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.…
Plain text has proven impressively durable despite marketers preference for HTML
When it comes to email marketing, there’s only a few Email metrics that all marketers focus on: open rates and clickthroughs (although they should consider more, like the value generated). Without positive levels of KPIs, marketers often feel like they have wasted time and effort creating an email that no one has seen or interacted with, and that’s a hard pill to swallow.
This is why marketers are constantly trying to find ways to improve on their email marketing campaigns in the hope that something – be it a subject line, content piece, image choice or header wording – will make a difference.
But something that marketers generally don’t seem to change is the format of their email. Comfortable in the flashy world of HTML email design, marketers may be…
Examples showing how to use quizzes to boost your email sign ups
If you've worked in marketing for more than ten minutes, you know that generating fresh leads is the backbone of everything that happens in the marketing world. In this article I'm going to look at how quizzes, those viral, shareable, pieces of content, can be turned into lead generation machines that feed the top of your sales funnel.
To better understand how quizzes can build your email list, we are going to follow the process of three companies whose quizzes combined to bring in 5,570 new email leads. We'll look at the exact method each marketer used to formulate these quizzes and we'll walk away with actionable ways you can create your own quizzes for lead generation.
Step 1. What to make a quiz about
Before you do anything, you need a subject to create your quiz on. To learn more on…
Email Still Outperforms Social Media for Engaging Your Customers
With some exceptions, social media has really poor engagement rates (people clicking links and taking action). And many companies are wasting their precious marketing budgets on an audience that rarely sees their posts, and when they do, is distracted and often uninvolved.
The proof is in the numbers: email campaigns see 50-100 times the click rates that Facebook and Twitter do.
If you’re after traffic that convert, clicks, comments, opts-in, and takes a credit card out to actually buy your product- you can’t afford to ignore the power of email.
Take Max for example…
Max wants to start selling a personal finance product online. He is an incredibly successful financial advisor in his town, and he’d like to share his wisdom with a broader audience.
Max gets off to a good start by writing detailed and informative blog posts that are relevant to his target customer. Unfortunately,…
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…
Examples and best practices for converting your subscribers to click and take action
Continuing my 3-part series on increasing email marketing conversions - Open > Click > Convert, in this post we’re looking at the second step in this process.
This step is the most obvious one you'll want to acheive and often most resource and attention is given to it and if we fail at this step, then we will also fail at achieving our final conversion. The conversion we hope to gain at this step is to drive them to the landing page, where the final conversion takes place.
Leverage the strengths of email and minimise its weaknesses
The aim is not to keep the readers engaged with your email and reading it at length in the inbox, but to convert them to the next stage – the landing…
Converting your subscribers to open and read the email
There are 3 key steps to increasing email marketing conversions and it’s necessary to get each of them right as they can all impact (either positively or negatively) the success of your email marketing campaign. All too often when we talk about email marketing we simply consider the email, however, email marketing is much more than that. There is a 3 step process to achieving conversions within email marketing and all 3 steps are as impactful as each other – so be sure not to neglect any of them! This article is part 1 in a series of 3 covering each step 1 - you can read part 2 and part 3 here.
Step 1: Email Opens
Yes, this first step is an obvious…
The latest research suggests many marketers are missing out on the benefits of automated Email marketing
The Email Marketing Industry Census 2015 from Econsultancy and Adestra shows a slight improvement in Email marketing automation and overall it seems that there are many enthusiastic adopters of Email Marketing Automation.
43% of email marketers agreed they have advanced marketing automated/email messaging functions and 2/3 of the respondents are using' subscription or sign-up to website' emails.
But when you look at the type of automated emails used we see a different story. Although there are steady year-on-year improvements across most types, the rates of adoption are still surprisingly low. For example, one third aren't using 'onboarding' emails when someone signs up. Two thirds aren't using follow-ups based on content viewed on site suggesting their email systems and web content tracking aren't joined up or no rules are in place to trigger these emails.
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Don't fall-foul of these Email Marketing myths
Have you inadvertently bought into an email marketing myth? It is easily done, but you could be losing out.
Email Marketing works differently for different brands and industries, so in this infographic EmailMonks are dispelling the myths that Tuesdays or Thursdays are the best days for email campaign broadcasts.
They have collated 15 myths, backed by evidence, to share how email campaigns can be more successful through companies adopting specific email marketing techniques. For example...
Brands are doubling their open rates by increasing the frequency of their emails and and re-emailing with a change in 'subject line' to lift non responders.
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