Email Marketing Strategy Just because you can do something doesn’t necessarily mean that you should! It’s an old adage and one many email marketers would do well to consider before embarking on their email marketing strategy. If we start from what is possible the prospect of drawing up an email marketing strategy, budget, resource and timelines is daunting. I like to start from the other end, not what is possible but what does the business need. It sounds simple and the oft flippant response is more sales but that doesn’t always hold true. So start with a blank canvas and decide your business’s short, medium and long term goals, they may all turn out to be the same – sales,…
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Do you even know me? Watch out for these email personalisation pitfalls
It’s ready. Your beautifully designed, flawlessly coded email is one click away from being fired off to thousands of customers. There’s just one problem: everyone is about to receive the same message. No, the forename which has been shoehorned into the subject line doesn’t count. It’s spray-and-pray dressed up as one-to-one. Email marketing deserves to be more sophisticated than that. And it can be. We live in an age of dynamic content, data science and machine learning. To the benefit of customer and business alike, it’s possible to send expertly tailored content based on a person’s purchasing and browsing activities. But even a richly personalised email programme can sometimes trip up. Read on for a list of personalisation perils –…
Getting started with Email Marketing for small businesses Part 1.
Starting out with email marketing for small businesses can seem like an impossible task. You have to make time to create content, you need to update your list of subscribing customers and many other tasks. All these tasks take time out of your work day. Marketing with email can also seem like a legal minefield with GDPR legislation to consider as well as all the laws governing spam email. Email marketing does not need to be difficult, however. It is easily the cheapest and most effective form of Marketing. 73% of marketers rate email as the number one digital channel for ROI (Marketing Week). It is also more often people’s preferred method of receiving marketing communication. Litmus’ 2016 State of…
Let’s get serious with auto responders!
Let’s get serious with auto responders! Auto responders tend to get set up almost as an after thought. We’ve planned our email broadcasting strategy for bulk sends but about those pesky auto responders? What should we send there? They also tend to get set up and often are left unchanged. We recently discovered a self-service client who had sent over 3 million auto response messages over the last 2 years for a brand they had shut down! The auto responses were set up in the system, the data was there, the trigger criteria had been met in each instance and so the email had been sent, approximately a 1/4 of a million of them a month, all because the auto…
Research piece on what email marketers are focusing on
We are pleased to announce that email industry heavy weight Jordie Van Rijn from Email Monday among many other well respected email marketing events, blogs and websites like email vendor selection has agreed to write a series of blogs for display block. The first of which, a research piece, is below. Please make sure you register at the bottom of our home page if you want to be informed when Jordie’s next piece is available. This is what Email Marketers will be focussing on There has never been a better time to start with building out your email marketing plan than right now. With that in mind it is interesting to gauge what marketers say are the top focal points…
Mobile Opens
Mobile optimised email is now nothing new but the excuse that mobile email is not right for all businesses is now a complete lie. All businesses across all sectors should be sending mobile optimised email. It is the industry standard now. Brands who fail to send out mobile optimised email risk losing subscribers and increasing the chances that their marketing will be less and less effective. The stats don’t lie the time to mobile optimise email campaigns has long since past. It’s not a nice to have anymore but a necessity. Mobile opens across all industries show high numbers of opens on mobile devices many with mobile opens well over 50%.
If not now, when?
Welcome to the first in a series of what to test and why with email marketing. It’s said that timing is everything and, given the change in the way we access our emails and the online world generally, it’s now even more important to send the right message at the right time. I’ve read a few posts lately saying 2015 is the year of customer experience, where marketers will put the customer first and create a positive experience from initial contact through to purchase and beyond. The other ‘big thing’ for this year is for marketing to become truly omni-channel. The drivers for these remain unchanged; fear and greed. Fear over rival brands stealing a march and customers, fear over…