Including the 5 "must-know" lifecycle segments
I work in client services for one of the UK's fastest growing email service providers. Although I deal with numerous different organisations and people at various levels on a daily basis, in most cases the range of email topics we discuss is broadly the same.
Email FAQs
The re-occurrence of similar client issues and questions means I invariably end up saying the same kind of things to different people in response.
Here are some of the questions clients most frequently ask:
Is email marketing ‘on the way out’ and social media where we should now be investing?
How can we work more effectively with our email technology?
How can we optimise and save time while increasing our email activity?
How can we ensure we are giving our customers what they need at each lifecycle stage but…
Ideas for increasing your responses by using a more human approach...
What would you say if I was to suggest you take account of your target audience when designing your email program?
Actually, you'd probably say nothing... just roll your eyes and find fresh reading material.
It's not exactly groundbreaking advice.
However, the nature of digital marketing seduces us into thinking of the "audience" as a collection of data or unfeeling robots.
So we have segments, samples, cells and clusters...where each email address is a set of numbers, a sequence of letters and a few database fields.
Of course, each email address also represents a human being (gasp!).
Not a shocking concept, I'll admit, but one we often neglect in the way we design emails and email systems. Yet a recognition of human foibles and limitations helps build better emails for better response.
Here are some examples showing…
There's more to social-email integration than share buttons
We know from what happens in 60 seconds in social media that we love to share on social networks. This amplification is what makes social media so powerful. We also know that with so many social updates, getting cut-through with social media can be difficult. Step forward email marketing which still offers reach and engagement. The obvious question; how can we integrate them - can they be "better together"? This was the topic for a recent presentation I gave at the eCircle Connect Europe 2012 event. The full presentation is available at the end of this post, but I thought I'd share some of the great examples of companies integrating social media into their email marketing. Thanks to Tim Watson for sharing some of these with me.
Start with who shares what?
Creating shareable content isn't quick, cheap or easy, you need to…
Ignoring customers will cost you revenue
Marketing emails from major and minor brands alike are often sent from a noreply email address - you will have seen them.
Either quite literally an address noreply@, or the email footer carries a statement like; "Please do not reply to this email, the account is not monitored, please contact customer support at ...". I think there's a lot more to them than meets the eye...
If a shop assistant failed to answer your questions you would shop elsewhere. So why are brands ignoring customers, in their millions, through email and social media communications?
Ignoring customers in social media
Interestingly, the social media marketing world is following the same approach as email marketing. This article notes that only 5% of wall questions from consumers on brand pages ever receive follow-up interactions from the brand.
The key to answering the…
What makes the perfect email call-to-action (CTA)?
The recent post by Kath Pay discussing what makes an effective call-to-action in marketing emails showed how it's easy to get this wrong. No excuses now! Check out this new + useful infographic from Litmus that shows every issue about CTAs you could possibly want to know about.
A lot of the ideas are obvious, but the obvious isn't always obvious, particularly when there are other design constraints. Of course, colour and size get a mention, but did you know there is even a law to back this up; this Fitt's Law states that:
"The time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target".
I also enjoyed the snippet that showed that buttons with arrows encourage more clicks than those that don't - collectively these small tweaks can make a…
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March 8, 2012
Video insights from the MarketingSherpa Email Summit
Just a few weeks ago, I attended the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Las Vegas. I brought along my trusty camera and interviewed most of the speakers and several attendees. Needless to say, these interviews resulted in some great insight on a range of email marketing related topics.
GetResponse ran a contest encouraging our customers to arm me with questions to fire at the influencers at the event. Here I've selected four great (common) questions from average email marketers and four great answers from the videos. I've also created a transcript of the answers for you to scan.
You can view all of the videos here.
Does email still work?
John Caldwell of Red Pill Email answers the question: "Why lately are email marketing campaigns not working as well as they should?"
“It’s not…
There are many excellent social media blogs providing great content to keep you up-to-date with the latest social media marketing trends and advice.
SocialMediaExaminer is one of these sources of great information. So its no surprise they have 47,513 followers on Twitter and 76,391 people have liked them on Facebook, however they have a secret weapon.
In fact this same secret weapon is used by the top 7 of the top ten best Social Media experts as judged by SocialMediaExaminer themselves that they picked from over 600 nominations.
So, what is the secret weapon? Email communications! Whilst their Twitter and Facebook stats are impressive, their email following is bigger at 129,329 people.
They are so keen to have you as a subscriber that the email sign up gets the prime real estate on their home page.
…
Why it pays to review your subject line length and purpose
What we think influences what we say, and what we say influences what we think.
Now what has that got to do with subject lines?
Well, it starts with our certainty that we pretty much know what works and what doesn't. You see similar advice in many places: don't use all capitals, keep it short...that sort of thing.
It's dangerous to rely on intuition and experience all the time
Repeating subject line mantras doesn't always make them right. The fact is, our intuition and experience are not always accurate guides to what works best.
And if you think otherwise, Which Test Won will quickly dispel any illusions.
Consider, for example, Tumbleweed Tiny House Company... when it tested a normal subject line against the all-capitals version, the latter got more opens - not what you'd expect at all.
All caps works for Overstock, too.
And keep…
A call-to-action at the wrong time in the wrong place?
How do you feel when a pushy shop assistant approaches you the minute you enter a shop?
When an email consisting of nothing but a hard-sell call-to-action lands in your customer's inbox, this probably makes them feel the same way.
“Register Now”
I recently received an email to promote an industry event out of the blue:
The “Register Now” link took me to a landing page that contained little information besides ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘where’.
On the basis of this scant information I had a choice - register or leave the page. As I had never heard of the brand or event, I left.
Give email recipients compelling timely reasons to respond
Using "Learn More" instead of "Register Now" might have encouraged me to spend some time checking out the company, perhaps ending in a conversion after all.
A landing page featuring in-depth information,…
Last October I wrote about how to put hearts, smilies and other symbols into the the subject line to make it standout in the inbox.
Whilst there was debate in the comments on that post about whether it made the email look like spam or not, its certainly a technique that many marketers have been using this Valentines. Maybe too many?
My thanks go to Andrew Kordek of Trendline Interactive and Cathy Conk from Netflix for letting me show the examples below. Note how the iPhone in particular shows a coloured heart with 3D effect.
Mobile email version
Desktop email version
Everyone is going ♥ crazy...
What do you think? If you have run split tests using…
