In a constantly evolving digital landscape, tools and platforms come and go. Email, however, has remained a steadfast and dependable channel with 3.2 billion email accounts worldwide. That's three times more than the number of Facebook and Twitter accounts combined, and if optimized correctly, an email marketing campaign can be all-powerful, driving better returns on investment and higher levels of engagement. The fact that you can dispense with printing flyers, save trees, and be an email marketing pro? Well, those are just added bonuses!
Like many of the specialties within digital marketing, the key to a powerful email marketing strategy is structure.
So what makes email marketing so valuable, besides its ability to establish brand visibility in the eyes that matter most (those of your customers, just in case you weren't sure!)? Like every other digital marketing specialty, the success of email is based upon a rigorous, consistent process. The Digital Marketing Institute's 3i principles underpin a general methodology that incorporates every field of digital marketing, and email is no exception.
Before we start exploring email marketing in deeper detail, take a look at Figure 5.1 and the list that follows for the four vital steps that comprise an effective email marketing process:
Even if you haven't carried out any email marketing activities (yet!), it's very likely that you will feel quite comfortable with the concept of email. Most users will have more than one email account, be it business or personal, and are familiar with a variety of email clients—from Gmail to Yahoo! Mail. It has already been mentioned that email marketing is highly structured and process-driven, which means everything you need to know will be easy to learn and simple to implement. It's just about following the process! By the end of this chapter, you will feel confident in your ability to:
Before you learn more about the details of acquiring data and subscriber management, you first need to know about spam and its intrinsic relationship to the data you use as part of an email marketing campaign. This is part of stage 1 of the process shown in Figure 5.2 and it will involve being aware of:
Just like the questionably colored, unidentifiable precooked meat in a can, the receipt of unsolicited email communications can be gross! Unsolicited email means that a user didn't ask, or opt in, to receive the email. Spam can also apply to bulk email, a term that applies to the same unsolicited email being sent out to hundreds of thousands of users who have not opted in to receive it. This is a practice that can result in blacklisting, which means that the sender is added to a list of naughty email senders that email clients can block and keep away from their users' inboxes. Blacklisting, in essence, means the death of an email marketing campaign and can be incredibly damaging to a brand as well.
Spam is insidious. At first a spam email can look entirely inoffensive; say, a simple inquiry about whether or not you are interested in eye drops manufactured in China. The difference lies in whether or not you have expressed a previous interest in buying eye drops. Did you fill in a contact form on a website? Did you give your email address to someone because you had the intention of buying eye drops? Did you opt in? A bulk email example of spam could include a newsletter on the topic of fly fishing that you have never subscribed to, which is only a good thing (not to mention a massive coincidence) if you happen to like fly fishing.
What email subscribers consider to be spam really boils down to personal preference. Recipients can audit the contents of their inbox, which include your marketing email, and can choose to send your message to their junk mail folders based on a range of criteria. One of the main reasons your email could be marked as spam is because a subscriber is unfamiliar with you, your business, or your brand. Sometimes users forget that they have opted in to receive marketing messages: They could have subscribed to too many sites' email lists, or they could have subscribed too long ago to remember what they subscribed to. Another key reason has to do with relevancy: They could have opted in initially, but if they view the content of follow-up emails as irrelevant or unrelated to the reason they opted in, they're more likely to regard them as spam.
Often these are factors over which an email marketer has limited control. But there are a number of actions that you can take to make sure you are abiding by the best practices to limit the likelihood of being considered a spammer.
Email clients are designed with an incredible focus on protecting their users from disruptive, annoying spam, and one of the methods used is built-in spam filters, which audit email messages based on a number of factors. Sometimes email marketing messages can fall victim to spam filters even if the recipient has opted in, so it's important to be aware of the criteria these filters use to make their judgments and avoid them when crafting your email messages.
Did you know that you are only allowed to send a marketing email to individuals who have been active subscribers in the 12 months prior to that email? Whether or not they have been active may seem like a hard thing to quantify, but essentially it means that if an individual has opened, clicked, or engaged with an email in any way within this 12-month window they can be counted as valid subscriptions. Marketers may also send an email if they have obtained an individual's contact details—during the course of a sale, for example—over the past 12 months and have told him the purpose of gathering his contact details.
