The Growing Importance of Welcome Emails [Infographic]

Didn’t think welcome emails are important? Think again. According to Invespcro, welcome emails are so important that they result in four times more open rates and five times more clicks. Clearly, welcome emails are critical messages sent to your subscribers to usher them to your online store/website.

Not only do welcome emails provide warm welcome to your new subscribers, they also provide them with relevant content at the right time, when they are psychologically ready for you. When someone visits your website and submit their email, it means they are seriously interested in your product or service. Literally, they are asking you to communicate further with them. As a matter of fact 74% of subscribers expect to receive a welcome email.

As soon as a new subscriber signs up, sending them an email welcoming them onboard will likely get you 320% more revenue than promotional emails. As if that is not enough, you will enjoy 86% more lift in unique open rate. On top of that, you will see a 196% improvement in unique click rate.

If you want to boost your email metrics, there is not a better way to start than sending that welcome metric.

The type of welcome email can range from a series of emails to just a simple automated welcome email message welcoming new subscribers and telling them more about your services or product. This is the perfect of opportunity for you to invite your subscribers to learn more about you. However, be careful lest you risk overwhelming them with too much information in the first instance.

If you think you risk overwhelming your subscribers with information, it is best to combat information overload by sending diving your welcome emails into different themes then sending many welcome emails` in intervals. For instance, you can send the first email to welcome them, the second one to invite them to your social networks and the third to introduce them to your products.

Welcoming emails are also effective because they save time that would have been used to manually collect new leads which can be time-consuming and tedious for even the smallest of businesses. The efficiency that comes with automated email campaigns is worth it. If you have a good marketing automation tool, then you will have an easy time implementing your first welcome email campaign.

Another critical point to note about welcome emails is that they have 10% higher read rate than normal marketing emails. This is the perfect opportunity to reach out to these consumers because they are more receptive.

ADVERTISEMENT

Source: https://www.business2community.com | https://www.invespcro.com

ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business organization focused on providing our members and guests with an extraordinary networking experience, bringing business professionals together for the sole purpose of generating new relationships and developing new business opportunities. Not a member, learn how you can become a member and join this awesome group of professionals to connect and grow your business.

Stay Connected with WNFP!

Using These 10 Phrases in Your Email Marketing May Keep you from Success

Marketers have to be careful when drafting emails to avoid having them be triggered as spam. Marketing teams send out bulk emails on a consistent basis to leads, opportunities, and customers in an effort to show as many people as possible why their business’ products matter.

Here, we’re going to break down our top ten spam trigger words to avoid in your emails. You want every email your marketing team sends out to count, to give your business the best possible chance at increasing conversions.

Spam Trigger Words to Ignore

Multi-level Marketing

This refers to the practice where businesses hire salespeople to go around and try and sell someone a product, then have that person recommend the product to someone else. Sometimes this is a legitimate practice; most of the time, it’s comparable to a pyramid scheme. Any business practice connected to a pyramid scheme should be avoided like the plague. Even googling “multi-level marketing” brings up questionable results, so it makes sense that any emails with the term in it will be triggered as spam. Don’t get it confused with multi-channel marketing, which is actually a growing strategy that works well.

Increase Sales

This is both surprising and not surprising. It’s hard to imagine a B2B marketing team drafting an email for hundreds or thousands of potential clients and not using this phrase; however, that’s exactly why it’s often triggered as spam in the first place. Here, context matters. It’s a phrase that will eventually come up in an email, but there are ways around it. For example, don’t use the phrase in the subject line. Steer clear of trying to look spammy and try these techniques instead to boost sales.

Web Traffic

If you saw an email with “Web Traffic” in the subject line, would you think it’s legitimate if you don’t know where that email is coming from? Increasing web traffic for an online business is absolutely essential for the success of that business. The more traffic your website receives, the more likely you’ll convert that traffic into sales. Spammers and scammers take advantage of this term because it’s something all online businesses are doing research on.

Online Biz Opportunity

Shortening words in an email might seem like a really convenient way for you to write emails quickly, and with a personal touch, but that’s not professional and it should be avoided even with the best intentions. “Online Biz Opportunity” screams spam to anyone who’s been on the internet for more than ten years. No Millennial or Gen Z’er will ever click on an email like that. We know better. You’d find this phrase on a sketchy Craigslist ad — not in a mass email for a legitimate marketing campaign.

While You Sleep

This is one of those phrases that’s simply too good to be true, everyone knows it’s too good to be true, and yet, it’s still used constantly. Marketing campaigns typically require more than a day to complete, along with the sales process and then completion of a purchase, depending, of course, on what you’re selling. You don’t want to oversell in general, so try to limit the hyperbole for your business’ and marketing team’s own benefit.

AFFORDABLE ADVERTISING OPTIONS

Free Consultation

Few things in today’s world are actually free, which immediately jumps out to just about everyone. Even if the consultation is free, there’s always a catch, and if there’s a catch, that means your marketing team isn’t being transparent to its targeted audience. Unless you’re truly offering a free consultation for potential buyers, do not advertise it as free. To avoid being marked as spam, leave “Free Consultation” out of the subject line.

Once in a Lifetime

This is another phrase that’s simply not true — ever. There’s no marketing campaign or product that’s going to offer a potential customer a “once in a lifetime” experience. Hyperbole in general needs to be avoided if you’re trying to make a conscientious effort to avoid having your emails being marked as spam.

As Seen On …

Who can honestly look at this phrase and not think about horribly scripted and produced infomercials for products that barely work? This also isn’t the best strategy for your marketing team because if the product they’re trying to sell has already been done, it shows that your product isn’t exactly better than anyone else’s. Having your products or services associated with a term that implies them being cheap or unreliable.

Call Now

Last, but definitely not least, is “Call Now,” which is innocent enough, but like “As seen on,” is often associated with potentially-sketchy products and services. It’s good to implement actionable content in your marketing strategy, but this phrase has been around for too long to be associated with anything other than a marketing ploy. Plus, customers today are more interested in using other channels to reach out to a company — especially if they’re being reached via email. That alone could set off a red flag.

