Tag Archives: email marketing best practices

Nonprofit organizations have a unique set of challenges to work with not only when engaging with their audience members, but when collecting donations to help both their cause and to keep them up and running. The tricky part with reaching out for donations for your nonprofit is that you must appeal to your audience’s emotional side.

A donation is an act fueled by emotion and a person’s need to feel as if they’ve done something for the good of others. Nonprofits need to pay special attention and gear their marketing efforts toward more than their cause by addressing this need of their audience.

One of the most powerful ways for nonprofits to reach their audience members is by using several digital marketing strategies—more specifically, email marketing.

Why email marketing is vital

Email is a crucial part of any brand’s marketing strategy but plays a vital role when asking for donations for nonprofits.

Nonprofits often lack the time and employees needed to maintain the organization while also trying to run year-round campaigns asking for donations. Email marketing can help your nonprofit stay on top of daily workload as well as help you connect with your audience in a swifter, more streamlined manner.

Email marketing is vital for nonprofits because it helps:

  • Develop a loyal donor base
  • Create a trusting, lasting relationship with your donors
  • Expand your nonprofit’s overall reach
  • Drive more donations

When compared to other industries, nonprofits have some impressive email marketing benchmarks, including the highest open rates.

Source: Campaign Monitor

When done right, email marketing can drive impressive donations for nonprofits. Read on to discover some email marketing best practices to help drive donations for your nonprofit, as well as a few examples of nonprofit donation requests done right.

Email marketing best practices to drive donations for nonprofits

Before your nonprofit can focus on email design best practices, it’s important to have a solid strategy in place. When it comes to building and maintaining your email lists and sending the best messages to drive donations for nonprofits, here are the key points to keep in mind.

Grow your list the right way.

While this may seem a bit generic, it’s crucial for all marketers, not just nonprofits. Growing a valid, healthy list of email subscribers isn’t an easy task.

Take time to get to know your audience and see where they’re spending their time online. If they’re on social media, then make sure they have access to a signup form on your nonprofit’s profile page. If they find you through your website, make clever use of popup forms or have a designated landing page that allows visitors to sign up.

Be sure you’re gathering the right information from subscribers.

This is essential because it can and will play a massive role in whether your subscribers will donate or not. You want to make sure you’re collecting accurate and highly detailed data so that you can get to know who your donors are.

Knowing this information will then help you develop better communication with your audience members and gives you what you need to personalize your messages to them. Why is personalization so important? Because 78% of internet users in the United States have stated that personal, relevant content helps to increase their intent to make a purchase or donation.

Seventy-eight percent of US internet users say personalized content increased monetary intent.

Source: Campaign Monitor

Always monitor your email campaign performance.

Consistently monitoring the performance of your email campaigns is essential for many reasons, including:

  • It’s the only way to determine the success of a given campaign
  • Provides you with important information on what’s working with your readers and what isn’t

Constant monitoring will give you access to key email benchmarks that you can compare to the industry benchmarks we mentioned above. From there, you can see whether your current content is driving the desired results or not. If they aren’t, then you know it’s time to revamp your campaign.

Once you’ve done the work to revamp your email campaigns, run them through an A/B test to see if they’ll produce the results you want to see before you send them to your entire email list.

Email design best practices

Having a solid email marketing strategy in place to drive donations for nonprofits is only step one. Step two is designing email campaigns that convert subscribers into donors.

Write a compelling headline.

Your headline has several roles in your email marketing message, including:

  1. Immediately grabs your reader’s attention
  2. Describes the content of your message

Statistics state that most of your audience will only spend around 15 seconds reading your email, so you have little room for mistakes. You need to make sure your headline stands out from the rest of your content, as far as style and typography, but that it also tells your readers what the entire message is about.

This example from Charity Water does an outstanding job of making their headline stand out while leaving an impact and making readers wonder how they can “give time.”

Subject: Time to give

Asking for donations – wording the CTA.

Source: Really Good Emails

The right imagery is everything.

Many marketers believe that having the best copywriting is what’ll get your messages noticed and drive donations. However, that’s only part of the puzzle. Including the right imagery can and will make or break your email marketing efforts, especially when it comes to asking for donations.

While the right copy can tell a wonderful story, images speak to readers on an entirely different level. Take this example by UNICEF USA. As a part of their #WaterIs campaign, they included a segment on how water can be dangerous. Instead of telling the story in the message, they included an emotional image of a young child in search of clean water.

UNICEF USA makes use of powerful imagery to compel readers to learn more and make donations.

Source: Really Good Emails

Using compelling imagery goes further than pictures. Nonprofits can and should include a mixture of images, videos, and GIFs throughout their campaigns to help them enhance their storytelling. They should also make use of the psychology of colors to their advantage. Different colors can help in your storytelling efforts and contribute to how your readers feel and react to your messages.

Colors can have a powerful effect on our emotions.

Source: VeryWellMind

Include an actionable CTA button.

Finally, you want to make sure each of your emails features an actionable CTA button that’s easily spotted. While hyperlinking text works in some cases, you shouldn’t use that as your CTA, as it can be difficult to find. Keep it simple by making your CTA a button, so there’s no room for confusion.

You also want to keep in mind that your CTA should be short and sweet and include words that encourage donations for nonprofits. While many nonprofits simply use “Donate now” as their CTA, that can come off as a command, instead of a plea for assistance. Instead of “Donate now,” try using words like:

  • Contribute
  • Give
  • Help
  • Provide
  • Assist

Real-world examples of donation requests done right

Struggling with creating your next donation request campaign? Check out these two real-world examples of donation requests done right to help spark your planning process.

World Disaster Response

In this example by World Disaster Response, a number of design features stuck out, including their use of:

  • Organization
  • Imagery
  • Clear and concise copywriting
  • Two actionable CTAs

Having a quality combination of imagery and copywriting is essential to your email’s design, and the WDR does a splendid job of just that. Their heading stands out, gets right to the point, and aligns with the image used. They go on to include a bit of information before supplying readers with the option to learn more or help support the restoration efforts.

We particularly liked the use of “Support” in their CTA instead of “Donate,” because it doesn’t make the reader feel commanded to take part and plays to the emotions of the reader in a positive way.