But what does that mean? A good example would be if you visited Amazon.com, bought a Kindle, filled in a contact form, and were signed up for an email newsletter as a result. Up until very recently the box that signed you up for that email newsletter would have been automatically checked as part of the contact form. Now you have to make a conscious decision to tick that box yourself, so that you can demonstrate you know exactly what you are signing up for besides purchasing the Kindle.
If a sale is being made over the phone instead, you can tell customers, “I'll need your email address to send you a receipt, but could I also send you our newsletter to keep you updated on our latest products?” If they say okay, then you can classify them as subscriptions!
If you have a subscriber list and you aren't sure if individuals have subscribed or been active over the last 12 months, then never assume that they are happy to receive emails from you. Target them with an opt-in email to be certain and make sure the option to unsubscribe exists on every email you send, to avoid any potential uncertainty.
As a marketer, you can only send an email if its message relates to similar products and services that the recipient has previously shown an interest in. This is very important because if you are part of a company that sells kitchenware, such as plates and cups, it means you can target your subscribers with emails for textiles (such as napkins and placemats) that they can use in a kitchen. However, you can't start trying to sell them cars all of a sudden (which would, quite frankly, be a bit of a bizarre product range anyway).
The key is to never mix your marketing messages: Everyone likes to know where they stand! Ensure that your emails are clear and consistent, avoid anything that could cause confusion, steer clear of too many calls to action, and keep things simple for the recipient.
Leave that to comic book superheroes and vigilantes and remember: Marketers cannot send an email if the identity of the sender has been disguised or obscured. This means when you are carrying out an email marketing campaign, recipients need to be able to identify the email sender, so even if you are just emailing to thank them for signing up to your newsletter, you need to remind recipients who is emailing them and why.
Transparency is key, and it also extends to providing an email address at which you, the sender, may be contacted. Using a valid email address rather than a so-called noreply is important for two reasons. Firstly, it shows a subscriber that the sender is tangible and reputable, and not a robot that can't be contacted sending out spam. Secondly, it provides a subscriber with an email address to which they can send an opt-out request.
As a marketer, you always need to be aware of the need for your email messages to have a human context, not only so you can stay relevant and relate to your subscribers, but also so you don't have to worry about being blacklisted or triggering a spam filter.
If you are a business that sells office supplies and you are targeted by an individual offering to sell you the email addresses of every law firm in the country, keep in mind that while that individual may have the right to use those subscriptions, you do not. So regardless of how tempting it is, never buy subscriber lists, because it could land you in a lot of trouble. Similarly, you should not share lists either. Why would you share a subscriber list with someone when you have invested a lot of time and effort into nurturing that database? If in doubt, always think about whether or not you are being transparent with the recipients of any marketing email: Will they know who is contacting them and how the sender got their contact details?
Before starting any email marketing campaign, the first area that you should focus on is subscriber management. This is the first stage in the iterative process for email, and it is primarily concerned with data. To put it in almost offensively simple terms: Without email addresses you cannot conduct an email marketing campaign! This means you need to know:
When you first engage with an ESP, it will ask you to import your subscriber list, which is a database of email addresses to which you can send your marketing emails. There are a variety of methods that you can implement to gain the consent of your target audience to market to them via email: This is also known as gaining the opt-in of your subscribers. Obviously, the more subscribers you win, the better, but it is imperative that they are of a high quality. For example, would you rather acquire 10,000 subscribers who have a 0 percent interaction rate with your emails, or would you prefer 1,000 individuals who open your emails and click through to your website to browse your products or services? Let's work on the assumption that you chose the latter option (and we hope you did!), because it's important to remember that the end goal is not to mindlessly accumulate masses of email addresses. It's about building a list of subscribers who are likely to engage with your email marketing messages.
To safeguard the quality of your subscriber list, you need to pay close attention to the methods through which you collect subscriber data.
After you have accumulated your subscriber data, it is essential that you know how to optimize your use of that data: The true value lies not in the data itself, but in what you do with it. Marketers achieve optimization through a process known as segmentation, which is the act of dividing your subscriber list into segments and defining those segments in accordance with your subscribers' attributes, likes, dislikes, and requirements. Think of it as a Venn diagram.