The Final Word

It’s important for marketing teams to make sure their emails aren’t being marked as spam or contain too many spam trigger words. If they do, they will either be ignored altogether or get reported, which doesn’t make the business look good. Marketing teams should avoid hyperbole whenever possible and avoid making claims that are too good to be true because they’re not really fooling anyone.


Spammers and scammers use these words to pray on those who are easy to manipulate. Any reputable business would never go out of their way to be anything less than transparent with their customers. They prioritize the customer experience and want to make sure the buyer’s journey is as clear as possible. The more a potential buyer feels like they can trust a company, the more likely they’ll return. First impressions matter, so it’s best to make sure even a simple email isn’t being interpreted as spam.


Source: www.smallbiztrends.com
Image Credit: Shutterstock




ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business organization focused on providing our members and guests with an extraordinary networking experience, bringing business professionals together for the sole purpose of generating new relationships and developing new business opportunities. Not a member, learn how you can become a member and join this awesome group of professionals to connect and grow your business.

Stay Connected with WNFP!

The Email-Marketing Death Spiral Begins When You Think More Is Better

You can build a powerful customer connection if your emails are personalized, relevant and perfectly timed.

It’s happened to all of us, and no one likes it.

You visit a banking site to research home refinancing options. Later, you receive an email from that bank about credit card rates. You browse men’s golf shoes on a retail site and then receive an email about a sale in women’s bathing suits. It just doesn’t make sense.

Email is such a powerful channel for engagement that companies across industries continue sending more and more of it. The problem is when the content of the email is irrelevant, or there’s just too much of it: It turns people off. To leverage the best one-on-one engagement channel they have, companies need to understand the right and wrong ways to do email.

Email is alive and kicking.

Email is certainly not dead. It remains the most effective channel marketers have for initiating a conversation and reaching out to their prospects and customers.  

Texting/SMS messages and push notifications share many similarities with email, but people tend to expect push notifications to be both urgent and important. People expect email to be important but not urgent, so they don’t get nearly as annoyed by a non-urgent email as they do by a non-urgent text.

Thus, the best way to reach out to an individual and initiate a conversation with them on a one-to-one level -- without irritating them -- is email. So why do companies keep abusing the power of email?

You’re doing it wrong.

Years ago, you could achieve email click-through rates of around 5 percent. These days, you’re lucky to get click-through rates of 0.5 percent. But even that 0.5 percent makes an impact, though, so companies keep emailing.

And then they get caught in an email death spiral. They find that open and click-through rates keep declining while opt-outs keep increasing. To get the same impact, they hit the list harder and send more frequent emails. But those emails lead to fewer opens, decreased click-throughs and more opt-outs. So they grow the list and send even more emails. And so on...

If this is you, take a deep breath, step out of the cycle, and do email differently. “One size fits all” emails cannot be nearly as relevant -- and therefore never as engaging -- as they might be if they were individualized. You have an excellent, one-to-one channel that allows you to reach out to a particular person, to appear in their inbox (the same place where they communicate with friends, colleagues and customers), and to begin a conversation with them, but instead, you sent the same communication you did to a million other people. Well, they noticed.

It’s a sign that you’re abusing email by sending me ads for women’s bathing suits when I want to look at golf shoes. Repeat after me: Bulk email is not relevant or engaging -- and it is increasingly ineffective.

How to do it better.

You cannot keep emailing everyone the same thing, but you definitely shouldn’t stop sending emails. So what should you do?

To save yourself from the email death spiral, you need to focus on sending emails that recipients will actually care about. Make each email so relevant and compelling that people click through at a higher rate, and you will start to reverse your sliding click-through rate, from your 0.5 percent back up to 5 percent or more.

There are two types of emails that help you provide a great experience to the customer.

AFFORDABLE ADVERTISING OPTIONS

Try triggered emails.

Triggered emails allow you to reach out only when you have something relevant to say. Various criteria can trigger the sending of an email: when a person’s actions indicate it’s an appropriate time to send an email; when something changes in your business that the person would be interested in, such as inventory or price changes; or when outside circumstances have changed, such as weather conditions.

Triggered emails increase the importance of all the email you send because they establish that you communicate only when you have something meaningful to say to that person. For example, if a shopper had recently engaged with a particular appliance on a retailer’s site or mobile app but has not purchased it yet, the retailer can trigger an email informing him when there are only a few left in stock to drive prompt action.

Or, a newly published blog article could trigger an email. No, not to everyone on the subscriber list, just to those who have shown an interest in the content area the blog post discusses. 

Try mass-personalized email.

When you still want to send emails to a lot of people at a certain time, during the holiday season, for example or on a regular schedule, perhaps weekly or monthly, you should use open-time email personalization. This method of mass email personalization utilizes machine learning technology. You might email part of your list or all of it, but at "open time," the email can be populated with relevant, personalized content that is truly individualized and unique to each recipient.

Machine learning is a popular buzzword, but it’s simply a form of AI that uses a scalable way to select the most relevant content to show someone based on what you know about him. Using machine learning is the best way to return your email to what email is meant to be -- a meaningful conversation with a person.

And by meaningful, I mean truly personalized. This doesn’t just mean mail merging a person’s first name or company name into the email. Real personalization means tailoring the content of an email dynamically for each individual: the message, the offers, the recommendations. To be good at doing this, you need to know who you’re emailing and what their interests are. That knowledge comes from in-depth data combined with machine learning.

Here’s a simple example. Assume a financial services firm sends out an email promoting an upcoming webinar to prospective clients. A recipient who learned about the webinar elsewhere has already signed up for the webinar before opening the email. At open time, the content of her email should be updated to acknowledge her registration and suggest a few relevant resources to check out in advance of the webinar.

The quality of your email will not go unnoticed as people respond by clicking through.

