Stream:20 Top 20 : Email MarketingCutting through the clutter to keep your customers engaged – 20 tips for success

Intro

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For too long, email marketing provided marketers with great ROI with relatively minimal effort.

Those times have long gone.

Email can still deliver a fantastic ROI but much more thought and investment, both in terms of resource and budget, now needs to go into your program.

Intro

Consumers are getting savvy and cynical – they demand the best in breed and only the most engaging and value-driven emails will cut through the clutter and resonate.

So where do you start?

Strategy

Plan, plan some more and then plan again.

Look how to collect data your budget needs, creative and integration with other marketing channels.

1. What’s the plan?

2. Deliver real value to your customers

Next, create a proposition.

Creating a customer-facing proposition for your email will help it cut through the clutter and ensure you deliver value consistently and constantly.

Strategy

Strategy

3. Data is power

Know what you want to tell the folk on your database and what you want to get out of the program?

Time to start collecting data.

If we’re talking a soft opt in, you’ve hopefully ring fenced real estate across your site as part of your data collection strategy. But have you ensured sign up is prominent on key SEO and PPC pages?

Does the sign up creative include popular search key words?

ESP Selection

4. Find your perfect ESP match

Spend time choosing an email partner that’s right for you.

Don’t just think about the present.

A platform which is suitable for your email activity now might not be powerful/flexible/all-singing-all-dancing enough in six months.

Welcome Messages

5. Education, Education, Education....

Start thinking beyond the welcome message you’re already sending (you know… the one that is triggered instantly, makes the recipient feel that they’ve absolutely made the right choice in registering and features all kinds of useful information to drive them back to your site).

You are doing that, right?…now start being more ADVENTUROUS!!

Welcome Messages

6. Sequential welcome process

• Look into a sequential welcome process to further educate your users

• Create a platform to show them what aspects of your service they have or haven’t used in a defined period of time

Used in this way, welcome emails are remarkably effective at cross-selling and for deepening product experience to extend lifetime value.

Welcome Messages

7. Targeted and Triggered

How about taking your welcome program further by setting up tailored emails that are triggered by the search term a customer has used to find your site and then register?

Welcome Messages

8. Use what you already know...

You could of course go even further.

If your business relies on affiliates to send new customers to your site, do you notice a difference in the value and engagement of users from different lead generators?

A welcome program tied around the characteristics of an affiliate’s leads could be used to better nurture and imbed new acquisitions and further extend their lifetime value.

Relevancy

9. Segmentation Identify your non-responders

- treat them discretely from your main “active” database

- Beyond the basics of demographic segmentation, perhaps the biggest quick win in segmentation is around life-stage.

- By establishing hurdle rates to identify active, lapsed and pending lapsed users/customers, you can quickly segment your base for effective messaging.

Relevancy

10. Personalisation

You can start at the email capture point.

However, this needn’t be in the form of reams and reams of questions and forms.

If you’re looking to deliver gender specific product info in your newsletters, simply use two submit buttons (I’m a guy/I’m a girl) and collect the data from the subscription action.

Once you’ve got all their vital stats, remember that personalisation is more than just using a name - think dynamically and start sending out variants acknowledging an individual’s interests.

Relevancy

11. Automation...

Relevancy is not just about content but also timing and reaction.

Triggered emails can be a strong driver of ROI so it’s worth investing in automated campaigns.

Relevancy

12. Feed responses back into the database

Looking for further data?

• That instant welcome email comes into play again. • Ensure it’s full of useful service or product information and is

rich in links. • Apply a careful link naming convention (based on product

type, genres etc) and feed this implicit info back into your email database to further target the content of your emails.

Relevancy

13. Analyse everything

The next stage on from this?

Naturally, that would be web analytics data. Don’t just rely on what they tell you they’re interested in.

Plug in an analytics tool to monitor and record their onsite behaviour too.

Optimise Creative

14. Observe basic best practice

First, some must-haves...

Regardless of your sector/messaging/type of email, your wireframes should include a pre-header message with CTA in rich text, navigation bar, and a footer including links to your privacy policy and company registration details.

Think of your emails as an extension of your site – essentially they’re there to drive traffic so it’s only right they should offer a seamless user journey.

Optimise Creative

15. “View mobile version”

Smart-phone sales are exploding…..at the very least, create a single column HTML mobile version that will render on most phones’ browsers.

Optimise Creative

16. Testing

Day

Time

Creative

CTAs

ContentTone

Wireframe

Subject line

Frequency

Testing is almost limitless, but unless you have a clear plan it’s also meaningless.

Before you start, set clear, attainable, measurable objectives.

Don’t rush!

Integrate17. Social Media

Advertisers have been on Facebook for a few years while email marketers are still feeling their way, waiting for ESPs to get the technology up to scratch to integrate social and email in a meaningful way.

Start mapping out your email-social integration strategy today.

Integrate

18. Mobile

Optimising your campaigns and strategy for mobile marketing is simply no longer a consideration, but an absolute necessity.

Integration is key and selecting a technology provider that offers x-channel functionality is vital.

Report

19. Report on the areas that matter to the people who matter …senior management

– Stop reporting on opens and clicks, they’re not interested.

– Revenue, ROI and conversion metrics are key

– But look at reporting on engagement, lifetime value, brand loyalty, opportunity cost and more.

Report

20. Control groups

• Central to testing and reporting is the use of control groups.

• If you’re to see the incremental improvements of your hard work, make sure you set a group aside for comparison.

Stream:20?

• Stream:20 is a leading digital consultancy based in London, UK

• We help senior digital marketers with strategic, tactical and resource issues to drive revenue

• We work with leading blue-chip clients and start-ups

Contact usconsultancy@stream20.com+44 (0) 207 793 2450www.stream20.com