I will be posting a comprehensive listing of effective email tactics in coming weeks. These will include 20 strategies that should be used in every email campaign to build and maintain a quality send list and provide conversions from those sends.
– Eric
eMarketing Innovation
Having a laser focus is critical in email marketing campaigns. The focus should answer one of two questions:
If the answer can’t be summed up in in a short answer, the email needs to be simplified. There shouldn’t be a lot of “ands” in what you are attempting to do. Decrease offers or abridge content. Remember, email marketing is not an extension of your website. This is not the place to show any and everything you do. It is an opportunity to present a simple idea or proposition that the audience is likely to be interested in.
If you are saying or asking too much in a single communication, the audience won’t understand. Rather than using time and energy to get clarification, they’ll just delete the email. Have a laser focus that is easy for your email marketing subscribers to follow.
Internet and social media should have spring cleaning seasons. If something hasn’t been used in years, it’s probably not going to be, and it needs to be tossed. There are a lot of internet and social media pack rats. They horde as many communication channels as they can find. The problem is that they never use them.
Be honest with yourself. Without a dedicated staff, no one can keep up with every single communication channel available on the web. Focus on the social media sites or online marketing efforts that are being used consistently and producing results. Trash everything else.
Unused profiles and vacant internet marketing campaigns are just a vacuum that can be potentially damaging. Our ideal targets might find a blank page with our name on it. The message delivered is that there is absolutely nothing we would like to say to you about ourselves and we have little interest in hearing from you. Wrong message when the point is to communicate.
My challenge to everyone that uses internet or social media marketing is to ditch what you aren’t going to use. Do you have a social media account profile you never check? Discontinue the account. Do you have an email newsletter sign up form but never published a newsletter and have no immediate plans to start? Remove the form. Is your website still featuring the “sweet” animated logo from 1998 because no updates have been made in 11 years? At least take the logo down, maybe take the site down if it’s that unimportant.
These are just things hanging over our heads that will never produce any results. Relieve yourself of the guilt of not using it and remove a possible blemish on you or your company’s image.
People tend to love designing the details of any marketing initiative. I truly understand why too. It’s the slick and cool piece of marketing. Unfortunately, it’s typically the least impactful to your audience and should garner the least attention. If you are doing any internet marketing activity, plan an overview before considering any details.
I was in a meeting where a new web design was being proposed. A basic wireframe was presented with hierarchy and navigation for a website. I felt the proposed layout was practical, provided good visitor flow (scent), and ultimately made a lot of sense for the company. The company representative’s comment was that the colors should be brighter and that she couldn’t read the text. She also pointed out a few typos.
While the presenter obviously did a poor job prepping the company representative for what she was going to see, I’m always a little put-off when I hear this response.
The first problem was that the text was just sample text. A lot of it was gibberish so I had to chuckle inwardly at picking out typos in the first paragraph. The second problem was that the company representative was focusing on all the wrong things. She was discussing design tweaks rather than hierarchy and navigation. The latter two are much more likely to effect ROI.
When setting up, designing, or re-designing any online marketing initiative. Get the overview down. Clearly define a goal and then create a diagram that will support the audience taking action on that goal. A slick layout will not convert your audience. The detail and design is a supporting feature of the larger hierarchies. You have to map out a trip before worrying about whether to take a left or a right.
Many people miss the forest for the trees. Make sure you understand what and where the forest is before deciding how to place the trees.
– Eric
eMarketing Innovation
P.S. No I am not the presenter in this story (though it seems like a “my friend” scenario. I was involved to collaborate on how the email campaigns would update and be incorporated into a new design.
One of the most common questions about email marketing is how often should emails be sent to the contact list. Unfortunately there is no magic formula to follow. However, an educated guess can be achieved by weighing content vs. marketing goals.
We’ve all heard “it’s better to give than receive”. In email marketing the rule morphs into, “If you don’t give, you won’t receive.” Most email marketing campaigns are conceived as a way of marketing products, services, or events. So to gauge send frequency, the first step is identifying what you are looking to promote.
Ideally a 2-to-1 or 3-to-1 ratio is achieved in subscriber-centered content vs marketing promotion. Unless there are special deals that the email subscribers anticipate getting, which double as a marketing promotion, anything less than 1-to-1 is almost sure to fail.
