Tag Archives: Email
Great Content Drives Great Email Engagement
You’re relatively new to email marketing. You know the basics, and you’ve already fired off a few internal tests through your shiny new marketing automation platform. Now all you need is to develop and deploy a brilliant email strategy that produces immediate and sustained results.
But how?
The first step in any successful email marketing strategy is to create compelling content that reaches the inbox, generates opens, and drives engagement through clicks and conversions. At first, this can feel like a complicated mystery — but by following these simple steps, you can increase your knowledge in short order, modify and optimize your efforts, and leverage email marketing as the centerpiece of a brilliant customer experience.
It Starts With Strategy — Plan Ahead
First of all, you should gather all relevant stakeholders to determine what you’re hoping to accomplish. Every aspect of your email marketing strategy (from your subject line to your signature) should work in unison toward your defined goals and objectives at every stage of the customer journey as you guide them through a well-manicured funnel.
Next, you need to plot how every email you craft will fit into that strategy. Every subscriber should represent a specific buyer persona who is at a different stage in their purchasing journey. So, you need to make sure that every email you send is tailored for and targeted to a relevant grouping of subscribers. More importantly, each of these emails should be focused on persuading your subscribers to engage with your communications and convert to a qualified lead.
Watch Your Tone!
Craft your email so that it stands out. Be friendly, and try to avoid jargon or overused language. Studies show personalization can significantly increase click-through rates, so make your email as relevant as possible. With Act-On, you can leverage our easy-to-use personalization features to make the most of the demographic and behavioral insights you collect and import.
And of course, never ignore the subject line — or take it lightly. The subject line is one of the most vital aspects of any email, as it’s your first and best hope of enticing the recipient to engage with your content. Therefore, it should always be clear and concise; you have about 3 seconds to capture your readers’ attention, so make the most of it by conveying the who, what, where, when, why, and how of what’s inside. You can also add humor with a clever turn of phrase or intrigue with a compelling statistic. And since research suggests that the optimal character length for successful email subject lines is 41, keep it short.
Oftentimes, the best evidence is already in our inbox. If you’re not sure what works best, think about which emails you’re most likely to open and which you’re most likely to ignore (or, worse yet, send to the Spam folder), and go from there.
Match the Subject With the Body
Immediate and long-term engagement is built on trust and clarity, so the body of your emails must reflect the subject lines. If your subject line says one thing, but the body discusses something entirely different, you risk damaging your relationship with your subscribers who might then unsubscribe from your communications or place your emails in the Spam folder. Build trust with your subscribers early to encourage further engagement, which will strengthen your email reputation — in turn creating further email inboxing and engagement.
Clearly Express the Value of Your Offerings and Content
You have a valuable product or service that you’re proud of and want to share with your prospects and customers, but how do you convince them of the value of your offerings (especially when compared to your competitors)? For starters, you have to grab their attention quickly — and then captivate them throughout the body of your email.
To do so, tell your audience exactly who you are, why they’re receiving your email, and what you have to say within the first paragraph. If you want to embed images, make sure they don’t confuse the issue or cause any problems with readability. And when it comes to color, iconography, and other design elements, maintain brand consistency so that your emails are instantly recognizable.
Empower Your Audience to Take Action
Most importantly, you need to maintain control of that engagement. Be concise and stay focused on the message with direct language free of any filler or fluff. Provide valuable information that is easy to absorb and make sure your call-to-action (CTA) is strong, commanding, and easy to identify — even to (and especially for) someone who quickly scans your email. If contacts are interested, they should know where to click almost immediately.
Anticipate Spam Filters
Every organization configures its Spam filters uniquely and can block an email due to even the smallest details. You know that your email is valuable and that you’re sending to contacts who are seriously interested in what you have to say and offer. So, follow these tips to ensure that your emails hit the inbox on time, every time.
- All of your internal links work and lead to sites secured with SSL
- The image-to-text ratio is balanced and every image contains alt-text
- The email renders correctly on both desktop and mobile
- The email has no emojis in the subject line and body content
- The subject line does not include “red flag” words for Spam filters — such as “purchase,” “free,” or “great offer”
Finally, edit and proof every email and send internal tests for quality assurance and accuracy. Send each communication to a colleague for a second opinion and carefully consider any suggestions they might have.
A/B Test Your Email Content for Continued Improvement
Once the testing process is complete, you’re finally ready to send a great email — but that’s not the end of your journey. Continue to A/B test various elements of your emails and campaigns, gather and collect the data, and optimize your future efforts based on behavioral and engagement insights. And as you continue to sharpen your skills through trial and error and success and failures, you’ll continue to improve email reputation, deliverability, and return on investment.
