Email has more than 3x the reach of social networking

With so much focus on social media today, it can be easy to forget that the most universal way of contacting people online is still email.  In fact, a recent study by Forrester Research indicates that email still has more than three times the reach of social networking, with 165.4 million users in the US.

Thus, while we are still firm advocates of establishing a social media presence and utilizing it for customer service, marketing, and sales, it’s important to make sure you’re still reaching those that don’t read your company’s blog and don’t use Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  And the most convenient way to do that remains a staple of Internet marketing: the email newsletter.

Email newsletters have evolved a lot since the early days, however, and there are now lots of different options for creating and sending one on a budget.  Here is a look at a few different providers:

Constant Contact: It offers a very comprehensive selection of design templates to choose from or the ability to design your own style from scratch.

Mad Mimi: It is lightweight and extremely quick and easy to get started with.

MailChimp: It allows you to pull your content from an RSS feed, instead of needing to come up with new original content for your newsletter, you can simply have your newsletter automatically send out your most recent blog entries to email subscribers.

Regardless of which service you choose for your email newsletter, there are two fairly obvious keys to making it successful: producing quality content and building a large subscriber base through successful marketing.

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67% of customers open transactional emails

Email Receipts, Confirmations, Tracking Numbers – and Marketing

Customers open around 70 percent of transactional emails. However, these messages usually only contain “just the facts” info like an order receipt, a shipment tracking number, etc. This is a huge opportunity for marketers. However, to successfully capitalize on transactional emails, marketers should incorporate customer behavior and interaction data from across communications channels.

A key enabler for incorporating transactional emails into the cross-channel marketing mix is having a single marketing view of customer and prospect data using a centralized marketing data mart within a marketing platform. By incorporating transactional emails as another communications channel within one marketing system of record for customer and prospect data, organizations can target and segment profiles, keep a detailed track of all past cross-channel marketing interactions, personalize and automate marketing efforts across multiple channels, and accurately measure audience response and effectiveness.

The potential of transactional emails is quickly evolving with availability of new processes and technologies that make it easier for marketing departments to take control over their delivery and design. Incorporating transactional emails into a cross-channel marketing platform can directly improve click-through rates and sales, but more importantly, it is vital to ensuring a completely closed-loop customer experience in which customer’s preferences and needs, regardless of the channel through which they are indicated, are influencing each customer interaction.

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8 Powerful Email Marketing Techniques

Strategies For Improving Your Email Marketing

With the cost of postage increasing again this May, it’s little wonder that businesses are turning toward email as a means of customer communication.  It’s a cost effective option but like anything else, it has its own downsides too.

1. Longer Isn’t Always Better: The trick is to give readers actionable content – information they can use right away to solve a problem.

2. Add Value: Focusing in on how to add value to your email newsletter or email marketing material is imperative.

3. Seperation is Key: Do you subscribe to your competitor’s newsletters and email marketing materials?

4. Welcome Letter Bliss: When someone signs up for your newsletter, orders a product, or requests more information, this is really your opportunity to “wow” them with nice gestures…without being pushy. Coupons, useful content, free offerings, special clubs,  contests and other promotions are great for inclusion in a welcome letter

5. Aim to make your title catchy, realistic, but fun… all at once: A great title instantly tells the user or reader what you, your product, or your service is going to do for them.

6. Create Community: Creating a sense of community around your email marketing. Including simple elements like reader feedback, Q&A, or even a customer spotlight section gives the instant feeling of community around not only your overall brand, but your mailings as well.

7. Brand it Baby!: A well-branded email marketing campaign is one of the most important factors in creating not only a useful newsletter, but also a memorable one.

8. Watch the Pros, and Learn: Set aside at least an hour, and skim through your old email marketing newsletters from other companies in your email inbox.

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Improve email marketing ROI

Email marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing used today.

• Deploys quickly
• Offers immediate and highly measurable results
• Enables advanced customer segmentation and personalization
• Delivers high ROI

But achieving optimal results from your email marketing programs requires experience, planning and advanced technology. Key factors to ensure success:

• Reviewing past programs
• Planning
• Re-engaging customers
• Building your list
• Increasing deliverability
• Analyzing metrics

If you want to know more about how email marketing can work for you, contact us >

Improve your email open rates

Whatever email open rates you get in your email marketing software or service reports, you obviously want to improve. Since the open rate is a measure of success, improving open rates is simply about doing better email marketing.

And that’s a giant subject.

So here’s a list of the main things to consider to get those stats up.

1. Improve overall strategy and approach

Adopting best practices in all aspects of your email marketing produces sustainable, significant improvements in all success measures. A commitment to professional permission-based email marketing practice is your best long-term hope of raising open rates.

2. Improve deliverability

The more emails get delivered, the better chance you have of people actually looking at them. No changes to the actual email itself will help if they never land in the right inbox.

3. Refine sign-up procedures and targeting

Reader interest in your emails depends on how targeted your audience are. The better you target, the more likely you are to plunk your email in front of someone who is interested in the contents (i.e. higher open rates).

 

Short-term efforts

1. Subject lines and other headers

The subject line is probably the single most important in-email element that drives open rates. Bad subject lines, poor open rates. Good subject lines, good open rates.

2. Timing

Open rates will vary for the same email sent on different days or at different times of the day.

3. Frequency

Send too much email and people lose interest. Send too little email…and people lose interest.

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Keep in Touch With Customers – but Not Too Much

Have you noticed your inboxes are filling up faster lately with promotions from businesses desperate to get your attention? If you’re like me and getting bombarded with multiple promotions, then your first inclination is to just tune them out, click delete and move on to the business of the day.

It seems like a simple solution just to e-mail customers more often, but that’s the opposite of what you should do.

1. Take Their Pulse.

2. Have a Dialogue With Your Customers.

3. Co-host an Event With Another Local Business.

4. Do Good and Drive Business to Your Business.

In difficult economic times, your business survival depends on strong customer relationships. It’s not how often you communicate with customers — it’s the richness and quality of those communications that’s important. Your goal is to establish the strongest relationships with your customers no matter what the economy looks like at the time. If you build and nurture those relationships, they will come.

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PODCAST: New Test Results for Email Send Times

Sending your emails at the right time of the day can be crucial whether you are a B2B or consumer marketer. It can be especially critical if you market to an international audience.

That’s why it is eye-opening to chat with Hunter Boyle, Managing Editor, MarketingExperiments. He recently tested sending emails at the brink of dawn and in the wee hours of the morning.

Among the intriguing things he learned:

- Emails sent before 9 a.m. dramatically lift clickthrough rates.

- Early-bird execs on the East Coast respond to email before their workday begins.

- Time-zone segments are worth testing for marketers with international lists.

Listen to the podcast > 

(The podcast is just under ten minutes long)

Test Content to Create Best Layout to Boost Email Revenue

SUMMARY: Mixing educational content with product promotions to boost sales is common. But where you place the content in your email design can make a difference.

Check out how an eretailer tested placements for informational and promotional content in their email layout. In three simple steps, they increased email revenue by 15% and lifted conversions and clickthroughs.

Read article at Marketing Sherpa until November 12 >