Does this describe you: You have 3 different inboxes and every morning, they're full and you just select them all and delete them all? I bet it comes close to describing your email workflow. It does mine.
Unsubscribe Has Become a Weekly Cleanup Exercise
According to yahoo, I have something like 40,000 emails I've saved over the years! They don't keep track (at least that I can see) of how many I've deleted. Still, the fact is, I routinely receive unsolicited emails from people who have obviously bought a list and sprayed and prayed.
Not How You're Supposed to Use Automated Email Platforms
I am nice guy, I unsubscribe versus marking them as Spam. But there's a reason I keep all those e-mails. Even I know they were most likely generated and sent using a system Constant Contact or MailChimp, two of the more popular Email Service Providers (ESPs), and thus, probably not relevant to me.
Managing the Email Flow
About once a week, I make it a point to go through my Inbox and unsubscribe from a whole bunch of emails. On the other hand, there are lots of emails I keep. Some are incoming jobs, and are expected.
In fact, being a highly networked SAP consultant, I get about 100 of those types of job emails a day. Those contacts are handy to keep track of and link too. That was originally one my primary lead generation strategies as far as keeping my own job opportunity pipeline full.
Types of Email Marketing Strategies
Post Purchase Follow-Up Emails
Some are emails from companies I've bought something from in the past. Those emails are just part of some digital marketers email marketing strategy. If the they are done right, they'll typically contain a discount coupon or other type of offer designed to get me to make the next purchase. Amazon comes to mind here with their never ending stream of emails that do a pretty good job of guessing what books I might be interested in and proposing various offers.
Lead Nurturing Email Campaigns
Others are just part of what I, a skilled digital marketing guru, know to be part of a lead nurturing campaign. They are, in effect, case studies happening in real time. Why do I say Case Study? Because, with a an email marketing powerhouse system like the Hubspot Marketing Hub, I can run these email lead nurturing campaigns, segmented by Smart Lists, and track the performance of every email, from open rates, to click through rates, and since I can it both campaigns and revenue, I can see how my email marketing campaigns are working to generate revenue and ultimately, profit. My clients can as well, so it is real time feedback on how you're doing.
Long Form Sales Emails
Long Form Sales Emails are a type of email marketing strategy that can be used to provide detailed information about a product or service. Unlike Post Purchase Follow-Up Emails or Email Lead Nurturing Campaign Emails, which are designed to encourage repeat business or build relationships with potential customers, Long Form Sales Emails are more focused on educating the reader about the features and benefits of a particular offering.
Longer Form Email
These emails are typically longer and more detailed than other types of marketing emails, and may include images, videos, and other multimedia elements. By providing a comprehensive overview of what a product or service has to offer, Long Form Sales Emails can be an effective way to convert leads into paying customers. However, they require a different approach to crafting and delivering than other types of emails, and may not be appropriate for every business or marketing situation. However, for the right kind of offer, it is one of the most effective email marketing strategies you can employ.
Right Target Audience is Key to Any of these Email Marketing Strategies
Regardless of the type of email marketing you planning on using, the key is audience segmentation. The very best audience segment is a segment of one. Marketing automation platforms, such as the Hubspot Enterprise Marketing Hub, allow you to create List of Contacts who meet the highest Predictive Lead Score criteria.
Dynamic Offer Management
The most effective email marketing campaigns or those that are most relevant and provide an answer to WIIFME (What's In It For Me). That can mean, for example, that a contact has finally achieved a predicted lead score that the marketing platform knows indicates the person is ready to buy, but could still use a little bit of incentive, perhaps in the form of a discount coupon. As part of your email marketing campaign, you can use Hubspot to send out a dynamically generate coupon, with varying percentage discounts, to each contact. This normally results in much higher click through rates (CTRs) and higher overall sales.
E-Mail Continues to Deliver the ROI
I recently had a conversation with a new client who said he too deleted most emails from his inbox. Yet he also sells a product online and buys products online. The point is, when used correctly, email is the right tool for the job, even for a guy jaded by the never ending flow of e-mails as was my new client. In fact, as marketing channels go, it continues to deliver an impressive ROI.
Email returns $36 for $1 dollar spent!
How Do You Define, Implement and Measure Your E-Mail Marketing Strategy
Systems, Database, Message
People search for information billions of times a day. They use Google, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and many other platforms. If you've done your job of designing your offer, they will pay you with their email in exchange for a bit more information about a product or service.
Well Thought Out Marketing Efforts
That means you need an integrated system to deliver your message (Systems), add those emails to your contacts list (Database), and a well thought out communications strategy (Message).
It All Starts With Your Offer
Whether you sell a physical product, like Amazon, or provide a service, such as Accenture, you have to have a compelling offer. In the case of services, you have to productize your service. Consumers, whether business or individual, have extremely high expectations when it comes to services. While expectations are higher than ever, supplier availability has grown across the board. You are likely to have 5 or more competitors with offers for any service you can imagine.