Contact Act-On for All of Your Email Deliverability Needs
If you need help along the way, Act-On is here to turn you into an inboxing pro. Our Email Deliverability Team brings years of experience, a wealth of knowledge, and several innovative strategies to the ever-changing world of email marketing. If you’d like to learn more, please follow this link or click here to schedule a free demo.
Or, if you’d like to learn more, please download our eBook, “Email Deliverability: Content Is King”. It’s full of great information to help you go even further in your email content journey to achieve awesome email engagement rates and email-attributable revenue.
Email Marketing Data Permission and Acquisition
Not long ago, marketers delivered email campaigns to millions of recipients — regardless of whether or not those recipients expected to receive communications from that sender.
As we shift into an era of ever-tightening privacy regulations and stricter recipient ISP expectations, however, marketers who engage in these outdated batch-and-blast strategies are experiencing far lower open/click rates — thus getting far less value from their email marketing efforts.
But fear not! Compared to the alternative of saturating inboxes with spam and potentially causing end users to abandon email altogether, moving to more calculated and targeted email marketing strategies is actually a good thing! All it requires is a simple shift in perspective.
Most notably, marketers need to empathize with their subscribers and follow best practices for email deliverability. Doing so builds trust in your brand and your email communication efforts. And when you strengthen trust, you start generating serious long-term revenue from dedicated repeat consumers.
So how can marketers thrive in an era of increasingly restrictive email marketing rules? It all begins with your data strategy!
Obtaining data permission to send to your contacts will increase email engagement, leading to more business opportunities. Conversely, marketers who don’t obtain these permissions will suffer from low engagement metrics and miss out on sales opportunities.
What is considered permission to send? How do we get permission? How do we keep it?
Read on!
What Is Email Marketing Data Permission and Why Does it Matter?
Email marketing data permission means that a contact expressly opts-in to your mailing list, granting you permission to send your email to them.
You should only market to those contacts who have expressly consented and opted-in to your list. By sending only to those subscribers who have expressly consented, you will drive more business opportunities through higher email engagement rates, achieve a more sustainable sending reputation, and obtain a better understanding of your customers and target audience.
However, a subscriber clicking a checkbox doesn’t automatically translate into positive engagement if you’re not setting the proper expectations — especially if your communication permissions request is buried in the fine print. During the opt-in process, make it clear what your end users are signing up for. You’re looking for clear consent here to avoid unsubscribes and the spam folder.
The Risks of Sending Marketing Emails Without Permission
Marketers might be tempted to purchase or rent leads from third-party providers. At Act-On, purchased data is against our terms of service. Permission-based sending is essentially the opposite of buying leads from a third party, sharing data between affiliated business partners, forcing opt-ins, or anything that does not involve the recipient expressly consenting to your marketing communications.
Sending to contacts who aren’t expecting your mail can be expensive, time-consuming, unfruitful, and most importantly, risky. Senders risk poor engagement rates, high spam complaint rates, and a damaged sending reputation — meaning your emails could soft bounce or your domain blacklisted. Most importantly, sending to contacts who have not opted-in to receiving your mail risks violating GDPR and CCPA laws.
Regardless of whether you’re a B2B or B2C marketer, sending without an inbox owner’s express consent ultimately results in brand damage, poor engagement metrics, and poor ROI on your marketing efforts. It’s just not worth the risk.
Go Organic to Obtain Permission
Now that you know what email marketing data permission is, how should you go about obtaining it? Here are the two most accepted methods of obtaining permission to send.
1. Double Opt-In
The double opt-in method is the best way to grow your marketing list with a highly engaged audience. This method collects contact information from valid contacts who have clear expectations on what they will receive and drives better email deliverability. While your overall list of contacts may be smaller, your engagement rates will soar because you’ll only be sending to contacts who want to receive your communications.
Here’s what the double opt-in process looks like:
- Form Submission: The contact completes an Act-On form supplying various demographic and/or firmographic information. (Bonus points if you include a captcha before they submit the form!)
- Verify & Confirm: Send the new contact an email confirming their address. Once they click the confirmation link, the contact has completed the double opt-in process, expressly consented to receiving your mail and cementing their position as an active subscriber!
2. Single Opt-In
This process requires a bit less work than the double opt-in process. The contact submits their personal information and email address via an Act-On form. Once that’s completed, they are an official subscriber. This method generates a larger (albeit less engaged) email marketing list.