If you use email marketing, now is the time to begin transitioning from the outdated batch-and-blast method to emails triggered at the optimal moment and mass-personalized at open time. True one-to-one email will enable you to unlock the full potential of the most effective engagement channel for businesses.


People appreciate the right communication at the right time. By initiating meaningful email contact, you can transform thousands of unsubscribes into millions of click-throughs.


Source: www.entrepreneur.com
Image Credit: dem10 | Getty Images



ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business organization focused on providing our members and guests with an extraordinary networking experience, bringing business professionals together for the sole purpose of generating new relationships and developing new business opportunities. Not a member, learn how you can become a member and join this awesome group of professionals to connect and grow your business.

Stay Connected with WNFP!

Add Social to Your Email Marketing to Boost Your Nonprofit Audiences

“Don’t cross the streams!”

That’s good advice when working with nuclear ghost-catching equipment strapped to your back, but it took breaking that rule for the Ghostbusters to defeat the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

Crossing your social media streams and email marketing so your audience can move easily from one to the other will help grow your nonprofit organization’s reach on both channels.

Using Constant Contact’s new email social block, you can start promoting your social channels and build an audience that will spread the word about your nonprofit for you.

Connect email to social and build other audiences

Building an email list builds an audience for your nonprofit organization, but building a social audience helps to support your email efforts. The more you build up your social channels, the more likely you’ll be able to drive traffic to sign up for your email list, and vice versa.

Social and email should work together to grow your organization’s reach and audiences. Adding social links to your email helps potential donors or volunteers find your social platforms, and also helps them share your email with their social network, reaching new people that may also be interested in your cause.

Give readers a backup option call to action

Adding social media buttons to your email not only brings your channels closer together, it also gives readers a third option, something other than clicking through to your site or closing the email. Even if they don’t click your call to action button to sign up as a volunteer or donate, they may decide to look at your social media channels, giving you another chance to target them later.

When designing your email, place a social media block below your call to action button. You could also add a small banner that says, ‘Spread the Word to your Friends,’ above the social links to provide context and help push them to action.

Direct readers to a specific action on social

Like deciding what to write in your nonprofit email, your social links should be specific and point readers towards a single action. Your social links should either direct readers to follow you on your social channels, or help them share your email message on their social media channels with a share button.

If you’re promoting your fundraising event in an email and the reader decides not to donate or sign up to volunteer, linking your social media channels can help them stay up to date with reminders to get involved later. If your cause needs petition signatures, as another example, it may be better for readers to share your email message on their own social media channels, to build your audience and spread the word faster.

Help your email and social media marketing work together


Combining your marketing efforts on social media and email will help grow your nonprofit organization’s reach on both channels. With a bigger reach, you’ll have more firepower when promoting a fundraising event, getting signatures for local causes or zapping the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in the streets of New York City.

Source: https://blogs.constantcontact.com/
Image Credit: Constant Contact

ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business organization focused on providing our members and guests with an extraordinary networking experience, bringing business professionals together for the sole purpose of generating new relationships and developing new business opportunities. Not a member, learn how you can become a member and join this awesome group of professionals to connect and grow your business.

Stay Connected with WNFP!

Email Marketing: How To Make The Most Of It

There are so many ways of marketing your business these days, and email marketing is one of the best ways of doing this. You have to make sure you are focused on making your business as successful as possible, and this is important. Email marketing is one of the most essential ways of marketing your business effectively. Since the internet has been around we have had email marketing, and it is still as popular as ever.

So, why do you need to make sure you have the best email marketing you can? Well, there are a lot of things you have to keep in mind when trying to do what is best for your business, and email marketing allows you to reach customers wherever they are in the world. It is so important to try to reach as many people as you can, and email allows you to do that more effectively. So, how can you make the most of email marketing?

Craft the Perfect Email

Crafting the perfect email is something of an artform these days, so it is very important that you make sure you work on this. The right content in an email can make a huge difference, and plays a really big role in making people engage more with your business. This is why it is so important to make sure you work on getting the content just as perfect as you possibly can moving forward.

Difference Between Personalized & Group Emails

The advantage of email these days is the fact that you can send personalised emails as well as group emails, and you can use these for a variety of different reasons. There are plenty of things to think about when it comes to the differences between the two, but it is essential to understand that the two are actually quite different in a fair few ways. Use them each for achieving different things, and making the most of the way you advertise your brand.

Subject Lines


It is also essential to keep in mind the fact that email subject lines can play a massive role in attracting people to the business. There are so many excellent things that can be achieved with the right subject line. The best thing you can do is to follow the proven email subject line strategies in order to craft the most compelling and enticing subject line you possibly can. This is something that is so important to get right as soon as you can in the process.

It is clear that email is one of the strongest and most important marketing techniques you have at your disposal. Because of this, it can be very difficult to properly promote the brand without i, and when you do use it, it is important to make sure you get it right. This means it is essential when it comes to making the most of email marketing, and trying to attract more people to the business as effectively as you possibly can. Embrace this, and your business will be all the better as a result.

Source: https://www.theselfemployed.com/
Image Credit: theselfemployed.com and iContact

ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business organization focused on providing our members and guests with an extraordinary networking experience, bringing business professionals together for the sole purpose of generating new relationships and developing new business opportunities. Not a member, learn how you can become a member and join this awesome group of professionals to connect and grow your business.

Stay Connected with WNFP!

The 7 Legal Rules Your Emails Must Follow

The following excerpt is from Susan Gunelius’ book Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing for Business.

As an email marketer, you need to comply with laws that were put in place to protect consumers. While it might be tempting to buy a list of email addresses and just start sending messages to everyone on that list, this is a bad idea for a few reasons. First, you might be breaking the law. Second, you might be hurting your chances of your future email marketing messages getting into people's email inboxes, including inboxes belonging to your own customers. The bottom line is, your actions as an email marketer can affect the deliverability of your email today and in the future.

