Jacqueline Biggs. Business email. marketing. Proven tips, solutions & tools for small business owners

Jacqueline Biggs Business email marketing Proven tips, solutions & tools for small business owners 1

Business Email Marketing Proven tips, solutions & tools for small business owners By Jacqueline Biggs 2

About the author Getting started What you will learn from this e-book. Why bother with email marketing, it s dead? Practical bits Costs and resources. Choosing en email service provider. How to build a subscriber list. How to avoid being seen as a spammer. Strategic stuff 5 steps to an effective email marketing strategy. Smart ways to use email in your business. How to extend the reach of your emails. Content creation How to give your readers exactly what they want. How long should an email be? Email design and layout considerations. How to craft compelling call-to-actions. Measuring effectiveness How do you split-test emails? Subject line guidelines. Split-testing schedule. The golden rule of email marketing. Contact Jacqueline Further reading 4

About the author Jacqueline Biggs has been a marketing strategist for almost fourteen years. For ten of these Jacqueline worked with a number of FTSE 100 brands including Intel, Scottish and Newcastle, GlaxoSmithKline, Reckitt Benckiser, Procter & Gamble and Kellogg s whist at Euro RSCG and M&C Saatchi advertising agencies in Sydney, New York and London. In 2009, Jacqueline launched Blue Lemons www.blue-lemons.com, a results focused marketing agency for start-ups and small to medium sized businesses. Jacqueline realised that all the tips and strategies she had learned and created for corporate brands could be applied to start-ups and small companies and generate extraordinary results on very small budgets. Blue Lemons is renowned for helping business owners to deliver the right message, to the right audience in the most effective way, whether on or offline. In 2011, Jacqueline co-founded Brand Camp www.brand-camp.com for entrepreneurs with Rob Bloxham, together they run events and online courses on all aspects of marketing and brand development ranging from how to create and build a successful brand, to how to make money from social media. Jacqueline is known for delivering real results and making her clients feel wildly optimistic about their business future. 5

Getting Started 6

What you will learn from this e-book At 41 years old, email is a veteran of the digital marketing world, every business uses email, but its very ubiquity is also one of email marketing s greatest weaknesses. We all receive too much email, so how is it possible for brands to break through the huge clutter? Add to this the explosion of social media that has changed the way that people communicate with each other, is there actually any future for email marketing? Yes, yes yes, there is! Email is still an incredibly effective marketing channel, when used correctly. Whether you run a large or small enterprise, it provides a cost effective way to communicate with prospects and customers. Email is not in decline, but it is changing and its vital that you move with these changing times. The marketers that are winning are those that increase the relevance of their emails through personalisation and better matching of behavioural data with content. For many companies, email is the most effective sales channel in their business. The goal of this e-book is to help you improve the effectiveness of your email marketing. Whether you have been using this channel for years, or are just starting out, you will get enormous value from this book, as I will show you how to create a targeted email marketing strategy that works for your specific business. This book will answer How to choose the right email service provider. How to grow a targeted database, fast. How to segment and identify profitable niches in your database. How to create an email marketing strategy that delivers results. How to write compelling content every time. The most important metrics you need to focus on to ensure your effectiveness. How to integrate email marketing with social media to maximise effectiveness. 7

