By
March 17, 2016
Ensure your email isn't unloved, underestimated or untapped
I feel that often, charities are missing a trick or two with email. Due to its ubiquity and apparent cheapness, it is often not given the credit it is due. There are clear merits for charities using email, it is cost effective, it can be well-targeted and can enhance both real life and online experiences.
Barriers for lack of email marketing with charities
Looking at this in more detail, what are the barriers to success for charities running successful email programmes? Some of the reasons for this are:
Email is not perceived as a valuable asset, particularly at senior level, so it is not given the staff and budget required to work successfully.
Lack of joined-up thinking – often the email programme is run by the communications team but the valuable understanding of the audiences is not well understood (as this knowledge lies usually with the services and…
Improving re-engagement emails to help bring a dead email list to life
According to MarketingSherpa, on average, marketers lose 25% of their email list every year. HubSpot have also modelled email database decay and suggest a similar figure if you don't take action. Essentially, subscribers stop engaging with your brand which results in fewer clicks and unsubscribes meaning that the number of active email subscribers falls.
Added to this, the role of subscribed yet unengaged consumers can be crucial when it comes to hurting the inbox placement rates, which can ultimately lead you to spam folders. So, what to do when your holy emails are being flagged as this hex called spam?
Re-engagement emails- the divine jackfruit can act as an elixir to bring your dead email list to life. Due to its inherent specification, re-engagement emails only target inactive consumers that give your email campaigns an accurate perspective.
According to the Stats…
Use these 17 points to check your email service provider has all the features you need to produce fully optimised email marketing campaigns
Optimising your email marketing is no easy task, if it was, everyone would be getting fantastic results from their email campaigns.
A major factor in either facilitating or constraining how effective your emails are is the functionality available in your "Email service provider (ESP)", which today is often called "Marketing Automation" or "Marketing Cloud" services. To help select the best fit of provider based on the most important features or 'functionality', we have produced this handy Email service provider checklist to see if your email service provider is providing you with all the features you need. For members, we also have a more detailed guide for choosing your email service provider.
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[si_guide_block id="39971" title="Download Free Email marketing platform RFP template checklist" description="This guide will cover all the key capabilities of ESPs…
Simon Swan interviews Tim Watson, founder of the email consultancy Zettasphere.
Email marketing – a digital tactic that remains an important channel in any organisations digital marketing mix has come under some negative “flak” with many digital “strategists” claiming that email marketing is dead. Certainly Email marketing has had to re-define it’s purpose and the more savvy digital companies have embraced this channel to help position the channel as a key tactic to support both it’s acquisition and retention strategies
To help shed some more light on the story of email marketing, it’s maturity and new opportunities to embrace this channel, we are publishing Simon Swan's interview with with Tim Watson, founder of email marketing consultancy Zettasphere and a regular contributor on Smart Insights. Use the article to look forward to current trends and how email marketing will evolve through 2015 and into 2016.…
5 all-too-common missed opportunities which you can take advantage of to make the most of the power of Email Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation is a powerful Marketing Technology since it promises better response by sending more relevant emails to your audience in the context of the their interactions with a business. Small marketing teams or even a 'team-of-one' in a small business can potentially do the work that previously would have required many marketers. These time savings are possible by using rules to automate the type of emails that are sent and embedding more contextual content in personalised emails and web pages through dynamic content insertion.
Yet, in my experience from training and consulting with email marketers and as shown by the GetResponse-Smart Insights Email Marketing benchmarking report, many businesses are not getting the full value from the Marketing Automation systems they have adopted.
This post takes a look at some of…
The DMA National Email Client Survey 2015 summary
The DMA's latest research using DBA data shows how email marketing is progressing as respondents expressed an increase in ROI as they are becoming more advanced with their email marketing techniques, through using behavioural and lifestyle triggers. According to the UK DMA Executive Director Chris Combermale,
'Email is the oldest digital medium still in use, growing out of the early internet. Even now, an email address is one of those things that helps define you in the digital world. It has endured because it is so useful. It also works. ROI figures alone show this, rising from £24.93 last year to £38 this year. Email is resurgent.'
Their Infographic shares some of the key findings from their report and explains how Email Marketers top 3 goals are focused on Engagement, Sales and Acquisition.
For more detailed…
Don't miss out on new email marketing tactics
We enjoy the style and content of the infographics from the Email Monks who always share good best practices and top tips for email marketing. Last year, was all about Responsive Design (email design) and Mobile Email. So what's in store this year for the remainder of the year?
Scan the infographic to find out their top 14 email marketing predictions which include email designs which are wearable and micro-targeting, as systems gather data from activity across social media. Please tell us any of your predictions?
Hopefully if you're a member of Smart Insights, you will have seen our Email Trends guide, but if not check that out too, it's a free download for all members.…
10 Email Marketing Experts recommend where to focus
When we ask readers which are the most important digital marketing techniques today, email marketing is always in the top three and getting increased budget in many companies. So, learning the latest email marketing approaches is important given the degree of competition and importance of new mobile email marketing approaches today.
'Even though email competes with organic and paid search for ecommerce orders, it delivers the highest sales volumes than social media or display'
As part of our new Email Marketing Trends 2015: A Visual Guide report we interviewed Email Marketing Experts from around the globe who are successfully delivering email marketing for their clients' brands and they enlightened us to how they feel companies should be maximising their email campaigns this year.
Here's a summary of their insight into their forecasts for 10 trends in email marketing we identified this year:
Trend 1: Simple Email design to work…
Exclusive excerpts from Chad White's new book
You don't have to be...ahem...nearing 50 to struggle to keep up with all the changes in digital marketing. (In fact, life becomes a lot more relaxed once you accept you can't.)
It's why guidelines, frameworks and similar play an important role in ensuring your marketing is based on solid foundations.
For email marketers, Chad White provides those foundations in the 120 best practices contained within the 2nd edition of his "Email Marketing Rules" book. The new edition also has additional chapters explaining the interactions and synergies between these best practices.
Obviously some of those rules cover basics like "Don't buy email lists", but Chad kindly allowed me to pull out other rules that many marketers neglect in the rush to write the next subject line.
1. "Focus on maximizing the value of a subscriber, not on maximizing the results of…
7 key email strategy questions every email marketer should be able to answer
Company owners and marketing directors won't want to get into the details of your email marketing like your click-to-open rates or your deliverability. But in my experience, they will often know the important questions to ask . Here are 7 tough questions that as an email marketing specialist you should be able to answer, plus my suggestions of how you should answer.
7 key email marketing questions
Q1. How do you manage our email strategy?
Good answer
Strategy is determined by a review of all opportunities to improve our email marketing based on marketing objectives. Each opportunity is reviewed against all others rather than trying to evaluate improvements in isolation. As resources are limited, we balance effort between activities that will bring fast return and those are of part of long-term vision and require more investment. Business and revenue value is predicted wherever possible to…
