This is a sponsored post written by ActiveTrail. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
Ever wonder what the real pros do to create email campaigns that rock? Read on to see how a few of London’s finest digital marketers do it.
SEO, blogging, social media marketing, growth hacking, etc. The digital marketing landscape is growing and changing on a daily, if not hourly basis, and our job as marketers is to look to exploit these marketing opportunities in ways that will most benefit the companies and organizations we work for. Seeing as email is what we do at ActiveTrail, we continually strive to make generating and running such campaigns easier and more effective for our customers. As such, we have enlisted a number of London’s foremost digital marketing mavens to share their thoughts and suggestions on email campaigns. We recommend taking a few minutes to hear their take on everyday methods to improve your results:
Amélie Canizares, Email Marketing Manager at LloydsPharmacy Online Doctor
Make your broadcast and automated emails work together
We tend to read more and more that automation is the future of email marketing, and demonizing broadcast emails. But I admit that I do send regular emails to a large portion of my subscribers’ list. Broadcast emails used smartly can include personalized content to adapt to your subscribers’ personality and needs. Automated emails also have multiple uses and are great to set up for birthdays, purchase anniversaries, or re-engagement series, but they cannot work alone.
I recommend starting your email marketing strategy by mapping the entire customer journey from opt-in, and include everything a customer will receive at each stage – automated series, regular newsletters, seasonal campaigns, one-off updates, etc. It will help you understanding how your campaigns interact with each other, find opportunities for automation, and ultimately providing the best customer experience.
Jack Gevon, eCRM & Email Marketing Manager at The Private Clinic
Are you an email Marketer that sends out birthday or anniversary emails to your customers as part of your loyalty and retention strategy? If your answer is yes, keep on reading….
Over the past few months, I’ve been using a new email tool called ImageWIZZ, which lets you personalize an image. This has given my email campaigns a significant boost with regards to CTRs and CTORs. Whenever I have used personalized images in a campaign, I’ve had at least a 10%-15% uplift in engagement and approximately a 5% increase in revenue as well.
This is an amazing tool, especially if you want to be a bit more creative with your emails to make them stand out even more or, as they say, have that WOW factor. Plus, if you want to take it to the next level you can also personalize an animated GIF – think of the possibilities.
Ellie Stamouli, Previously Senior Email Marketing Executive at MR PORTER
When writing subject lines, always put yourself in the position of your customer; they have an inbox full of marketing emails like yours. What is going to make your email stand out?
And don’t overlook the pre-header. As probably more than 50% of your audience check emails on mobile, you can use it as an extension of your subject line, in order to give more insight into the content of the email and ultimately another reason for your customer to open your email.
Barbara Leszczynska, Graphic Designer, Email Marketing Specialist at Corney & Barrow
Email Marketing has always been an integral part of my personal growth. There is no recipe for a successful email campaign: the only way is to experiment and make sure that the campaign addresses the relevant target audience.
Email campaigns may vary depending on the selling offer and the type of customer, but to gain recognition among competitors, it is more important to sell the story than the actual product itself.
As a designer and illustrator, by heart, I always incorporate an interesting image of a hero. It might be a simple drawing or an animated gif with a very strong message. Let’s leave some space for the audience to guess the context, and even include an element of humor in order to encourage them to want to read more. Don’t try to copy your competitors, just be yourself. Email marketing is a part of brand building and one of the ways to secure customers.
Luke Greenfield, Email Marketing Manager at Pinnacle (formerly known as Pinnacle Sports)
It’s important to be data driven, not just data aware. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of making changes without relying on data to validate your hypotheses.
This can be achieved by conducting qualitative and quantitative research on your subscribers to help inform the changes you should make. Once you’ve established the areas you need to work on, identify the metric(s) you should be measuring against, and run longer term A/B tests for validation. This will ensure that the changes are robust and ideally statistically significant.
Joseph Crane, Email Marketing Associate at Tough Mudder
Email Marketing Strategy – Know Your Audience
What’s key to consider is your target demographic, their expectations and how their experience or “journey” will unfold. Your window of influence is incredibly short and, as an email marketer, it’s your job to persuade the recipient to engage with the organization within this time frame. So how do you do that? What I’ve found successful is to work with colleagues who have a closer relationship with our audience to understand what they want and how to give it to them. Knowing your audience is half the battle. The other is marketing to them appropriately.
Using segmentation, I was able to personalize campaigns by leveraging content that provided additional value for the consumer which in turn drove sales, and with a few small design tweaks edited the layout to place greater emphasis on elements which resonated strongest with our database improving engagement and leads.
Kath Pay, CEO at Holistic Email Marketing
When creating call-to-actions, be mindful of the fact that email is a Push Channel and the website is a Pull Channel – a key difference which is oft-forgotten when creating CTAs for emails.
With a pull channel such as a website, the customer is there because they have been pulled to the website by wanting to complete a task they have set themselves, and have a mission to fulfill.
Whereas with a push channel such as email, we the marketer, are pushing our offers to them and suggesting ‘Would you like’, ‘why not consider’. This means the buyer is more likely to be closer to the top of the purchase funnel with email, rather than closer to the bottom of the funnel as with search or the website. It all has to do with intent.
Keep in mind that CTAs are the trigger for an action, and we need to ensure we’re asking them to take the most appropriate action based on where they’re at within the buying journey. If the trigger isn’t appropriate for where they’re at in the purchase funnel, they’re less likely to convert.
Hadar Graf, Author of this Article, Marketing Manager EN Markets at ActiveTrail
I hope you have benefitted from these tips from this set of truly inspirational digital marketers. I’ll leave off with a few of my own words on how you can improve the deliverability of your email campaigns.
In general, it’s good practice to clean up your mailing list every now and then. For our own housekeeping, at ActiveTrail we do a “deep clean” every three or four months, after which we consistently notice a 2% – 3% increase in deliverability. This might not sound like much, but in email marketing, small percentages count! Fractional gains eventually add up to substantial numbers. Also, when you have very large mailing lists, small percentages are still significant in absolute terms. You can find many articles online discussing the various techniques for cleaning up your mailing list, so I won’t list them here.
The campaign management software you use to deliver emails is also important when it comes to deliverability. As an email marketing software company, we at ActiveTrail make it a point to maintain the highest deliverability rates in the market.
For instance, we have developed a proprietary system that detects “spammy” users (of ActiveTrail) and bans them immediately. Doing this is one way in which we screen our clients to keep our servers as clean as possible, thereby helping to ensure our trustworthy clients’ emails are received.
Summary
As with many areas of life and business, the best options to improve lie in “going back to the basics”, mastering them and maybe expanding on them. In the realm of digital marketing, perhaps the most basic of basics are email campaigns. Study after study show that despite the introduction and proliferation of alternative mediums of massive scope, e.g. Google and Facebook, email is still king. No other online marketing tool comes close to being as effective as email in getting people’s attention and kicking off marketing funnels. As part of our commitment to our customers, we try to keep an ear to the market, listening to and internalizing the advice of “power digital marketers” such as the experts presented in this article. I would like to take this opportunity to thank each of the contributors for their efforts, and you, the readers, for taking the time to hear what they have to say.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by ActiveTrail. Used with permission.
In-post Photos: Images by ActiveTrail. Used with permission.