A Venn diagram, like segmentation, allows you to create distinct sets, or segments, of data based on both different and shared characteristics. Simply put, segmentation allows you to personalize your email communications based on these specific characteristics of your target audience.
It's important to remember that when you are segmenting your target audience you should create clearly identifiable segments, or groups of subscribers with similar defining features. These features could include:
Insights can be drawn from every one of these interactions. Unlike a traditional, or static, subscriber list, dynamic lists evolve as these different actions are taken. Link activity in particular helps to provide details on how subscribers interact with your email in terms of what and how often they click, and this informs the development of a dynamic subscriber list. Dynamic lists are especially useful for interacting with customers, allowing you to automatically include new customers on email newsletters and exclude old ones, and for building lists based on the particular interests of your subscribers, allowing you to ensure that you are marketing to them as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Even after you have accumulated and segmented your data, and used the results to the benefit of your email marketing campaigns, the story doesn't end there; there's life in the old data yet!
You should look to enrich and refine your data all the time, in keeping with the established email marketing principle of quality over quantity. The final part of step 1 of this iterative email process is assuring the quality of your subscriber database by maintaining it regularly.
Every iteration of the email marketing process provides an ample opportunity to improve the quality of your data. All you have to do now is apply your newfound knowledge from this section to start managing your subscriber lists like a pro!
If this chapter is doing its job right, you should now be confident of your ability to acquire email addresses, segment your subscriber lists, and manage your data. Once you know whom you're going to target your email marketing campaign to, the next fundamental stage of the iterative process is design, which is highlighted in Figure 5.7. Ultimately, your main goal at this stage is to encourage interaction: to invite as many users as possible to open your email and engage with it. You can achieve this through a combination of optimized content and appealing design. In order to master the design phase of your email marketing process you will need to:
Depending on the consumption channel, be it a website, a social media platform, or an email, users apply personal preferences to the messages they expect to receive and how they expect to receive them. This means that marketers have a responsibility to approach the sending of communications with a certain propriety. You can segment these consumption channels into different communication zones, which should help you to distinguish how you should conduct yourself—think of it as online finishing school!
The closer you move to users, the more you need to accommodate their preferences. It's just good manners! With this in mind, it's helpful to remember that users often carry out a simple prioritization exercise within their inbox when engaging with emails. Imagine you have come back to work after a two-week vacation and you have a terrifying 500 unread emails in your inbox; how do you get through them? What do you do? You would start by distinguishing between work emails, personal emails, and general emails. Then you could break those emails down into varying levels of importance by taking into account the following criteria:
When scanning a full inbox, most users will start by looking to see who sent a message, so familiarity with the sender is always an incredibly important factor. Then they might look at the subject line to gain an understanding of what the email is about. Finally, they would look at the message preview to acquire slightly more insight into the message before choosing whether or not to commit to opening the email.
Within some geographies there can sometimes be cultural and gender biases with regard to the displayed sender name, so it's imperative that you really know your target audiences and take advantage of your knowledge of their preferences so that you use the most appropriate sender name.
You should always personalize the sender name, too. Grounding your email in a human, personal context is the best method of guaranteeing engagement. Try not to use reply addresses such as sales@ or info@; personalization is a simple, effective method to improve open rates.
An email client, also known as a mail user agent (MUA), is a computer program that allows users access and manage their email. So, what email clients are recipients using? Common examples include Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo!, and Gmail; some are very much work-oriented and some are more likely to be adopted for personal use.
Take, for example, Microsoft's Outlook email client. There's a task pane on the left with various folders, and the inbox with the sender name, subject line, and a short summary of the email copy. There's also a preview of the email on the right that displays commands such as Reply, Reply All, and Forward, as well as the email copy itself. The line between the email summary and overall preview can be adjusted, and that truncated view is important to bear in mind when you are crafting subject lines; keep them concise and direct.
