Email Marketing
Stay in touch and keep your brand top of mind
Email marketing is essentially a digital form of direct marketing. It is one of the fastest growing forms of internet marketing on the landscape today and, done right, it is a very powerful marketing tool. Done wrong it can be disastrous and damage a company’s image permanently. For organizations that do not know all the basic email etiquette, as well as the regulatory compliance requirements, execution on email can often result in driving customers away instead of pulling them closer.
When email marketing is done well, that same organization has the potential to truly engage their audience with their brand and products or services. This often leads to greater positive word of mouth exposure, higher revenues, and larger market share.
The eBoost Way
We approach Email Marketing from the same strategic perspective as all our services. First, we have to define some goals for the campaign. Are you looking to expand your customer base? Hit a certain revenue goal? Increase customer lifetime value? What does a successful campaign look like to you?
Then we must determine who your customers are and what they want from your business. You may have users who will look to you for advice, buzz-worthy news, or expertise in your field. In other cases, customers may be looking for deals or promotions. Either way the strategy must come first.
Once we know who we are sending to and what types of communications we will be sending, we begin designing the creative. During this process, we take into consideration your brand’s look and feel, web reading patterns, email user behaviors, and persuasion architecture.
Once we’ve got the layout and context just right we start with the best practices for content. Just a few things to consider are:
Sender: We want to make sure your customers know they are getting correspondence from someone they want to hear from. We use best sender practices to help insure delivery to the highest number of inboxes.
Subject: A great subject line compels your reader to open your email. The subject line is a first impression you can never get back. Subject lines need to be descriptive, personal, and professional in order to make the most out of each send. Let’s face it, there is no point to send emails that no one wants to open. At the same time, the email content must deliver on the subject line’s promise.
Content: We want to make sure the email content is relevant to your target customers and is targeted toward their behaviors – their needs, wants, and demands. We also need to make sure those customers can easily update their preferences. We don’t want them unsubscribing from our communications all together when it was just one type of communication they really didn’t want. Other pieces of the email content to include and optimize:
- Links: Landing pages, Calls to action, Location, # of links
- Tracking: Call tracking, URL tracking, CTR, Revenue, Deliverability
- Sharing : Forward to Friend & SWYN (Share With Your Network)
- Rendering: Images, Videos, Formatting
- Dynamic Content: Segmenting lists, Customized communication
- Compliance : CAN-SPAM
Even if you think the campaign is perfect, it is important to always be testing. In order to make sure that we are constantly improving the engagement of your customers, we proactively employ tactics like A/B or Sequential Subject Line Testing, dynamic content, smart list segmentation and preference management.
By incorporating all these important details into an Email Marketing campaign, you can send targeted and relevant content that your audience wants to receive and share. Remember the old adage: it’s easier to remarket to current customers than to acquire new customers. When you build a receptive and engaged opt-in email list that expects to receive high quality communication from you, Email Marketing can deliver the highest conversion rates you’ll see out of your entire marketing mix – online or otherwise.
Next Steps
eBoost Case Studies
Email Marketing Case Study
A specialized organic pet food company needed to increase the percentage of online sales versus in-store sales. ... read more »
eBoost Articles
Segmentation - Using Interactivity
There are 4 major categories of interaction behaviors, each with several message types in them. 1) Date Based, 2) Click Behavior in Emails, 2) Website Interactions Post Click, and 4) Purchases. ... read more »
Did You Know?
When email lists are segmented, Open Rates are 14.4% higher than average
