Digital Marketing Power

From personalized subject lines to custom content videos, emails are getting flashier. After all, marketers are continually looking to improve results with an edge over the competition. There’s always a new tactic, technology or theory that promises to drive more opens, clicks and conversions. The problem is that in our zeal to find “the next big thing,” we often lose sight of what really matters: putting together the right foundational elements that will drive sales consistently and predictably.Here are four basics every successful email marketing strategy should include. By getting back to these basics, you can rest assured that you’ve built a strong foundation to support all that flashy content.

 

Now that email marketing has been around for years, every retailer has an email marketing program. But, each program is at a different level of sophistication.

Do you ever wonder where your program ranks compared to others? Need helping mapping out where to go from where you are?

The crawl, walk, run metaphor and PR can resonate with many marketers. Many times after finishing a race, you will hear a runner say, “I’m never doing that again!” But after just a few days, the runner is already planning her/his next race.

Getting to the finish is hard, and at times may not seem worth it; but in the end, you can recognize your achievements and realize you can push yourself to be better, both as a runner and as an email marketer.

 

The concept of inbound marketing is to provide great content to attract visitors to your site, convert them into leads, create a relationship with them, close them as customers, and then delight those customers. I have seen this methodology provide significant and powerful results across all different industries. Committing to an inbound marketing methodology, however, can require considerable manpower and time. It can also be a slow process in the beginning, which can be frustrating.

It usually takes 3-6 months to start seeing the benefits and results. So when companies are eager to get leads for their sales team during this beginning time period, purchasing email lists starts to look pretty attractive to them. Great idea, right? Think again.

This is all too common of a strategy for companies and unfortunately what tends to happen is that marketing departments waste thousands of dollars on useless leads that are cold and old.

In today's world, knowing how an individual email campaign performed on a one-time basis is not enough. To learn whether your company is deriving true value from email marketing, you need both broader and deeper perspectives offered by program- and list-level analyses.

Though email campaign process metrics such as delivery, open, and click-through rates have their place, if you don't look beyond them... the true impact of your email marketing—and opportunities for continuous improvement—will go undetected.

It's high time for email marketers to assess email marketing performance in relation to goals, objectives, and contribution expectations that matter.

So, what matters?

 

If we have to be honest and real about event marketing, we have to admit that the email newsletter is still the King. You will get more traction from an email newsletter than you will any social campaign hands down; no shit.

Emails are marketing gold and getting your attendees or potential attendees to part with their email address, that little slice of “butts in the seats”, is one of the hardest things you will ever do. Let’s talk turkey and admit that simply sticking an email newsletter sign-up in the sidebar of your website is just not gonna cut it, you have to do more. You have to give your attendees a reason to want to trust that signing up for yet one more email newsletter is the right thing to do.

What special sauce is needed to get people opting in? Well, it is different for every event or conference but here are 9 simple things that you can try. One or more will work, you just have to hit on the right combination. Don’t be afraid to try more than one.

"I’ve had enough" says Scott Stratten. Every month a new “study” comes out to say when the best time is to send email out to your list/subscribers/mother.  If you're not familiar with Scott's approach then you're in for a treat.  Also check out his book 'Unmarketing' - one of the best I've read recently on online marketing.

Email marketing has become one of the principal methods business uses to market to leads and existing customers. We know it’s a cost effective method to market our business yet we don’t often see direct analysis of exactly how cost effective it is.

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review reported on an experiment proving how effective email marketing is, and HubSpot developed their numbers further to determine the ROI of the examples tested.

If you hear, “Put down the burrito and step away from the re-fried beans”, coming through a megaphone from the other side of your office, you know you have a problem. Unlike when you have a problem with your email marketing efforts, there is no one with a megaphone letting you know you’re in trouble. The problem is that most people don’t realize they have a problem; unlike a bad case of you know what. We’ve all been there. You don’t know where it started. You don’t know how to fix it. And, unfortunately, you don’t know what to do about it. If, after taking a step back, you realize that your marketing strategy is about as pretty as a greasy bean and cheese burrito, on the exit, it’s time to rethink your strategy. The last thing you want is for it to get out of control. Email marketing isn't a science, but there are basic rules you need to follow.

Marketing automation may still rely on email for most of the communication work, but times are quickly changing. Sophisticated marketing automation focuses more heavily on user behavior, providing visitors with the right content at the right time in the buying cycle—on any channel. To achieve this, you have to move beyond mass email campaigns and, instead, shift focus to personalized, content-focused lead nurturing.

As with all things in life, in email marketing there are a lot of things you can learn from the mistakes you made. Even better though, is to learn from other people’s mistakes.

Here are five email marketing mistakes other people already made, so you don’t have to:

 

The Barack Obama campaign raised almost $700 million dollars online – and almost all of that came from emails. The same email strategies they took advantage of can work for your business too – and they don’t require having a 100-person team of volunteers.

Here are 5 Email marketing tactics businesses worldwide can learn from Barack Obama’s campaign…

As online professionals, we spend a lot of our time testing, researching and applying new strategies to create “best practices.” Sometimes these practices apply to everyone and sometimes they just apply to us. It’s the “testing” part of it that’s so crucial to determine which is which.

Along with the most popular content, publishers pay close attention to click-throughs per campaign, revenue per subscriber, revenue per thousand emails sent and revenue per campaign. These metrics help you plan future email marketing campaigns and create new best practices for your company.

Understanding these metrics and detailing them each quarter can help you tighten up any weak links in your email newsletters and email marketing campaigns. And that’s without considering the actual design of your email pieces.

This post outlines some recent research. Do you agree/disagree with some of the findings?

There couldn’t be a better time to strategize final changes and improvements to your 2013 email marketing programs as you ready them for launch. In fact, while many of your new year’s email plans may be firmly sketched out, it’s not too late to give them a final polish with these insights and tweaks. Knowing where to amplify, adjust or even contract can take your email marketing programs from “ho-hum” to significantly greater impact on your bottom line in 2013. Here are five recommendations for boosting email marketing results and impact in the coming year. Stay tuned in January for even more ideas to make 2013 your email program’s most successful year yet!

Forrester’s recently published The Purchase Path of Online Buyers offers insights that aren’t surprising to many in the know. Email and search are the key drivers of online sales, with social contributing only a tiny bit.

You can of course buy  the paid report, but if you don’to, the bottom line is that smart retailers are using paid search and sophisticated email marketing to drive sales and repeat business. This article will give you the key findinds of the Forrester report.