we will now take a deep dive into another important marketing technique which is email marketing. In the session ahead will understand the basics of email marketing. We will learn about how to use email marketing for customer acquisition, making the audiences aware and making offers to them.
We will also learn about the various types of email marketing and its different components. Not taking too much time, let’s get started.
So email marketing is the most misunderstood marketing channel that is, you may have heard it but then let me just remind you. Email marketing still is one of the best performing marketing channels out there. According to the DMA that is the ‘Direct Marketing Association’ of the US survey who survey marketing efficiency from multiple channels every single year, Email marketing channel is still the first or second-best performing every year.
And if I remember correctly, the last year the return on investment on email marketing campaigns was 34 dollars on every one dollar spent, only outperformed by the search. So how do you become successful with email marketing? Let’s first look at what a good email marketing is. Good email marketing to me is permission-based email marketing that means people have opted in, they have said ‘yes, thank you, I would like to receive your email messages’ Unfortunately in many countries that’s not how it works!!! In many countries people buy list, people scrape address of the internet and then they start, pardon me, my friends started spamming people with emails that they never asked for and that doesn’t work very well. So really what you want to do is you want to look at what we call permission based email marketing where people sign up to receive your emails and where you respect them when they unsubscribe and say to you ‘I no longer wish to receive your email communication’, that’s email marketing.
And what’s involved, there is lots of thing involved in becoming successful with email marketing but obviously the first thing is to understand as you would for all of the other channels, what are your objectives? What you want to achieve and is this a short or long term mechanism to you? Let me tell you as a general rule that email marketing is more in the medium term, longer term than it’s a short term mechanism.
So once you have set your objectives and you know what you want to achieve and you know whom it’s for and as you have heard about it in the previous session you know what kind of content concept you have for your email marketing. In other words, you have developed what I like to call an email value proposition. An email value proposition is what makes people sign up.
Once that’s done you want to start figuring out how do you build an email list. A good way to start is by inviting your existing customers to subscribe to your email communication. And in terms of non-customers it’s always a very good idea to start using the email newsletter as part of your whole lead acquisition ecosystem because a lot of times leads who are not ready to buy or likely if they qualify to be ready to sign up to one of your newsletters.
So we spoke about objectives for your email marketing obviously it depends on who you are what you are selling and what you want to accomplish.
But some of the main goals that email marketers typically have is –
(1) They want to acquire more qualified leads. So use your email communication to get somebody so interested that they eventually raise their hands and say ‘can you please contact me?’
Another way is to educate your audience through the content that you provide in your email newsletters and perhaps offer things like, if you are in b2b webinars, videos and so on and the goal of that of course is also to nurture leads and move your audience closer to what’s becoming a customer. Sales is a very good goal to have for email marketing and let’s say that you are in business to consumer, let’s say for example you are telcos like Airtel or any of the other telcos, it goes without saying that if they build a good email list and they give good offers especially if that offer is time-limited they will be able to generate sales so that should be part of their goals.
But if you know that the purchase behavior is more complex for you and it’s not possible for you to sell directly through email then you don’t want to have direct sales from emails as a goal but as a consequence of the communication that you do.
So there are many different types of email marketing but let me you before what they are, that obviously it’s important that you differentiate your email communication between two significant types which
- one is for potential customers and
- the other for existing customers because keep in mind there are many stories your existing customers already know and they don’t want to hear about that again, so that’s the first step.
The second step is to sort of understand what your weapons are, if you will.
1) So one is in very common use that can be very successful it’s just traditional email newsletters. Typically traditional email newsletters need to have sort of a set publishing plan, some make the mistake of having a frequency that is too low, for example, once a month. I believe that’s too low for most brands, I am one of the guys who believe in weekly, seems to be working best. So if you publish your newsletter weekly you should be okay. Some companies publish their newsletters with even greater frequency but again it all depends on who you are and whom you are selling to.
