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August 16, 2016
5 tactics for more engaging email in 2016
Email is the most misunderstood tactic in marketing. We’ve all heard the oft-referenced statistic that email’s ROI can be as much as $130 per dollar spent. That idea gave rise to the perception that email is a cheap, easy way to generate high returns. And that’s why so many brands treat email as a money button: Press send, get cash.
Of course, that attitude doesn’t leave much room for creativity. Email does present enormous earning potential, but that potential often remains untapped because so many marketers are stuck in 1999. They see email as merely a workhorse moneymaker instead of a source of inspiration and brand engagement.
Email strategies can do more than serve marketers. When done well, they can also serve their recipients. For example, after I bought a Karma Go, I started using the hotspot device like crazy. After a number of…
Simple messaging, clean design and the use of white space to steer the eye are key to effective email designs.
While many companies do email marketing effectively, the ones that don’t often are slow to learn from their mistakes. Companies will spend big marketing budgets only to be disappointed with their results, and are often left unaware of what went wrong with the campaign. One key to getting your email marketing campaign right, is to have a full understanding of what exactly people find or do not find engaging with your emails.
Easy SMTP and EyeQuant teamed up together to evaluate a number of different email marketing campaigns using their heat map software. They used the results of their evaluations and created an infographic which you can see below.
The heat map analysis allowed them to understand how customers are engaging or not engaging with their emails. As you can see in the…
How to deliver successful email campaigns with little or no HTML knowledge
Email campaigns tend to be the bread and butter of what marketers do. They typically have high conversion rates compared to other marketing channels and are a quick and easy way to stay in touch with your contact lists. However, marketing staff are spending way too much time developing emails and not enough time focusing on activities that will give them a better ROI, such as future planning and developing successful data practices (according to the 2016 Email Industry Census).
How long does it typically take for your staff, or you, to build an email?
In Litmus’ ‘State of Email Production’ report the answers ranged from a few days to between one and two weeks, with 64% of participants being more likely to spend weeks rather than days. That’s a lot of time invested in something that will take…
Make sure you remember your target audience aren't always like you. Write emails for them, not you.
I collect first names on my newsletter sign-up form, but I never use them.
[Cue embarrassed silence and nervous shuffling among the experts out there.]
Yes, it’s an email marketing no-no. The extra form field hurts sign-up rates and it raises expectations that subsequent emails will be personalized more than they are. The survival of my “first name” field is partly down to the delusion that I’ll bite the personalization bullet “sometime soon”.
Call me a database coward. But it also survives because seeing those first names acts as a necessary reminder that my emails go to, um, human beings. As in many online industries, the idea that the audience actually includes sentient beings is often trampled into oblivion by our technology focus and the words that go with it:
Targets, segments, cells, addresses, clusters, groups, samples, lists, databases,…
Write better copy to get better results
I once had a tarantula walk over my hand. The experience comes to mind every time I face a blank piece of paper. A rising sense of panic…paralysis…a prickle of sweat. Sound familiar? So I thought I’d share the practical tricks I use to write email marketing copy. Not so much the intricacies of word choice or paragraph structure, but the process of actually getting the job done and done well. Your tips are also welcome!
1. Define the recipient
The writing process needs a framework to proceed in: a real or implicit briefing…the whos, whats and whys of the task. Who will get this email and in what context? Have they undertaken some specific action (like registered for an event)? When will they get the email?
How does this email fit, conceptually and in terms of timing, with other emails or related marketing campaigns…
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June 20, 2016
How to best use punctuation in email marketing campaigns
Is the smartphone really killing off the period as a punctuation mark for texters? A recent story in the Washington Post says it is.
Where the full stop once marked the end of a sentence, the simple line break now claims that role in texting. The stop itself has evolved into a shorthand symbol that charges an otherwise innocuous sentence with deeper meaning, such as anger. It's less obvious than emoji and takes fewer taps on the keyboard.
That made us think (because we think about email all the time) about subject lines with stops at the end. Do they help or hurt opens, clicks and deliverability? And what about other punctuation marks? Do question marks really drive more traffic? And what’s the deal with exclamation marks?
To get some definitive answers, we turned to Touchstone's universe of virtual subscribers to see what impact punctuation…
Use these 5 ideas to give your promotional emails a boost
Promotional email is a powerful channel when it comes to driving e-commerce sales - the Custora Ecommerce Pulse shows marketing emails are the third biggest driver of online sales after Search marketing. This makes it the biggest driver for customer sales and way ahead of social media But, sadly, most email marketers aren't making the most out of this channel.
When it comes to creating these campaigns, most marketers spend a lot of time on the design and copy of these emails. Though this is a good approach and will yield good results, this will only get you so far. If you don’t know what compels your recipients to click through and buy your products, you're not going to get the desired results.
To find out which elements work for your audience and which are unsuccessful, you need to A/B test…
With the majority of email now read on smartphones, to be effective, your emails have to stand out from the crowd
There are a lot of boxes to tick to design a successful email. It needs to be on brand, it needs to stand out, it needs to work on multiple devices and it needs to deliver enough value that customers don’t just hit unsubscribe when it arrives. The design also needs to be effective on a mobile inbox. As the latest stats from Litmus on Email reading platforms show, over 50% of email opens are on mobile.
A lot of things can go wrong.
But with the channel still delivering higher ROI than any other – an average of £38 for every £1 according to the DMA - getting it right can have incredible results for your business.
So, where do you start?
Here are 5 key steps to designing an email…
Clear subject lines, personalized content and clear call to actions will boost your ROI from email
Convincing customers to join your email list is tough, but keeping them engaged is even tougher. An email list is of very little value if it doesn’t contain engaged subscribers who look forward to receiving and reading your emails. If your subscribers aren't engaged they’ll never convert into paying customers or those who once bought from you, will not convert into repeat customers.
So how do you craft emails that will keep your subscribers engaged and get them clicking?
Here are three such important components that can turn your email campaigns into an ongoing revenue and engagement generator.
1 - Use creativity and personalization in subject lines to induce opens
The Subject line is the door into your email marketing world. It's the first thing your subscribers will see and it plays a major role in determining whether your email…
CONVERT: Achieving the final conversion on the landing page
This post is the final in a 3 part series (read Part 1 and Part 2 here) of articles addressing how to effectively increase your email marketing conversions – looking at the third and final step in this process.
When planning their email campaign, too many email marketers only plan for the first 2 conversions steps, however, the landing page/website/product page is the point where the final conversion happens.
No matter how successful we are at conversion steps #1 and #2 if we fail at the point of conversion then we have failed. I regularly quiz email marketers as to their KPI’s and the majority inform me that they’re rewarded on conversions (Step #3) – not on opens (Step #1) nor on clicks (Step #2). This article looks at the conversion part of the process and how to make sure you don’t throw…