So let’s look at an example. I work with a client who runs an event quarterly. His ultimate goal is to advertise the event and get people to register. The campaign we created uses a 2-to-1 ratio. We run a content rich piece that provides tips and insights into his field of expertise. The promotional piece is an event specific invitation that provides information and registration details. We decided that two invitation were an ideal mix for the event. So knowing we had three months to promote and needing two invitations in that time frame, we used our ratio. Two invitations required four content rich emails. A bi-weekly send schedule worked perfectly to make sure the contact group was getting the promised information but also met my clients goal of getting two event promotions delivered for each quarterly event. The added bonus was that the content emails provided credibility by displaying his knowledge of the topic.
But what if the my client ran monthly events? A weekly schedule would be necessary. What if he ran two events a month? Then he would need to segment the emails into lists of contacts or personas that the content would apply. If that wasn’t possible, he would need find other avenues to promote the event. Don’t let this general equation convince you to make absurdly frequent sends. No matter how good your content is your contact list does not want daily emails.
Of course, this is just a guideline and a lot of individual factors come into play. However, it can provide a basis to start a campaign and then make improvements as the numbers are analyzed. It also forces us to take the users into consideration. One of the most common and detrimental mistakes made in email marketing is focusing solely on what you want to market and forgetting about what the contact group was promised. That’s the perfect recipe to have a large opt-out list or a big group of people that ignore your messages.
As fantasy football hits full swing, it occurred to me that internet marketing and managing a fantasy team is a lot like managing internet and email marketing. Its about paying attention to numbers, making educated guesses about what will reap the most reward, reacting to past trends, and hoping for a little luck.
People get obsessed with fantasy football but few people get consumed by their internet marketing numbers. The truth is online marketing can be fun. Yes, looking over the numbers and formulating a strategy to improve can get tedious but no more so than pouring over player stats. Seeing the results is typically more fun than winning a fantasy game as it can show a measurable impact on the business.
The secret to motivation in online marketing is not placing bets for performance or setting up a smack talk feature. It’s realizing that you are gambling with a lot more than fantasy football glory. Online marketing has the power to drive sales or leads which will improve business returns and likely improve the lifestyle of the people who make up the organization.
Think of it as a game, but one that needs to be taken seriously. You should have some fun but also need to focus on what and how you are improving.
Why bring this up? Too many people focus on the wrong end of improving their online marketing. They want to do the “fun” stuff like redesigning the webpage or putting together cool banner ads. Nothing wrong with those things but they aren’t likely to significantly increase ROI unless the metrics have been weighed and evaluated.
Find the fun in incremental growth. It will keep the site improving toward set goals and avoid a lot of energy wasted on “improvements” that likely won’t display measurable benefits. That can be a lot more exhilarating than hoisting your virtual trophy.
– Eric
eMarketing Innovation
P.S. Yes, I am a fantasy football player (I limit myself to 2 teams a year to avoid the addict label) so I know first-hand how all-encompassing it can be.
Social media is the newest form of online communication. It’s the band wagon everyone is jumping on as the next marketing media for business. But is it? For some people it will be, for others it will be just one more hot topic stop on their way to the next “new thing”.
Online marketing boiled down is about communication. It’s getting our message to a desired audience. The beuty of the internet is that message can be delivered quickly and cheaply. That doesn’t mean there should be little thought or investment made in crafting the communication. Every online media is just another avenue for doing the same thing. I don’t say that to marginalize any one form of internet marketing. They are all important if the audience prefers that form of communication.
So if someone asks, “How can I use social media sites to support my business or organization?” The answer is easy, just convert your other forms of communication to social media. A blog is easy to convert. However, SEO and email marketing can be simple too. A landing page is a great place to point a social media post. Email marketing can provide great content for social media posts.
Twitter is the hot site now with new accounts popping up everywhere. My guess is 1 in 10 will actually stick with it and provide usable content. Many marketers are declaring an end to email marketing but all my favorite subscriptions are going strong, get consistently delivered, and I prefer receiving them in my inbox.
Make good content and communicate it to your audience in any form they prefer. Are people looking for your information on search engines? Make a blog or online directory. Are they expecting to get them trough social media updates? Get the content on those sites. Did they ask for an email? Deliver an email campaign.
The secret isn’t in the media, it’s in the content and the energy exerted in delivering the communication.
There is a temptation email marketers are often subject to. It’s the “how large is the mailing list” lure. It typically the most accessible metric that email marketers are subjected to and can cause a yearning for more and more people. Resist this urge and keep tidy lists. Email success rates don’t come from how many people you send to, it comes from how many people read and take action on the emails that are sent.
Just to prove that anyone with enough time or money can build a large email list, you can review multiple list broker services. These sites contain listings for millions of email addresses. Just think, talking to millions of people; that don’t want to listen. It’s more important to build a credible list than a large one.
