Posts about email marketing, email campaigns, etc.

Are You Ready to Send that Email Newsletter? [CHECKLIST]

Maybe you’ve heard that email marketing drives more conversions than any other marketing channel. Or maybe you know that your customers are five times more likely to see a message in an email than on Facebook. With the power of email marketing on your mind, you’ve decided it’s time for your company to launch a newsletter.

Deciding to start a newsletter is a great first step. Email newsletters can be useful tools for:

  • Increasing brand awareness.
  • Building a relationship with current and future customers.
  • Driving traffic to existing content assets, such as blog posts and videos.
  • Updating recipients on offers that may benefit them.

Before you start reaping the benefits of a successful email newsletter, though, you have to put in the work. (Hey, anything worth doing is worth doing well, right?) Go through the checklist below to make sure that you’re maximizing the value of your newsletter before hitting ‘Send’. If you want to download a handy .pdf version of the checklist, click the button below.

download-our-email-newsletter-checklist

Initial Steps

  1. Build a subscriber list. Don’t have a lot of subscribers yet? Try these steps:
    1. Create a newsletter landing page that outlines the benefits of signing up.
    2. Add an opt-in form at the bottom of every page on your site.
    3. Add an opt-in form at the bottom of every blog post.
    4. Promote your upcoming newsletter on social media to drive sign ups.
  1. Research successful newsletters in your industry (and beyond). Look at the newsletters in your inbox. What do they do to convince you to open and click through them?
  1. Determine how your newsletter can provide value to your readers. Making your newsletter 100% promotional is a great way to get recipients to hit ‘Unsubscribe’.
  1. Come up with a design and layout that fits your company’s brand. Email platforms like Mailchimp and Emma let you design email newsletters without any coding experience.

Writing the Copy

  1. Come up with a primary, highly visible call-to-action. For example, if you want email newsletters to contact your company for more information, you might include a brightly-colored button that says ‘Contact Us with Your Questions’ towards the top of your newsletter.
  1. Come up with a compelling subject line. Don’t just use ‘Company Newsletter’ as the subject line for every message—give recipients a reason to open the email and see what’s inside. Hubspot has a list of great email subject lines if you need inspiration.
  1. Collect content. Decide what content assets you want to feature in your newsletter. This could include blog posts, videos, major company updates, industry news articles, or even newsletter-exclusive content.
  1. Have someone review your newsletter copy. It’s easy to miss minor errors and typos if you don’t get a second set of eyes on your newsletter.

Getting Technical

  1. Make sure all the links in your newsletter work. Send yourself a test email and click the links to make sure none of them are broken.
  1. View your test email on your desktop and your phone. Make sure it looks good and can be easily read on all screen sizes.
  1. Add alt text to your images. Alt text will appear when an image doesn’t load in an email. Having alt text is especially important when your calls-to-action are images.
  1. Add social sharing and follow buttons. Social sharing buttons make it easy for recipients to share newsletter content they like on their social networks with one easy click. Social follow buttons make it equally easy for recipients to start following your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest page, if they haven’t already.
  1. Make sure you’re legally compliant. You’re required to include your company’s physical address on every email, so add that to your footer if you haven’t already. You also need to include an easy-to-find ‘Unsubscribe’ or ‘Opt Out’ link or button.
  1. Decide what variable to A/B test. Most email providers will let you run A/B tests where you split your subscriber list into two groups and send a slightly different email variation to each group to see which one performs better. Variables that you can test include your subject line, CTA button placement, and CTA copy.

Your job’s not done after you send your newsletter. Remember to look at metrics like open rate, click-through rate, and conversions in order to see what’s working and what needs to be tweaked. Analyzing each newsletter will help you determine how to improve future newsletters for better engagement and more conversions.