The single opt-in method is not without fault, however. Users commonly submit erroneous personal information. And sending to incorrect email addresses can result in increased spam complaints and bounces, damaging your sending reputation. If your marketing efforts revolve around long sales cycles or ongoing subscriber engagement (as is often the case for B2B marketers), the double opt-in method is a better fit.
When using the single opt-in method, keep a close eye on your bounce rates and spam trap hits. If you’re having trouble with either of these, switch to the double opt-in method.
Maintaining Email Marketing Permission
Obtaining email marketing permission is just the first step in the email marketing process. You also need to maintain it.
Just as easily as permission can be granted, it can be taken away. It’s imperative that you respect the privilege that your subscribers have given you in order to maintain their permission to receive your email communications.
Here are some things you can do to maintain your subscribers’ permission:
- Let Subscribers Manage Permissions: Include opt-out links in every email you send, and maintain a permissions page that includes options on how and when your customers hear from you. This will help you gain trust and protect brand reputation.
- Send Engaging Content: Don’t send your subscribers emails asking them to purchase your products or services! Send them engaging content that makes you stand out as thought leaders in your field.
- Prove That Subscribing Is Beneficial: Make unique offers, provide content that would otherwise be gated off, and remind them that subscribing to your mail is valuable to them.
- Respect the Privilege to Send: Don’t over-communicate with subscribers. Always ensure you send at times that make sense to them. Email fatigue is a very real phenomenon. Nothing revokes permission more quickly than sending with too much frequency, too much volume, or poor timing.
- Passive Revocation of Consent & Sunsetting: Sometimes subscribers give consent to receive marketing communications but later stop engaging with your mail. If a subscriber stops engaging with your marketing efforts for longer than 6 months, consider them unengaged. Before sunsetting them from your active mailing list, consider a re-engagement campaign so that no one accidentally slips through the cracks.
Any subscribers who do not engage with your re-engagement campaign can be sunsetted from your marketing list. Doing so ultimately protects your brand, sending reputation, and deliverability performance.
Learn How Act-On’s Expert Deliverability Consultants Can Help You Achieve Success!
In the world of email marketing, permission has become more important than ever. As marketers are driven by highly targeted sending, adhering to email deliverability best practices to achieve strong engagement rates can be frustrating.
Act-On’s team of expert Email Deliverability Consultants are here to help you at every step of the way. Our team provides ongoing monitoring of your sending performance, personalized engagement reports, and strategic recommendations to help you realize success and drive the most value from your marketing campaigns.
To learn more about our approach to email reputation and deliverability, please click here to schedule a no-risk demo. Or, if you’re not quite ready to speak with an expert, download this free eBook to get better acquainted with the benefits and drawbacks of email marketing.
Use Power Automate to build an email recipient list and sending in Outlook vs Dynamics connector
Have you been wondering how you can build a dynamic list of email addresses that can be used to generate a new email? Below, we will take a look at how to build this list using Power Automate. We will also look at how to send this list using the Outlook connector and will then compare this with sending an email directly from Dynamics using the Common Data Service(Current Environment) connector.
Let’s get started.
First, choose whichever trigger is necessary for generating the email recipient list. For this walk-through, I am simply using a recurrence trigger so that I can trigger it manually.
Once you have your trigger specified, you want to choose the Initialize Variable action for your recipients list, which will be built as an array
You can get your list of recipients from any data source available, but in this case, I am building a list of the top 5 Contacts that have an email address for demonstration purposes. This is using the Common Data Service (Current Environment) connector. To keep this simple, I am returning the top 5 Contacts where the Email Address field is NOT NULL.
You will need to iterate through each Contact record by choosing the Apply to Each action. Within the Apply to Each action, add the Append to array variable action to add the email address value to the array. In this case, I pull in the emailaddress1 using dynamics values from the returned Contact records.
Outside of the Apply to each loop, you need to join all of the array values with a semicolon. Select the Join variable action. Specify the outputs of the array values and enter a semicolon to join the values.
You can run the current configuration to test your results. When you look at the results of Join, you will see the following
You will see the inputs of the array and the outputs into a string of email addresses.
To send this using the Outlook connector, select Send an email (v2) action. Specify the Output of the Join function in the recipients line
After you send, you will see the recipients listed and sent successfully.
Now, if you want to achieve the same thing, but send directly from Dynamics, you will run into some complications. Dynamically building a list of recipients and adding to an email like we did in the Outlook connector, is not yet possible. Let’s take a look.