Need for High-Converting Landing Pages
For an email campaign to truly be judged as successful, as denoted by the ROI it achieves, it helps if it is coupled with a high converting landing page. It must be high-converting both the desktop as well on all types and models of mobile devices. One of the ways you can really improve your email click through rate is if your email subject line is completely aligned with your Landing Page. This concept goes much further, though, than achieving a high click through rate from the CTA within an email and your landing page. You need to also ensure every element on your landing page has been thoroughly optimized. This is called CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization and you can find out the expected ROI from CRO using our free CRO Profit Improvement Calculator.
For Consumers, This Can Be Overwhelming
Now they not only have to know what they want, they have to spend some of their limited attention learning about and deciding upon the different offers. It's time consuming, hard to organize and leads most often to 'no action'.
Many Types of E-Mails for Many Jobs
From your inbox point of view, all emails appear more or less the same. But from the sender standpoint, there are a variety of emails. There are marketing emails, educational emails, transactional emails, personal communication emails and many others, including junk and SPAM.
Each is just a tool for a different job. Each requires a particular skillset to craft and deliver effectively.
Measurement Helps
With the right email marketing systems in place, you can measure almost any aspect of your emails. In fact, unless you take a holistic approach, wherein your emails are part of a larger marketing campaign, you will leave valuable insight behind. But done right, you can tell how much revenue each email generated. Then you can adjust all of the different elements of your e-mail program to optimize your results.
It's the Ultimate Segmentation Tool
As they say, no one wants to be sold to, but they do like to buy. As a marketer, you can use the information consumers reveal about themselves, either explicitly via fields on a form or via behavior.
Tailored Communication
Your messaging can be tailored, literally, for a segment of one. Even deeper, it can be a segment of one person who is displaying a single characteristic.
That's why you shouldn't be buying list and doing mass, spray and pray email blast. Aside from the extreme negative impact on your email deliverability, it doesn't work as well as thinking through your overall marketing and communications strategy.
Some Quick Email Marketing Tips
While we won't attempt to teach you everything there is to know about email marketing in this blog (but Hubspot does offer an outstanding email marketing certification course to customers), we did want to touch on a few common email tips:
- Personalized Subject Lines: While a personal subject line is almost table stakes, you would be surprised how many email marketers don't do this right. You can, with a system like Hubspot, which is aware of every activity contact has ever taken on your website, do far more than just insert their first name using an email token. You can make the subject contextually relevant and have it change based on not only what you're offering, but one what they have already done.
- Personalized From Email Address: If you want your email to get into your contacts inbox, you need to be using personalized email addresses. Not Info@ or non-specific sender emails. The power move here is to assign a new contact an 'owner', usually from the sales team, and then, have the Sender Email Address dynamically change to be from that contact owner.
- Personalized Signatures: If dynamically swapping the from address is a 'go to' email guru move, (and it is), then swapping out the signature with that of the contacts owner takes this one step further. Pro-Tip for Hubspot Users: Include your meeting link in your standard email signature. That way, the contact can book directly on the right sales person's calendar.
Maintain Email List Hygiene
Maintaining email list hygiene is crucial for any successful email marketing campaign. It involves regularly removing inactive subscribers or unengaged contacts, correcting any typos or incorrect information, and ensuring that your list is up to date with the latest data protection regulations. Email service providers, such as Hubspot, can assist you with this task by offering tools to automate list cleaning, segmenting contacts based on engagement levels, and providing reports on email deliverability rates. Hubspot takes this one step further by offering a predictive lead scoring system that can identify contacts who are most likely to engage with your emails and become paying customers. By continuously maintaining email list hygiene, you can ensure that your email marketing campaigns are reaching the right people and delivering the highest ROI possible.
Formatting for Different Email Clients
A well designed, effective email campaign also includes testing your email templates against each type of mobile device and all of the most common email clients. Hubspot makes this easier by providing an inbuilt testing capability for most common iPhone and Android Devices and most common email clients. The tremendous variation that exist across devices and email clients also means you should ensure you have a version of email formatted as plain text. You should always test every email by sending yourself a test email, using yourself as the intended recipient.
Introduction to Email Marketing
Like all muscles, your email marketing muscle takes some foundational education work. That's why we recommend you start learning how to up your game with our Introduction to Email Marketing. It's part of a short course you can take for free from us to help you develop an effective email marketing strategy.
- How To Use Google Keyword Planner Tool Tutorial
- How To Segment Your Customers using SAP BW and CRM
Please Leave us a Question or Comment!
As the world's top email marketer, I am constantly reminded of Sun Tsu's wise words, "strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory, tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." Developing effective email strategies requires a thoughtful approach that includes defining your offer, creating a well-crafted message, and implementing an integrated system to deliver that message. It's not enough to simply send out mass emails and hope for the best. Valuable comments from readers can help us refine our strategies and provide insights into what is working and what is not. Did you find the key point about maintaining email list hygiene interesting? What other topics related to email marketing would you like to learn more about? As email marketers, it's our job to constantly adapt and improve our strategies to achieve the highest ROI possible.
More Reading and Related Topics:
12 SAP CRM Content Management System Requirements [Checklist]