5 Pervasive Myths about Email Marketing

For years now, marketers have been asking whether email marketing is effective–here’s one example from this past year and another from several internet eons ago (2009). With 205 billion emails sent and received last year and an estimated 91% of consumers checking email at least once a day on their smartphones, I think we can safely lay the “email marketing is dead” myth to rest. However, there are still plenty of other email marketing myths floating around—and if you believe them, you could be losing out on opportunities to increase your ROI.

Here are five myths that could be getting in the way of successful email marketing, along with some tips to help you move past them.

Myth #1: Open rate and click-through rate are the most important metrics to track.

Open rate and click-through rate (CTR) are essential metrics to track, but they won’t tell the whole story of your email marketing campaign. Open rate may be an indication of whether the subject line and sender name compelled someone to open the email, and CTR can help you determine how much engagement you got with any given email, but that doesn’t tell you whether an email campaign led to a recipient completing a desired action.

To determine how successful your email marketing has been in driving recipient action, you’ll need to look at the percentage of recipients who clicked an email link and completed a specified action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form. Divide the number of email recipients who completed this action by the total number of emails delivered, and you’ll have your conversion rate.

Other valuable metrics to measure include email list growth rate, email share rate (i.e. the number of people who clicked a social media button within the email to share it on their networks), and overall ROI.

Myth #2: Recipients prefer image-heavy emails.

Multimedia Laptop

You might think that splashy, image-intensive emails will get the most engagement. In fact, that’s what most email recipients think too—in Hubspot surveys from both 2011 and 2014, almost two thirds of respondents said they prefer image-heavy emails. However, when Hubspot looked at their own data set for emails with between zero and fifteen images, they found that the click-through rate actually dropped as the number of images increased. This could be due to the fact that not all recipients could view images on the device they were using to open their email, or because too many images distracted from the email’s call-to-action.

This doesn’t mean that you have to banish images from all email marketing campaigns. What you should do is A/B test emails with different numbers of images, or different image heights and widths, to see what the recipients on your mailing list respond to best.

When you do include images, make sure they’re optimized to be viewed on all device types, from small smartphone screens to large desktops. You should also make sure that your key message is at the top of the email so it’s visible immediately when someone opens an email on their phone.

Myth #3: Campaigns sent out to large lists are most effective.

Sure, growing your email list is a worthy ambition. After all, the more people you have on your list, the more people will receive your marketing messages. But that doesn’t mean you should abuse your list by regularly sending out mass email blasts. Impersonal emails get less engagement than personalized emails, and a message that’s irrelevant to a recipient could lead that person to unsubscribe or mark your email as spam. To avoid this, plan email campaigns around specific list segments, and use a personalized recipient name when that information is available.

You may also benefit from sending emails that are triggered by a specific action, such as a website visitor downloading an eBook or making a purchase. In this email, you might thank the site visitor for their download or purchase, and then recommend other content or products that they may be interested in. Over 75% of email marketing revenue comes from this type of triggered campaign, and transactional emails have an average of eight times more clicks than bulk mailings.

Myth #4: It’s best to send commercial emails early in the week.

Calendar and Pen

According to Hubspot, emails sent on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays have the highest open rates. However, several studies have found higher click-through rates on Saturday and Sunday. This is likely because fewer marketing messages are sent on the weekend, so even though there are fewer total clicks, the percentage of clicks is higher. It’s also possible that because there are fewer messages in recipients’ email inboxes over the weekend, they are more likely to engage with the messages they receive.

So should you send your messages earlier in the week or on the weekend? Unfortunately, there’s no clear best day of the week to send—it’s going to depend on your industry and audience. Try testing different days to determine when you get the best engagement.

Myth #5: Email marketing isn’t as effective as search or social media marketing.

Email marketing is inexpensive to implement and drives more conversions than any other digital marketing channel, including search and social. And because of the relatively limited visibility of organic social posts, marketing messages are five times more likely to be seen through email than Facebook, and emails are six times more likely than tweets to get a click-through. If you’re in ecommerce, emails can also increase your bottom line. An estimated 4.24% of people who get to your site through an email message buy something, as opposed to 2.49% who get to your site from search engines and 0.59% from social media. The next time someone tries to make the case that email marketing is outdated or ineffective, point them towards those statistics.