Below, I have selected Create a new record using the Common Data Service (Current Environment) connector. For the entity name, select Email Messages.
As you can see below, you must individually specify each recipient value. Meaning, you would need to know the entity type and number of recipients. It requires the format as /entitylogicalname(recordid) in the Activity Party Attribute field. Unfortunately, you cannot specify multiple values in a string like we do with Outlook. There is a product enhancement suggestion to vote on here. Ability to dynamically build recipient list for Create Email Message in CDS (current environment) action
Stay tuned for the next post on creating and sending an Email from Dynamics using Power Automate.
Aaron Richards
Creating and Sending an Email from Dynamics 365 using Power Automate
Earlier, we looked at building out a dynamics recipient list for a new Email and how you can use that in the Outlook connector vs the challenges with doing the same thing in the Common Data Service (Current Environment) connector. You can see that post here.
If we know the entity type and number of recipients at the time of building the Flow, we can use the bound actions to actually send the email using Power Automate. This will only be possible in the Common Data Service (Current Environment) connector. If you use the standard Common Data Service connector, you will only be able to create an Email Message in Draft state.
Choose whichever trigger is necessary to create and send the email. In this case, I am simply using a Recurrence trigger for testing.
Below, I return the top 5 Contacts that have an email address for demonstration purposes. This is using the Common Data Service (Current Environment) connector.
We need to loop through each Contact returned, using the Apply to each action
When building the Email Message, the format is /entitylogicalname(recordid). Below, I populate the /contacts() and input the Contact GUID from the list returned from above
Once the recipient is populated, I click on Show Advanced Options. You will need to, at minimum, specify the following fields.
- Description
- Direction (Yes=outgoing, No=incoming)
One thing you will notice with the Description field (body), is that is currently does not support Rich Text formatting. There is a product suggestion here, that I would recommend voting on: Allow Rich Text Editor for email message entity
- Status Reason- Select Draft
- Subject
Once you have completed populating the data here, you need to actually send the Email, as it currently sits in Draft state.
Select Perform a bound action
When you specify the entity type, it will display a list of actions that are bound to the entity type. In this case, we select SendEmail
Next, specify the unique ID of the Email Message created in the prior step
Finally, specify the IssueSend as Yes
Click Test
Select I’ll perform the trigger action, Test and Run Flow
Once complete, you will see the emails as Sent in Dynamics:
Thanks for reading!
Aaron Richards
Custom Email Address PCF Control for Model-Drive Apps
Hey Dynamics and PowerApps community!
Many may not know that there is specific functionality tied to the out-of-box Single Line of Text field with the Email Format. Many will simply create this field so that the email address value is clickable, using MailTo, to open that email address in their local mail client.
However, the functionality behind this field is actually used for email resolution and correlation for Exchange Integration (Server-Side Sync, App for Outlook, and Dynamics for Outlook Client). Once you create a field of this type and data is added to this field, it will create a row in the EmailSearchBase table, which is then looked at when a record is tracked to Dynamics.
There is a scenario called out in Part 4 and Part 5 of my App for Outlook blog. See the Bob Jones/ Happy Hogan scenario. In short, if you have multiple entities with OOB Email format Single Line of Text fields that, for any reason, have the same email address, if this email address exists as a recipient of an Email or Appointment, each entity record will resolve. See the screenshot below:
This functionality is not called out specifically when creating this type of field, as you can see in both the new and old Field creation forms.
Here is the public documentation for this field type: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/common-data-service/types-of-fields
Since most of the time, this field type is not created specifically for correlation purposes, but to use the click to email functionality, I have created a PCF control that mimics the out-of-box Email field. However, this will be bound to a standard Text formatted Single Line of Text field. Meaning, this will not be used in the Email Resolution or Email Correlation process.
It will still allow the click to functionality from both web browser and mobile app. However, this is not clickable from a grid.
This is a sample control, so please do your diligence with testing before implementation to ensure this works for your uses cases and feel free to provide any necessary feedback to me directly or in the comments.
Note: This is not clickable from the grid
You can find the source for this control here.
Thanks!
5 Ways B2C Companies Can Leverage Email for Better Results
4) New and Updated Product Launch Emails
Good businesses are constantly releasing new products, services, and features. Great businesses are able to disseminate that information to their customer base in fun and innovative ways that lead to better engagement and more sales opportunities.
Whenever your company releases a new product or updates an existing product, you should include a strong email marketing campaign as part of your holistic go-to-market strategy. Think about it: your existing customers are already invested in some aspect of your company and offerings, so there’s a very good chance that they’d also be interested in what’s coming next!