The most important law you need to know and follow in the United States is the CAN- SPAM Act of 2003. This law applies to all forms of commercial email messages and not just commercial email messages sent in bulk to lists of people. What makes a message commercial? It's not clearly defined in the Act, but it's probably broader than you think. For example, a commercial message doesn't have to promote a product or service directly to messages as be considered commercial. Even messages that promote content "any electronic on a commercial website -- such as a blog post, free ebook, mail message, educational article or tutorial -- would be considered commercial since they indirectly promote the company.

The cost for noncompliance can be very high, particularly since you can be charged penalties for each separate email violation up to $40,654. Furthermore, if your email messages violate other laws, such as those related to deceptive advertising, you could face even more fines or criminal penalties, including imprisonment.

There are seven primary requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act. Following is a basic explanation of each of the main requirements. If you always err on the side of caution and assume messages sent from your company are commercial advertisements or promotions (even if they're not directly advertising or promoting a product or service), then you should be safe.

ADVERTISEMENT

Header information. The header information in your messages must not be false or misleading. This includes the information in the message's "From," "To," and "Reply To" fields as well as the routing information. In other words, your messages should accurately identify both the person and business that initiated the message. Furthermore, the header information should include the originating domain (which is typically your business' web domain) and real email address.

Subject line. The subject line of your email messages must reflect the true content of the message. Don't try to conceal what the message is about with a clever subject line. Instead, the subject line should clearly explain what the recipient will get when they open the message. Both inaccurate and vague subject lines could get you in trouble.

Ad disclosure. You must identify that the message is an ad or promotional in nature. The good news is that the CAN-SPAM Act provides a great deal of flexibility in terms of how you disclose this information. The most important thing to understand is that somewhere in your message, you must conspicuously explain that your message is promotional (even if it's indirectly promotional) or an advertisement. Leave no room for confusion here.

Location. You must include your physical address in your messages. This has to be your valid postal address, which means it can be your street address or a post office box registered with the U.S. Postal Service. It could also be a private mailbox that you registered with a commercial mail receiving agency, but make sure that agency was established under postal service regulations or it won't meet the requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act.

Unsubscribe option. Your messages must include an easy and obvious way to unsubscribe if recipients want to opt out of receiving email messages from you in the future. You cannot create conditions to opt out, such as requiring a person to pay a fee or provide any personally identifiable information aside from an email address. Furthermore, the opt-out process must not require a person to do more than send a reply email message or visit one web page. If you send multiple types of messages (e.g., newsletters, product updates and so on), you can offer a way for people to choose which types of email messages they want to opt out of receiving from you. However, you must also provide a way for them to opt out of receiving all messages from you.

Opt-out completion. After you send a message, recipients must have 30 days to unsubscribe. If someone unsubscribes, you must honor that request within 10 business days. Once a person unsubscribes, you're not allowed to transfer or sell that person's email address (individually or as part of a list) to anyone else (unless the company you're transferring the list to is helping you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act).

Third parties. If you hire another person or company to manage your email marketing, you're still responsible for complying with the CAN-SPAM Act. In fact, both you and the person or company handling your email marketing are responsible and could get in trouble if the law isn't followed. Therefore, make sure anyone you work with knows the laws and complies with them. You'll need to monitor their activities for compliance on an ongoing basis.


Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com

Image Credit: cnythzl | Getty Images



ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business organization focused on providing our members and guests with an extraordinary networking experience, bringing business professionals together for the sole purpose of generating new relationships and developing new business opportunities. Not a member, learn how you can become a member and join this awesome group of professionals to connect and grow your business.

Stay Connected with WNFP!

15 Biggest Email Marketing Turnoffs for New Customers

Email marketing remains one of the best ways to communicate with your audience. However, nobody likes their inbox spammed with too many messages that provide no value, so here are some of the biggest email marketing turnoffs any business should keep in mind when approaching new customers.

1. Template Emails

There is nothing worse than making the investment, as a client, into a new product and service and receiving a template email correspondence. Your first email to a new customer should be personal and offering next steps, gratitude for their business and a way to contact you with any questions or issues. Make the customer feel like you personally care about them. – Jennifer Mellon, Trustify

2. Excessive Emailing

In an effort to better understand your users’ needs and provide an exceptional customer experience, it’s easy to break a cardinal rule when it comes to email marketing: overkill. Excessive emailing frustrates new users and leads to unsubscribes and churn. Be sure to coordinate your engagement outreach, survey gathering and abandoned cart emails so they don’t get in the way of your good intentions. – Matt Bendett, Peerspace

3. Misleading Emails

Some businesses still send out messages with misleading subject lines, implying that the recipient has won something or that they can get something for free. When they open the email, it turns out they have to buy something. Anything in the subject line or message that’s not completely honest will only ruin your credibility. You can send compelling messages without such tactics. – Shawn Porat, Scorely

4. An Immediate Sales Pitch

Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to reach an audience and grow a brand. However, subscribers are very smart. If someone is willing to give you their email address, you need to provide them with value and appreciate the relationship. This is where autoresponders can really come into play. If you want to lose a new subscriber right away, try to sell them in your welcome email. – Zac Johnson,Blogger

5. Poor Format

Most people prefer to skim through content and email is no different. It’s critical to avoid big chunks of text. Instead, use short sentences and lots of line breaks. Make sure your first sentence captures the reader and then get to the point quickly. You only have a few seconds to get your message across. – Ajay Paghdal, OutreachMama

6. Lack of Substance

The difference between an email that new customers will read versus one that will be filtered into their spam folder is substance. Even if you send emails with pertinent information and exclusive offers, customers will be discouraged to take advantage if it looks like generic promotional spam. Adding some interesting copy will help make a better impact with customers. – Bryce Welker, CPA Exam Guy

ADVERTISEMENT

7. Communication Without Permission

One of the biggest turnoffs to a new customer is to be suddenly bombarded with emails. Instead, initial emails should be informative and set expectations, i.e. we will be sending you an email once a month to let you know about our offers and to share news you might find useful. That way, the customer feels you care about their time and their understanding of how you communicate with them. – Peter Boyd, PaperStreet Web Design