World Disaster Response keeps their message short, sweet, and to the point while using a CTA that asks and doesn’t demand of their readers.

Source: Classy

Pencils of Promise

Pencils of Promise stood out to us because of their use of multiple CTAs, all of which compel readers to help. The green color of the CTAs stands out from the rest of the message and, without even reading the message, it’s clear that the organization is looking to build schools and fund education for those who may not have access to it.

From there, they use compelling storytelling to help deliver a message that urges readers to do their part to bring education to those in areas that need it most. How are readers compelled to help? Pencils of Promise place the story into the reader’s hands at the end by stating how their contribution will be put to use and then kindly asking “Will you help?”

 Pencils of Promise makes use of multiple CTAs that compel readers to take action.

Source: Community Boost

Wrap up

Crafting emails that drive donations for nonprofits doesn’t have to be a difficult process, especially if you focus on:

  • Your email marketing strategy
  • Email marketing design best practices

Need help with our nonprofit email marketing? Be sure to check out our Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing for Nonprofits.

This is a guest post from Christine Soeun Choi at Fit Small Business.

Email is the undisputed king of performance marketing. For every dollar invested, you can expect an average return of $32. Yet the inbox is becoming increasingly crowded: With half of US marketers planning to increase their marketing activities, you’ll need to implement a data-driven strategy to continuously optimize your email approach and beat the competition.

This means setting the right goals, understanding what to track, and constantly tracking email marketing performance. From email lists to bounce rates, open rates, click-throughs, and, ultimately, purchases and subscriptions, there are many metrics that need marketers’ constant attention.

Measuring and optimizing email marketing is a continuous journey; it lives and grows along with your business.

In this article, we’ll discuss what you should track, as well as how you can improve your results to master the art of high-performing emails.

Read on for a step-by-step guide on taking charge of your email marketing metrics.

How you can start tracking email marketing metrics

It all starts with your email list(s)—i.e., the audience you’re trying to reach and engage. While at first glance you might feel as though the bigger the list, the better, that isn’t always the case.

You’ll want to maintain a high-quality list. What does that mean? Email lists that include engaged people with up-to-date addresses decrease bounce rates and drive click-throughs up, as you’re reaching potential customers.

When was the last time you managed your email lists? On average, your email list quality goes down by over 20% each year.

What contributes to list decay and churn? People change email addresses, switch companies, or opt out of your marketing communications. Perhaps they’re no longer in the market for your service.

Another factor driving performance down are simple typos. Go through your subscribers and look out for misspelled names and addresses (e.g., @gmial.com instead of @gmail.com).

Not sure how to build your first list? Learn how here.

The metrics you should focus on are essentially all of the key markers of your email marketing performance.

If you start seeing a stark uptick in unsubscribes, spam reports, and bounces, while open rates and click-throughs are decreasing, it’s a tell-tale sign of a poor-quality list. Aim to keep your bounce rates under 2% for high-performing campaigns.

Anything between 2-5% is worth paying close attention to.

While many email software providers can help remove hard bounces automatically, you could try to re-engage your passive subscribers by sending them an email sequence with a special perk, or offer them the option to unsubscribe.

If you’re lacking in subscriber volume, invest in a subscriber growth campaign instead of buying a list.

Frequently used signup campaign tactics include: adding a popup on your website, offering a discount in exchange for an email, and running paid social ads to capture new subscribers. Test to see what works for your brand.

Open rates are paramount to email performance.

With email marketing, you’re tasked with two missions: Get people to consume your content, and then get them to take action (click to read more, book a service, purchase a product, and so on).

First, before they ever get to your email content, you’ll need to master creating persuasive and compelling email subject lines.

Before we dive into the best practices, as well as what to avoid in subject lines to drive results, let’s focus on the key metric of open rates.

What’s considered a good open rate? The short answer is that it depends on your business, industry, and even email type. For example, an e-commerce brand may send a variety of emails related to both prospecting for new sales as well as automated, order-related messages.

Those that contain purchase information are naturally more likely to draw higher open rates compared to marketing content, so you can’t really compare apples to oranges.

A good way to benchmark your performance is to compare your open rates to industry averages. (See your industry’s averages at a glance with our infographic.) According to Campaign Monitor’s original research, the average open rate is 17.92%, but there’s quite a bit of fluctuation once you dissect different industries.

Once you’ve done your research and established your open rate threshold, it’s time to start optimizing towards higher open rates.

The first stop on the journey is to ensure that you look the part. Consider attaining a professionally branded email address that includes your name (or whoever sends the emails and ends with your business name).

For instance, if your clothing store is called Fashion First, your email address could look something like maria@fashionfirst.com.

81% percent of businesses currently use email, so coming across as professional and trustworthy will help you get those coveted email opens, while sending business or commercial content from a personal email address may not go over well with subscribers.

What drives open rates? Besides high-quality lists, there are a variety of tactics used by smart marketers across industries.

Below, we’ve listed popular subject line approaches for higher open rates:

  • Personalize: Include the name of the recipient in the subject line
  • Open with a compelling question
  • Highlight the benefit: Is there an offer? A new product?
  • Numbers drive clicks: Using stats or percentages can help convince the reader
  • Keep it concise, as long subject lines sometimes get cut off on mobile devices
  • VIP access: give your audience an exclusive perk

There are also a few practices to steer clear of, which you can see here.

Driving click-throughs

Click-through rate is the percentage of people who clicked on any of the links, images, or CTA buttons you included in your email.

70% of marketers use this metric to measure the success of their email marketing, and there are many ways to optimize and drive this metric up.

Click-through rates can help you gauge how relevant your content is to your audience—although it’s not always an exact science.

For example, a customer may see your email on a spring sale, not click on the content, but search for your online store later, when they’re ready to make a purchase. Having said that, measuring and optimizing CTRs will have an immense impact on your bottom line.

The more people you have clicking, the more will potentially convert to customers.

Click through rate is one metric you can use when tracking email marketing performance, as evidenced by this CTR graph.

Image source: Superoffice

As shown in the graph above, click-through rates are on the rise. With audiences clicking more, the competition for attention will accelerate, and you need to ensure that your content is designed and written to attract action.