2) So another type, of course, is promotional emails, in other words, an email that contains some specific offers. We know about that is that the better you are able to use past behavior and insight about your audience and differentiate product offers depending on that past behavior, the better result you will get. So how often can you publish a promotional newsletter? Well, some business they do it every single day!!! And they are actually selling every single day and their customers are happy. The general rule here I think is that more your customers can save as a result of receiving these newsletters the happier they will be. But the moment it’s not relevant to them obviously they will not be happy about receiving a newsletter
3) And then we have transactional emails. So they are typically emails that are sent as a result of some sort of transaction. The most common one of course is when people sign up to a newsletter, you want to send them what I call a welcome email and not just a simple transactional email which says ‘thank you for signing up for the newsletter’.
But there are many other transactional type of emails for example I have to purchase you might want to confirm the purchase, I educate the customer about the product in a transactional email and so on.
So all of these three different types of emails, all very different in nature and requires different focuses in order to become successful with them. And we will talk a little bit more as we go along on how you can do that.
Hi… We just learned about the basic points that we need to keep in mind while making a marketing strategy that is executed through emails. Stay tuned for some more on this in the videos ahead.
Let’s look at some of the components that can make or break your email marketing success. So the first is actually very important it’s the sender name. So it really matters, lot of people don’t believe this, but it actually matter what the sender name is! It’s also important that the sender name is consistently used and what we know about sender name is that just a brand name is less effective from a person’s name comma a brand name.
An example of that is corporate client that I had pleasure working with globally some years ago where we tested this through AB split testing and other means and found that the first name of a girl along with the surname of that girl with the name of the newsletter turned out to be the most efficient way. But for other industries for other businesses it can work out differently and sometimes it is actually a good idea just to name your newsletter, give it a name whatever ‘sunshine news’ and then the sender name could be ‘sunshine news’.
But whatever it is remember that the email address that you use originally to post this information you want to keep that email address because that is the email address that builds sender reputation score something we will cover later on. So the sender’s name is the most important thing. A lot of people think it’s the next thing I am going to mention but it’s not! And there are surveys done every single year that proves that the sender names becomes more and more important to the recipients
And the next one of course is the subject line. So if you talk to agencies and brands around the world they go on and on and on about the subject line, how many characters and this and that. And it is important and it can make a huge difference as to whether or not you are successful but not if you don’t get the sender name right first.
Think away there is an envelope if you have ever received an envelope from the post what do you do first? You look at who is it from, right? And if you trust the sender you are more likely to engage in fact if it’s somebody unknown you may be afraid that this is spam or phishing or something like this. When it comes to subject line something very interesting here to talk about which is that a lot of marketers when they measure their success or the success of the subject line they look at open rate. So in another word, they think they have done a really good job if they are able to increase the open rate but there are many examples of higher open rates producing less sales than lower open rate, let me explain. So a good friend of mine she did a number of test with a champagne company in Europe, I forgot their name, where essentially what they wanted to know was the impact of a good subject line and was a really good subject line able to produce more sales than a less performing subject line.
And it turned out it wasn’t, it turned out there is a clear correlation between what a recipient understand from a subject line and the actual sales. So you want to be sure that you are tuning your subject lines to make it compelling to make it seem compelling for people to open but don’t trick people into opening because if you do you may not accomplish whatever the actual goal is.
And the actual goal should never be ‘open read’ but ‘click through rates’ and the conversions on your website landing page or your ecommerce portal. The content of the email is obviously very important and that’s something where everyone can improve dramatically.
But let’s address this from two aspects one is generic content in other words you have a newsletter for example where everyone who receives it receive exactly the same content.
It’s really important that you structure the content of the newsletter in such a fashion that you imagine that you want to give everybody in your audience something that may interest them. And in those types of scenarios, it’s usually a good idea to have more content because you are addressing a large non homogenous audience so you want to have different types of stories, different types of offers so that there is a bigger likeliness that each individual finds something that attracts them.
The better version of course is to work with what we call dynamic content. Dynamic content is essentially using the information you have about the person receiving it to deliver some content that you presume is relevant to that particular person.