8. Inconsistency

Many times, people will dive into email marketing overpromising and underdelivering. They will tell their new customers to expect a weekly newsletter from them, only to deliver a couple of newsletters a year. To make sure you’re keeping your promise, use email service providers to automate the weekly newsletter and keep customers posted on what they want to see from you. – Jared Atchison, WPForms

9. No Welcome Email

Think about this: you just gave your favorite website your email address to send you relevant news, and you go to your inbox to see if they sent you something yet. Nothing. Not even a welcome email. Welcome emails get viewed the most and they are an opportunity to set the stage and expectations for future emails. – Syed Balkhi, OptinMonster

10. Feeling Taken From Rather Than Given to

New customers are trusting you with their info, and it’s crucial not to break that trust. Lack of email etiquette/boundaries, and communicating without offering something of value, are just a few of the things that turn new customers off. Companies should be mindful of this and always aim at sending communication that their customers (especially new ones) cannot wait to open. – Dalia MacPhee, DALIA MACPHEE

11. Offering Too Many Products

We receive the best returns on email marketing when the email focuses on a single product. Using a single email as a broad spread of products does not generate nearly as much interest as focusing on the details, benefits, pricing and turnaround of a single product. Each email is targeted to a list of customers who would be most likely to consume the advertised product. – Carmine Silano, CheerSounds Music

12. A Poorly Written Subject Line

Thanks to Twitter, we all know how to craft a good message with limited characters. A good marketing email should tell who you are and what you want, as well as why the recipient is receiving it. This way, the customer will be able to know what they are about to open and will be more inclined to do so. – Ryan Bradley, Koester & Bradley, LLP

13. No Clear Ask

Despite the spam potential, I’m generally open to receiving marketing emails, especially for new software products. This helps me stay on top of the new trends. Unfortunately, many of the emails I receive have no clear value or ask. I don’t really know what they are offering and what they want from me. This should be clear for the recipient. – Brian Samson, True North

14. Tacky Taglines

Nothing turns someone off in an email marketing campaign more than a super pitch as a headline and pure sale copy. Inherently, there is an understanding between a recipient and sender of sales intent. However, the sender needs to offer information useful to the recipient that opens a dialogue. You should start building a relationship through useful content, then transition naturally to a sale. – Matthew Capala, Alphametic

15. Automation Overkill

I think it’s great to find tools that help you use your time wisely, but when used incorrectly, automation can be detrimental to the customer experience. There’s nothing worse than knowing when the next “just checking in” message will arrive in your inbox, and when it’s clear to the customer that they are on an automated list, automation serves as a waste of everyone’s time. – Kevin Yamazaki, Sidebench

Source: https://www.business2community.com

ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business organization focused on providing our members and guests with an extraordinary networking experience, bringing business professionals together for the sole purpose of generating new relationships and developing new business opportunities. Not a member, learn how you can become a member and join this awesome group of professionals to connect and grow your business.

Stay Connected with WNFP!

How to Boost Deliverability and Win at Email Marketing

In my last piece for Entrepreneur.com, I went over the basics of email deliverability -- what it is, the key metrics to understand and some of the tools to use to understand how your deliverability is being scored by the major inbox providers. Hopefully, you have adopted the use of some of those tools and have fairly good insight into your deliverability rating. Now that you understand your goals for deliverability and how to measure the effectiveness of any of your efforts it is time to get into the actual tactics and actions you can take to improve your inbox placement.

The basics of list maintenance

There are hundreds of actions that may have an adverse impact on your deliverability -- particularly when you are accelerating your list growth through using tools like ReferralCandy to build incentive-based referral programs or DojoMojo to run giveaways and sweepstakes (full disclosure: I am a founder of DojoMojo), which are powerful growth engines but can also result in the acquisition of many less-qualified emails that require active maintenance.

Fortunately there are numerous methods you can adopt to improve your reputation. The key is to identify which of these efforts are likely to have the highest return on investment in the form of making sure that your emails get in front of your target audience. When confronted with our own list issues, these were some of the actions -- among the nearly countless ones we tried -- that yielded the highest return for us.

Prune your list regularly.

Think of your email list as a garden that requires constant nurturing. While many delicious fruits and vegetables may grow therein, weeds will also spring up from time to time. Left untended, the weeds will overrun your garden and ravage your otherwise healthy plants. But, if you actively prune those weeds so your vegetables and fruits have space and can grow, your garden will become more vibrant than ever.


In much the same way with email, you need to be diligent about removing unengaged users from your list. I hear all too often that brands are reluctant to remove users from their list in the vain hope that they will someday become engaged. Trust me: If someone has not opened an email from you in six months, he likely never will. Not only are you paying your email service provider (ESP) to have that person in your list but you are harming your ability to reach your already engaged existing audience. Worse yet, any future emails you acquire will as a result be even less likely to see your communications. Since success is defined as having an engaged email list, and not simply a massive one, it's important to be proactive about ridding your list of unengaged users regularly.

Make it incredibly easy for a user to unsubscribe.

This should go without saying but bears repeating. Ensure that each message you send includes a working unsubscribe within the email. Some ESPs like Mailchimp automatically generate these links and include them in the footer of each email, while others like Sendgrid do not. If you're using an ESP that doesn't include the link by default, be sure you add one in yourself, and make sure that it's simple and easy-to-see. You never want to thwart people who want to unsubscribe from your list by complicating the process, which is unsurprisingly one of the fastest ways to get into hot water with the inbox providers.

Don't include the words "click here" in an email.

"Click here" is a phrase that can often trigger spam filters. In fact, many unsubscribe links read as "Click here to unsubscribe from messages like this," which somewhat ironically can cause spam triggers. Be sure to use copy in unsubscribe links that avoids the spam-triggering terminology and utilizes alternate phrases and action words.

Make sure all images have an alt tag.

Alt tags allow the inbox providers to read images. Many senders will leave the alt tags blank, but that ultimately translates as an empty space to the inbox provider, prompting your message to end up in the spam folder since the content appears to be blank. Always add alt tags to each image that give a brief description of what the image is displaying. This not only allows the inbox providers to better understand what you are sending, but also displays this text if the images are unable to render properly in the user's inbox.

