Fluent 2016 Page 5 The Performance Marketer s Guide to Email Marketing: Engaging Your Subscribers You ve cleared the initial hurdle of acquiring new prospects for your email marketing campaigns, but now you re faced with the challenge of getting those subscribers engaged and on the path to making their first purchase and then becoming long-term, loyal customers. Our team of customer acquisition experts and email marketers here at Fluent have compiled a simple and easy-to-follow guide encompassing the key steps to executing a successful email marketing campaign. In the pages that follow, you ll find a comprehensive list of the steps that you should take from the moment you acquire new subscribers to when your prospects reach the end goal of your campaigns. We touch on important email marketing topics such as: Email Automation Welcome Emails List Segmentation Calls-to-Action Optimizing for Mobile We hope that you ll enjoy this first guide in our Best Practices series, and we welcome your feedback! The Fluent Team
Fluent 2016 Page 7 WELCOME EMAIL WAIT 3 DAYS Email Automation SEND EMAIL 2 CLICKS LINK Email is an essential channel for acquisition, relationship building, and driving sales, and it has become imperative for brands to reach the right consumers at the right time via email. You can be certain that if you aren t utilizing it, your competitors surely are. The first step to successfully engage your prospects via email marketing is to choose your email automation platform. What exactly is email automation software? SEND PRODUCT REVIEW EMAIL SEND DISCOUNT OFFER OPENS EMAIL MAKES A PURCHASE! Email automation software is technology that allows you to segment your contact lists, and create and schedule unique emails to be delivered to specific prospects at the optimal times. With email automation software, you can pre-schedule emails to welcome new subscribers, send recommendations or tailored product offers to prospects, educate users down your sales funnel with great content, and even follow up on website activity and actions that users have taken. There are literally hundreds of email marketing and automation platforms on the market, from free and inexpensive solutions such as MailChimp and GetResponse, to more comprehensive options like Experian and Oracle. Your specific use cases and budget should help you determine the best software option for your company.
Fluent 2016 Page 9 Establish a Goal for Your Campaign Before mapping out the intricate details of your email campaigns, you should first determine the end goal(s). There are a number of things that you may be looking to accomplish with your emails. Perhaps you d like your subscribers to become more familiar with your offerings and engage with your content. Or maybe your goal is to get a trial completion or a product purchase by the end of your email flow. Whatever that objective is, determining it at the onset and jotting it down will allow you to better map out the sequence of your emails and drive users down an ideal path to conversion. If you have multiple goals, it s wise to write out each one and create different email flows that correspond with them. The clearer your goal is, the easier it will be to develop compelling emails, and the better you ll be able to measure results and optimize each campaign.
Fluent 2016 Page 11 Welcome Email Welcome emails are extremely important because they are your first opportunity to grab your subscribers attention and set the tone for the rest of your email series. If you fail at crafting a compelling opening message, you probably will not get much engagement on your subsequent emails, and even worse, you may lose a few readers via the unsubscribe button. Make your welcome message less promotional and more of a soft introduction. Briefly reiterate how the subscriber signed up for your email program and take a moment to inform them of the type of content that they can expect to receive in your emails. Take advantage of the information that you have about your subscribers to personalize your opening email as much as possible. Use demographic information, personal interests, and actions that subscribers have taken on your website to craft a winning welcome message. For example, if a customer downloaded a particular piece of content on your website or visited a specific product page, then it would be wise to start an email series with a related item or a mention of similar offers that they can expect. Lastly, the optimal time to send a welcome message is always right now, right away. As soon as someone opts-in, send a triggered welcome message. The more time that drags on between opting in and receiving the welcome message, the less likely the recipient will be to open and engage with it (and to all of your subsequent communications). Here at Fluent, we always recommend deploying a real-time welcome email, and have built integrations with virtually all of the top email marketing and automation platforms to make real-time data transfers and triggered welcome messages seamless.
Fluent 2016 Page 13 Segment Your Lists Now that you ve sent your welcome message and have set the tone for your email program, it s time to start sending tailored, personalized content. If you re sending the same exact content to every subscriber on your list, chances are that it won t resonate with many of them. Effective marketing today is about understanding the unique needs and interests of real people and communicating with them accordingly, rather than flooding their inboxes with offers and hoping that they stick. Divide your contact database into smaller lists based on information that you ve gathered about your users such as demographics, personal interests, and actions that they ve taken on your website or in response to your previous emails. Be sure to also segment your lists by the stage of the sales cycle that each of your contacts is in when you first initiate your campaign. A subscriber who has visited your website and explored product and pricing information should not be emailed in the same manner as one who has elementary knowledge of your company.
Fluent 2016 Page 15 Provide Useful Content & Relevant Offers The next tenet is a no-brainer and will almost outright determine the success or failure of your email campaigns: provide useful content. Consumers are constantly inundated with emails from every direction, so if your content and offers are not useful to your readers, you will face an uphill battle trying to convert them into paying customers. When you sit down to craft your emails, take a moment, place yourself in the shoes of your readers and go through a quick exercise. Ask yourself the following questions: Are my offers well-presented and clear enough to entice a reader within a few seconds of glancing at the email? Is the value of my content very clear to users? Is this email for everyone? (If the answer is yes, then you aren t offering anything differentiated and will be less likely to get your ideal prospect to bite.) Target your offers to your respective audience(s) and differentiate as much as you can. Then watch your data closely, look for trends positive or negative and adjust accordingly!
