Chart of the Day: Do you get your emails approved? How many are involved? (Approval process) - Part 5 of 6
This week in our series, we will be looking at the approval process for our emails. (Catch-up on previous episodes.)
Email approvals are fun. Well, for the people approving the email. For the email marketer, it can be torture. If there was no brief, it will result in many changes. And the majority won't have a brief for each and every email created because only 18.5% do.
How many people generally have to approve an email before it's sent?
In the chart below, we can see that the majority have '3' people included in the process (32.2%), and second has '2' involved (30.8%).
Scarily 8.6% have to send each email to '6+' people to gain approval.
6+ people!
You will find that the majority of those who have…
Use these steps to maximize your email outreach
It is difficult to argue against the benefits of automated email outreach when it comes to online marketing, be it for promoting your blog posts, software or conducting general sales pitches. However, the biggest challenge is to make them look personal. Sending emails is the easy part. The challenge is to get responses from the people we send the emails to. With the sheer number of emails that reach a person’s inbox, you really have to find a unique way of standing out in your recipients’ inbox.
To give you an idea how small tweaks can change the way your campaigns perform, here are some stats:
Research conducted by MailChimp indicates that adding both, the first and the last name of the recipient in the subject of the email can double the open rate when compared to adding just the first or last…
Chart of the Day: Do you test? If not, why not? (Quality assurance) - Part 4 of 6
This week in our email marketing series, we will be looking at testing our emails. (Catch-up on previous episodes.)
While I'm typing this, I'm thinking of reasons why you wouldn't test your emails. And you know, other than being unsure how or what to test, there isn't a single reason why you wouldn't.
Mistakes happen, we are human. And believe me, I have made my share of mistakes - actually some pretty huge cock-ups. That sinking feeling when you realise something has gone wrong. You try to stop the dispatch, but it doesn't matter. It's out there now.
As Confucius said, "table your mistakes, learn from them, then move on." I learnt from my mistakes and now I'm probably one of the most cautious email geeks there are. So have…
Chart of the Day: To code or not to code? (Technology) - Part 3 of 6
We are now half way through our six-week series on email workflow. So far we have discussed Planning and Time spent on tasks. Last week I asked in a poll, "for each email that your company sends, which task takes you the longest?" View our results and find our which task takes you the longest.
This week we will be looking at what companies mostly used for the creation of the emails. There are two options - you can either use an email template or use HTML and CSS coding from scratch. Firstly, let's look at what an email template is.
Email templates - what they are and why you should use them?
An email template is a pre-formatted and reusable HTML file. When you load the template, it…
Chart of the Day: The State of Email Workflows in 2017 (Production Cycle) - Part 2 of 6
We are now in the second instalment of our six-week series on email workflow. Last week we discussed content planning and how correct planning isn't just advantageous to you but your clients.
This week we are focusing on production cycles and how long email marketers spend on tasks.
When this article was published on 26th July 2017, I asked you "for each email that your company sends, which task tasks you the longest?"
The results are in the chart below. We had 43 responses and the results are very interesting. We see that 32.56% of you find that copywriting takes the longest. This is really encouraging that copywriting is in first place. It means that more thought is being focused on the content,…
Chart of the Day: How email marketers plan email marketing campaigns (Email Workflow) - Part 1 of 6
What process do you use to send your emails? What is your workflow? Well, I'm here to tell you about best practices from start to finish.
Planning
Time spent on tasks
Technology
Quality assurance
Approvals
Sending
For today's chart, I'm starting at the beginning of the email journey - the planning. I have mentioned before that planning is one of the most important tasks to complete before work should begin. I know sometimes it isn't possible because of demanding senior leadership, clients etc. But it's something we should all strive for.
So let's stop procrastinating and get on with our planning.
Calendar
We all need a calendar for scheduling email dispatches. How you use that calendar depends on your…
Chart of the Day: Email Personalization in 2017
Dynamic content is broadly viewed as highly effective in the world of email marketing. For anyone not sure what this buzzword means:
Dynamic content involves a web page or email communication that is created in real time, often with reference to a database query, in response to a user request.
In the chart below, we see that dynamic content in email marketing is the most effective of personalization tactics. But what is interesting is taht personalized email content based on software/machine learning is 58% effective. People are capitalizing on using machine learning to deliver highly relevant content to marketing emails. This is definitely a trend to look out for.
Want to start to personalize your emails? Find out how in our article; 1 to 1 dynamic content personalisation is the future of email marketing.
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A case study in how to reduce the time spent preparing and deploying brand emails.
Most ecommerce retailers run a permutation of some or all of the following platforms and systems; ecommerce software, CMS, CRM and each of them store valuable data about their customers or products. This data can and should be leveraged in your marketing endeavors. Today, we’ll let you know how fashion retailer Brandshop did just that using the ExpertSender platform.
Brandshop is a Russian multi-channel (online and offline) fashion retailer that sells a wide range of products from over 100 world famous brands, including clothing, accessories, footwear, and beauty products.
Problem: Brandshop wanted to save their marketing team some serious time in the email creative creation process. They wanted to find a way to make use of their extensive website content library within their email campaigns to drive sales…
A short tutorial and example showing how to track your email marketing campaigns by tagging links in your email with Google Analytics
I was prompted to write this how-to post since some email marketers I speak to during Email Marketing training courses, use Google Analytics, but weren't aware it can be used for email tracking "beyond the click". This means that as well as getting reporting in your email marketing system on opens and clicks for your sends, you can also isolate visits from email in your Google Analytics to see which pages are viewed and whether visitors convert.To set this up email tracking you will need to tag your email with 'Google Analytics campaign tracking codes as explained later with the example in this article.
Once you're using tracking, Google Analytics segments can be used to isolate visitors referred from email to understand their preferences and behaviours. This really helps prove the value of…
Chart of the Day: Understanding subscriber loyalty - Part 2 of 2
This is the last of a two-part blog, covering subscriber loyalty and unsubscribing following on from - What is a good Unsubscribe Rate?
We all know about click-to-open (CTO) metrics and even click-through-rate (CTR), but what the heck is unsubscribe-to-open (UTO)?
UTO, is a good indication of how unsatisfied a customer is with your email. They are the customers, who open your email but promptly unsubscribe.
If your Email Service Provider (ESP) doesn't offer this statistic in your reporting, you can calculate it yourself.
(Total Unsubscribe/Opt-Outs ÷ Unique Opens) × 100
Eg: (20 ÷ 359) × 100 = 5.57%
Is this UTO rate good or bad? In today's chart, it shows that the average UTO is 2.59%. So the above example is performing rather poorly. The sector with the highest UTO rates is Sales/Marketing/Design at 4.89%. While the best performing is Public Relations at…