What are the most effective ways to ensure that your audience finds its way to the desired destination? Let’s begin with copy.

When it comes to emails, keeping the body copy short and sweet is the way to go. Make sure you write with a single goal in mind: Emphasize the one message you wish to convey and craft it in a manner that supports the end goal.

Having said that, it’s important to inject your brand personality into your emails, as customers are more likely to buy new products from brands they’re familiar with.

When you’re formatting your content, avoid walls of text by dividing the content into paragraphs, use subheadlines, and emphasize key content by hyperlinking to the destination website.

In addition to embedding links in plain text, CTA buttons are another essential component of email performance.

What are they and why do they matter? Call-to-action buttons, commonly abbreviated to CTAs, are designed graphical elements that look like digital buttons.

They often stand out from the rest of the content in design and color. Paying attention to CTAs is well worth it: Emails with a single CTA can drive close to a 4x increase in clicks and a whopping 1617% increase in sales.

Create them to simultaneously fit your email visually, but make them different enough that they pop out from the rest. Data-driven marketers test CTA performance by creating multiple variations and testing them against each other in A/B tests.

This way, marketers can identify the best-performing variants and scale their use in future campaigns.

Images also play a role in click-throughs, as you can link them directly to the products or services you’re offering. Your images should be optimized for mobile consumption; high file sizes load slowly on mobile devices and areas of poor connectivity.

Some consumers read emails on programs that block images, so you should never include crucial information into the image only, but repeat the key message in the text as well as the design.

Email affects the bottom line.

The final step of measuring the success of your email marketing efforts is to look at the total impact of your email campaigns. How many new customers signed up to your service? How many people bought a product as a result of an email?

Measurement tools like Google Analytics allow you to see a detailed breakdown of traffic sources, including those driven by emails.

The data that details clicks, cart behavior, and purchases can tell you a lot about your email performance and even your product offering. By running and analyzing multiple campaigns, you’ll be able to see trends over time and optimize toward high-performing tactics.

You could try running a product-focused promotion against a more brand-first approach to see which campaign drives revenue. Or, if you’re seeing a lot of clicks but only a few buys, try nurturing the “clickers” by enlisting them in a sequence of content that convinces them of your product or offering.

Over time, they may become more lenient to purchasing as they become acquainted with your brand.

Wrap up

Once you’ve mastered measurement and aligning email activities with your top-level marketing calendar, it’s time to take your campaign and email insights and put them to work.

Tracking email marketing variables (lists, subject lines, click-through rates) in an organized way allows you to get more granular with your strategy. You can start segmenting your campaigns by funnel stage: awareness, consideration, and conversions.

Craft distinct content for each stage of the funnel using the tactics and tips detailed above.

One last thing to consider: you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time you set up a new campaign.

Leverage best-performing pieces of content, such as promotions from previous campaigns, and set them up to trigger automatically. For instance, if you have a high-performing perk email for new subscribers, set it up to send automatically once they subscribe.

You can even re-send the content with a different subject line if they don’t open it the first time around.


About the author

Christine Soeun Choi is a digital marketing associate at Fit Small Business. Currently based in NYC, she has a background in business studies and math with a passion for business development. Outside of work, Christine enjoys traveling and exploring art.

This is a guest post from Lee Savery at Ricemedia. 

When it comes to lead nurturing, it’s important to understand the marketing process. By understanding how to capture the interest of potential clients and produce a sales journey, you can more easily generate existing leads into paying customers.

Often, companies that have a lead nurturing strategy spend less money and yet still generate more sales than those that don’t.

Lead nurturing is soon becoming the most important marketing strategy in 2019, thanks to its ability to guide customers through potential sales and develop strong relationships along the way.

To help you, we’ve put together a holistic guide on how to nurture your leads in 2019 to help you convert inbound traffic into real sales, generate a stronger reputation, and increase brand revenue.

Email nurturing

Email nurturing is one of the best ways to regenerate leads, thanks to its cost-effective advertising strategy and ability to easily automate marketing campaigns across a wider audience.

Email nurturing allows you to formulate a more personalized human interaction with your audience, which inevitably allows you to build stronger relationships with your customers and grow your business in the long run.

As a lead nurturing tool, it can help track the customer journey and create more timely emails that’ll keep your audience engaged, informed, and satisfied.

The most effective way of utilizing your email nurturing performance is to make sure you track how your current campaigns are performing and learn from them.

With Campaign Monitor, for example, the analytics suite can give you an aggregate view into the performance of your overall email marketing program, including geography, acquisition, and engagement per campaign.

With the right tools, you’ll get actionable insights on how to improve your strategy and generate more leads and sales.

Top tips on how to regenerate leads with email nurturing:

Send relevant content that’s tailored to both your audience and the business sector. Understanding your demographic is key to generating content that’s liked and admired by your audience.

By undertaking appropriate market research and tracking audience behaviors, you’ll have a better chance of keeping your business top of mind. With a more relevant business, you’ll organically have more opportunities to show how your business can benefit your audience.

Utilize the use of email and video marketing to increase diversity in your content and track more leads based on who’s watching your videos.

Personalize your content to build a positive relationship with subscribers and boost client-facing communications. This will make your audience feel appreciated, and you can naturally build a sense of trust with readers.

Send regular emails to keep audiences engaged, but don’t go overboard. We suggest inputting a preference center, which will allow readers to further personalize their communications from you.

Track the success of your campaigns to see what works well and what doesn’t. Each business is different: Therefore, it’s important to test and trial to see which works best for you.

Personalizing your responsive design

Although the importance of personalization in email nurturing is key to generating a responsive audience, it’s also crucial to consider personalization beyond your content and messaging.

Creating a personalized experience means your audience is more likely to feel engaged and eager to make purchases. Building a relationship allows them to feel like they’re a valued customer to your brand.

Personalizing your content

A great way to personalize your content is through the use of dynamic content. By introducing a creative and effective planning strategy, you can easily incorporate personal communication into your content marketing.

Learn about the importance of content marketing and how you can include more dynamic content here.