Perform list hygiene and verification.

There are a number of third-party services that, for a fee, will run emails through verification and hygiene filters to ensure that an email is both real and unassociated with any known spam traps, blacklists or other risky domains. While this method differs from the others on this list in that it comes with a monetary cost, using a third-party software can be incredibly powerful particularly in cases where your reputation is already damaged. There are a number of good providers to evaluate including companies like Webbula and BriteVerify.

Focus on communicating with engaged users.

While you may not want to immediately remove users who have not engaged with your last several emails from your list in the hopes that you can re-engage them in the near future, you should be careful not to target them in your communication, either. Instead, focus on messaging your engaged base to ensure your deliverability metrics remain well above industry averages. This of course signals to the inbox providers that you are a good sender, which will gradually improve your deliverability ratings. Then, when you are ready with a specific re-engagement campaign for dormant users still in your list, you can prepare very specific content with them in mind.

Low-hanging engineering fruit

There are quite a few best practices worth undertaking here, but as almost every business owner will attest, engineering hours are among the most precious resources. With that in mind, here are the most impactful initiatives that require the least amount of effort. Fortunately, most of these require a single set up and relatively little maintenance.

Email signing with Google apps. This ensures that your emails are electronically signed to legitimize emails in a way that can be verified by recipients using a public-key. A short overview of how to undertake this process can be found here.

Set up Sender Policy Framework (SPF). SPF configuration ensures that spammers cannot send from your domain.

Set up DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). DKIM allows an organization, as the handler of the message, to take responsibility for its message. Having DKIM set up validates the domain's identity through cryptographic authentication.


Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC). DMARC aims to create a collaborative system fo senders and receivers to improve mail authentication practices and reject unauthenticated messages. The process for registering your domain with DMARC is fairly straightforward and easy.

Ensure that WHOIS information is up to date. WHOIS information identifies your domain as the sender. This is where you're able to assign a name and address to your domain through your hosting service (for instance a provider like Amazon Web Services). Even if this was already set up, you'll want to double check and make sure that the information isn't outdated.

[WATCH VIDEO]

One of Facebook's First Employees Explains Why Email Marketing Is Better Than Social Media Marketing

Deliverability is hardly something that can be improved overnight, especially if you've already damaged your reputation. By following these steps and staying disciplined in your sending practices and principles, however, it is possible to see positive changes in both your open and click-through rates after experiencing even the most drastic slip. The secret is to be as patient as you are diligent and proactive, and to give your efforts time to result in stronger deliverability, more engagement and, in the end, successful conversions. Your email list can and should be the most reliable and cost-effective user acquisition tool in your repertoire, so take advantage of these tips to make sure that that remains true for your business.

Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com

Image Credit: tolgart | Getty Images




ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business organization focused on providing our members and guests with an extraordinary networking experience, bringing business professionals together for the sole purpose of generating new relationships and developing new business opportunities. Not a member, learn how you can become a member and join this awesome group of professionals to connect and grow your business.

Stay Connected with WNFP!

The Best Tool to Plan Your Email Marketing Automation

Imagine this: Your best marketing content is delivered automatically to your audience at the perfect time. You don’t need to lift a finger. You watch revenue flow into your bank account. Your business grows. You optimize your automation. More revenue flows into your bank account each month. Now, you’re saving hours and making more money . . . and it’s automatic. That’s the power of marketing automation. However, there’s one hurdle which often prevents people from using automation –– the fear that it’ll be too difficult to get started. In fact, 50% of marketers think it’s difficult to implement marketing automation, according to the market research firms Three Deep and Ascend 2. After all, automation can get pretty complex. But, there’s a tool that can make it much more simple –– an automation map.

What is an automation map?

An automation map is a visual representation of your automation flow. Just like a map, it can give you direction, and help you plan ahead and avoid missteps as you create an automated series. Email automation can have a lot of moving pieces. Your automation map will help you take all of that into account and plan ahead. Plus, you can build upon your map as you add more emails and complexity to your automation. 

They help us review the flow and content of simple series and plan every step of complex, branching automation series. By glancing at an automation map, I can quickly see whether or not my email automation leads subscribers all the way through the marketing funnel. I can determine whether or not my series contains dead ends. And I can see if I’m segmenting my audience in the best way possible. Whether you’re just getting started with automation or an expert, an automation map can provide guidance and level up your efforts.

How to map your series

Before you start mapping, you should decide what tools you’d like to use to map your series. I recommend either hand drawing your series with a pencil and paper or planning your series out digitally with a tool like Google Draw. Which you choose all depends on your preferences. Once you’ve chosen your preferred tool, you’re ready to map your series. Every automation map is comprised of 4 simple elements:

1. The emails in the series

You might have a 4-email automation series or a 20-email automation series. Either way, the goal of the emails within your series is to lead your subscribers through the marketing funnel or persuade them to take a certain action. You can review your automation map to see if your content and emails will accomplish this.

2. Time delays between those emails

Whether it’s minutes, hours, days, or weeks, you should include a time delay between nearly every email. Time delays will deliver your emails at the perfect time, rather than all at once. So, what is the perfect time? That depends on your audience and the expectations you set on your sign up form and welcome email. If you’re unsure, survey your audience to ask them what they prefer. Or, test different time delays to see what works best for your audience.

3. Tags or labels you’ll use to segment your subscribers

Most email marketing and automation platforms can apply tags or labels to your subscribers when they perform certain actions, receive an email, or subscribe to a list. These tags can help you segment your audience into groups based off their tags. You can then send automated emails to those groups specifically. For example, let’s say you set up your email marketing platform to apply a tag to a subscriber when they click on a survey link in one of your automated emails. You could then resend the survey email to anyone who does not have that tag. That way, you could give non-responders another chance to answer your survey without sending an irrelevant email to those who already responded to your survey.