Don't forget that when you are designing an email, you are not just designing it for its display on an email client; you should design it for the device on which it will be viewed as well, be it a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop. Leave no screen unturned! Back in 2010 a lot of the MUA market share was owned by Outlook, which was the email client of choice for over half of all users. Five years later the data is dramatically different, as the Apple iPhone now dominates email-client market share with 26 percent and the Apple iPad is the third most popular email client. Outlook is now fourth. This means that, with the rising prevalence of smartphones and tablets, you have to foster a culture of testing to ensure that your marketing emails display on both various email clients and various mobile devices.
There is no more important method for increasing open rates than email copy that really interests and engages its reader. Here the subject line is key; it's your email's value statement, its pickup line. You have a small handful of words with which to seal the deal and secure an open (no pressure!), so the first two or three words are crucial. Make sure that your subject line is relevant to the recipient, rather than you, the sender. If you are targeting a segment that is engaging strongly with you and your brand, perhaps you could go for a slightly harder sell and incorporate keywords such as 10 percent off or buy one get one free. If you are targeting a new list, you might want to be a little more subtle. Subject lines are industry-dependent too, so what you might use in the travel industry (pricing discounts, for example) might not work as well if you are targeting the education sector.
To accommodate all of these little permutations, testing is essential. If you use an ESP such as MailChimp, you can split test your subject lines with a small subset of recipients to see which keywords work best before sending out your emails to the rest of your recipients. For example, if you have an email database of 1,000 and you want to ascertain that you are sending the best possible email to them, you can take 100 recipients out of that 1,000, split them into groups A and B, and test open rates based on different subject lines to see which variation will give you the best ROI.
If sender and subject line are all-important elements to improve open rates, then the email copy itself is essential to guaranteeing engagement. So, what are the key features of email copy that affect engagement?
Although there is nothing more engaging than a beautiful image, maintaining a balance of text and imagery in your email copy is paramount to that email's success. Images should support, rather than contain, your email's message. Always make sure that the key points and calls to action you want to convey to a recipient are in the text. A lot of email clients don't automatically display images, so users have to right click to download the pictures; if the main CTA in your email is included in an image there is no guarantee that that they will have bothered to download that image. Besides maintaining this balance, another element you should consider in your emails is alternative text. When uploading images into your email, there is a field for alternative text that you can fill in. This means that if your email is delivered with the images turned off, the alternative text will still display and the image's message be conveyed. So if you have an image that reads 50 percent off your next ski holiday and the image is turned off, the alternative text will still display (as in Figure 5.9), and rather than instantly deleting the email, a recipient might still engage with the offer.
According to Radicati's mobile statistics report 2014-2018, by the end of 2018, worldwide mobile email users are expected to total over 2.2 billion. By that time 80 percent of email users are expected to access their email accounts via mobile devices, so it is very apparent that the unity of mobile and email is on an increasingly steep path, and that mobile is becoming the number-one device for email opens. But what does this mean for you? Essentially, you need to achieve mobile integration for your email marketing campaign and design emails that are optimized equally for viewing on tablets and desktops. If you use an ESP such as MailChimp, you can use a mobile template to simulate how your email will be rendered on this device. What you are trying to achieve through optimizing your campaign for mobile is increased engagement, regardless of screen size.
At every stage of the email design process, think about how the email will look on all devices. PC screens are often approximately 23 inches, while tablets are 10 inches and mobiles screens average 7 inches. If you have a very text-heavy message that you created with desktop users in mind, look at it on a mobile device. See how long it takes to read, and how much you have to scroll, pinch, and zoom. You can then reduce the amount of text and increase your use of imagery. If you have used five calls to action in a desktop-friendly email, limit that to two for a mobile, knowing that it's that little bit more cumbersome to click through on a mobile device.
Through testing, it's possible to ensure deliverability across a broad range of email clients and devices. ESPs allow you to view an email in browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome. Don't forget to see how your email looks on mobile, and check spam-filter results. It is valuable insights such as these that will enable you to develop an email that gets delivered, opened, and read—the golden egg in any email marketing campaign!
We are moving into the next step in our process, as shown in Figure 5.10. You have a consummately segmented subscriber list. An impeccably designed email that is optimized for every email client and mobile device imaginable. You are poised to send what could be the greatest marketing email ever created. Now all you need is to guarantee is its safe delivery, which won't be a problem as soon as the key components of the delivery stage are covered and you are able to:
ESPs have been a constant touchpoint throughout the email marketing process. If you are brand new to email marketing, join a few different services to identify the ESP that best suits your requirements. A lot of ESPs offer a free subscription, so it won't cost you anything to test their features and make an informed decision. Other notable benefits to using an ESP include:
When it comes the success of your email marketing campaign, like most things in life, timing is everything. What you really need to know is this: When are people most likely to open my email?