This is just like cleaning your room when you were a kid. Sure it might have felt good to be surrounded by all those neat toys but ultimately you couldn’t find or use the ones you intended to play with. You were drowning in a pile of unusable possibilities. That’s what large unkempt lists are, unusable possibilities.
So how do you keep a tight ship with your lists. First, almost every email marketing program has the functionality to identify and scrub bad addresses. Identify yours and use it. Bad addresses are unmonitored email, bounced sends, full mailboxes, non-existent addressed, and some out-of-office reminders. (If you get the same out of office reminder for six months, remove the address. If it says the person is no longer with the company or passed away, definitely remove the address.)
Why does a clean list matter?
Clean email lists make for cleaner email marketing. It helps to keep data accurate and might even save a buck or two.
For the most part site owners are beginning to see the value in tracking their sites performance. Several surveys have indicated that most people gather the data and never do anything with it. That’s not the best idea as reports are nice but the whole point is to measure improvement. However, there is a growing number of people that do take action on the numbers. Unfortunately, many are finding that their actions are negatively effecting site performance. Take time to critically analyse site data to make sure that the prescribed solution is not an oversimplification of the problem.
I recently encountered a site that had been performing moderately well, providing small niche recorded material. The site owner had let data compile for two months and sorted through it to see if he could improve orders. He was reasonably pleased with his traffic but felt that pages were being abandoned too much. He had a 5% order rate.
His conclusion was that people weren’t getting the information they needed because the time on page was small. For his products index page the average time was 2 seconds. Since it had the lowest amount of time per page he decided to focus his efforts there. He set out to increase that time and felt some revised content that was more in depth would help conversion.
Here’s the problem, the products index page only listed the items he had for sale with a photo. It was a good thing that people were only there for a very short period. Page tracking showed that 93% of them moved off to one of his half dozen products. The page was working perfectly by getting people to the information they wanted.
He added descriptions to the links and found that time on page increased to around 25 seconds. He was pleased until he found out his monthly revenue dropped slightly three months in a row afterward. Upon further analysis we discovered that he had gone from a 93% rate of people making it to the individual product page to a 79% rate. Site abandonment on this page went from 4% to 7%. People couldn’t find the product they wanted as easily and were getting lost in added descriptive paragraphs.
The site owners oversimplification of the numbers blinded him to user experience. He tried to apply a “universal rule” to his numbers and found it was actually detrimental.
Understand who uses your site and how. Always think critically about why analytics are showing what they are showing before making changes. Most importantly track changes you make so that if you miss the mark on an optimization you have the ability to recognize the error and correct it.
Great content is only good if people can find it. Some thought towards navigation is always necessary in any internet project. This means social networking sites, blogs, wikis, traditional sites, forums, etc. Make sure that all your online efforts provide an easy way to access information.
Most of us know that website navigation is important (look at all these articles). Navigation doesn’t end with just the website. Any content driven media online should provide convenient ways for finding desired material. People tend to ignore navigation outside their website. The good news is that it’s not too challenging. It just takes diligence.
A blog is an easy example. Most of the navigation is built in for you. Search features are common and adding categories or links is a good way to provide an ability to sort material. It’s just a matter of doing it. Many people get caught up in writing content they don’t take the last step to categorize it. Be diligent and always make sure that people can find what you’ve written.
Another danger is getting caught up in “the rules” or “the style guide”. Having defined standards on a site, blog, forum, etc. that people can follow is essential. However, there needs to be some room for exceptions. Don’t be afraid to buck a rule if it causes confusing navigation.
I recently encountered an example. The site I was revising had several pages that served as indexes for different sections of content. So far so good, the sections were all unique categories. However, the second level provided the quandary. The site rule was that all lists would be in alphabetical order.
Not inherently a problem. However, one of the category pages had a link that 83% of visitors ultimately clicked. However, the time on the page was much longer than one would expect to simply move on to a content page. Furthermore the service group routinely got calls asking about the location of this link. It was by far the most popular link on the page but was not easily located.
Where should it be placed? Logically we would expect it to be right on the top of the page, right?. Wrong, the link started with “Materials” so it was the 21st link out of 28. It wasn’t even visible without scrolling down.
Now anyone freshly looking at this information would say put the most popular link on top. Maybe it should be bolded or emphasized in some way as the analytics are clearly showing it’s what visitors are looking for. However, the site owner fell into the “rules” trap. The rule was alphabetical lists so “M” was toward the bottom. No exceptions.
Make sure navigation is available and logical. It’s important to remember that it has to logical to visitors rather than site owners. Don’t make rules that work for you but not your visitors. When visitors can find what they are looking for, the credibility of your content and your organization increase.