Fluent 2016 Page 17 Next Step Play it Free BUY NOW Call-to-Action One of the worst mistakes that you can make is to make it difficult for subscribers to figure out the next step. With the exception of a few emails, such as no-reply email alerts, every message that you send should have a clear and concise call-to-action. Download REGISTER NOW Check it out! A call-to-action or CTA is a button or link in your email that directs readers to the next action that you d like for them to take. For example, if you re offering your readers a new, limited-time only product offer, your email should contain a large, clear button that says Buy Now! or something of the like. Learn More Inquire now Buy Now! GET IT NOW! SEND MAIL Activate My Free Trial try it free While most marketers understand the importance of calls-to-action, many are still making the costly mistake of placing their CTAs in or around a block of text. Use large, bright buttons or clear blue hyperlinks placed away from the body of the email to yield the highest engagement. Sign Up Call Now!
6% 5% 3% The Performance Marketer s Guide to Email Marketing: Engaging Your Subscribers Fluent 2016 Page 19 22.3% Desktop Short & Sweet Mobile vs Desktop 77.7% Mobile Nearly 80% of online interactions in Q4 2015 took place on mobile devices and email accounted for a quarter of those sessions*. One of the biggest factors in email engagement is the length of the message. Long and wordy emails are intimidating and almost always result in users glancing over them. Keep your messages short and sweet and make it as easy as possible for subscribers to get the gist and engage with you quickly. Use images and icons in favor of lengthy text, if applicable, and get to your point quickly. Which of the following activities do you use your smartphone for the most? 25% 25% 20% 20% 19% 15% 14% 10% 5% 7% 0 EMAIL SOCIAL GAMING PHOTOS WEB SURFING SHOPPING VOICE OTHER *Fluent s Devices & Demographics 2016 (http://www.fluentco.com/resource/devices-demographics-2016/)
Fluent 2016 Page 21 Optimize for Mobile Responsive Email Non-responsive Email On the previous page, we mentioned that 80% of online interactions in Q4 2015 took place on mobile devices, so making your emails responsive on mobile devices is a must. Period. The penalty for sending emails that are not mobile optimized is stiffer than ever. Take a look at the two emails to the right and ask yourself if you d bother to zoom in and read the second one if it came from a brand that you re not already loyal to Probably NOT. Implement responsive design techniques to ensure that your emails look good on every screen. For more information on responsive design, check out the How to Guide to Responsive Email Design from Litmus: https://litmus.com/blog/the-how-to-guide-toresponsive-email-design-infographic
Fluent 2016 Page 23 Measure, Improve & Repeat! DELIVERY RATE If you ve completed each of the previous steps carefully, then congratulations, your emails will be a hit! Well not so fast. Email, like every other marketing channel is both an art and a science. Following the aforementioned steps will help you better understand the art of crafting effective emails, but only data will help you understand the science of great email marketing. Collect data on each of your campaigns, monitor the numbers continuously, and make changes and test the results against the previous version(s). Make sure that you re not running multiple tests simultaneously so that you can attribute the variation in the data to specific changes that you ve made along the way. CLICK RATE OPEN RATE Continue to test, measure, optimize and repeat! CONVERSION RATE
Fluent 2016 Page 25 Summary Let s quickly recap our steps. Here are the key things to remember: Automation If you don t have a solid automation platform you ll be very limited in the types of emails that you can send and how quickly you can deploy them. Campaign goal Establishing and writing down your goal(s) allows you to map out the proper sequence of your emails and drive users down an ideal path to conversion. Welcome email Your welcome message will make or break the rest of your email campaign. Make it less promotional and more of a soft intro, personalize it based on the information you have on your subscribers, and send it as close to the opt-in time as possible. Calls-to-Action Every message that you send should have a clear and concise call-to-action. Use large, bright buttons with simple text and place them away from the body of your email to help make it stand out. Optimize for mobile Anticipate that the majority of your subscribers will read your emails on their smartphones. Don t forfeit such a huge chunk of your audience. Send mobile responsive emails! Measure, improve & repeat! Successful email marketing requires ongoing optimization. Get comfortable with your data, and let it inform your decisions about your campaign updates. Provide useful content and offers Consumers receive messages from brands through every conceivable digital channel, so if your message isn t relevant and useful, you can forget about that conversion. Target your offers to your respective audience(s) and differentiate as much as possible.
About Fluent Fluent, LLC, an IDI company (NYSE MKT: IDI), is an industry leader in people-based digital marketing and customer acquisition, serving over 500 leading consumer brands and direct marketers. Leveraging a massive reservoir of proprietary audience data, as well as millions of real-time survey interactions with consumers every day, Fluent enables advertisers to more effectively target and acquire their most valuable customers, with precision, at a massive scale. The company s headquarters is in New York City, with a satellite office in Washington, DC. For more information about Fluent, contact us at info@fluentco.com or 646.647.2966. Connect with us @Fluent_HQ Fluent HQ Fluent, LLC FluentHQ