Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Join us on May 16 and learn all about the latest trends and best practices in email marketing without leaving your desk.

Let yourself be inspired by the latest tactics that work and take away a list of action items you can implement immediately.

What’s on the agenda?

• Beyond just selling: engaging with your subscribers
• 7 reasons why your subscribers don’t respond
• Tips & tricks for designing emails for a mobile audience
• Inactive Subscribers: Prospects or Problem?
• Creating a successful content strategy for email marketing: 8 Easy Steps
• and lots more…

Topics include:

• Getting started with email marketing
• Building a quality list
• Creating effective email campaigns
• HTML for email
• Performing an audit of your email marketing strategy

The workshops will be taught in Dutch and will be very hands-on, so bring your own laptops!!

More info: www.emailmarketingworkshop.be

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Consumers are savvy, they want, in fact, they demand their expectations to be met. Remember, email is an opt in channel – they can leave at any time. They expect relevant, personalised, timely emails of interest to them to be delivered by the brands they have chosen to be involved with. As marketers, we need to honour and respect their wishes. If not, they will move their loyalty to a competitive brand which services their needs and respects their wishes.

Originally published on DMAEmailBlog

The simplest way to achieve this is to think of email marketing as you would any other channel and spend the appropriate time planning, strategising, personalising, creating and testing the ultimate marketing experience you can create based upon the lifecycle of your customer. The majority of email marketers are still using email to send ad hoc campaigns, with little thought as to where the customer is in regards to the sales cycle, little personalisation and no campaign automation.

Simply put, I see the future of email marketing to be this: we as marketers will begin to value email as a channel which delivers the highest ROI of any marketing channel (according to multiple sources) and we will endeavour to deliver emails of value to our databases which will entail testing, personalising and segmenting, using triggered approaches.

Having said all the above, it is important to note that the future of email marketing will not involve it being used as a standalone channel but rather as an essential part of the marketing mix which is used to communicate with the consumer at various touch points of their lifecycle.

An example of this future (and it should be noted that there are a few brands who are successfully implementing something similar now) could be as follows: whilst on Facebook, our protagonist, Sophie sees an ad for BrandX and clicks on the ad. It takes her to BrandX’s Facebook page where she signs up for email and mobile offers, thus creating an account with BrandX. An offer grabs her attention and she clicks through to the website and adds the item to the cart and purchases it.

An automated email is then sent with the details of her purchase as well as some suitable accessories based on her purchase and a reward card is sent in the mail to her. The following day she receives her reward card in the mail and is very pleasantly surprised at this so she finds the email and browses through the suggested accessories. Finding a pair of shoes she likes, she places them in her shopping cart but does not purchase them.

A day later her item arrives in the mail in the morning and in the afternoon, whilst out shopping she receives an automated shopping cart abandonment email ‘coincidently’ offering her a 10% discount voucher on the brand of shoes she had put in the cart the day before.

Taking this voucher to her local BrandX shop she purchases the shoes and uses her rewards card to start earning her reward points.

From Sophie’s perspective, BrandX supplied an efficient and convenient service and fantastic products, with the added bonus of being rewarded for her purchases. With the end result being that Sophie is now a loyal customer.

From BrandX’s perspective, all communications were automated and they were able to create a personalised, one to one communication using multiple channels to achieve excellent results. Plus they have set the scene now for furthering the relationship via the loyalty card and more lifecycle multi-channel communications.

Of course, this is a simplified version of what could happen – there are many other channels which could be integrated in Sophie’s Lifecycle such as direct mail, QR Codes, SMS, Foursquare etc – but you get the picture. The main takeaway from this example is that this scenario is about Sophie and how her experience with BrandX was tailored to herself by herself.

Technology is on our side and by leveraging the tools we have at hand today (not to mention the tools which will be developed tomorrow), let’s get to it and start making the future happen!

How do you feel when a pushy shop assistant approaches you the minute you enter a shop?

When an email consisting of nothing but a hard-sell call-to-action lands in your customer’s inbox, this probably makes them feel the same way.

“Register Now”

I recently received an email to promote an industry event out of the blue:

The “Register Now” link took me to a landing page that contained little information besides ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘where’.

On the basis of this scant information I had a choice – register or leave the page. As I had never heard of the brand or event, I left.

Give email recipients compelling timely reasons to respond

Using “Learn More” instead of “Register Now” might have encouraged me to spend some time checking out the company, perhaps ending in a conversion after all.

A landing page featuring in-depth information, such as an article or press release, a list of people or companies planning to attend or recommendations from past attendees, might have been more persuasive.

However, this call-to-action arrived at an inopportune time in my buying cycle, so even a more persuasive call-to-action and a compelling landing page were unlikely to convert me. It’s vital to establish when your customer is ready to buy.

And, a complex sale, or a sale with a long consideration cycle, shouldn’t rely on a single email.

Four sources of insight to shape your email communication strategy

Combining and using all the customer knowledge and insight you have to shape your emails is the only reliable way to improve your email results.

Here are four valuable kinds of customer data; and you may already have identified others:

1. Email analytics. Find out who opens and/or clicks regularly and who’s apparently comatose on your email list.

2. Search keywords. The longer or more specific the keyword string, the closer people are to acting.

3. Customer and email subscriber surveys. A survey is the fastest way to find out where customers and prospects are in their buying cycle. Customer profiles will give you even more detailed information. It is vital to ask customers how close they are to a purchase decision – this classic business-to-business approach works equally well in business-to-consumer markets but it isn’t always used.

Perhaps only a fraction of your subscribers will fill out a survey or profile. But, if you keep them uncomplicated and easy to complete, you should still get enough data to draw some valuable conclusions.

4. Website browse data. Where do your customers land? How long do they stay? Do they burrow deep into product pages for product specs or do they bounce from page to page? This data can help you create relevant calls-to-action that move customers through the funnel.

Don’t underestimate the power of the right call-to-action!

Once you’ve established who’s mildly interested in your products and who’s ready to give you their credit card number, this data can be used to segment your database and create relevant messages and carefully targeted calls-to-action.

Then you’re ready to test which call-to-action works best for each segment.

Even if you don’t have the data to create segments, you can still conduct a simple A/B split test to show whether “Buy Now” generates more response than “Learn More”.

Another important point concerns which test metrics you should measure.

‘Call-to-action A’ might produce more landing page clickthroughs but ‘Call-to-action B’ might generate more actual conversions.

Ensure you create landing pages to support your call-to-action; provide more information for site visitors who aren’t ready to commit, such as links to product spec sheets or agendas.

Think about other value events besides conversion

An email can generate many valuable outcomes for a brand.

For example, promoting and providing links to your email newsletters gives people who aren’t ready to buy a chance to sign up and develop a relationship with your brand.

Last year Google released data revealing only 1 in 9 landing page visitors converted, so getting permission to email the remaining 8 is another potentially valuable outcome.

Perhaps of most long-term value to a brand, every email offers an opportunity for the brand to develop its relationship with customers.

Treat each email as a bridge to your customers rather than as a solitary promotion; a great opportunity to find out all kinds of information to increase the relevance of your communications.

Use customer information to shape email content and calls-to-action around customer needs and you create a virtuous circle of communication that should continue to grow in value to both the brand and its customers.

Originally posted on SmartInsights