New and updated product launch emails are designed to do more than generate sales; when done properly, they help foster connection to your entire brand. You’re advertising your bright, shiny, and new offering, so you want to create a real sense of enthusiasm that you can transfer to your existing customers. This means using big, sharp images and clever, concise copy. Most importantly, you want to make sure your branding elements jump off the page while also tying seamlessly to your new product.
Use the subject line and preview text to let your audience know that they’re about to view or learn about something new and exciting, being as explicit as possible with the limited characters at your disposal. Include a prominent CTA that clearly states the desired action, and make it easy for your customers to access the new or updated product by redirecting them to a clean and simple landing page where they can request a free trial or purchase the new item outright.
5) Use Email to Gather Customer Feedback
Successful B2C companies are constantly innovating and improving upon their product and service lines. And one way they can do that is by understanding what is and isn’t working. Sending emails prompting customers to take a survey or leave product feedback can help your company gather the data you need to develop and deliver the best possible offerings and experiences.
Obviously, you want to make sure you’re sending survey emails to customers who have actually purchased something from you in the past. So, a common best practice is to send these emails as part of a trigger campaign following a sale or interaction with customer support. These emails empower your customers to voice their opinion of your products and services, which helps to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. Further, it allows you to understand where you’re succeeding and where you might have missed the mark, so you can continue to improve your offerings with each new iteration.
In addition to surveys, which usually limit the interaction to objective yes/no or multiple-choice questions, you should encourage your customers to give more detailed feedback by inviting them to leave a review or testimonial. You can leverage great reviews by sharing them on your website, product pages, or social media platforms. Or, you could even follow up with the customer directly to see if they’d like to participate in a more involved case study or success story.
Even negative reviews can be extremely helpful as they give you the chance to improve your product and reach out to the reviewer directly to help make the situation work to your advantage. In some cases, these reviews (and your responses) can help your other customers solve their problem, which could save you from additional negative reviews in the future. For example, a customer trying to decide if they want to buy a pair of jeans might notice a negative review suggesting to size up, which would prevent them from making the same mistake.
If you aren’t getting much traction with your customer feedback emails, consider adding additional value to incentivize your customers to participate. This might include a standard discount with a simple user code or maybe a free trial to your next product release. Make sure the offer is included in the subject line to inspire your audience to click through to the email.
The 5 Tools Every Email Marketer Needs to Succeed
Katelyn Merendino, AMO Marketing, Retail and Bronto
Email has been around for a while, but it’s still king of the marketing world. For every $ 1 spent, email marketing generates $ 44 in ROI.
Today’s consumers expect relevant, personalized engagement from the businesses they choose to interact with. If you’re relying on “batch-and-blast messages,” you’re likely missing out on opportunities to capture your audience’s interest—and consequently, to drive more revenue.
Here are five tools that’ll help take your email marketing program to the next level.
Grow Your Lists with a Pop-Up Manager
Until someone signs up for your emails, you’re limited in the marketing messages you’re able to send to them. Contacts who aren’t subscribers can only be sent transactional emails and most email marketers believe marketing messages in a transactional email should be limited to 20% of the content. While you can encourage people to subscribe at checkout or through a transactional email, those options won’t capture website visitors who don’t convert. For this, you need to consider using a pop-up.
Pop-ups are one of the easiest and fastest ways to accelerate list growth. For example, The Duck Store, the University of Oregon’s book store, increased its subscriber base 71% in just one year using pop ups. All the potential subscriber needs to provide is their email address, so the barrier to entry is low. Yet, having that single piece of information lets you start delivering relevant messages. A pop-up management tool that allows you to control the look, feel, timing and placement of your pop-ups—and deploy different versions on desktop versus mobile—is key to providing value to the customer. With a well-customized pop-up, you can offer incentives, share content or provide information on current sales or upcoming events, all while gathering subscribers.
Recover Lost Revenue with Cart Abandonment Messages
Cart abandonment messages are vital to the bottom line. Forrester Research estimates that up to 87% of consumers abandon their carts, resulting in $ 18 billion of lost revenue annually. However, by automating email sends after a shopper leaves something in their cart, you can quickly, easily and economically bring in some of this outstanding revenue.
Turning abandoned carts into sales is most effective with a tool that can identify abandoned carts in near real time and respond to these shoppers by dynamically inserting cart information into messages.
