15 techniques to grow your email subscribers
It's often easy to neglect your email list when there's a push to grow fans and followers on the social networks. But it's worth working on boosting email subscriptions too since email subscribers often have a strong level of trust in your content and brand. It's also easier to target them more easily with relevant offers based on their preferences and past behaviour. It’s often your email subscribers who convert to sale at a much higher rate than other sources of web traffic; they are most likely a significant segment of your buyers.
It makes sense to focus on getting sign-ups to an email list. "Traffic" is less useful unless you're confident of the source and that you can convert it, to something. Email traffic is a strong source of warm traffic.
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Email marketing in action. A case study in using something more advanced than MailChimp
I've been a heavy user of MailChimp for many years. And as a tutor and examiner for the CIM's digital qualifications I can see that I am not alone. The majority of my students seem to have experience of the platform and only the very larger brands seem to regularly be using anything else like a fully integrated CRM system for email.
MailChimp has some awesome features. And for companies with small mailing lists and limited resources or technical expertise, it's an excellent first choice for regular emailing.
But it has some severe limitations. You can't really do much personalisation. Sure you can put a first name in and you can use Autoresponders to send specific emails in response to a trigger but they are complex to set up and lack the sophistication of a more specialised marketing automation…
Predict what your email database will do to improve your click rate
The growth in Data Science techniques during the last few years has generated a vast interest in using analytical techniques to optimise engagement on email campaigns. Whether a company wishes to compare the performance of two email templates, compare the performance of multiple email templates or see the association between several characteristics of an email and a single metric, Predictive Analytical techniques allow them to acquire the answers they need.
Below we are going to outline 3 techniques you can implement from ‘getting started’ lists of around 500 subscribers, to highly advanced models geared towards enterprise users.
Understanding Sample Size
For these techniques to make sense, it is important to have a basic understanding of statistical significance and what size of list may be required for your tests to be useful. Very basically, the larger the sample size, the more statistically significant…
Going beyond opens and clicks to evaluate and improve subscriber engagement with your email programmes
How engaging are your emails? It’s likely that you review open and clickthrough rates for individual email campaigns and newsletters, but can you measure and prove how engaging your email marketing is on a long-term basis across multiple emails starting with the first welcome email. Dan Hare showed that it's challenging - he presented data which shows between 50-90% of subscribers may never open or click in a 6 month period.
In this article I’ll show some more advanced techniques we recommend to assess subscriber engagement which go beyond the basic email metrics of delivery, open and clickthrough rates.
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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…
5 trends Email marketers need to stay on top of in 2017 and a couple of things you can safely ignore...
As we move from one year to the next, the heart of (email) marketing remains the same. It is about providing customer-centric experiences. For email experiences, this is the mantra of right message, right person, right time. The closer you get to this the better the results. Each year
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This is simple to say, but has been incredibly hard to deliver. Broadcast email has been so effective because of the high cost and limited accuracy of solutions to get right message, right…
Expert tips for choosing the right Email Marketing Software
Choosing the right email marketing software is tough. There is a jungle of vendors out there and it is often hard to see what all of the vendors exactly do? But before you go out and fire up google for a wild and unsatisfactory search, read on for some crucial tips on the process by Jordie van Rijn.
Jordie is the co-author of the recently published Email Marketing Software Buyer’s Guide, which is officially the biggest research ever on ESP and Marketing automation providers, has some tips for companies starting their selection.
The right order: No cups of coffee based on gut-feeling
Doing through the process in the right order is very important in a selection. The first step is to find out how you will be using the tool. Because only then it becomes clear what to look for in a potential vendor.…
Get more from your data with these answers to frequently asked questions from email marketers
Digital marketers love their statistics and are always looking for that next piece of insight to drive their business forward.
As Data Insight Manager at Communicator, I work daily with leading brands and I’m often contacted by Digital Marketers with a whole range of questions. Below are the three most popular questions I’m asked, with some actionable tips to help you make more impact.
Question 1: The big one! “When is the right time to send my emails?”
There’s no simple answer to this. As you can appreciate from the sheer scale of differences in businesses, brands, customers and even the devices they use, there’s (unfortunately) no one size fits all approach.
The send time is a vital piece of email campaign building which is often overlooked. After you’ve built countless emails, chosen your images and text then proof read…
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…
A new tool from Gmail lets you see what Gmail and its users think of your email based on a reputation score and spam reporting levels. Follow Tim Watson's tutorial for how to use it.
It’s no secret to email marketers that the major ISPs create reputation scores for email senders and that a good reputation is fundamental to getting delivered to the inbox.
Until now you had no way of knowing your Gmail reputation score. Getting to the inbox has felt like ten pin bowling with a curtain in front of the pins.
But over the summer Gmail made available a free tool for senders to obtain data on their own reputation. Finally you can know what Gmail users think of your email.
I’ll cover in a minute how to sign up to see your own stats, but first a quick summary of why you’ll want to do this.
Access gives you reports for…
