Does your email marketing meet the goal and over benchmark?
Epsilon recently brought back one great resources, the Email Trends and Benchmark report.
is your email marketing doing better then this industry benchmark?
As the buyer takes control of the purchase process, marketing’s job becomes one of synchronizing its activities with the buyer’s process to:
(a) Stay top of mind;
(b) build propensity for the brand;
(c) accelerate the buying cycle, if possible.
Traditional “batch and blast” e-mail marketing strategies no longer cut it. Today, marketers need to think “outside the inbox” and have conversations with prospects—watching specific behaviors and reacting with the appropriate responses. Here are six tips how to accomplish that:
1. Mix up your campaign styles and methods. Send some from marketing and some that appear to come from a specific sales rep. You’d be surprised how receptive people can be when they know the message is coming from a real person.
2. Segment based on behaviors. Combine the “standard” segmentation approaches (lead source, industry, etc.) with behavioral data (who opened up an e-mail, downloaded an offer, spent more than 30 minutes on your site and visited more than three pages). According to Jupiter Research, this can increase conversions by 350%.
3. An e-mail message is called a “message” for a reason. Use A/B testing in your e-mails to see which messages resonate with your audience.
4. Use “check-in” e-mails to build your relationships. Prospects and customers will appreciate a “check-in” e-mail from you or a sales rep every once in a while. These are great opportunities for you to ask how you’re doing as a company and ensure that your e-mail communications are useful and informative. Ask what they find most useful about your specific programs and what they’d like to see in the future.
5. Move beyond open and click-through rates. Measure success based on where prospects go on your Web site and how often they visit.
6. Automate what you can, and leave more time for creativity and strategy. Use your marketing automation solution as the extra marketing resource you never had. Let it keep track of which e-mail to send.
The way e-mails display on handheld devices is an increasingly important topic these days. Especially in the b-to-b realm, how many business folks do you see these days with a BlackBerry in their hands? There are a number of components that can be optimized for handheld rendering, but let’s focus on a quick and impactful improvement: optimizing the “from” name.
In the early days of e-mail, it was important to monitor subject line truncation in a number of e-mail clients to ensure that it did not make the subject line misleading. While this isn’t as large a concern today, it is once again time to revisit truncation discussions. This time, we are looking at “from” name truncation on handheld devices.
Until recently, I wouldn’t even have considered this an issue. But then it hit. The little red light on my BlackBerry began to blink. I picked it up. I looked; and low and behold, I have received an e-mail from … eMarketer Ass.
Don’t laugh too hard. It could happen to you because this phenomenon is not getting any attention. After polling a number of my clients, I learned that none of them had even considered the potential for disaster. It is important to know that, on average, 14 characters of the “from” name will render on a handheld device. While this might not be a concern for everyone, it definitely should be considered.
The downside is that testing this rendering is difficult. Varying screen sizes, font sizes and themes all affect the number of characters that will render, but using the 14-character guideline is better than having no benchmark at all. Do a quick gut check of how your “from” name is rendering on a few handheld devices to ensure you don’t encounter the same issue as the eMarketer Association.
As companies cut budgets to streamline operations in these tough economic times, e-mail marketing managers are feeling the heat to deliver stronger results. In many instances, direct mail budgets are being slashed, with some of those funds diverted to e-mail as a potentially more cost-effective use of marketing dollars.
The people making those budget decisions are also transferring high expectations that the e-mail channel will make up for lost sales they once expected from direct marketing.
Sharpening your company’s e-mail subscriber list is a key factor in improving results of online marketing campaigns, offering these tips to help make that happen:
1. Relevance is more critical than ever before. Put yourself inside the readers’ mind and make sure you really understand the people you’re sending e-mails to, Jennings said. In some cases, you may need greater segmentation of your list. What you send a junior-level or a senior-level IT person on your list may be very different.
2. Build relationships. Spend time understanding what information is critical to readers on your e-mail list. It’s imperative to know what subscribers need to do their job better in their markets. The more you can do to show them you understand their needs, the more likely they will buy from you down the road.
3. Eliminate the dead wood. It’s worthwhile to comb through your e-mail list and eliminate those who aren’t responding at all. If you’re sending e-mails monthly and someone hasn’t opened a single one in a year, chances are they’re not going to open any going forward, either. People don’t really unsubscribe anymore; they just ignore you. What’s more, some of those unresponsive individuals may have been laid off by their companies and the IT departments may not have gotten around to returning the bounce to let you know they’re gone.
4. Test to optimize performance. If you’re getting a little more money in your e-mail budget, spend 10% to 20% of it on testing to learn more about what will trigger people on your subscriber list to respond to your e-mails. What you learn may result in a 1% lift in your conversion rate. That doesn’t seem like much but, if you can do that consistently, it adds up over time. Plus, you’ll never improve your effort if you’re not testing it.
It’s an open secret that email marketing is the highest ROI tool at a marketer’s disposal. It’s more cost-effective than direct-mail, paid search and a wide array of other tactics. So it’s no surprise that email is seeing even more action than usual now that the economy’s officially in recession and marketing budgets are flat or decreasing.
Here are a few tips on what to do – and what not to do – with your email program.
Maintain frequency until requested otherwise
When the going gets tough, it’s human nature to do more of something to increase your odds of success. But in email, sending more campaigns with reminder messages, offers and requests to respond will likely backfire and alienate opt-in prospects, customers and advocates. It’s important to remember that your target audiences have many other marketers sending them messages that may not be as valuable as yours – but it can all become a blur when email volumes increase in the PC, social or mobile inbox. Stick to the game plan that audiences agreed to unless they tell you different. Maintain a rhythm to help ensure your messages are anticipated, welcomed, responded to and shared, instead of ignored or shut down with spam.
Focus on value, not fluff
Give people what they want, when they want it, and make it very easy for them to quickly experience the value of your information and offers. This is achieved when marketers apply the right blend of preference center and CRM thinking to help identify wants and needs, and deliver content that is expected and perceived as valuable to each individual recipient (not one-size-fits-all to the entire list). Design can certainly play a significant role in making valuable information easier to understand and act upon. Keep messages short and simple instead of long-winded and complex. This strategy is not only good for email campaigns. Short, comprehensive messages can also be repurposed much easier and faster for mobile marketing messages like SMS.
Be confident
Confidence, not arrogance, is a very attractive quality when people communicate with one another. We’re all a little bit nervous about the economy and certain world events. Prospects, customers and advocates will respond better to email campaigns that are fact-based, relevant and come from a thought leader with a credible voice and calm nature. Remember, great email and messaging is a conversation between people and not a blast to a list.
Incorporate social and mobile
Email, or messaging in general, is taking on new forms via a variety of inboxes across channels, including traditional email, social and mobile marketing. That said, marketers need to remember that their campaigns and content can get more mileage across channels – which can lead to better engagement with audiences at lower costs to marketers. Call it repurposing or just better orchestration, marketers can save money and improve campaign results by thinking in terms of “tri-messaging” via email, social and mobile.
Don’t trash your sender reputation
Sure, email and messaging have great delivery economics on the surface, but resist the temptation to save time and money by cutting corners when it comes to sending best practices. There is a fine line between being a reputable email marketer (that ISPs, spam filters and recipients respect) and a spammer. Stay abreast of how to create a good reputation online, and apply time and investments to remain reputable. This will go a long way to improving your business results and brand equity in any economy.
Author: Erick Mott
