Happy 2020! The New Year is a new opportunity to consider what’s working well in your marketing and what can be improved for the coming year. For email marketing, that can mean tweaking the foundations of your program.
Respondents to a recent study from Marketo indicated that the most effective type of marketing technology (martech) was “marketing automation/email/CRM.” Furthermore, they also marked “increasing marketing ROI” as the number-one challenge to the success of a martech strategy.
As we covered previously, you can use email marketing to promote trade show appearances via pre-show marketing and post-show marketing. These efforts can include email sends to a show list beforehand, and multi-touch campaigns, drip campaigns, or lead nurturing campaigns to the trade show attendee list after the event. You can even use email for webinar marketing.
Email isn’t going anywhere soon.
There are many different ways to customize your email marketing campaigns so they can perform beyond your expectations, including:
- A/B testing
- Multi-touch campaigns
- Template approaches
And, while having a fancy marketing automation platform is helpful, you can also perform many of these approaches in simple programs (like Constant Contact). The point is to get started somewhere.
Testing Email Subject Lines
Let’s look at A/B testing. This is the art of testing a portion of an email send before deploying the entire send, with the goal of improving the open rate. While testing can be based on different portions of the email – like the subject line or the send-from address – the most common I see is based on the open rate of two different subject lines.
Instead of sending your email out to your entire list, you can make two different subject lines to test (A and B). You send subject line A to one-fourth of your list and send subject line B to another one-fourth of your list. After you send that test, you determine which subject line had the higher open rate. Then, you send the winning subject line to the remaining one-half of your list. The idea, of course, is that the remaining emails will naturally have a higher open rate than they would have without doing the test.
Multi-touch Email Campaigns
One of our clients recently held their annual customer event. Instead of sending out one email promoting the event and hoping that people would come, an entire multi-touch campaign was built around the event that included at least eight sends prior to the event, sends that occurred while the event was live, and post-event sends that included a link to a satisfaction survey. A post-event email we did for this event to attendees that provided the satisfaction survey link garnered a 41% open rate and 15% click-through rate. According to Emma and Eventbrite, an event-related email typically achieves an open rate of 21-30% and a click-through rate of 3-11%.
Tip: Make several of the pre-event emails more personal by highlighting some of the individual speakers and what they’ll be covering that’s unique to the event. This approach puts faces to the speakers’ names, and potential attendees can see the value of the content before the event even starts.
A comprehensive email marketing program like this takes potential attendees on a journey that highlights what makes your event different, conveys the benefits of attending, and invites attendees to keep in touch after the event ends. The result: relationship-building that leads to sales. You’ve now started building a foundation for a relationship or are continuing to nurture one through these regular communications.
Enhance Email Campaigns with Marketing Automation
Multi-touch campaigns can be enhanced by marketing automation technology. Platforms that provide this approach allow you to take email marketing one step further by automating some of the tasks of relationship-building.
For instance, typically we set-up email programs that automatically provide a white paper or other thought-leadership deliverable when a recipient opens the email and completes a form. A list of the leads can be provided showing who downloaded the deliverable and these can be passed along to the sales team for follow-up. Someone who actively downloads your content is more likely to have a conversation with your team. According to Demand Metric, 60% of people are inspired to seek out a product after reading content about it.
Programs can also be built to provide an automated cadence of emails over time. Think a segment of prospects needs to be introduced to your organization and, as such, they are put on a program that delivers them information about your products and services over a period of several months to warm them up. You’re staying top-of-mind. And, for those with marketing automation platforms, all the results from these emails can be delivered straight to your CRM and the platform can even score your prospects according to their interactions with you.
Get Better Results with an Email Template
How many times have you received an email on your mobile device and when you try to read it you have to move the screen around to read the whole message? What has likely happened here is that the email wasn’t optimized for mobile devices.
Using a template approach can easily solve this issue. Many email systems come with pre-selected templates you can choose from, and I recommend trying one of those to start with to get better mobile results.
Exclusive Tip: We’ve found that an average of 23% of our emails were opened on a mobile device over the last six months. If you’re not sending mobile-friendly emails, you’re disappointing a good portion of your audience – which may lead them to unsubscribe or delete it before being read. It has been suggested that as many as 15% of users will unsubscribe when a mobile email displays poorly.
While some templates may not be to your liking exactly, there are often simple options available to remove and add sections (like header banner images, photos, logos, and text areas).
If you have graphic designers on staff – and we do – enlist their help to create some of these images for your templated email sends. This will help create an overall cohesive look and feel for your brand and get recipients of your emails used to identifying your messages with your organization.
Coming Up…
In our next post in February, we’ll look at some real-world examples from the areas above. Email marketing can be nebulous and is an ongoing work-in-progress as technology evolves. The good news is that we can help you get started with your program or can enhance your current program.
Start increasing your open rates and ROI from email – get going by calling us today.
Author – Scott Fuhr
Scott is a marketer with concentrations on lead generation campaigns, marketing automation programs (Marketo, SharpSpring), Google search and display ads (PPC), social media strategies, and business writing.
Brandwidth Solutions serves the healthcare, life sciences, energy and contract pharma industries. We work with companies that want to make the most of their marketing – who want their marketing empowered to help drive leads – and ultimately sales. If you want to move your product or service forward in a smart way, we want to work with you. Call us at 215.997.8575.