Embrace data

Analyzing data is key to understanding your user. By using tools like Google Analytics, you can track users interests, where they’re from, age, gender, and site behavior, allowing you to craft your content accordingly.

By using tools like Google Analytics, you can track users interests, where they’re from, age, gender, and site behavior and target your content accordingly.

Personalizing your mobile and web design

Another way to offer a personalized experience is to consider the responsiveness of your website or email. If a user is having trouble accessing your mobile site, more than likely, they’ll turn to a competitor who has a more mobile-friendly user experience.

As a result, it’s important to make sure your templates are designed to respond to your user’s device to avoid losing a potential customer. Again, Google Analytics can help track the percentage of users using mobile and desktop, as well as the make and model.

Google Analytics can help track the percentage of users using mobile and desktop, as well as the make and model.

Generate leads on social media

One-on-one interactions are an important part of the automation process and are crucial when considering effective points in nurturing.

Generating leads on social media is a key example of one way you can add a personal touch point to your nurturing process. These touch points are an essential part of accumulating a strong and profitable audience.

By connecting to your leads directly through social media, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, you can add a personal element to your relationship and, therefore, generate a powerful lead toward your sales process.

Social media can also provide some insightful knowledge into your content marketing plan. By regularly checking your accounts, you can gain insight into the content your audience is interested in and possibly gain a better understanding of competitor content.

Another way to utilize your social media presence is by setting up Google alerts for any relevant content that may interest you or your audience. This way, you can easily comment, like, and share audience feedback.

Building a following and interacting with your audience not only encourages them to engage with your company, but it also shows that you’re present and up to date with your marketing strategy.

Automated workflows

Automated workflows can be used to drive customers down a funnel and direct them to the path you want them to go.

A workflow is a set of automated actions that are triggered by the customer—for example, your customer might download a guide or make a purchase through your site.

If you haven’t implemented this strategy already, automated workflows are a good way to nurture your leads without the need to constantly send out manual emails.

For example, on an e-commerce site, if a customer adds something to their basket, but doesn’t purchase, you can set up an automated workflow that will trigger an abandoned cart email.

Additionally, if they bought an item from your site, you can also set a trigger that will automatically send emails recommending similar items. With automation, your leads are constantly being nurtured.

Segmenting your audience database

The biggest aspect to consider for lead nurturing? Make sure you’re targeting your leads with the right content offers. By doing this, they’re more likely to convert quickly.

Segmenting your audience database will allow you to categorize your demographic into groups based on their characteristics, needs, and interests.

For example, there’s no point trying to sell a complex product to someone who’s just discovered your company and knows nothing about your industry.

Lifestyle segmentation will nurture your leads through the buyer’s journey and only share content relevant to them. Ultimately, this will prepare them for the appropriate sales conversion.

Using the tools discussed previously, you can easily build certain client personas based on their interests, age, gender, and location, but it’s worthwhile to spend some time building a variety of personas for your brand based on market research.

With proper segmentation, lead nurturing will be more precise and, therefore, generate more sales.

Track the success of a campaign.

Tracking the success of your campaign is crucial, as it allows you to find the holes in your lead nurturing strategy.

Setting benchmarks can help you gauge whether or not your campaign was successful and where adjustments need to be made to make sure procession is still present in future campaigns.

In lead nurturing, it’s important to make sure you stay on top of campaign reports on a monthly basis to showcase your performance and set up future benchmarks for upcoming campaigns.

Wrap up

To summarize:

  • Use an effective resource for email nurturing
  • Personalize your content to appeal to the right audience
  • Interact and engage regularly on social media
  • Set up automated workflows
  • Understand your users and their intent through segmenting your audience database

Lee Savery is a Content Executive for SEO and PPC Agency Ricemedia, where he supports businesses with their content marketing. Lee is a huge gaming nerd, loves Doctor Who far too much and can usually be found at any Comic-Con event. You can also find him on Twitter: @Leegend90.

This is a guest post from Adelina Benson.

Marketing is an intense field, and marketers are tasked with seemingly impossible challenges, such as engaging plummeting attention spans and growing numbers week over week. 

Plus, there are tons of different options available to marketers, which can be both exciting and challenging in an intensely competitive market (especially one filled with companies all striving to overcome various complications and hurdles). In other words, there’s a lot of opportunity in marketing, but there’s a lot that can be confusing, too. So, what’s the best path for you and your company?

The positive side to marketing is the freedom it provides. No one has a perfect handbook for marketing a company, especially in our current time of nonstop communication. However, most marketers agree that antiquated marketing techniques (e.g. batch and blast emails) aren’t likely to be successful in the contemporary marketplace.

In fact, many companies are shifting to new technologies like AI and social media, and while this can be extremely positive for companies, it could be a mistake to ignore some marketing techniques of the past, especially in relation to email marketing.

Compared to newer technologies, email marketing has been around for a long time, and yet it continues to present a unique and wonderfully rich opportunity for you to market directly to consumers.

Read on to learn about four powerful ways your email list can be a valuable marketing tool.

1. Constantly utilizing segmentation

In today’s world, people are increasingly well-versed in the methods of marketers. In other words, people know when you’re trying to get them to buy something. This can be a complex problem for marketers, especially since each person wants a highly personalized experience.

“The end result of a lot of marketing campaigns is that they can feel snazzy or engaging but they belittle the potential customer or client and make them feel like they are a statistic, one little dot in a sea of other marketing opportunities for a company. This isn’t helpful for any company, but at the same time is incredibly hard to combat effectively,” says Jane Harper, senior marketer at WriteMyx.

The solution to this (very real) problem is segmentation. Segmentation involves breaking your audience into smaller subsets through the information you have about them.

You’ve probably used similar personalization tools on social media platforms like Facebook Ads Manager, but the technology is still clunky and can be fairly costly.

The difference with email marketing is how precise your segments can be. For example, you can decide to break up your email list in a number of ways, simply based on how subscribers interact with your products. All of these specific, company-oriented pieces of data can be employed to create a detailed understanding of your subscribers, and you can optimize your email marketing in ways that other forms of marketing struggle to achieve.

Plus, did you know most consumers no longer trust Facebook to keep their data safe? Learn more about the difference between email marketing and other digital channels by checking out this Campaign Monitor infographic.

