Original cartoon found here
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Thursday 26 January 2012
The Golden Rule of Email Marketing
We are the start of what is looking to be a great year for email marketing. Online sales from email are up and it is still the channel that is seeing the highest Return on Investment - a perfect reason for companies to increase email marketing efforts and budgets.
Email marketing isn’t all about the numbers. In the day-to-day work of a marketer it might even be more about the combination of results and enjoying the work. But don’t be fooled, building a great audience and email program is hard work. There is one rule I’d suggest marketers to live by, keeping that hard work doable:
The one golden rule to live by
Enjoy working on your email marketing program.
It is as simple as that. If you enjoy working on your bulk email marketing program it will show through in all emailings you send out. How do you think a recipient is going to be enticed if you aren’t? Going to enjoy reading if you didn’t enjoy writing?
Here are 3 ways to keep the marketing juices flowing and bring enthusiasm to your email program:
1. Get Hooked and get Newsjacking
Marketing is the art of connecting with your audience. One of the ways to connect with your audience is to tap into their everyday life and understand what is keeping them busy. So this year you might want to put the Olympics on your agenda as well as Easter, Father’s Day, Valentine’s or school vacations.
What really gets blood pumping is what is called “real-time marketing” or Newsjacking – a kind of hook on to the events of today. Luckily email and social media are both as quick as you can spell “real-time”. What’s in the papers today can become the subject of your marketing.
Some email tools can connect the website RSS feed to your newsletter templates, making it easy to publish over multiple channels at the same time. Because in these cases, time is of the essence, it requires a flexible marketing team and one or two quick thinkers, tough it can really give you encouraging results and a boost of energy to work on a project like this.
2. Create a goal specific campaign
All email marketers have goals to reach. Even if the goals aren’t written down (yet). Email marketers want new subscribers to sign-up, they want to increase sales or stimulate customer loyalty. Or even measure their impact through the more simple metrics in life such as increasing email opens and click throughs.
Take at least one of these goals and run with it. It is very stimulating to work towards a (new) goal especially if the results can be measured and monitored real time. So for instance; create a campaign that is specially designed to get people that haven’t opened their email in a while to interact. Think about including new and stimulating ‘from names’, stellar subject lines, pre-headers, preview pane design and all elements to re-active that interaction-lagging subscriber. You can just go ahead and make the improvements. But if you really want to know what works best, there are different ways to do A-B testing with your bulk emails. Are you getting some creative ideas yet?
3. Go green
Creating fresh content isn’t about reinventing the wheel. Most companies have a ton of (unused) content lying around and some of that is really good too, like blog posts from a year ago that could have been written yesterday. Check out what evergreen content had some good impact before. There are lots of ways you can go crazy when you have a great foundation.
For example; customer feedback that hasn’t been used or what the top five email newsletters of last year were?
Grab that content, and revive it, make it even better than it was. This is not only very efficient use of your resources, but also very rewarding, because you will almost certainly see the effect.
The one email marketing rule to live by
There you have it. Do you love to create great emails? Maybe not every day. But by adding some juice, a sparkle of enthusiasm and some variance it certainly becomes more enjoyable! So see if you can adapt one of three ideas and don’t forget the one rule: Always enjoy working on your email program.
Article originally published by email marketing consultant Jordie van Rijn on eMail Monday.
Email marketing isn’t all about the numbers. In the day-to-day work of a marketer it might even be more about the combination of results and enjoying the work. But don’t be fooled, building a great audience and email program is hard work. There is one rule I’d suggest marketers to live by, keeping that hard work doable:
The one golden rule to live by
Enjoy working on your email marketing program.
It is as simple as that. If you enjoy working on your bulk email marketing program it will show through in all emailings you send out. How do you think a recipient is going to be enticed if you aren’t? Going to enjoy reading if you didn’t enjoy writing?