Want to get more information about email marketing best practices, as well as digital marketing tips, trends, and debunked myths? Subscribe to our newsletter below.

HOW TO MAKE YOUR HOLIDAY EMAIL MARKETING PAY OFF

 

Although we still have a few weeks until Thanksgiving, many consumers have already started their holiday shopping, or are at least starting to think about what gifts their loved ones might appreciate this year. And not all of their shopping is taking place at local malls and department stores—60% of consumers are planning to do at least some of their shopping online, making online retail the top sales channel this holiday season. If you sell any products or services online, it’s time to prepare for the onslaught of online shopping by rolling out your holiday email marketing campaign. Unsure how to stand out from all the other online retailers competing for attention in shoppers’ inboxes? Read on for 6 tips to improve your email marketing in time for the holidays.

 

Make Your Messages More Personal

Rather than just sending the same bland mass messages to your entire email list (and seeing your open and click-through rates suffer as a result), consider dividing your list into segments so that you can send slightly more personalized emails. You might, for example, look at behavioral data such as past purchases to offer product recommendations to different segments of your email list. If a shopper has abandoned their shopping cart on your site, you could send them a transactional email reminding them that the product is still waiting for them. You might also use demographic data, such as gender or geographical location, to promote the products and deals that are most relevant to specific groups of customers.

Tease Time-Sensitive Sales

If you’re planning to offer discounts on major shopping days, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, don’t just assume shoppers will know about your great deals—give them all the important information they need and get them to anticipate your discounts by sending a series of emails leading up to the sale date. You might send email subscribers a message several weeks before the sale reminding them that it’s coming up, another reminder a few days before the event, a reminder on the day of the sale, and a message after the sale. Let shoppers know about other last minute holiday shopping deals they may enjoy even if they missed this sale. Just be careful not to get too carried away with your series of emails—there’s a negative correlation between email frequency and engagement, which means that at a certain point, sending too many emails leads to fewer recipients opening them. The ideal send rate depends on the type of business, so be sure to track your email open rate to determine at what frequency you are most successful and at what frequency engagement begins to drop off.

Share Gift Guides

While the holidays should be a happy time, they’re often overshadowed by the anxiety of finding and purchasing the perfect gifts for friends and family members.  In fact, a Consumer Reports survey found that 68% of shoppers stress out about holiday crowds and long lines at stores, while 28% stress over picking gifts. You can reduce your email recipients’ stress levels—and make them more likely to buy from you—by sending out emails with gift guides featuring groups of products that may be good choices for different people on their list (e.g. ‘Gifts for Mom’, ‘Gifts for Outdoor Lovers’, etc.). You might also consider writing a blog post with actionable holiday shopping advice (such as ‘How to Find a Meaningful Gift for the Person Who Has Everything’) and including an excerpt from that post and a link to your blog in your next monthly newsletter.

Offer Special Holiday Deals for Email Subscribers

Reward your email subscribers by offering them special holiday discounts, deals, coupons, or gift cards that can be redeemed on your site. Be sure to include the specific deal in the subject line of the email (e.g. ‘10% Off’) in order to encourage recipients to click through and receive the deal. If it’s not feasible for your business to offer huge product discounts or free shipping for the entire month of December, consider participating in Free Shipping Day on December 18th and notifying email recipients ahead of time. Free shipping is the holiday promotion that gets the single biggest response from shoppers, so it’s a good choice even if you only pick one holiday deal to offer. Just make sure to tell email recipients how long their purchases should take to ship so that they can be sure their gifts arrive on time.

Track Your Metrics

You should be keeping track of email marketing metrics throughout the year, but it’s especially important to measure your email campaign results close to the holidays so that you know what works well (and what doesn’t work well) when it comes time to roll out another holiday email campaign next year. Keep track of your open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, and revenue per email in order to determine which holiday emails had the greatest success. You should also pay attention to your conversion rate, as this will have a huge impact on your revenue per email. Pay attention to what pages on your website users land on after opening your email and what path they take if they make a purchase.