2. The element of surprise

One of the other major tools you have at your disposal is the element of surprise. Email marketing, as we mentioned above, is traditional. Because of this, many companies don’t use it to its full advantage. Since other companies aren’t cashing in on email, you have a wonderful opportunity to surprise and delight your audience with fresh, unique content.

Take a look at this example from Pinterest:

This segmented email example from Pinterest shows recommendations based on customer behavior, which is a great example of email list marketing.

Source

Not only does this email aim to surprise and delight, but the recommendations are specifically based on the subscribers Pins and Boards. Something like this could change your customers’ experiences.

If, for example, a customer is accustomed to bland transactional emails and irrelevant promotional messaging, receiving a highly segmented, beautifully written, well-crafted email could instantly persuade them to move through your sales funnel. After all, you’re trying to compel your readers to take action by providing a great experience.

3. The ability to foster relationships

Perhaps the most glaring problem about newer forms of marketing is their inability to create trust with an audience.

Lydia Schwartzman, an email marketer at NextCoursework, explains it best:

“…There is an inherent problem with a lot of marketing techniques: They provide only a single repeatable opportunity to do ‘marketing.’ They don’t foster relationships in the same way you can do through intelligent email marketing.”

If you buy billboard space, all you can do is display an advertisement. It can be clever and eye-catching, but it’s not fostering a relationship. Email marketing, on the other hand, is an on-going communication with flexibility.

For example, when a customer receives a re-engagement email, it feels more thoughtful than promotional, and trust is being built through communication. You can even send an email on a user’s birthday, offering them a free gift as a birthday present.

You might even send an after-birthday email like Sephora:

When doing email list marketing, you might even send an after-birthday email like this post-birthday email example from Sephora.

Source

Notice how the products in the email specifically correlate with the subscriber’s previous shopping data. This type of automation builds a dynamic of reliability and encourages brand loyalty on the part of the customer. Learn how you can scale your business with automation in this blog post.

Email allows you to introduce a dialogue, which is an empowering thing for the average customer. They have the freedom to respond to you with questions and concerns, unlike paid advertisements.

4. A smaller, more optimized data set

With some forms of marketing, you’re forced to send the same message to masses of people. With email marketing, however, you’re talking to a list of people who have already interacted with you and are voluntarily staying in touch with you.

Paying big money for the opportunity to market to hundreds or thousands of people who aren’t interested in your product could be less effective than marketing directly to interested, loyal shoppers.

Want to start building your email list today? This video will show you how:

Wrap up

Overall, the email list is an overlooked asset. Its simplicity means it’s less flashy but often more successful than other forms of marketing. Hopefully, these four tips will make you rethink the value of email marketing.

Not sure how to get started with email marketing? Check out our guide on getting started right now. You’ll learn why email marketing works as well as how you can use it to earn revenue and build relationships with customers.

Adelina Benson is an email marketer and writer. She develops email marketing strategies as well as editing and proofreading. She also works in communications, with an emphasis on innovative use of video. In her free time, she loves to help people reach their full potential.

This is a guest post from Deana Kovač at Point Visible.

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past decade, you’re likely to be (even slightly) aware of the fact that you need to do email marketing if you hope to run a successful business.

And if you’re still unconvinced, feel it might be too much of a hassle, or not worth your time, just listen to Noah Kagan, and you’ll be completely sold on the idea and want to send your first promo email.

But before you start hitting the send button blindly and ineffectively, allow yourself the proper time to prepare for this endeavor. Having put all the right wheels in motion, your list-building and email-sending efforts will yield much better results.

So here are the nine things you need to do before the first promo email leaves your outbox:

Target audience insights

The first question you want to ask yourself is: Who are you targeting with these emails? Because, bear in mind, you definitely won’t want to send the same email to all the people on your list.

Let’s assume you’ve done your homework and you have an established target audience in mind every time you publish a blog post, post on social media, or launch a new product or service.

Now think of the emails and who you want seeing them. Is it a returning customer? Or perhaps someone who’s visited your site but hasn’t made a purchase? Are you looking for new leads only? Cold leads? How cold?

You’ll also want to keep in mind that your blog target audience and your email target audience don’t need to overlap. Neither do your client and email lists need to match in terms of demographics, age, online behavior, etc.

Which is where segmentation comes in:

Segmentation at its finest

Segmenting your list is a step you’ll need to tackle before doing much else.

You’re segmenting your list because you want to give your contacts a personalized experience, rather than a generic email. This kind of messaging will annoy some, interest others, and inspire the rest of your list to unsubscribe.

You can look into different email segmentation ideas, and start from some of the more basic ones: age, location, buying stage. As you get the hang of things, you can slowly start to delve deeper into the specifics and shoot for inactive users, email open rates, etc.

You’re likely to mess up at some point, but the important thing to remember is this: You can always move contacts from one category to another, and you don’t need to cling to your initial ideal. Your leads will appreciate it.

Content and context

Before you send out the actual email, you’ll need to decide on the following:

  • A subject: make sure to A/B test your subject lines and change them around. For example, you can start with [10% discount inside—get yours on time!]. This type of subject is clear about what you’re offering, yet still requires the reader to open the email (and see until what date the discount is valid). Write down a set of subjects for each segment, and test them all out as time goes by.
  • Content: tailor the voice of the email to the actual reader. Add as many custom visuals to it as you can. Like so:

This is a promo email from Colourpop displaying several options to click. Consider using this style in your first promo email.

  • Schedule: will, again, depend on your target audience. Some brands love to send out emails daily (Colourpop being one of them), while others do it once a week. You can go for any interval that works, as long as it works. Again, test and make sure.
  • Unsubscribe: you have to give your target a chance to opt out. Not only does it create a poor user experience to not do so, but it’s also required. And don’t forget to remove this person from the list.

A means to an end

Every list needs to have a clear goal in sight. What’re you hoping to do with it? Are you looking to get more likes on a post you just shared on LinkedIn? Are you looking to get people to buy something? Are you just trying to get them to engage with the email?

When writing your emails, subjects, and landing page copy, make sure you factor in the end goal and the target audience. What would inspire them to do what you want them to do?