Why bother with email marketing, it s dead? Despite businesses tightening their purse strings, email marketing continues to attract significant sums of investment as it is inherently accountable and more trackable than other marketing channels. The importance of email marketing is outlined in the results of Econsultancy / Adestra s email marketing Census1; when it comes to return on investment (ROI), almost 75% of companies rate email marketing as excellent, out of all the digital channels. Only search engine optimisation, (SEO), is rated higher and just 1% higher I might add. What s more, research also shows that UK consumers are very responsive to email marketing as 60%2 of consumers rated email as the best means of communication to receive advertisements for sales and special offers. A distant second was postal mail, just 28% of respondents considered this the best. Over the pond, in the US we see similar trends. How your business could benefit from email marketing There are a number of marketing objectives that email marketing can help you to achieve: Drive loyalty & customer satisfaction Acquiring new customers is always more expensive than retaining existing. If done correctly, email marketing can be an extremely cost-effective way to generate repeat business, as relevant and timely information is appreciated by your audience. Emails are also a great way to remind your consumers of the benefits of your products or services and the value they receive from you, as well as updating them about new offers. Add to this that the price of sending emails through an email service provider has significantly decreased in recent years and you start to see the real value of email marketing. Increase brand awareness Regular emails to both prospects and customers help to keep your brand top of mind and build ongoing relationships with your list. Emails are also a great channel to both educate and entertain, as the content can be as long or short and media rich as you want it to be. 1. http://econsultancy.com/uk/reports/email-census (2011) 2. http://econsultancy.com/reports/habits-and-motivations-of-consumers (2010) 8

Drive sales You have already heard that two thirds of consumers surveyed stated that email was the preferred channel to receive promotions and special offers, so it presents an ideal opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell your products and services. Improve customer retention Research has shown that consumers are loyal to brands that make them feel that they care about them. Regular, timely and personalised emails are a very effective way to demonstrate that you understand your customer base s needs and wants, which makes them feel more connected to you. The right message at the right time is key to retaining your customer base and retention is significantly cheaper than acquisition. Improve customer service Email is a great channel to ask for feedback about your products and services and how you could improve the overall service that you offer. Analysing the data will also help you with new product ideas that will create additional revenue streams. So, whilst email is far from the new kid on the block there are numerous benefits to creating a focused email marketing strategy. So let s get you started. 9

Five steps to an effective email marketing strategy The most effective emails are the most relevant; those that successfully deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. The holy grail of all marketing of course. It s by no means easy to achieve, but the following five steps will help you to maximise the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. 1. Set clear objectives. 2. Create a content strategy. 3. Segment your database. 4. Integrate email marketing with other marketing channels. 5. Test, evaluate, learn. 1) Set clear objectives What role will email play in your marketing mix? Do you intend email to be a key promotional channel? Or do you want to improve your customer service through regular emails? Perhaps you want to demonstrate your expertise through case studies, or maybe all of the above? Spend time getting clear on your objectives, as this will drive your content strategy. It s ok to have more than one objective, you just need to create a content strategy for each. When you set your objectives make sure that they are SMART. You have probably heard of this acronym before, but it is a useful guide to setting objectives. SMART objectives are: Specific: Rather than stating that you want to improve customer service response rates, be specific, by how much? A SMARTer objective would be To reduce customer response rates from five days to four over the next quarter. Measurable: You need to be able to track and measure your objectives, otherwise how will you know if you are improving? Following the example above, given you can know the response rate is currently five days, you will be able to track and measure the improvement. Achievable: Whilst I am a big advocate of bold objectives, they need to be within the realms of possibility. Creating an unachievable goal is incredibly demotivating, so make your objective optimistic, but realistic. 10

Relevant: Are you measuring what matters to your business? How do your objectives for email marketing contribute towards achieving your broader marketing objectives? Timed: Give your objectives a target date, when do you want to see the results by? 2) Create a content strategy If your goal is to increase online sales through email marketing, then it helps to segment your database according to where your customers are in the buying cycle and create specific content for each segment designed to move them through the buying process. If this is you goal, I recommend creating the following three buckets of content. Induction: Content designed to turn new sign-ups into active buyers of your products or services. Adoption: Content to encourage those who repeatedly don t buy from you to purchase for the first time. Retention: Content focused on retaining customers and driving repeat purchase. Induction Your content should take your prospects on a journey that starts by promoting your brand values, then tells them what sets you apart from the competition and then educates them about each of the products and services that you offer. You need to create a different email for each part of this journey The welcome email: Craft a fun and engaging welcome email that introduces your new sign-ups to the type of content that you will be sharing. It s really important to encourage your readers to take action right from the start, as this sets a precedent that will make it easier to get them to buy from you later. So in your welcome email consider asking a question, encouraging them to share your email, download a document, watch a video or send a tweet. At this stage it doesn t matter which, just encourage one action. 11

