email every day. You should be targeting people in hope that they’ll open your email and check out what you have to say.
• Conversion rates are high among emails, meaning that it’s more likely for a past customer to return to your site after seeing an email with intriguing content.

You can curate a list of people to email. With a subscribers’ list, you can effectively target specific people, keeping in touch with them, both now and in the future.

Getting Started with Email Marketing

Before you can begin creating emails for customers, you need a list of subscribers to work with. One of the best ways to accrue a list of potential subscribers is to feature a pop-up on your website—one that asks visitors if they’d like to sign up for your email service. You can further entice them to do so by saying they’ll be notified via email about sales, new products, and more.

Once you begin establishing your list of subscribers, you’ll want to move on to finding the right email marketing service for you.

Tip: You want to make sure your pop-up on mobile is non-intrusive and takes up a small amount of space on the screen. If it’s too large on mobile and users have a hard time exiting the pop-up, this could negatively affect your SEO (more info on this here).

Choosing Your Email Marketing Service

Email marketing services are platforms and software which simplify the email process for businesses. Upon signing up, businesses will be provided with an intuitive, interactive interface that allows them to store subscriber lists that can be emailed on command. Think of the software as a means of streamlining the process, where emails can be scheduled ahead of time—like using Hootsuite to schedule future social media posts.

ConvertKit is a popular email marketing software in the business and blogging world. With affordable plans, you can store subscribers, build custom email campaigns, create specific segments and much more. ConvertKit makes it easy for anyone to get started with email marketing. You can check out their services here.

Segmenting Your Email List

Some email management software will allow you to segment your subscribers’ list, meaning you’ll be able to add tags to specific subscribers with available information. Rather than keeping your subscribers’ list as is, you can customize lists with various designations, including subscriber location, preferences, interests, activity, shopping cart abandonment, and more. Maybe you’re sending mass emails to employees or business partners and want to ensure you meet the same tone.

Segmenting makes it easier to target specific people when creating email campaigns for any type of group. Instead of emailing your entire subscriber base at once, this segmentation allows you to effectively email certain groups of people. Examples include sending a welcome email to new subscribers or rewarding with coupons and special deals recipients who have opened past emails.

Improve Email Engagement

Write to the Right Audience

With your subscriber list segmented, you should make sure to target specific individuals from the list. You should be writing to the people you are targeting with each one of your emails.

While you should set the tone and content for the particular group, remember to write the email in a personal way—you shouldn’t be writing to a group but to an individual. This is important to make recipients feel as if they alone were emailed rather than just received a generic group email. Get an idea for what these people want to hear and how they want to have that content provided, prior to sending your email.

Make Content Stand Out

Emails should be interesting. You shouldn’t just be pitching your services and products to recipients with every email. And, even if you are pitching a service or product, it should be wrapped in more interesting, informative content.

You want people to open your email. Consider presenting them with information they might be looking for or a headline that pops and catches their attention. They might already know what you offer as a business, so show that you understand just what it is they’re looking for in life.

Analyze Your Timing

The time that an email is sent can have a serious effect on whether or not it is opened. An email sent during the middle of the night is sure to be missed by a large segment of your subscribers’ list. Instead, consider tracking the engagement of your emails via a “time posted” basis. Consider doing some A/B tests to see how certain timeframes affect the rate at which recipients open emails. With a bit of research and testing, you can find the best time of day to send emails to your subscribers’ list.

Keep Track of Your Data

To make the most of your email marketing campaigns, you should keep track of available metrics to make the most out of every future post. Most email marketing platforms will provide you with metrics that can be tracked to determine the effectiveness of past campaigns.

Metrics you should consider tracking include deliverability rate, open rate, and click-through rate. These metrics allow you to identify how many emails successfully made it to recipients, how many recipients opened their emails, and how many recipients who opened your email clicked on a posted link. These analytics can be used to determine how effective past campaigns were and what things need to be tweaked. Perhaps certain emails didn’t make it to some recipients or maybe some people received them but didn’t open them. What could be the reason? With these metrics, you could start analyzing past emails to see flaws that could be fixed for future campaigns.

Summing Up

Email campaigns don’t have to be complicated. With the right host and a smart strategy, you can effectively reach recipients and keep them interacting with your brand.

Author Bio:

Nick is a digital strategist with over twelve years’ experience in planning and executing marketing plans for B2C/B2B brands. Currently, he’s the Marketing Manager for Refersion, the advanced affiliate marketing platform that helps brands manage, track, and grow their affiliate network.

 

 

 

Are you currently using email marketing for your business?