If you’re looking to score likes, make sure the link is prominent, clickable, the anchor text you are using (if any, and not an image) is enticing. Your job is to make it as easy, quick, and enjoyable as you can, no matter what you’re asking your reader to do.

But before you actually begin!

Speaking of landing pages…

If you’re sending your contacts to a specific page, make sure it’s optimized first. Is checkout working? Are your products clearly listed and are your descriptions well written? Do your internal links point to other items visitors might find interesting?

If you send readers to a chaotic page (or, worse yet, your homepage), they’ll leave in a heartbeat. You need to make it easy for them.

Make sure there are no typos and errors in the copy on the page, that all the links work, and that you’re tracking conversions from this page. You want to know what you may be doing wrong, as well as what you’ve done right.

Software aids to the rescue

If you’ve come this far, you’re likely already thinking about the amount of time doing all of this will take. Luckily, smart marketers and software techs have solved some of these issues for you.

The easiest thing to automate is sending out all these emails.

You can use ESPs like Campaign Monitor or Buzzstream, for example.

The main thing to automate is the send part. You don’t need to be clicking send thousands of times.

The main thing not to automate is your customer service responses. Sure, you can have general automated responses, like, “Thank you for contacting us,” but you also need to have a human who’ll sift through all that.

Make sure your customers feel like they’re dealing with humans, not robots.

Make subscribing easy and worth their while.

Getting people to subscribe to your list won’t always be simple. You can try pop-ups, paid ads, CTAs, and you can also offer gated content that’ll require a sign-up.

However, making people feel forced to give an email address just to be able to access something will often mean they’ll unsubscribe after they get what they want.

Which is why you need to make them feel like a part of an exclusive club.

Offer email-only discounts, email-only offers, personalized recommendations, tailor-made shopping guides, additional information on your products—anything that you don’t offer on the website, but that can make someone want to stay a member of the club.

Offer email-only discounts, email-only offers, personalized recommendations, tailor-made shopping guides, additional information on your products—anything that you don’t offer on the website, but that can make someone want to stay a member of the club.

Offer email-only discounts, email-only offers, personalized recommendations, and tailor-made shopping guides on your first promo email.

Write guides and articles that you only send to your subscribers, which provide value. No one will read an email if they’re not interested. They might stay subscribed, but that’s not the point.

Rely on mediums other than email.

Marketing your email list through media other than email is also a good practice. Include subscription links at the ends of blog posts you write for others in the industry or to social media blasts and YouTube videos.

Be active on forums and in communities that host your target audience. Start a blog on Medium (which is a sound content marketing technique in its own right) and market your newsletter (or whatever you’d like to call it) there as well.

Naturally, this approach will work better in certain lines of business, so make sure you explore how viable it can be before you actually start doing it.

Lend a helping hand.

Finally, let’s talk a bit about cross-promotion.

If you can find a company that’s complementary to yours (i.e., not your direct competitor in any way), you can easily find a way to help each other out. If you sell shoes and they sell socks, the partnership is only natural.

Not only you can use each other’s lists (not in the sense of taking their list and sending all of the emails, but having them promote you through their own list), but you can learn a lot about the tactics that have worked well for them and try to adopt some of them too.

As new leads start pouring in, you’ll also likely become aware of new target audiences that you haven’t considered before, but are very keen on jumping on board as well.

Wrap up

Let’s recap: Having an email list is important. Segmenting it and personalizing it is just as important.

As with every other marketing tactic, the more research and prep work you do, the better the results should be. Don’t rely on strength in numbers alone—there’s something to be said for quality, too. So, go ahead and send that first promo email—the first of many more.

 

Deana Kovač is an internet marketing specialist at Point Visible, a digital agency providing custom blogger outreach services. In her free time, she enjoys listening to music and singing karaoke. Also, her day just can’t start without a hot cup of coffee.

This is a guest post from Mark Cirillo at Leadsbridge.

Statistics have shown that email marketing can be an effective and proven strategy to generate leads and customers for any business. However, many businesses may not know how to implement it in the most effective ways.

Email engagement is higher in comparison to other forms of communication. In fact, email marketing has a statistically higher ROI and click-through rate than paid advertising.

Email engagement is higher in comparison to other forms of communication

And did you know? The average open rate for email is 17.92%, with certain industries boasting an even higher rate.

Click here to find out the best day to send your emails.

However, engagement and opens are just one piece of the puzzle. The pertinent question here is: will those who read your emails convert?

The average ROI of email is 4400%. But the truth is that not every email you send will get that ROI. Some emails produce better conversions than others.

Read on to learn how to build an effective follow-up sequence to increase your email campaign conversion rates.

1. Welcome email

A welcome email is the first email your subscriber receives when they join your email list. It’s the first point of contact you have with them. It’s important because:

a. Studies show that 74.4% of consumers are waiting to receive a welcome email from you when they subscribe.

b. Subscribers who receive a welcome email show about 33% more long-term engagement with the brand.

Here’s the best part:

Welcome emails receive more than three times the transactions and revenue per email over regular promotional emails.

A welcome email helps you welcome new subscribers to your business. It’s an avenue for you to give them incentives, set expectations, and encourage them to connect with you on your other channels.

A welcome email should contain an introduction that familiarizes your audience with your brand. Let them know who you are and what your business does. Build their expectations with your content and share helpful resources that’ll help them solve their pending problems.

You can package it in the form of eBooks, white papers, guides, blog posts, podcasts, or videos. Encourage them to connect with your social media networks by including links to them at the end of the email.

Check out an example of an effective welcome email from Nomad below:

Check out an example of an effective welcome email from Nomad below:

It looks simple, clear, and concise. Did you notice the introductory part? It tells subscribers who Nomad is and what they sell.

2. Q and A email

New subscribers will always have questions to ask you. Regardless of the kind of content you put on your website, they’ll always want to know more about your business.

Asking your audience questions is a great way to better understand them and their needs. You may want to ask them simple, open-ended questions that’ll help you understand their struggles so you can craft better content to resolve issues.

Try asking your subscribers: What inspired you to sign up? This is a very important question to ask new subscribers because it’ll help you determine what they’re looking for on your website.

