2 As a customer outreach tool, email marketing plays a fundamental role in today s business landscape. A popular method for both engaging current customers and attracting new ones, email marketing provides a wealth of opportunities to nurture and convert leads, as well as building brand loyalty and awareness. Consider, for instance, the many strategies that can be executed through email marketing. You might reward existing customers through special offers, or launch a drip campaign that gradually warms cool leads and teaches them your value through repeated outreach. You might stir up repeat business through upsell and cross-sell opportunities, or reengage fading prospects. And thanks to today s marketing automation technologies, it s possible to design emails that deliver the most relevant message to the right prospect at the perfect time. Of course, email marketing offers many practical benefits as well. Because most of the production costs in artwork, printing and shipping are eliminated, the faster and inexpensive execution levels the playing field for small companies, entrepreneurs and enterprise brands alike. And unlike the ephemeral nature of other mediums such as a TV ad that s gone in thirty seconds or a social media update that gets rapidly buried under other updates an email will stay in an inbox until the prospect is ready to deal with it. It can also work synergistically with other marketing mediums, and offers sharper tools for tracking ROI when compared to a traditional direct mail campaign. Yet not everyone is aware of how to capitalize on email marketing s full reach and power or previous campaign experience has left them with the wrong impression of its potential.
3 Email marketing has come a long way from its early days when marketers would buy a list and release an impersonal and irrelevant blast campaign to anyone they could. Because the technology arrived before marketers formed an intelligent strategy to utilize it, many quickly adopted haphazard techniques and flawed execution. Those first email marketing efforts were often unwelcome and eventually inspired the invention of the spam filter. But even as marketers learned their lesson, the next generation of emails still had trouble reaching the right consumers. Because they couldn t target their audiences with precision, they often hit customers in the wrong demographic, or business people who lacked purchasing power. As a result, those early batch campaigns left many with a negative impression. In spraying recipients with a generic and meaningless monologue, they frequently created a sense of distaste among readers. Instead of driving purchases and engagement, they often alienated prospects and squandered any positive brand associations. That said, it s important to realize that today s email marketing is nothing like the unwanted batch campaigns of yesterday. Deft marketing strategies can craft appealing content, advanced technologies can ensure it s delivered to exactly the right targets. A well-planned campaign is still an ideal way to initiate meaningful dialogues that segue into closed deals. Unfortunately some people today still associate email marketing with spam or they consider it an obsolete tactic when compared to the popularity of social media. But the truth is that email marketing is still a rich and exciting tool with almost unlimited potential. It s just a matter of capitalizing on its value. FREE
As new marketing technologies evolve, email has been able to accommodate many of the new techniques used to attract customers and deepen relationships. And with the rising popularity of mobile, users are more connected to their email than ever before. But the real value of email marketing today is its applicability to content marketing. Customer BIO Smart marketers recognize that content resonates differently with every recipient and that to engage customers on a unique and relevant level, content must speak to each prospect s goals and challenges. Email offers the perfect medium for personalized, thoughtful content. And because it can extend and intensify the customer relationship, email also has the power to foster an essential feeling of sincerity. 80 60 40 20 75% more likely to purchase items online on Saturday than any other day. Likes Cats Teen romance novels In a time when authenticity is prioritized by consumers, delivering content that reflects and caters to customer needs is the gold standard in earning customer loyalty. Emails tailored to personal nuances can carry a marketer over the obstacle of a customer s cynicism, and build a dialogue that s actually desired by the consumer, rather than viewed as an intrusion. Which brings us to the reason email marketing is positioned for success in today s business world marketing automation. 4
5 Marketing automation is an essential tool in every marketing toolbox, guiding leads from initial engagement to purchase by delivering targeted information at the right time. The more specialized the content, the greater the impact which means that marketing automation provides email marketing with a special ability to attract, convert and close. The first step is remembering that relevance leads to conversion. Segmenting will give every campaign a boost by providing marketers with the ability to amplify the personal significance of every email. Also helpful: Examining the data on prior campaign activity. Who unsubscribed? Who opened the email and who clicked through? Do response times increase at specific times of day? All of this will guide your next approach to prospects at every point in the funnel. Consider also using marketing automation to initiate transactional emails. Based on customer behavior, transactional emails can include order confirmation emails, receipts and dropped basket messages and they traditionally enjoy a higher open rate than regular promotional emails. This means that while the surface reason of a transactional message is to deliver information regarding the behavior that initiated it, they represent the perfect opportunity to upsell or cross-sell products, engage customers, deepen the relationship, and answer questions or post intriguing announcements.