On-going engagement: Create a series of emails that slowly tell your brand story and include information about what your business can do for its customers and hero key products and services in the emails. At the end of this series create one big promotional email designed to convert these prospects into buyers, something that really encourages readers to take action. You need to think about the frequency of the on-going engagement email series, can you commit to sending these daily, or is weekly or monthly more manageable? The frequency will be driven by your objectives, but avoid overloading the recipients. I recommend creating your email series in advance, before you launch and setting up an auto-responder sequence using your email service provider, as you can plan for the emails to be sent on pre-determined dates, no matter when someone signs-up. Once someone has bought they will then start to receive the retention content focused on driving repeat purchase. Adoption Just because you send out emails does not mean that they will be read by all recipients. The percentage of unopened emails is the bane of most email marketers existence, it is always higher than we would like it to be. Then you have those who read your emails, but don t click and then there is the even more infuriating segment that read your email, click through, but still don t buy. It can be very frustrating, but help is at hand! The email series you create for the adoption programme will help to minimise your frustrations. However, you will never have 100% conversion rate, it just doesn t happen, so you have to be prepared to delete the dead wood from your list. Yes, your list will shrink, but the aim is to create a list of warm prospects. For the adoption programme to be effective you need to be able to track the following in the analytics of your email service provider: Those who have never opened an email. Those who have opened at least one email, but never clicked. Those who have clicked at least one email, but never bought. As you send out emails in your induction phase, these three segments will be created, so you need to pull these out of your main list and create three new lists (segments) to which you will send the following tailored emails. 12

Non-openers: Something isn t working for this group, so you need to play with your subject lines. See the chapter on split-testing for more ideas, but I recommend testing different styles and monitoring what works. Feature direct promotions in the subject line e.g. 25% off today only, ask questions relating to your products and services, e.g. Did you know all of our products are organic? Test a more direct approach: What can I do to make you open me? And even try humour. Use the re-send to un-opened function to test more subject lines - this sends the same email with a new subject. If they repeatedly do not open your emails, they are dead wood so delete them from your list. Non-clickers: Test the language you use for your call-to-actions, try different messages and monitor uptake. Play around with different images of your products and services and make sure you include testimonials from happy customers. As you need to create the habit of clicking on content, use other content to encourage clicks such as surveys, links to videos and to social media. If you have a range of products, then include a section on most popular products, or latest products to attract clicks. However, remember to only change one thing at a time, otherwise you will not be able to identify what drives the increase or decrease in results. Non-buyers: Sometimes great buying intentions go out the window as your readers get distracted by other commitments or they simply forget about your email. Test emailing a reminder that an offer is coming to an end e.g. Don t miss out - Just 2 days left to get 20% off! Consider the most common objections to buying your product or service and create emails overcoming these barriers and underlining why they should buy your brand. The goal of this content marketing strategy is to move your prospects through the induction programme and into the retention so that you can maximise the lifetime value of your database. Retention This is where you make real money. It can also require a lot of work segmenting and re-segmenting to maximise results, so attention to detail is critical in this phase. The retention programme has two types of content: 13

1) Non-salesy - news, updates, educational content - anything that isn t trying to sell. 2) Promotions. Non-salesy: This focuses on building a relationship with your readers; updating them on company news, new products or services in development, sharing the latest customer testimonials, your latest PR coverage and encouraging readers to join you on social media. Remember that each email needs to have a call to action. Promotions: As the name suggests, emails are purely promotional and focus on increasing the frequency of purchase and the average order value of your customers. Combine promotions related to previous buying behaviour with blanket promotions to all of your retention segment, these could include free delivery, end of line promotions and best sellers. To keep your readers engaged create polls to find out more about what they like and dislike about your products and services. The key to a successful retention strategy is the balance between nonsalesy and promotional emails. I recommend two or three non-salesy to every promotional email, as no one wants to be sold to all of the time and particularly us Brits. 3. Segment your database The more specific and tailored you can make your emails, the greater your response rates. However, there are a number of different ways to segment your list beyond the customer lifecycle. You need to decide what makes the greatest sense for your business, so consider the following: By location Segment geographically only if your product or service is tailored to meet the needs of a geographical area. Groupon segments consumers geographically on sign-up to tailor promotions and then sends daily national promotions to the whole database. By industry If you sell to different industries, it makes sense to segment each, so that you can tailor your messages. A printing company would promote his 14