You should also offer to help: Is there a particular pain you’re hoping we can help you solve? This will help you to know what they’re struggling with and how to help them out. Other questions you can ask include:

  • How can we further help you?
  • What would you like to improve in your business in the next year?
  • What are you struggling with the most in your business?
  • What kinds of things have you tried to solve X problem in the past?

Another great example is from Canva.

Another great example is from Canva.

They provided common sample questions that their subscribers tend to ask.  They also asked them to reply to the email with similar questions:

It’s a great way to demonstrate your expertise and also provide genuine help to your subscribers.

3. Benefits with the proof

It’s a great idea to let your visitors know what they’ll be getting once they opt in to your email list. You can show potential subscribers the testimonials of your past customers, highlighting how they used your products or services to solve their problems, which will help them to overcome any potential objections about your product. Here’s a great example from Emma.

“Benefits with the proof” emails can be perks that let your subscribers know that being part of your email list was a great idea.

An example of this email in practice is this one from Birchbox, a cosmetics company. It lists the kinds of perks that new subscribers will get when they sign up:

Want to improve campaign conversion rates? An example of this email in practice is this one from Birchbox, a cosmetics company. It lists the kinds of perks that new subscribers will get when they sign up:

Check out the perks they’re offering their new subscribers:

  • Four-to-five free deluxe samples of high-end beauty and lifestyle products that are customized
  • Tips and tricks from the editor of the Birchbox magazine.

These are enticing perks that are designed to keep them coming back for more.

4. Nurturing sequence

As a business owner or marketer, when you nurture your subscribers, you can get up to 50% more sales-ready customers that can make 47% larger purchases.

Most businesses aren’t nurturing their subscribers properly. This is like leaving money on the table. According to ReEngager’s 3/47/50 rule, 3% of your visitors are ready to buy now, 47% of your visitors are not in the buying mood (but they may be in the near future), while 50% of your visitors will never buy.

The problem here is that most businesses focus on the 3% that’ll buy now and neglect the 47% that’ll buy in the future. You have to create a balance here. Focus on the people that are ready to buy and nurture those that’ll be buying in the future.

You can create different types of nurturing emails, such as education emails, emails inviting them to further connect with you on your social media channels, regular offers that correspond to their level in the sales cycle, etc.

When creating nurturing emails for your subscribers, ensure that your content is interesting and helpful.

A good example of a nurturing email is this one from Michaels, an art supply, craft, and framing store.

A good example of a nurturing email is this one from Michaels, an art supply, craft, and framing store.

The email above is all-encompassing.

  • It teaches their audience how to customize the emails they receive.
  • It informs them about their classes and events.
  • It encourages them to shop everywhere.
  • It informs them about their coupons and deals, etc.

Wrap up

Email marketing is a great way to drive leads and sales to your business.

But you have to know which email follow-up sequence will convert for your business. Above are four different follow-up sequences you can use. Each type of email will convert differently, so choose the best one for you. You can also combine two or three sequences together to get the best results.

What type of email drives the best campaign conversion rates for your business?

Want to know more about lead generation? Take a look at this list of 101 tips to boost your lead generation results.

Mark Cirillo is a Growth Hacker at Leadsbridge. He is an eager digital marketer, nurtured by news and strategies of this world, helping people and businesses to build and reinvent their online presence.

This is a guest post from Chintan at InboxArmy.

Email marketing has evolved at a tremendous pace and emerged as one of the most promising marketing channels. Once solely used as a medium for personal communication, email marketing is now used by almost every brand to promote their products and services and build their brand visibility.

According to internet live stats, more than 2.7 million emails are sent every second. This astronomical figure is expected to get even bigger with time.

According to internet live stats, more than 2.7 million emails are sent every second. This astronomical figure is expected to get even bigger with time.  

Considering this scenario, your email must stand out in the inbox if you want to capture the subscriber’s attention and get ahead of the competition.

So how will you stand out and offer that “something new” to your email recipient who might be bored of seeing the same kind of marketing emails every day?

Read on for some tips to help you ramp up your email marketing strategy in 2019:

1. Micro-segmentation

There was a time when subscriber lists were segmented based on age and demographics. With increasing competition, it has become important to go beyond these variables and segment the subscribers on the basis of the customer’s past purchases, total purchase value, products or services searched for, and resources downloaded. This will help in sending tailor-made emails that are more relevant for the subscriber. Furthermore, as your emails are being accessed on different email clients and devices, you need to consider that information too. It is especially important if you are planning to try something new in your emails. For example:

  • It would be a great idea to try fixed CTAs in your email only if you do not have any iOS (Apple) users in your list, as fixed CTAs do not work on those devices.
  • Nintendo sends out different emails according to the interests of the subscribers.

email marketing strategy examples - zelda breath of the wild email

Nintendo sends out different emails according to the interests of the subscribers.

2. Hyper-personalization

Hyper-personalization tactics have given a leg up to email marketing by making the emails more relevant for the target audience. Here’s how you can hyper-personalize your emails:

a) Use dynamic content

Dynamic email content is a unique tactic by which you can update the content when the email is opened. You can consider a number of factors:

  1. Basic demographic information like name, age, sex, etc.
  2. Firmographics like organization name, work address, and industry type
  3. Behavioral aspects such as purchase patterns, browser and cart abandonment, response to different offers, etc.
  4. Psychographic factors like lifestyle, hobbies, interests, etc.

Dynamic email content is a unique tactic by which you can update the content when the email is opened. You can consider a number of factors:

If you personalize by list segmentation, you need to customize the email copy based on the different lists. But, if you are using dynamic content blocks, you don’t have to customize your email copy. You can create different email templates for the various configurations. With a dynamic content block in the email copy, you can send the same email to all your subscribers with different images, product offers, or calls to action, which are modified according to the buyers’ personas.

Consider how Adidas promoted their Originals series through dynamic content.

Consider how Adidas promoted their Originals series through dynamic content.

b) Employ artificial intelligence

Smarter email automation is made possible by using artificial intelligence (AI) in emails. For example, imagine you have bought a mobile phone from an e-commerce site. After an hour, you receive an email that promotes a trendy mobile case and other accessories. It is quite likely that you would end up purchasing those items. That is the magic of AI-powered automated emails that are triggered after a specific action is taken by the subscriber.