Here are 3 ways to keep the marketing juices flowing and bring enthusiasm to your email program:
1. Get Hooked and get Newsjacking
Marketing is the art of connecting with your audience. One of the ways to connect with your audience is to tap into their everyday life and understand what is keeping them busy. So this year you might want to put the Olympics on your agenda as well as Easter, Father’s Day, Valentine’s or school vacations.
What really gets blood pumping is what is called “real-time marketing” or Newsjacking – a kind of hook on to the events of today. Luckily email and social media are both as quick as you can spell “real-time”. What’s in the papers today can become the subject of your marketing.
Some email tools can connect the website RSS feed to your newsletter templates, making it easy to publish over multiple channels at the same time. Because in these cases, time is of the essence, it requires a flexible marketing team and one or two quick thinkers, tough it can really give you encouraging results and a boost of energy to work on a project like this.
2. Create a goal specific campaign
All email marketers have goals to reach. Even if the goals aren’t written down (yet). Email marketers want new subscribers to sign-up, they want to increase sales or stimulate customer loyalty. Or even measure their impact through the more simple metrics in life such as increasing email opens and click throughs.
Take at least one of these goals and run with it. It is very stimulating to work towards a (new) goal especially if the results can be measured and monitored real time. So for instance; create a campaign that is specially designed to get people that haven’t opened their email in a while to interact. Think about including new and stimulating ‘from names’, stellar subject lines, pre-headers, preview pane design and all elements to re-active that interaction-lagging subscriber. You can just go ahead and make the improvements. But if you really want to know what works best, there are different ways to do A-B testing with your bulk emails. Are you getting some creative ideas yet?
3. Go green
Creating fresh content isn’t about reinventing the wheel. Most companies have a ton of (unused) content lying around and some of that is really good too, like blog posts from a year ago that could have been written yesterday. Check out what evergreen content had some good impact before. There are lots of ways you can go crazy when you have a great foundation.
For example; customer feedback that hasn’t been used or what the top five email newsletters of last year were?
Grab that content, and revive it, make it even better than it was. This is not only very efficient use of your resources, but also very rewarding, because you will almost certainly see the effect.
The one email marketing rule to live by
There you have it. Do you love to create great emails? Maybe not every day. But by adding some juice, a sparkle of enthusiasm and some variance it certainly becomes more enjoyable! So see if you can adapt one of three ideas and don’t forget the one rule: Always enjoy working on your email program.
Article originally published by email marketing consultant Jordie van Rijn on eMail Monday.
Monday 23 January 2012
List building without headaches: 3 Easy ways to get more subscribers
When it comes to your address book, size does matter.
The more people you have on your emailing list, the more marketing messages you can send out and the more responses you can potentially get. But, growing an email list can be a slow and difficult process.
There are no shortcuts to building a large qualitative list of subscribers. In fact it can be so much of a bulk email marketing migraine that after a while some people might feel like giving up on promoting new sign-ups altogether.
So how do you build your subscriber database without all the worries?
1) Make signing up as simple as possible
Email opt-in should be made easy. The more clicks and keystrokes a potential subscriber needs to make in order to sign up, the more of them will abandon the process before you have them securely on your list.
Why force a person to take multiple steps to do something that they want to do, if there are ways for them to do it with just one?
Lubricate your subscription process by testing the success of rate of single opt in vs. double opt in. Think about reducing the amount of required fields on your subscription forms - most of which are always details you can ask your subscribers about later. And rewrite your confirmation emails to be as brief and skim-easy as possible.
2) Focus on converting web visitors
If (like most marketers these days) you are promoting your business via online channels, chances are that your website will be a hotspot for catching new sign-ups.
This means that your email newsletter opt-in should be compelling, obvious and everywhere.
Make sure the form is prominently placed on all your web pages and make it stand out visually.
Also place sign-up promotions on relevant content such as within articles and blogs, and at the end of slide shows.
This area is where email marketing services need to help their clients. GraphicMail makes it easy to manage the online sign up process with our lists and contacts tools. You can even import all your subscribers from other emailing programs and cloud-based CRMs such as Salesforce, or sync up your address book with Outlook. Our features make it really simple to gather all your contacts neatly into one archive.