Another strategic use of marketing automation is using emails to drive audiences to dynamic landing pages. Just as you use traffic-generating keywords in your sites, dynamic landing pages will change in response to whatever ad or search phrase led the reader there. By utilizing specific keyword links in your emails, you can control the web content offered to your reader. The rewards are twofold: not only can that tailored content boost conversion rates, those pages can also help you measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. This is just a start, of course. Marketing automation platforms can help produce polished-looking emails, engineering campaigns based on time, actions or pre-defined steps, edit email content on the fly, personalize emails through segmentation, customize text and images and more. The features are so numerous, in fact, that marketers who don t use automation are handicapping their campaigns performance. 6
7 FIVE PATHWAYS TO HIGH PERFORMANCE The need for savvy email marketing is clear and so is the potential as glimpsed in marketing automation technologies. Yet the very abundance of strategies and options can leave many marketers feeling lost. To craft intelligent campaigns that bring in high ROI, marketers must redefine their best practices. Five pathways in particular can fully maximize results and build a foundation for the future.
Before getting lost in the details of open and click targets and the size of your lists, sit down and draft your high-level business objectives. After your goals have been outlined, formulate strategies that tie your long-term objectives and marketing practices together. 8
9 Too many marketers treat content as an afterthought, and think that any promotional email will get attention. They re wrong. Interesting content and irresistible subject lines are critical to increase open and click-through rates. So are commanding calls to action. Even though emails are typically briefer than a direct mail letter, the content creation should be just as strategic; you still need to think from your customer s perspective, address their pain points and align your offers with their goals. Offering meaningful emails will also establish a track record that trains your recipients to read future messages instead of deleting them unread. Also important: make sure that your branding, storytelling and messaging are consistent across mediums and platforms. Your email campaign should possess the same tone and aesthetic as the rest of your Web presence, from social media, to landing pages, to digital assets like online guides and webinars. Finally, make sure that your email content doesn t contain red flag words like free or offer that can trigger a spam filter.
10 If any trend has been red-hot these last few years, it s social media; platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Google+ have been a game changer when it comes to customer outreach and marketing. Yet many marketers have made the common mistake of thinking that social media is an adequate substitute for email campaigns. It s not. The two should be used in tandem, offering a smooth cross-channel experience that carries an engagement campaign from its initial email launch though mobile, social media and display marketing strategies. Thanks to analytic tools, marketers can understand exactly where those campaigns performed and failed. Email and social media should also work together in combining leads and prospects; use your list to guide your email subscribers to your social media sites, while converting your social media followers into email subscribers.
11 While social media has been a dominant trend in marketing dialogues, it s in danger of being eclipsed by the excitement over mobile. Don t listen to marketers who call mobile the future of digital the truth is that it s very much a primary player right now. And when it comes to smartphones and tablets, reading email is just as popular an activity as surfing the Internet or visiting Facebook. This means that appealing to the mobile readership should be the top of any marketer s to do list. The first strategy should be prioritizing the user experience, and understanding the difference between an email read on an ios device and the desktop version of that email. Just as your merchandising strategy would change based on venue, your campaign look and feel should adapt to both smartphone and desktop subscribers. The user experience can make the difference between a delete and a transaction.
One of the most useful tools a marketer can employ in email marketing is testing different content versions on variable groups. Experiment with multiple CTAs using criteria like title, location or industry, or subject lines with different offers and see which performs the best. With those results in hand, the campaign can be refined and optimized for maximum impact before the official launch to the entire list. 12
Email marketing is no longer a niche channel. Nor is it still an intrusive, unwanted form of outreach. From brand management to lead nurturing and customer loyalty, email campaigns can act as the perfect medium for your marketing deliverables, driving authentic connection through personalized content and ultimately creating revenue. One final secret to successful digital marketing: staying responsive to changing technologies. As with everything digital, email marketing is an ever-evolving tool. Remaining flexible and educated on new developments will help you craft innovative campaigns that deliver the most meaning with the most impact, and eventually lead to closed deals.
About LeadMD LeadMD is a conversational marketing services firm specializing on organic lead generation. Headquartered in Phoenix, LeadMD helps companies fix their funnel by leveraging cutting edge sales and marketing technology to produce quantifiable revenue based results. We love marketing automation - it s a fact. We ll make a believer out of you as well. In fact we re so confident (Certified Marketo Partners & Professionals, Certified Salesforce Administrators and Consultants) in the knowledge we wield, we ll examine your automation roadmap with our popular Health Check and get a plan in place before you can say ROI. It s no wonder that LeadMD has helped over 750 organizations harness the power of Marketo. Website: leadmd.com About Marketo Marketing Software. Easy, Powerful, Complete. Marketo, (NASDAQ MKTO) uniquely provides an easy-to-use, powerful and complete marketing software platform that propels fast-growing small companies and global enterprises alike. Marketo marketing automation and sales effectiveness software streamlines marketing processes, delivers more campaigns, generates more win-ready leads, and improves sales performance. With proven technology, comprehensive services and expert guidance, Marketo helps thousands of companies around the world turn marketing from a cost center into a revenue driver. www.marketo.com blog.marketo.com Contact Marketo: +1.877.260.MKTO sales@marketo.com Twitter: @myleadmd