The recommended time frame is between the hours of 5:00 A.M. and 9:00 P.M. Why not the Dolly Parton-popularized 9 to 5? Because if you target your subscribers between the hours of 9:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M., you are completely neglecting the evening, a time that people catch up with their emails after a busy day in the office. Whether they are on their commute home, relaxing before dinner, or reading before bed, the evening can be a prime time for scheduling if you want to increase those open rates!
For B2B (business-to-business) marketing, the optimum times to send are Tuesday through Thursday between 10:00 A.M. and 12:00 P.M. and after lunch between 2:00 P.M. and 4:00 P.M. The rationale behind these time frames is simple. Think about when you are most likely to check your emails (the ones that don't pertain to work and require your immediate attention!). On Mondays you are trying to acclimate to being back at work after the weekend. On Fridays you are probably trying to get through work in anticipation of the weekend. Early mornings are a difficult time to gain anyone's attention (especially precaffeine) and any time after 4:00 is just too close to the end of the working day.
For B2C (business-to-consumer) marketing, on the other hand, optimal send times vary dramatically across industries but will be more in line with evening open rates, because a lot of people cannot access their personal emails during the day. But if open rates vary across industries and locations, what should you do to acquire those opens? Test it. If you are targeting segments of 100 people and you find out that 10 are opening at a certain time and 90 are opening at another time, then you can use the behavior of that 90 percent to shape your subsequent campaigns.
Now the only step standing between you and supreme email marketing success is the reporting and analysis step, highlighted in Figure 5.11. Being able to evaluate your email marketing activity from design to delivery is critical to iterating its success. You can use reporting to identify and address both issues and opportunities in your email marketing process, and crown yourself an analytics wizard when you know how to:
In order to measure the effectiveness of email marketing, you first need to define your goals. Why are you creating this marketing email? What are you trying to achieve? These questions might seem like those related to an existential crisis, but the reality is this: If you want to know the data you need to report on, you need to choose the email marketing metrics that best align with your goals. Common email marketing metrics include:
Why are open metrics important KPIs? They provide information on the quality of your subscriber list, the relevance of your message content, and the effectiveness of your subject line. In short—if you have excited and engaged your subscribers, they will have opened your email!
Why are click metrics important KPIs? They measure and validate the relevance of the message content as well as the quality of the segmentation and targeting. For example, if a link to a blog post on a certain topic did particularly well, you could use that insight to help determine what kind of content your subscribers are most interested in!
Although it's easy to get carried away by high open rates and low bounces, don't forget that it's the quality of interactions rather than the quantity that matters when you are measuring your email marketing success. This ties in with the value of setting goals against which you can measure your campaigns. Are your emails driving traffic to your website? Are they generating conversions? Are they achieving what you want them to?
Now that you have come full circle and explored every key component of an effective email marketing process, the only thing standing between you and email marketing mastery is a firm understanding of the laws and guidelines that govern it.
These laws and guidelines are strict in some locations and not so strict in others. Regardless, you need to be aware that there are laws, guidelines, and conventions that pertain to email marketing in your region, and issues to consider, particularly regarding data protection. Data protection laws inform what is considered spam; remember that spam is in the eye of the beholder, and the definition will differ greatly across geographies.
It's important to be aware of local privacy regulations too; common characteristics of electronic privacy regulations include:
Key governing bodies that you can consult include the Information Commissioner's Office for the United Kingdom and the Federal Trade Commission for the United States. The FTC is responsible for enforcing the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which sets the national standard for the sending of commercial and marketing emails and requests compliance in a number of areas, from sending behavior to content.
Enough to safeguard your status as an email marketing superstar! If in doubt, take comfort in the fact that you are already utilizing email every single day. This means you are already cognizant of your subscribers and their email experience, whether you know it or not! And just in case you need a reminder of how to ensure that experience is the best possible:
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