You'll also do well if you sell your newsletter to potential subscribers by adding a line or two about the benefits of signing up, such as mentioning special deals or exclusive content, or adding some testimonials by a few clients who’ve found it useful.
Once your website’s sign up forms have all been set up and testes, focus on driving traffic to your sign-up forms through all possible channels; such as your social media pages and PPC campaigns.
3) Leverage word of mouth and social media
Word of mouth is a powerful technique that works great with email marketing. If your readers find the content you share with them to be useful and informative, they will pass your newsletter on to their friends, which can be a good source of new subscribers.
A really great way to grow your list is to allow people to share your email with others. This adds a social component to your email which increases the possibility of you message going viral.
Add a ‘forward to friend’ link and newsletter social share buttons to your template. Even think about including an incentive for both sender and recipient, such as a voucher or free credits. You may be surprised by the amount of referral activity you can generate if you just take the time to ask.
It all comes down to asking everyone, everywhere and at every opportunity about whether they would like to hear from you via email. Be sure to tell them what benefits there are if they sign up and then make it easy for all subscribers to share your email newsletters so other people will see the advantages.
The more people you have on your emailing list, the more marketing messages you can send out and the more responses you can potentially get. But, growing an email list can be a slow and difficult process.
There are no shortcuts to building a large qualitative list of subscribers. In fact it can be so much of a bulk email marketing migraine that after a while some people might feel like giving up on promoting new sign-ups altogether.
So how do you build your subscriber database without all the worries?
1) Make signing up as simple as possible
Email opt-in should be made easy. The more clicks and keystrokes a potential subscriber needs to make in order to sign up, the more of them will abandon the process before you have them securely on your list.
Why force a person to take multiple steps to do something that they want to do, if there are ways for them to do it with just one?
Lubricate your subscription process by testing the success of rate of single opt in vs. double opt in. Think about reducing the amount of required fields on your subscription forms - most of which are always details you can ask your subscribers about later. And rewrite your confirmation emails to be as brief and skim-easy as possible.
2) Focus on converting web visitors
If (like most marketers these days) you are promoting your business via online channels, chances are that your website will be a hotspot for catching new sign-ups.
This means that your email newsletter opt-in should be compelling, obvious and everywhere.
Make sure the form is prominently placed on all your web pages and make it stand out visually.
Also place sign-up promotions on relevant content such as within articles and blogs, and at the end of slide shows.
This area is where email marketing services need to help their clients. GraphicMail makes it easy to manage the online sign up process with our lists and contacts tools. You can even import all your subscribers from other emailing programs and cloud-based CRMs such as Salesforce, or sync up your address book with Outlook. Our features make it really simple to gather all your contacts neatly into one archive.
You'll also do well if you sell your newsletter to potential subscribers by adding a line or two about the benefits of signing up, such as mentioning special deals or exclusive content, or adding some testimonials by a few clients who’ve found it useful.
Once your website’s sign up forms have all been set up and testes, focus on driving traffic to your sign-up forms through all possible channels; such as your social media pages and PPC campaigns.
3) Leverage word of mouth and social media
Word of mouth is a powerful technique that works great with email marketing. If your readers find the content you share with them to be useful and informative, they will pass your newsletter on to their friends, which can be a good source of new subscribers.
A really great way to grow your list is to allow people to share your email with others. This adds a social component to your email which increases the possibility of you message going viral.
Add a ‘forward to friend’ link and newsletter social share buttons to your template. Even think about including an incentive for both sender and recipient, such as a voucher or free credits. You may be surprised by the amount of referral activity you can generate if you just take the time to ask.
It all comes down to asking everyone, everywhere and at every opportunity about whether they would like to hear from you via email. Be sure to tell them what benefits there are if they sign up and then make it easy for all subscribers to share your email newsletters so other people will see the advantages.
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