services very differently when talking to a chain of restaurants versus a wedding planner, for example. Industries can be further segmented by title if relevant. By size of business This can range from start-ups to SME s (small to medium enterprises) to behemoth corporates, depending on your target audience. Using demographics like number of employees or average revenue can help you to tailor your promotions to the right audience. Software companies often have three different subscription services targeting start-ups, SME s and then the top end service for FTSE 100 companies. By demographic This is a common segmentation strategy based on age, sex, marital status even religion if relevant. By product or service type Segmenting by product or service preferences is a great opportunity to create cross-sell and up-sell promotions. A cross-sell is when you sell products directly related to what is being purchased, or has been purchased in the past, with a view to increasing customer spend at the point of purchase. Let s assume you sell shoes, typical cross-sells are cleaning products, protectors, shoehorns and inner soles. An up-sell is when you encourage a customer to buy a more expensive version of a product or service. Up-sells are a key sales strategy for mobile phone providers; they have a myriad of packages of increasing value, based on more, or less air time, messages and internet usage. A tiered pricing model can be very effective. By buying behaviour This could be based on average order spend or frequency of purchase, Creating heavy, medium and small buyer segments enables you to see trends in your customer base and tailor promotions accordingly. As you can see there are a lot of ways to carve up your database. When starting out with a small list I recommend dividing it into customers and prospects only. Sometimes your content might be very similar to 15

both groups with just a simple tweak at the start that acknowledges the difference. As your list grows, the more thoroughly you can segment your database, the greater your response rate will be. 4) Integrate email marketing with other marketing channels. Cross channel campaigns make the most of each channel and email and social media campaigns are very complementary. They do however, have different mechanisms; email pushes content into an in-box, whilst social media pulls and is current and attention based. Neither is better, you actually need both as combined they amplify each other as response rates increase as the message is reinforced by different media. So, if an email gets a great response rate then link to the web based version across your social media channels. Don t feel that you are bombarding people with the same content, as people have preferred ways of managing their content. However, if you start conversations on Facebook and Twitter, make sure that you respond and stay a part of the conversation; otherwise it looks really bad for you. Ultimately you want to get the email addresses of your social media followers, so that you can deliver more tailored communications, so find ways to build your list by offering discounts, promo codes work well and creating separate ones for Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc will enable you to track the effectiveness of each channel. It s also important to encourage social media sharing in every email, so add buttons for each of the main sites to your content, make it really easy to spread the word. 5) Test, evaluate, learn This is the most important part of your email marketing strategy. You need to analyse the results of our campaigns, identify trends and opportunities between your segments and review your content marketing strategy to identify how you can then turn these insights into action through targeted communications. When you start out, treat you campaigns as if they are always in beta. The more you test, evaluate and optimise your marketing the more effective it will become. I cannot stress this enough. Different markets have different nuances and whilst there are guiding marketing principles that I can teach, you need to fine tune your marketing strategy for your niche market and business. 16

out now on Jacqueline Biggs Marketing to Win Jacqueline Biggs Marketing to Win international Best selling author of Business email marketing How small businesses can do more with less Buy the uk Paper Back Buy the uk kindle Buy the us Paper Back Buy the us kindle 17

CONNECT WITH JACQUELINE @jacquelinebiggs facebook.com/brandcampcommunity uk.linkedin.com/in/jacquelinebiggs jacqueline@jacquelinebiggs.com www.jacquelinebiggs.com (book resources) www.blue-lemons.com (marketing agency) www.brand-camp.com (marketing courses) vi Marketing To Win 18