Convert Online Window Shoppers with Browse Abandonment Messages
How many times have you browsed a site without making a purchase? Probably more than you can count! According to the Monetate Ecommerce Quarterly Report, Q1 2018, more than 95% of visitors leave your site without converting, but triggered browse recovery messages can nudge them to return.
Many businesses worry that automating these emails will be viewed as intrusive or increase unsubscribe rates, but times have changed. Ninety-one percent of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that recognize, remember and provide relevant offers—in other words, brands that convey value directly to each customer. To ensure a personalized experience, you need to use a browse recovery tool that allows you to configure how often customers receive messages, regulate which SKUs to highlight and capture and match page views to current or future contacts.
Drive Efficiency and Visibility with Seamless Integrations
As your business grows, using a number of stand-alone applications that each handle short-term, tactical needs creates functional silos and lowers efficiency and visibility. The ability to easily transfer data from your ERP or ecommerce platform to your email platform (and back) is important to developing a more sophisticated approach to email marketing.
If sharing information between your email marketing platform and other systems is arduous or time-consuming, it’s harder to create targeted, hyper-personalized messages. A built-in connector seamlessly syncs contact, order, product and opt-in data between all platforms, enabling you to gain deeper insight into your customers’ behaviors and send more relevant emails that drive them to engage.
Expand on Email with SMS Text Messaging
Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging is an increasingly utilized tactic among marketers now, as 98% of texts are read within two minutes and consumers are increasingly opting in to receiving text messages from brands. Sending emails and texts from a single platform allows you to reach the customers who engage most with each channel while delivering a unified, consistent user experience.
As part of your email platform, your SMS tool should enable you to display dynamic content based on list, segment, or keyword membership and expand your existing automation to include SMS campaigns within the same multi-channel workflows.
Sophisticated Email Marketing Made Easy
Enhancing your email marketing program doesn’t have to be complicated with the right tools in your arsenal. To learn how the Bronto Marketing Platform can help your business gain subscribers, grow revenue, and drive engagement, check out the on-demand webinar below that applies to your industry.
Watch these webinars to learn more about email marketing for retailers, email marketing for software companies and email marketing for nonprofits.
by NetSuite filed under
How to Grow Your Email Marketing List
3) Develop Great Content Marketing to Entice Your Audience
Nothing I’ve written so far is going to matter much if you’re not consistently pumping out great content that reflects your brand’s tone and positioning. This requires a proper SEO audit of your existing content across all of your digital properties to establish a baseline of your current state. Once that’s complete, continue to work with your in-house SEO specialist (or, if you don’t have an SEO pro on staff, check out Moz, SEMRush, and/or the Google Keyword Planner) to develop SEO campaigns that reflect your business direction and goals and that will facilitate the process of having your prospects find you (instead of the other way around).
Here are just a few ways you can spruce up your content to help grow your email marketing list:
Blogging About Thought Leadership and Product Features and Benefits
Your blog should be the sharpest tool in your inbound demand generation arsenal. It’s your best chance to get your organization out in front of the right audience by honing in on their primary interests and pain points — and shouldn’t be taken lightly. Each blog should follow a strict editorial process (from topic ideation through posting) and include:
- High-Level SEO research
- Editorial calendar creation
- Topic-Specific SEO research
- Drafting
- Editing
- Edit implementation
- Staging
- Final review
- Posting
- Social sharing
- Email distribution
Don’t focus too much on your organization’s products or services. No one wants to be sold constantly. Instead, approach each topic from a thought leadership perspective and then gradually filter in content that explains how your company executes these best practices and innovative techniques.
Lastly, if you want to make serious SEO headway and attract new prospects to your blog to help grow your email marketing list, you should be posting at least two new blogs each week. Recent research suggests you should shoot for roughly 1,900 words in each blog to satisfy our Google overlords, but anything between 1,500 and 2,200 words should place your article in the sweet spot when search engines crawl your site.
Informative Webinars for Prospects and Customers Alike
Webinars are one of the most effective ways to build your organic email marketing list because they offer your prospects something substantial. You can promote upcoming webinars on your website, in your newsletters, and throughout your social media platforms. You can also create dedicated paid campaigns to attract more attendees. Not only that, but once you have this valuable contact information, you can place these potential prospects and existing customers into targeted trigger and nurture campaigns.
Best of all, after the webinar, you can continue to collect new contacts by repurposing these online events as on-demand webinars and promoting them across your site, social media platforms, newsletters… heck, you can even place them on your blogs and in your topic-based email campaigns. An extremely effective method of collecting information is by gating the webinar after a predetermined amount of time spent watching, thus leaving your audience wanting more and generating even more form conversions!