That obviously produces better results and the reason for that is relevance kicks in. Whenever something is relevant to an audience they are much more likely to engage initially and much more likely to engage in a dedicated way as we call it which means they will click, they will go through the website, they will engage with the website and so on.
A marketing strategy across any channel is said to be successful when we put across the right content and our professor just explained the major categories of content that we could use. Before we focus on creating that dynamic content for our website, let’s see some more information on email marketing.
When we talk about ‘call to actions’ the sad story is that some of us that came out of direct marketing we completely understand this. This is like the simplest thing in the world to understand that you really have to work on your ‘call to actions’. Getting back to Steven Cowe that I referred to before who said ‘always start with the end in mind’ that’s what good email marketers do, they start with the end in mind!! They look at an email, they say ‘what’s my objective, what do I want to accomplish, and then how do I get people to do that?’So when you look at ‘call to action’ don’t just look at buttons which many have a tendency to do. What you want to do is you want to be sure that you both use hypertext or hyperlinks as well as buttons. So it’s not one or the other it’s very often both. And the text inside of these ‘call to action’ you really want to work on that. Let me give you a little example and this does not just apply to email it applies to all channels.
If you think about the last step button on a web page and you have one button that says ‘give me my stuff’ and you have another button that says ‘get your stuff’, which of these two do you is most effective? The difference is in one we use the word ‘my’ and in the other we use the word ‘your’, think about that for a moment.
Maybe you came up with the right answer but most people don’t!! The right answer is ‘my’ And that has to do with the dialogue in the subconscious of the mind of the consumer and likewise when you consider what’s your right in your call to action links you really want to put yourself in the mind of the consumer as well. Now there are other aspects that we just have to cover. Obviously you can add banners inside of newsletters but I got some bad news for you which is banners usually don’t work very well in emails, it’s better to work on your images to make sure that there is a good synergy between your headlines which are awfully important in email marketing and your images and don’t forget to use captions.
A lot of email marketers and marketers in generally forget captions on images and if you are using people in particular you want to leverage the opportunity to use captions because as we have covered in previous sessions they are very curious about who these people are and that will lead them to watch the image which in turn will get them to read the caption and if you put a link inside of that image caption then I am pretty sure that you will see a lot of people clicking on that particular link.
What about the length, what about frequency are questions that people often ask… frequency you have to experiment but make sure that its more aggressive in the beginning until you figure out how your audience behave. So what about the content? So there is all these nonsense going on about keeping it short, don’t write too much text because people won’t read.
Now that’s only partially true because reality is if people are closed to making a purchase decision in general they read a lot because they want a lot of information to feel secure about the decision that they are about to make.
So don’t be afraid of producing long newsletters or long promotional emails or even long transactional emails. But the great thing about this you don’t have to my word for it, you can go ahead and test these yourselves. And that’s actually one of the strength of the email marketing and many other digital marketing channels is that you can test and test and test again and through testing you too can become world class marketer because everything really is about common sense and the common sense is that you test what you don’t know to get a response from the people that matters which is your audience out there.
So let’s talk about some of the various elements that can influence the success of your email marketing. If you envision that your company that are selling online, bunch of stuff online, it’s likely you have a broad target audience that means you reach young people, old people, you reach people who purchased once before, people who never purchased, people who purchased multiple times and so on.
And if you think about the year we are living in where a lot of audiences really are carrying their inbox around. So that means lot of people will be interacting with the email on the desktop and a lot of people will be interacting with their email on a smartphone.
So first and foremost, to be successful you need to be sure that you optimize your emails to render properly on smartphones and I would actually go further. The way I would build an email today is I would start to sign the email and the level of interaction based on a small screen, for example, five inch or five and a half, that’s how I would brief at the signer because it’s very easy to design for desktop. Usually larger the screen the easier it is to make the design fit and look great. But it’s actually pretty difficult to understand how do we get people to engage in a five inch or give and half-inch screen? So that’s your first thing.
