Social media has undoubtedly been in the spotlight for the last couple of years. It’s time email marketing received its due praise. While it’s true that social media can accomplish things like reaching a broad audience and encouraging conversations with customers, email marketing offers its own list of benefits that social media will never be able to emulate.
Guaranteed Exposure
Does your post make it on your fans’ news feed? With Facebook’s algorithm, only the pages deemed most popular or relevant will make it on the “worthy to be seen” list. Even if you do make it, your post will disappear from your fans newsfeed within hours. Email, on the other hand, always makes it to your subscribers’ inboxes (forget about bounces for now), giving you a better chance of grabbing your subscribers attention with a carefully crafted subject line. In addition, even unopened emails can remain in an inbox for days, with each new visit by the subscriber an opportunity to snag his attention.
Your call to action is arguably the most important element of your email marketing messages. Because it provides the link between passive reading and active clicking, it supersedes even the supremacy of the subject line. But many businesses fail to treat it with the respect it deserves. Subject lines tend to get all the attention because they provide the first point of contact and the incentive to open. And while that is undoubtedly a vital role, the call to action requires the subscriber to take decisive action towards your conversion goal. That’s why it’s essential that you put some serious thought into creating a single call to action that will funnel your subscribers toward the decision you ultimately want them to make.
Why a Single Call to Action?
Simply put, too many calls to action paralyze the decision process. For instance, one email I received offered me the opportunity to donate, review new merchandise, visit the store website, and make a purchase, all in the same email. Just reading it burned through my allotted attention span for this email campaign; forget about actually deciding which call to action was most enticing. Studies show that you’ll make more sales by offering fewer choices than you will by offering a smorgasbord of options. Why? Ever try to choose between twenty-four different flavors of barbecue sauce? After a while they all start to taste the same.
When was the last time you created an email and sent it out to your entire subscriber list? Last week? Lifecycle marketing offers a more personal approach to creating emails by targeting them toward customers at various stages in their relationship with your company. By segmenting your audience based on their current interest level, you can create emails designed to elicit the next logical response. Still not convinced? Take a look at how lifecycle marketing approaches these three common groups of subscribers.
Subscriber #1: The Newbie
Profile: This subscriber has just expressed interest in your company by signing up for your email list.
Email Type: Send the newbie a welcome email that makes him feel appreciated and that encourages him to engage immediately.
Email Goals: Encourage a first purchase, educate him about your company, promote your website, and let him know you’re glad he’s on board.
Email Approach: Thank him for signing up and offer him a discount off his first purchase. This is also a great time to let him know what benefits he can expect to receive as a member of your subscriber list.
Subscriber #2: The Supporter
Profile: This is the loyal gal who loves to shop at your store and opens every email you send.
Email Type: Respond to the loyalty of this customer by giving her the VIP treatment. Make her feel like a valued customer and she’ll reward you with return visits and recommendations.
Email Approach: Offer sneak previews for upcoming sales, give special valued-customer discounts, target email creation based on viewing history, send abandoned cart reminders, and provide immediate customer service interactions when appropriate.
Subscriber #3: The Bystander
Profile: This person has been a member of your email list for a while but has no recent purchases and may fail to open or click on any of your email campaigns.
Email Type: Seek to win back the loyalty of this subscriber with special offers and “we miss you” messages.
Email Goals: Jump start re-engagement, understand her concerns, and keep her from transferring loyalty elsewhere.
Email Approach: Solicit comments by asking for social media involvement or survey responses, offer incentives for purchases or website visits, and seek to make her feel like a valued member of your list.
The goal of lifecycle marketing is to segment your subscriber list based on their customer behavior and then to create targeted emails that encourage greater levels of participation. eConnect Email can help you reach these goals by managing subscriber data, analyzing list metrics, and building segments based on custom criteria.
Choosing the right day to launch and send your email campaigns can have a huge effect overall results. Much of the process of deciding on a day will initially rely on intuition (Will people be packing up for the weekend on Friday and therefore be less likely to open emails? Will they be stuck in the doldrums on Wednesday and therefore be more likely to open?). Your decision will also depend on your list specifics and the idiosyncrasies of your target audience, meaning that best practices will be relative. However, there are some concrete steps you can take to determine what day your subscribers will be most likely to engage with the content you send them.
Make an educated guess.
You know your customers better than anyone and you’ve had the chance to observe their habits over time. Take advantage of eConnect Email’s analytics tools to monitor open rates and click rates and then make an educated guess as to which day will be best for your email campaign based on what you learn.
Test.
Don’t rely strictly on guesswork, however. Test your theories by sending emails on various days and observing how customers interact with them (again spend some time reviewing campaign stats from previously sent emails).
Consider weekends vs. weekdays.
Aggregated benchmarks often point to weekends as good days to send email. If you engage primarily in business-to-business marketing, however, weekends probably won’t perform well for you. On the other hand, many people can now check email from the comfort of their easy chairs via smartphones, making weekend email checking easier than ever before. Again, we recommend testing, reviewing results and testing again.
Consider the email content.
Does your email discuss a weekend sale? Is it a newsletter that talks about best practices for business? How about a weekend gardening project? The day you send each email will be affected by what the email contains, so be willing to alter the content within your campaign if you’re sending a time-specific message.
Be flexible.
Even if you’ve found the perfect day to send, it’s still important to remain flexible. You might usually send on Mondays, but you’ll want to alter your strategy for Labor Day weekend, for example.
The bottom line is that there is no perfect day to send email that will work for every business. The analytics and stats tools available from eConnect Email can help you determine what the best practice will be for your company in order to maximize the actions (opens, clicks, purchases) taken by your subscribers.
Here’s how to make your product remarkable, according to Seth Godin – it’s about getting your ideas to spread, and to get your ideas to spread, you must be remarkable so that your ideas are “worth making a remark about.” Godin uses a Japanese word called “Otaku” to describe what he’s after. The word has a bad rep in Japan, but is used elsewhere as a slang word for fandom.
So here’s the million-dollar question for legitimate email marketers – how do you turn a newsletter subscriber from your regular site-surfing reader into an Otaku? Godin says it’s about getting the right target audience, and not about getting 10,000 new sign-ups per week for your newsletter.
Unfortunately, the latter seems to be the obsession with many email marketers nowadays. What Godin is proposing, is for marketers to sit back and study your audience – the genuine subscribers, not the ones who are just in it for the free whitepapers and perks. If you start focusing on those who are listening, on those who want to listen to you, you would have found yourself an Otaku base, who will read what you write and help you spread your message.
Now, that’s the very reason we’ve integrated Tagging into our email marketing system. When we started to redesign our email marketing system to reach the masses, we asked ourselves: What do marketers want? What do marketers need? What’s missing in all the email marketing systems out there? Is it about the ability to send 1 million emails in five seconds? Is it about the ability to have unlimited lists and subscribers? Is it about making sure all your emails get to your subscribers and not their spam boxes?
Then one day, Johnny said, “Let’s tag,” and we realized we’d just found the missing link. Imagine a simple tool that could give you the ability to really understand your subscribers. You could then target the right people in your mailing lists, ensuring that everyone always receives information that’s relevant to them. Once that happens, your readers will spread the word. And here’s how you do that on eConnect Email – by tagging all your links with carefully chosen tags, so that in time, you will know exactly what your subscribers want.
So take some time, watch the video and see how you can relate it to your own email marketing campaign. Again, it’s all about getting the right people to read what you have to say, not about getting as many sign ups as possible for your newsletter.