Webinars are such a dynamic content source. Make sure to leverage them to the fullest before, during, and after the fact!
eBooks, Infographics, and Datasheets… Oh, My!
Also known as marketing collateral, these content assets are the proverbial carrot to your list generating stick. These are the elements you’ll want to gate behind a contact form in order to build that list. But if your content isn’t up to par, no one is going to bother completing the form in the first place. Everything from your paid advertising copy, landing pages, subject lines, title, abstract, images, and design needs to be spot on.
To start, you need to go back to the SEO research you conducted for your blog, refocus your efforts on topic ideation, and then work on creating longer, more detailed assets to release as gated PDFs. These pieces should go through a rigorous editorial process similar to the one taken during blog creation and should have much more of a design elements with quotes, callouts, graphs, images, icons, etc. When finished, these eBooks should really shine and offer great information to move your prospects and customers through the sales funnel.
Again, the goal here is to educate, illuminate, and entertain — not to sell. People do not want to be sold to (at least not at this stage). They want the information they need to make informed decisions that eventually lead to more productive conversations with sales reps. So position yourself as a credible thought leader that also just so happens to solve your target audiences’ pain points.
By creating better, more engaging marketing collateral, prospects and customers will be more inclined to trust that you deliver awesome material and continue to complete more forms — giving your sales reps more detailed information to help them close the deal!
What Is the Difference Between Email Marketing and Marketing Automation?
You’ve probably heard the buzz around marketing automation but are wondering why you need to invest in it if you already have an email service provider (ESP). Although marketing automation platforms and ESPs have many of the same features, marketing automation is designed to help you go beyond email marketing to provide customers with a more tailored and unique experience, improving your engagement rates and ROI.
Sure, things might be going just fine with your ESP, but why settle when there’s a better alternative? Marketing automation can help you move beyond random one-off emails to deliver your target audiences with a more personalized and holistic customer journey. By drastically enhancing the customer journey, you can expect improved engagement and even better results while saving your organization time and resources. Who doesn’t want that?
If you’re not convinced, keep reading to learn a few key ways marketing automation helps you go beyond email marketing.
Move Beyond Random Acts of Marketing Through Segmentation and Personalization
Savvy marketers know that marketing is not a one-size-fits-all deal. While one email message might inspire one customer to open, read, and engage, the same email message can motivate another to delete it or unsubscribe from receiving communications from you altogether.
That is because different customers will want different things based on their specific pain points and where they are in the sales funnel. You can also expect different recipients to need different tools and resources to help them make a decision based on criteria such as industry, pain points, job title, preferences, and budget — just to name a few. In order to gain that final sales conversion, it is your job as a marketer to segment your customers and deliver them targeted and relevant content that keeps them moving along from one stage of the sales funnel to the next.
While segmenting your audience and delivering targeted messages is possible through an ESP, the manual process involved in those outdated platforms is very labor-intensive and prone to error. The many hours involved in exporting and importing lists might not be worth the effort when you only see a small spike in improvement.
The great thing about marketing automation is that it allows you to do this better and with much less effort. For example, Act-On has adaptive segmentation which enables you to automatically move contacts into tightly targeted list segments as you find out more about them and they meet certain criteria. As they do, you can automatically enter them into automated nurture campaigns to ensure they receive relevant and useful information that will keep them engaged and motivate them to take action sooner rather than later.
But why stop there? With marketing automation, you can replicate this personalization beyond email so you can improve your marketing and see better results across the board. You’ll gain valuable insights that will enable you to develop more targeted landing pages, forms, and content.
Deliver the Right Message at the Right Time
Email marketing success is highly dependant on sending the right message to the right person at the right time. Marketing automation platforms allow you to send behavior-triggered messages, such as onboarding emails, that are automatically launched whenever your contact fills out a form, downloads an asset, or completes any other action worthy of a follow-up.
Act-On’s Adaptive Sending takes this practice one step further by tracking each contact’s behavior and learning their preferences, enabling you to email each individual in your database at the most optimal time.
Improve Your Ability to Track ROI and Enhance Your Email Marketing Efforts
It’s easy for our email marketing efforts to remain stagnant when we don’t have the insights and resources to figure out how to make them better. While ESPs might provide you with a limited overview of what’s working, the results you gather simply aren’t granular enough for you to make significant improvements.
Marketing automation enables you to perform A/B Testing on everything from subject lines, CTAs, email design, copy, and more — so you can pinpoint which email elements are catching your audience’s attention. You can use the insights you collect to make your emails better and better each and every time.