E-commerce marketers can reap huge benefits by using AI in their email marketing strategy as Amazon does.

E-commerce marketers can reap huge benefits by using AI in their email marketing strategy as Amazon does.

3. Social media integration in email marketing

You can amp up the power of email marketing by integrating it with social media marketing. And, as a marketer, you must be aware of including links to the social media handles of your business account in the email. You can now add live social media feed in your emails too.

InboxArmy tried this strategy in their email campaigns and the results were fantastic. You can utilize tools like Zapier to add a live Instagram or Twitter feed in your emails. This is a great way to increase organic followers on your social media and also leads to interaction with the subscribers on a platform other than email.

You can utilize tools like Zapier to add a live Instagram or Twitter feed in your emails.

You can utilize tools like Zapier to add a live Instagram or Twitter feed in your emails for your email marketing strategy.

4. Visually appealing email designs

Emails are no longer limited to the column layout with a header at the top, followed by a succinct copy, a couple of images, and email footer. Try a broken grid layout, which has been used in website designing, and gives your emails a complete makeover. Your subscribers may be bored of seeing similar promotional emails all the time. Try defamiliarizing them by designing an innovative email and see how it works for your brand.

Tiffany & Co. presents a beautiful example of how to do this right.

You can utilize tools like Zapier to add a live Instagram or Twitter feed in your emails.

Alternatively, you can also include custom illustrations to create a visually impactful email like this one by Hipmunk.

Alternatively, you can also include custom illustrations to create a visually impactful email like this one by Hipmunk.

Whenever you employ visual email marketing, you should be sure to add suitable alt-text so that your subscribers are able to get the context of the email. You can give a creative twist to your alt-text by using pixel art, just like Pizza Express has done.

Whenever you employ visual email marketing, you should be sure to add suitable alt-text so that your subscribers are able to get the context of the email. You can give a creative twist to your alt-text by using pixel art, just like Pizza Express has done.

5. Gamification in emails

Your subscribers love playing games and getting rewards. This is even possible in emails. Just send out a game in the email and reward the subscriber with exciting discounts and incentives if he or she wins. This is a great way to increase subscriber engagement and will prompt them to buy from you, especially during the holiday season or any special occasions like birthdays.

Channel 4 sends out an awesome gamification email with a fun questionnaire to woo their customers during Valentine’s day.

Channel 4 sends out an awesome gamification email with a fun questionnaire to woo their customers during Valentine’s day.

View the email online here.

Timeless tactics for an effective email marketing strategy

While the tactics discussed above will add an element of freshness to your email marketing strategy, there are some strategies almost every email marketer is well accustomed to. These are the tips that you should follow as a marketer, irrespective of the year we are in.

1. Follow the anti-spam laws and guidelines

Be it CAN-SPAM or GDPR, follow the anti-spam laws so that your emails do not land in the spam folder and there are no deliverability issues. Do not use a single image as the entire email content and abide by the 80/20 text-to-image ratio. Make sure your emails are not too flashy, lest they trigger the spam filters. Also, adhere to the coding best practices and keep the email size under 30kb.

2. Carry out A/B testing

The trends in email marketing are constantly changing. Carry out A/B testing to determine what kind of emails are working for your brand. Keep an eye on the email marketing metrics and make necessary iterations based on the data. Ultimately, trial and error is all it takes to shape an effective email marketing strategy.

3. Test before hitting the “Send” button

In order to make your email strategy work, it is important that there are no errors in your emails. Check for grammatical mistakes, personalization blunders, and coding inaccuracies. Also, test the email on different email clients and devices for any rendering issues. Send the email only after you are doubly sure, and have a checklist to ensure that you do not miss out on anything.

Final thoughts

Email lets you send customized messages on an individual recipient basis, so it’s time to try out these tactics to make the most of this data-driven technology in 2019.

Do you have any other ideas? We would love to hear from you.

 

Author Bio: Chintan is Head of Operations at InboxArmy LLC. He has been in the email marketing domain for the last 7 years. Chintan is connected to InboxArmy, a professional email marketing agency that specializes in providing advanced email marketing services, from email production to deployment. Chintan’s track record of email marketing success covers building email programs from scratch and using data-driven strategies to turn around underperforming accounts.

As a marketer, you want to use each marketing channel effectively to promote your brand. Luckily, marketing channels are not mutually exclusive, and you can use them together. But how do you combine social media and email marketing for the best results?

In this episode of The Email Minute, Shane tells us exactly how you can integrate these two channels to empower your marketing strategy.

Is your email working in harmony with your social media? If not, you could be missing a chance to gain more subscribers.

Hi, I’m Shane Phair, Chief Marketing Officer here at Campaign Monitor, and this is The Email Minute.

Today we’ll talk about the ways you can combine the power and reach of social media with email marketing.

First, use your social media presence to attract more email subscribers.

Screenshot 1 from Campaign Monitor's Email Minute series with Shane Phair Episode #19: Use social to grow your list when combining social media and email marketing

Put your email signup link in your social posts or in your bio, then encourage followers to join your list. This is an easy win, and gaining access to your follower’s inboxes now means you can deliver even more personal messages.

Secondly, target prospects on social media.

This is the second screenshot from Campaign Monitor's Email Minute episode 19 with Shane Phair: Combine social media and email marketing by targeting prospects on social media.

You can target prospects on social media by hosting Twitter chats that answer customer questions or promote gated content.

You can even integrate your subscriber list with social networks. This helps you find social media accounts affiliated with subscriber email addresses, allowing you to put faces to names.

Finally, use social media successes in your emails.

Screenshot 3 from Email Minute 19 video with Shane Phair: To combine social media marketing with email marketing, use social media to grow your list.

Use high-engaging media in your newsletters. This might be an Instagram story or a Facebook image. You might even use a positive social review in an upcoming email series, or share a post from a customer.

Now that you know how to integrate social media and email marketing, how will you make the most of these marketing channels?

Tell me with a tweet to @ShanePhair, or post a comment on our blog.