A/B Test Your Emails

If you want to tweak specific components of an email to figure out what works best, you can also A/B test it by sending one version to a percentage of your email list and another version with one change (such as a different subject line) to another equal and representative percentage of your email list to see which version gets more engagement. You can then send the more successful version to the remaining, larger percentage of your email list.

By paying attention to what works well with your holiday email marketing this year, you can be better prepared to anticipate your customers’ needs and hit the ground running when the holiday season comes around next year.

 

Why spend money on email?

Your marketing budget is getting cut; you have to find innovative (read: inexpensive) ways to market your products. But how? All the new and exciting ideas cost lots of money and really you can’t justify them anyway.

According to “Winning in Turbulence: Protect and Grow Customer Loyalty” by Rob Markey and Darrell Rigby of Bain & Company, Inc., “Loyal customers cost less to serve… (and) …help stretch marketing dollars. Their word-of-mouth referrals to friends and associates provide a company with more like-minded customers, laying the foundation for growth when the economy turns around.”

Epsilon conducted an email branding study and published the results in February of this year. The statistics point out how important email marketing is in the advertising process. Consumers said they enjoy receiving email from companies with which they are registered (84%). It may be a struggle to grow your list, but once you have those names and are sending them email, you know you’re talking to an audience that wants to hear from you!

In addition, the Epsilon study found out that 57% of consumers have a more positive impression of companies when they receive email from them. And 40% said that simply receiving email has a positive impact on their likelihood to make a future purchase from a company. What does all this mean? Email builds loyalty and trust with people that want to hear from you. And those people are telling their friends about you, which helps you grow your customer base, your email base and your bottom line.

And if all of these statistics and numbers aren’t evidence enough, then maybe Mr. Markey & Mr. Rigby of Bain & Company, Inc. can convince you: “When spending drops, the companies focused on protecting and growing their most loyal, profitable customer segments often manage to stabilize their business. They may even attract new customers as competitors falter.”

Email Marketing

Watch your step when you get up, because Leverage Marketing is about to drop some top notch email marketing services!

Our email marketing specialists have been buzzing around our office to make sure our email program is in shape so we can keep you in the hive with what goes on around here at Leverage. It’s been a proven efficient technique that we’ve been perfecting since our beginnings. Now, for the first time we are bringing this program to you — our privileged customers.

Email marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to stay in touch with your customers — whether you’re trying to up sell a customer or get them to make a purchase, an email campaign keeps your company top-of-mind. It is a more effective means of marketing your products and services compared to other advertising techniques. While your budget may be getting cut across other channels, you should be increasing your budget for email marketing. Email drives a high ROI and the results are measurable.

According to Stephanie Miller, vice president of strategic services at Return Path, there are excellent opportunities for email marketers during recessions.

“Due to its high ROI, executives are actually paying attention to email marketing. It’s up to us to rise to this occasion, and dissuade everyone else from thinking of email as a cheap alternative. Email has proven its ability to sell, engage and build loyalty,” said Miller in a recent article for Email Insider.

Leverage Marketing is not only able to create, build and implement email marketing campaigns, we can also look at the email marketing you’ve done in the past and make suggestions on how to improve. We can help you keep your customers engaged with your products and services. Think of us as your nimble email marketing consultants. We will help you execute a campaign to drive traffic and increase sales, and we offer customizable packages can tailor to your budget.

According to an email report by the Direct Marketing Association, in October 2008 the ROI for email marketing was $45.06 per dollar spent, while non-email marketing had a $19.94 ROI per dollar spent. What does this mean for you? For us, that’s at least five extra Starbucks coffees for our caffeine addicted employees.

If you haven’t already started gathering names for email lists or started emailing that list you already have, now is the time to start. Contact us today to learn more.