4. The various paths or journeys your subscribers might take

Action-based or behavioral email automation is when you send automated emails to people based off their actions. If you’re using action-based automation in your automated series, your subscribers will go down different paths or journeys depending on what they do. A subscriber who clicks one email may receive another email targeted to them. While a subscriber who opens a different email, may receive a 3-part email series based off that open. Your automation map should outline the different paths your subscriber could possibly take. This way, you can avoid sending too many emails to the same subscriber on the same day. And, you can preview your subscriber’s possible experiences. An automation map becomes extremely important when you start using action-based automation. You might think you have a brilliant idea for an action-based automation series. But, once you map it out, you might discover it would lead to a terrible experience for a particular segment of subscribers –– like getting 3 emails on one day.

An automation map in action

To help you see how automation maps work, we’re going to look at an example. Let’s say you’re an author who wants to promote his brand-new novel through automation. You decide to send a chapter every week for four weeks to your subscribers. At the end of the four-week automated campaign, you’ll promote a link to buy your entire novel. If you were hand drawing it, your automation flow might be mapped out something like this:

The same automation map created in Google Draw might look like this:

Pretty simple, right? But with this map, you know exactly what your time delays are, and you know exactly which emails will launch and to whom they’ll send. Now, let’s say you want to take it a step further with action-based automation. You’ll still offer your novel for purchase after you sends the fourth chapter, but you’ll also ask a question of your audience. Which genre do they prefer? Romance or Thriller. Depending on which option the subscriber clicks on, they are automatically tagged with either “Romance” or “Thriller.” You’ve now segmented your audience into two groups, and you can target those segments with his other book titles that fall in those particular genres. You could then send 2 different automated series to those segments. For those who chose “Romance,” you could ask them to buy your new romance book. For those who chose “Thriller,” you can promote your new thriller book. Here’s an example of what your automation map might look like for this action-based series:

As you map your own series, ask yourself these questions:

Should you apply a tag at the beginning and/or end of your series? (Doing so can help you identify who is currently within a series and who has finished a series.)

What’s the right time delay between each email? Am I sending too many emails? Am I sending too few?

Which emails slot into the different stages of the marketing funnel (awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty, and advocacy)?

Is there an email I can add to the series that’ll make my user more likely to convert?

Not sure what to write in your automated emails? This free course will help.

Before you can launch an automated series, you need to write your emails. If you have writer’s block or need direction, our free “What to Write in Your Emails” course can help.

Source: https://www.business2community.com

ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business organization focused on providing our members and guests with an extraordinary networking experience, bringing business professionals together for the sole purpose of generating new relationships and developing new business opportunities. Not a member, learn how you can become a member and join this awesome group of professionals to connect and grow your business.

Stay Connected with WNFP!

4 Tips to Spruce Up Your Email Marketing Efforts This Spring

It may not feel like spring just yet (especially if you’re based in the northeast U.S.), but it’s still a good time to do some email marketing spring cleaning.

Not only will you feel a sense of accomplishment but making even small changes can have a big impact on your results. And getting these tasks out of the way now will pay off later by ensuring you’ll have time to relax this summer.

With that in mind, here are four suggestions for this your on-the-job spring cleaning:

1. Scrub your mailing lists

If you haven’t paid attention to your lists over the long winter, start with this.

“Clean email lists produce fewer bounces, which improves your sender reputation because it signals to ISPs that you’re committed to respecting recipients’ inboxes instead of spamming them,” writes Jeff Cox at SendInBlue. “This translates to improved deliverability across your entire subscriber base.”

Laura Buxton, at Braze, writes that a list-cleaning effort begins by identifying customers from whom you haven’t heard for half a year. “Users that haven’t opened an email from you in the last six months should be removed from your email list,” she writes. “You can still target these users with re-engagement campaigns but be mindful that continuing to target them can indicate to ISPs that your emails don’t deserve to be in recipient inboxes. So, make sure you’ve got a really compelling pitch before you send them that last-chance email.”

2. Dust off some compelling new subject lines

Subject lines drive open rates, which means you can’t just recycle a few of your all-time favorites and expect to get the results you want. This is a great time of year to determine which of your subject lines performed best, learn from them and come up with new ones that will perform better.

“No matter what they say, people do judge emails by their subject lines,” writes Olivia Allen on the Hubspot blog. “In fact, 47% of email recipients decide whether or not to open an email based on subject line alone. That’s why it’s so important to craft subject lines that are compelling enough to get people to click through.”

Allen provides 17 tips for creating high-impact subject lines, a list that includes using action-orientated verbs and posing compelling questions and using numbers – and don’t forget to test!

ADVERTISEMENT

3. Polish your writing’s ‘urgency quotient’

Every word in every message needs to play a role in getting recipients to click on your CTA. Review some of your recent messages – does your body copy tell a compelling story? Does the wording of your CTAs themselves convey urgency? Are you doing everything you can with your writing to drive action?

If a sense of urgency is doing anything less than absolutely popping off the screen, now’s the perfect time to see what you can do to inject some FOMO into your writing.

“While web writing is generally passive, email content should be straightforward and drive action,” writes Joanna Milliken at Marketing Land. “Apply this approach when you’re trying to get someone to click on an offer or register for an event, and when you’re trying to deliver more value to a consumer over email. The call to action for a reader is particularly important. Removing articles, such as ‘the’ or ‘a,’ can drive your message home: ‘Read e-book’ or ‘Buy jeans’ sounds more pressing than “Read the e-book” or ‘Buy the jeans.’”

4. Sharpen your content’s mobile-readiness

“Without question, the emails your company sends will be read on mobile devices,” writes Gabriel Shaoolian at Forbes. “This is true even for B2B companies that target users in the workplace. One of the number-one activities people use their phones for is email, and we all know that today’s modern workers check email at all hours, even long after they’ve left the office. Users won’t be forgiving of lackluster mobile email performance — they’ll trash your message and move on.”

We certainly don’t want that! Fortunately, we can prevent it.

