I thought it would be useful for all of you who are just starting in email marketing to lay out few basic elements for your emails. With a well-crafted email you can skyrocket your results and over the last few years I have developed a list of things, which I include in my emails. They’re nothing extraordinary or super-inventive. Just simple things that require little time and effort but can make your campaigns both more profitable and successful.
Well… Valentine’s Day was 3 weeks ago, but if you’re planning to create some mushy email campaign for the next year, you better read this article already. Here is some insight and inspiration for you. The overall idea this year was to focus on products and offers that were already available and just adjusting them to this special occasion. So even if you don’t have time or any special campaign for this holiday, you can use it to promote and sell some more of your products/offers. Go ahead and spread some love!
The era of batch-and-blast campaigns is over. Today’s most powerful tool seems to be relevance, which underscores the need for careful database segmentation. However, being a complex and delicate undertaking, for many it is still only a theory. In practice it poses too many doubts and problems especially for the inexperienced ones: bad choices for segments may result in no improvement, or even be worse than no segmentation at all. That’s why we all depreciate it. MarketingSherpa’s recent case study is one of a few which not only present its benefits but also some practical ideas on how to successfully implement it.
Although many email marketers still struggle to make it work, the integration of your email campaigns with social media is a must. Everybody goes social on the net, so Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube and their like have become the most influential media. Today your audiences must be built via many channels to keep you on top and ahead of the competition. Working adults, who with the highest disposable income are the highest purchase intent group, check their emails with a far greater regularity than use their social media accounts. However, email campaigns, even the highly personalized ones, only reach relevance in context of a relatively small group susceptible to your call-to-action. That’s the end of the story. Within a few days your email goes to the bottom of the list, and then becomes expired. However, if you try to integrate it with any online social community, its lifecycle is much longer, as a supplementary stage is introduced. A small number of genuinely interested email recipients pass on the message to a larger group of similar enthusiasts, some of them share it further and this way you get free supplementary brand promotion, more buzz, increased brand exposure and brand awareness and your message wins second life.
The question of efficient brand promotion has recently become vital for all online retailers. No service or product is unique anymore – their distinctive features sink in the sea of variations of the same idea. Ruthless as it sounds, we have to face it and deal with it. If we want it to be us, and not the tens or hundreds of our likes we have to stand out from the crowd, become recognizable and memorable.
Finally, I got some feedback on one of my posts. It left me completely speechless, that’s why I just had to share it with you.
So, here’s the story. It’s from Ryanair – Irish airline who’ve gained quite a reputation as a result of their CEO Michael O’Leary’s cutting cost techniques and cheap advertising. Since I’m not a fan of either I never subscribed for their newsletter. I should have, because once in a while it offers some great treats that can provide excellent case studies for every committed email marketer. One of my colleagues forwarded this to me and I’m really curious what your opinions are. Please, feel free to comment on this subject line.
At the beginning of everything, the essential question every email marketer struggles with is: What makes an email open?
And before it is a relevant content, classy creative, killer incentive, or slick call-to-action – it’s the subject line!! Be it newsletter, autoresponder, or trigger mail – they all need unique carefully planned subject lines. All is decided in a nick of time – a glimpse of an eye. Even though it’s only a few words, they can mean a no-go. So here are a few simple rules to generate opens only – extracted and tested by experts.
When it comes to creating buzz, no one does it better than Apple and Steve Jobs. They are famous for simple, but highly inventive marketing ideas that keep people craving their products and rushing to the stores on launch day.
It was business as usual with the recent release of iPhone 4…well, almost sort of. Antenna issues aside, this time there was a unique ingredient added to the email marketing mix. Quite a few lucky customers who contacted Apple about the new iPhone received a “personal” response from the celebrated CEO, Steve Jobs himself!
Every company should at least be aware of the benefits of using email marketing by now. It’s the channel that delivers the highest conversion rates by far, while being the most cost effective by a mile. However, at ExpertSender, we’re aware of the challenges marketers can face when trying to achieve professional-level email marketing. That’s why we decided to kick off our blog with an article presenting our top tips for getting the most out of your email marketing investment. Read it through, then get all hands on deck to implement the following to your email campaigns!