How important is a welcome email really when it comes to email advertising? It may feel like an extra step that is a bit of a hit or miss in terms of necessity, but the reality is actually quite surprising. Even though it may seem like an unimportant step, the right welcome email can actually be effective in creating lasting, loyal customers in a way that costs virtually nothing on your part.

Where does a welcome email campaign actually get used? Typically, if you have some kind of subscription or membership service, a welcome email is sent out to “welcome” them to the party. The range of welcome emails is expansive. Some are simple confirmations that the signup is complete. Others are elaborate messages designed to promote further action or conversion.

In short, it is never a bad idea to have a welcome email if you have this type of service or any other way people can sign up as a member. While it is a safe bet to have this message, one area that people often struggle with is knowing whether to use an automated drip email sequence or not. Having to reply to every single signup by hand can be difficult and time-consuming, so the idea of automation is attractive from the start. But is it the best approach?

To help you with your email campaigns and to determine if you should be using welcome email automation, here are some of the pros and cons of this strategy.

Pros of Welcome Email Automation

It Saves Time

It is not difficult to see where the major benefit of welcome email automation really comes in. Just like anything else that can run automatically, a welcome email that is sent off on its own does not require any time or effort on your part. This means you can attend to other things after you have crafted the actual welcome message and have hit the “run” button.

Automated welcome emails usually work through online software supplied by a web host or dedicated messaging service. Because of this, you do not even have to waste your time installing and learning new software if you do not want to. Instead, these services typically make the process easy to craft a new message and send it on its way.

It Offers More Consistency

Let’s face it, not everyone can be a prolific writer 24/7. Even the best copywriters have their off days. If you have experienced the need to communicate to customers on a daily basis, you have probably learned that consistency is difficult when it comes to written communication. The benefit of an automated message is you only need to be good once. After that, the message will be sent to fresh eyes each time without any possibility of “being off.”

If you have hired someone else to do the writing for you, this can also help you save money while maintaining consistency. Writing a single message will always be less expensive than hiring someone to maintain that part of your customer communication. This will also give you time to consider the exact details of the message. What do you want to achieve? What is the tone? How should it sound to the reader?

Best of all, many of the online automated platforms allow you to customize the message with details (Disclosure: I get affiliate commissions for purchases made through the link above). You can change basic information like the recipient’s name or get more advanced with things like changing promotions and news. Much of these placeholders are automated as well, so you can set the program to change once and then forget about it later on.

Cons of Welcome Email Automation

There Is Less Personalization

Despite the convenience that automated welcome messages offer, there are drawbacks that make it unsuitable for certain businesses and situations. More than anything else, because it is automated, the welcome message will lose a sense of personalization. Even with the customization many services offer, there is no substitute for a genuine personalized email or message.

Readers are often good about telling whether a message is genuine or just an automated script. Quite often, the tone and content of the message is broader than something personalized would be. The lack of specific details other than the basics like a name are also a good giveaway. Even when you have a lot of customization, it can be easy to tell when placeholders are being used instead of the real deal.

What is the harm of this? It depends on the audience. Some readers are okay with automated scripts. They may even come to expect this type of content. Readers looking for a personal connection with a business, however, are less likely to be impressed. More importantly, they are also less likely to connect with the business. This can be harmful if you are wanting to build a positive relationship with your customers based on a more personal connection.

Conclusion

Choosing to Automate or Not

There is no concrete answer when it comes to whether you should or should not use automated welcome messages. It depends on your business, your customers and what you hope to achieve with the welcome message in the first place. Depending on these things, combined with the variety of possibility with automation, you will begin to see whether automation is appropriate or potentially effective for you or not.

The size of your business and customer base will be the most important thing to consider. If this welcome message is for a membership group or subscription list, the size of these things is important as well. In all cases, the smaller the business and number of people, the more personal things should be. The advantage of having a small presence and audience is you can take the time to personalize your welcome to any newcomer without resorting to a script.

If you have a large audience, however, it may be time to automate. Unless you have employees or the time to personalize these messages, you may find efforts to be overwhelming without automation. If this is the case, be sure you customize the message as much as possible, so you can retain the convenience and personalization a good welcome message can create. More than anything else, do not rely on just a single message without updating and customizing it.

Author Bio

Jim Rulison serves as the CEO for Media Loop LLC (formerly the National Center for Pain Inc). Jim oversees the day to day operations for all lead generation accounts, with a concentration in the healthcare industry. Before joining Media Loop, Jim was the CEO of PME Home Health and was the founder of one of the nation’s first virtual call centers. He lives in Rochester, New York area where he and his late wife raised their two children. Jim spends his free time with his family and enjoying cooking and his two dogs.

 

Are you currently using welcome email automation?

How have your results been?