“It isn’t difficult to make sure your emails are optimized for mobile and, in fact, many email marketing services offer responsive templates that make the job easy,” Shaoolian writes. “Remember that what looks like a short paragraph on desktop will take up considerably more screen space on mobile. Use a stacked layout, which is far easier for mobile readers to follow than a column layout. Don’t forget that CTAs should be easy to click with a mouse and a thumb.”

Source: https://www.business2community.com

ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business organization focused on providing our members and guests with an extraordinary networking experience, bringing business professionals together for the sole purpose of generating new relationships and developing new business opportunities. Not a member, learn how you can become a member and join this awesome group of professionals to connect and grow your business.

Stay Connected with WNFP!

Improve Your Email Marketing Deliverability

I’ve expressed in a past article that one out of five emails never makes it to the inbox. So the question is, what do we do about this? There are many things you can do so I’ve decided to focus this article on the top three. 

Here they are:

1. The most important thing you can do to maximize the deliverability of any email campaign is sending your content to people who want to receive it. Seth Godin calls it “permission marketing.” One of my favorite quotes from Seth is, “when someone chooses to pay attention they are actually paying you with something precious.” I think marketers sometimes forget this. But for email marketers, we can pretty much guarantee that we’re sending to people that want our content. The way to make this happen is by getting them to opt into our database. Either collect their email addresses at a tradeshow or create a sign-up sheet on our website to invite people to receive our content, etc. Do not continually send to people who don’t want your content. How’s that for a double negative?

2. Create an engaged segment within your database. This is a fundamental tactic we use to make sure we’re not sending content to people who will be unhappy to receive it. Most email marketing platforms can create triggered segments based on behavior. For every client, we use this capability to identify people who are engaged in the campaign. If somebody opens an email, this tells us something. They didn’t delete the email. They didn’t complain about spam. And they didn’t opt out of the campaign. This behavior shows they are engaged and can be treated as an opt-in. These people receive emails every time we send something out. Then we are very careful not to send to the rest of the list every single time. One thing you can do is break up the remaining list into three or four segments and then only send to one of those sub-segments each time an email goes out. This will increase your open rates and definitely improve deliverability.


3. Set up authentication. This should be done when you very first set up a new email campaign for a new client or a new company. Most email marketing platforms will insist this be done. But it’s critical you understand DKIM, SPF, and DMARC authentication practices. Explaining these goes much deeper than the intended scope of this article. But the critical thing to understand is that these tactics identify you as an authentic person or company and not as a robot or a spammer. These authentication practices not only improve the deliverability of your emails, but they protect your IP address and domain reputation on the Internet. So my main point here is if you are doing email marketing make sure you do a deep dive into this topic, so you fully understand authentication and how to implement it.

This article originally appeared on the So-Mark Blog and has been republished with permission.

Source: https://www.business2community.com

ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business organization focused on providing our members and guests with an extraordinary networking experience, bringing business professionals together for the sole purpose of generating new relationships and developing new business opportunities. Not a member, learn how you can become a member and join this awesome group of professionals to connect and grow your business.

Stay Connected with WNFP!

11 Quick Email Marketing Tips That Will Increase Your Response Rates

Despite the rumors, email marketing is definitely not dead. In fact, among savvy marketers, it is actually rated one of the most effective marketing strategies. Take a look at this chart from Smart Insights and Get Response.

So take a look at your email marketing tactics and evaluate how you can improve. These tips will help.

1. Use your name in the “from address” of your email marketing campaigns. Using your business name results in fewer opens because it isn’t as friendly and personal.

2. Make it worth it for your audience to open and read your emails. Always include a surprise in every three or four emails so they get used to the idea that you may give something away in your emails that no one else is going to get. This can be something as simple as a free audio download.

3. It’s all about stand-out headlines. Focus on crafting headlines that let your readers know what’s inside and why they should open without being dishonest. Your text should deliver everything your headline promises.

4. Segmentation is imperative for good email marketing because that’s the only way you can freely mention the right product, the right service, and the right topic to them at the right time. If you’re new to this tactic, read 50 Smart Ways to Segment Your Email List Like a Pro from Optin Monster. Then enlist the help of your virtual assistant to implement it.

5. Check out your competition’s email marketing list. Sign up for their freebies and watch how they do things. Don’t copy them, but do figure out how they do it, identify the gaps, and note the topics.

ADVERTISEMENT

6. Work on building a real relationship with your email list members. Let them reply directly to the emails you send, and then answer them. They like knowing a real person is behind the emails rather than nothing at all. Check your email marketing software, many of them default to a generic reply to address. You can change this for each email.

7. Evaluate your writing style. Email writing should be a little more laid back than most people think. Email should be personal, brief, and exciting to read. Show your enthusiasm with your word choice. Try talking your emails using voice to text to get the rhythm right. Be sure to edit if you do this! The spoken word doesn’t always translate well directly to written language.

8. Get personal in your email. Share your experiences and give details that you normally would not give on your site. Trusting your readers with a little-known fact will make them feel special and that your friendship is mutual.

9. In your high school English class, you were probably taught to write in the third person, rather than using you and I. However, you should talk directly to each individual, using the word “you” to allude to your more personal relationship, which helps persuade your readers to take the action based on your relationship and their trust.

10. Tell stories to your audience that leads them to make the conclusion to buy what you’re recommending to them. Stories can be case studies, your own story, or client stories. When they see real-life examples, they’ll be much more connected to the content.

11. Include your CTA link in more than one spot in your email. If you mention the product or solution, link to it, don’t wait until the end. That way the moment your reader is ready to click through, they can do so. Make sure they land directly on a landing page specific to the CTA.

Source: https://www.business2community.com

Image Credit: Smart Insights | Get Response




ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business organization focused on providing our members and guests with an extraordinary networking experience, bringing business professionals together for the sole purpose of generating new relationships and developing new business opportunities. Not a member, learn how you can become a member and join this awesome group of professionals to connect and grow your business.

Stay Connected with WNFP!