So if you are an ecommerce vendor then obviously its lot about products. So when you optimise for mobile or what I would like to call it a mobility space you want to make sure that the product shows properly with images that are created specifically for that particular screen because what people see when they open your email on that smartphone what they actually see on the smartphone is going to be indicative of whether or not they will click to learn more about the product and potentially purchase it or not. So you want to make sure that you optimise for all channels.
The content has to be useful and relevant to the recipient, that goes without saying, we have already covered that before and then there is some simple let’s say housekeeping tools which is to beware of what they call ‘spam words’. So there are certain words that are very often caught in spam filters with ISPs that’s the Internet Service Providers and other such folks.
One of the words for example is the word ‘sex’ is very often perceived to be spam even if it isn’t and as a result it may give a higher spam score and if it does it may be that the email is actually not delivered to that particular person or to a large group of people. Another word is ‘free’ but really I could list more words here but really what you want to do is to check the list with all of the most common spam words that are filtered out in various ISPs.
But one this spam words and another thing is the reputation of you as a sender! You have to keep in mind that there is lot of powers in place to prevent those that will us evil from reaching people’s inbox. In other words the notorious and the criminals spammers that we have all over the world, right? So you want to make sure that you are not perceived to be one of them, that’s one of the reasons why you want to be permission-end marketer and not the opposite.
So deliverability rate which are really important for how well your emails are delivered all relies amongst other things on a component called your sender reputations. So you want to check out in the link we have here just a few pointers on how you make sure that you create a better sender reputations score, that has to do in part with the email marketing service provider that you choose, I won’t mention names here but some of them are really great in terms of ensuring high deliverability but I am sad to report that many of them are also really bad and sometimes the cause of your problems because the reason itself why your emails are not being delivered to enough people. So it’s a discipline in itself to understand how you develop a great reputation score. But if you are a true commission marketer and if you respect people off doubt it’s not very likely that too many people will report you as a spammer.
Let’s talk a little bit more about some of these components. So we already touched upon this previously which is ‘the appropriate time’. How would you know what is the appropriate time to send? Well obviously depends on what you want to accomplish if it’s a newsletter the appropriate time may be ‘a’ if it’s a promotional email the appropriate time may be ‘b’. Don’t believe all of these surveys that come out nearly every month that says ‘now Tuesday at 10 am is the best time to send’. Because it is a little bit baloney, what you want to do is check it out for yourself. But do it based on the information of we have about people’s behavior. For example, as we mentioned previously in India a lot of people spend a lot of time online in the hours between 6 pm and midnight.
But also look at when people commute because when they commute they are more likely to be engaging… More engaging with their smartphone. Whether they are on the bus or on the train or as a passenger in their own car likeliness is that they will be checking up on their emails on their phone as well. So test various times but do it in an intelligent way.
So frequency we talked a little bit about before and the golden rule here is frequency can never be too high as long as what you communicate is relevant to your audience. So you can say any frequency is bad if you are not able to communicate to me in a relevant fashion.
You have to add value to me and all of these components really don’t matter if at end of the day you are not adding value, you have to understand who I am, what my past behaviour was and what I am interested in. So in this way this plays into things will speak about lead qualification, the lead scoring and the lead grading has a lot to do with this but also understanding purchase behaviour, past transactions and the behaviour on your website in order to understand which content is most likely to be interested to each individual recipient.
Summary: What is Email Marketing?
Hey … So this module was all about understanding the different aspects of email marketing. At the beginning of the session, we learned about
- Objectives
- Goals
(i) Long term
(ii) Short term - Target group
We then learned about the main goals of email marketers which is to
- Acquire qualified leads
- Educate audiences through
(i) Newsletters
(ii) B2B webinar & videos - Nurture leads
We moved on to learning about the two types of customers that our target group comprises of. They are:
- Potential customers
- Existing customers
Then we discussed about the two types of content used in email marketing which are:
- Traditional: Content-driven
- Promotional: Sales driven
We also discussed the 4 components of email marketing:
- Sender’s name
- Subject line
- Content
(i) Generic
(ii) Dynamic - Click-To-Action button
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