We practice A/B testing ourselves here at Act-On and meet every few weeks to review our results and talk about how we can enhance our future email marketing efforts. We recommend you do the same on a regular basis, even if it just means updating a subject line or CTA that did not perform as well.
Target the Best Opportunities Through Lead Scoring
Even if you’re seeing leads coming through the door thanks to your email marketing efforts, you should be asking yourself how you can continue to improve. How do you know what else they need? Where are they in the sales funnel? Are they ready to talk to Sales? Piecing this information together is difficult when all you have is open and click-through rates gathered through your ESP.
Marketing automation gives you greater visibility into the status of your leads by allowing you to identify criteria that indicate when a lead is ready to move to another stage in the customer journey and then score your leads accordingly. Lead scoring not only allows you to keep track of where prospects are in their journey, but it also improves your ability to transfer the most qualified leads to your sales team so they can focus on the best opportunities.
Empower Your Sales Team to Have More Impactful Conversations
One of the most valuable aspects of marketing automation is that it enables you to provide each target customer with a personalized buying experience. That means that you have the tools and insights to deliver targeted solutions from the moment your contact first becomes known to when they’re ready to chat with a member of your sales team.
Marketing automation integrates with your CRM so that your sales team is able to gain a detailed view of your target customer’s behavior and engagement history, empowering them to appeal to their specific pain points and product interests. This leads to better collaboration between marketing and sales and, in turn, helps your salespeople close more deals, all while allowing you to attribute marketing ROI. When was the last time your ESP helped you do that?
Marketing Automation Success Is Closer than You Realize
Let’s be real. Investing in new technology is not a decision that comes easy or cheap, and it’s hard to part with your ESP, even if it’s not getting the job done. With the right knowledge, tools, and strategy in place, however, you can make sure you’re generating the best return from your marketing automation investment from the beginning.
If your organization is considering marketing automation and wants to start off on the right foot, you should check out an eBook that we wrote with our friends at London Research. It’s appropriately titled “Making Marketing Automation a Reality” and gives a comprehensive but easy-to-follow overview of how and why to implement marketing automation.
We also interviewed several high-profile digital marketing thought leaders, and their views and advice are threaded throughout the resource to help you make better, more informed decisions about the next step in your digital marketing journey.
Check it out below!
Best Practices for Email Marketing Automation
Segment Your Lists and Provide Personalized Email Content
List segmentation is one of the principal benefits of email marketing automation and separates marketing automation platforms from email service providers (ESPs). Segmenting according to engagement level, areas of interest, and demographics allows email marketers to tailor their messaging to target their audiences with compelling content when and where they’re looking for it.
Compared with the traditional batch-and-blast approach used by ESPs, segmented sending produces exceptional open rates, engagement, and return on investment. It also results in fewer unsubscribes and spam complaints because the content being sent via email has been written for each specific audience — and increased relevance leads to increased resonance every time.
Yet, while segmentation is crucial in the modern digital environment, many companies continue to struggle to group their audiences properly. Here are three ways to ensure accurate audience segmentation and increased engagement through personalized content.
1) Learn Your Audience’s Pain Points
As marketers, sometimes we have a tendency to overcomplicate things, which is only natural considering the tools at our disposal. However, one proven way to learn more about your audience’s challenges and interests is to simply ask them! When you seek your initial or follow-up opt-in, include a checklist of 5-10 pain points or areas of interest for them to complete. Once armed with this valuable information, segment your lists accordingly and work on developing relevant content for all stages of the sales funnel.
2) Collect Website Visitor Data
The great thing about digital marketing is that skilled marketers are able to gather tons of meaningful data and then leverage that data to segment their marketing lists and deliver content that pushes prospects and customers through the sales cycle. First, you’ll have to create intuitive email reporting dashboards in your marketing automation platform so you can see which emails certain recipients are opening, reading, and engaging with. From there, you simply divide and conquer with compelling content delivered to the appropriate inbox.
3) Market Based on Location
Depending on the type and size of your company, knowing where your customers live, work, and shop can be a major competitive advantage because, more often than not, geography influences purchasing patterns. Email marketing based on location also helps senders optimize for multiple time zones, execute regional promotions, and deliver geo-targeted content to different audience segments. One particularly powerful way to do this is to send emails with testimonials from satisfied customers who live close to your intended recipients. Understanding where your customers and prospects live will help you understand what makes them tick and empower you to foster trust and nurture relationships.