6 Keys to Email Marketing Success

Run-of-the-mill advertisers have little respect for the personal nature of email. But smart email marketers know how to talk to their customer as individuals. Here are six ways to do just that.

1. A “From” Field That Shows You’re a Real Person

Consider the different impressions these “from” lines create:

Bill Kastl
William Kastl
William D. Kastl, Nakatomi Corporation
Nakatomi Sales Department
Bill Kastl, Nakatomi Sales

You want your email to be warm and personal without looking like spam. The key is to say something that’s so specific to readers’ particular interests, they know no spammer would ever come up with it. Pick a “from” field that your customers will understand, and stick with it.

2. A Provocative Subject Line

The most important thing about email is that its success or failure is all about context. Email subject lines work not because they follow standard copywriting formulas but because they tap into what specific people are interested in at a particular time.

Here are some subject lines of some successful emails I’ve sent out to my Google AdWords customer list:

When Google is NOT the Best Way to Get a CustomerAre Google Employees Spying on You?Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” and All That5 Insidious Lies About Selling on the WebFistfight at the Board of Directors Meeting

These headlines don’t assault the reader with cheesy-sounding promos -- they hint very strongly at a story. They provoke curiosity rather than scaring people off.

3. Everybody Loves a Good Story

B&B Electronics sells industrial communication hardware—a “boring” geek business if there ever were one. But when Perry Marshall writes its monthly newsletter, he turns that dull, geek image on its head and interrupts a dreary day of engineering with wry humor.

The method? Storytelling.

Subject: ZIGBEE AND THE GEEKS’ REVENGE

Leslye was the girl who made my heart go pitter-patter in junior high school.

I was always sure to take the long way to Social Studies, down the stairs to first floor, past her locker, then back up to second. Just checkin’ up.

I wasn’t the boy who made her heart go pitter-patter. She liked Sam. And she never discovered that I liked her. It was my little secret.

Now maybe you didn’t run the sound system in Junior High like I did. Maybe you ran the film projector instead. Maybe you programmed Apple II computers in BASIC and belonged to Chess Club.

Still, you and I were geeks, and the pretty girls took no notice of us.

But now we geeks rule the world. All the pretty boys and their material girls have viruses on their computers, and they can’t function without us. They’re at our mercy.

And the latest Geek Revenge these days is . . .

ZigBee.

ZigBee is sort of like wireless instant messaging for sensors and smart devices. You drop ZigBee nodes wherever you want, no cables necessary, and the more nodes you have, the more communication paths there are and the more reliable your system is . . .

The story doesn’t surrender to the stereotype that engineers are dull, lifeless geeks who only understand ones and zeros. No. It celebrates it. It turns it into the central message.

More importantly, though, it smashes the engineer stereotype to pieces: Engineers make buying decisions on emotion no differently than the rest of us do. Storytelling works when marketing to them, no differently than people in any other profession.

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4. People Can’t Forget You When They Hear from You Often

Get an autoresponder series going, and you can win the hearts of customers for life:

We like prime-number sequences, so three, five, and seven days are good.

After that sequence is done, keep in touch at a slower rate, maybe every few days or every week.

Your unsubscribe rate should be between 3 to 10 percent. If it’s more than that, your message isn’t matching your market. (If it’s less, you may not be edgy enough.)

Want to squash refunds and returns? After people buy from you, send them a series of messages that show them how to use your product more effectively and share features they might have missed.

When people complain that they’ve missed a day or two from you, it’s a sign your content is good and that the spam filters are doing their job.

5. If You Violate the Expectation of Relevance, You Damage Your List

Let’s say you’re a chiropractor who’s just launched a new herbal remedy that you want to tell your customers about. Should you blast your entire list with it?

Odds are, you could maximize your sales that day, but you’re going to pay a price. All the people who aren’t interested in herbal stuff are now going to be less responsive to everything else you do—even if they don’t unsubscribe. You’ve just taught them that you like to send out emails about stuff they’re not interested in.

The typical marketer will treat everyone the same. The smart marketer will not. The smart marketer will have different lists for each topic—different sublists.

So if you’re the chiropractor, you build an herbal sublist and then sell the herbal remedies just to those folks. That way, you maximize the value of every single list you have.

6. The Human Touch Sells

Don’t hide behind your email. Use it to express more of yourself. You’re not a faceless corporation; you’re a person. Show that side of you, and people will remember you, buy from you, and tell others about you.

Express a personality that people instantly recognize. This is free branding. When you introduce new products or make changes in your marketing program or message, now you can attach those to a name—your name or another person that your business is known for—and that name has even more meaning and credibility.



Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com

Image Credit: Hero Images | Getty Images




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5 Ways Personalization and Segmentation Are Changing Email Marketing

In years past, personalization and segmentation may have been optional, but no more. In 2018, marketers have to meet expectations and that means creating relevant, personalized messages that subscribers want to read.

Research shows marketers lean on email marketing to create a personalized experience for customers, compared to other options:

MarketingCharts email personalization chart

There’s no question, there’s a lot of power behind personalization and segmentation. In this post, we’ll look at five ways it’s changing email marketing:

1. Increased revenue through advanced segmentation

Segmenting email contacts into specific groups can give your bottom line a boost. Marketers have noted a 760% increase in revenue from segmented campaigns, according to Campaign Monitor research.


Why does segmentation impact revenue? Grouping contacts by location, gender, age, job title, or buying history, gives you the opportunity to send emails that are more in-tune with what subscribers are interested in. As a result, subscribers are more apt to open your emails, click through, and convert.


For continued success, segment your segments. Start breaking your segmented lists into even smaller groups. For instance, take your ‘female customers’ list and create a list of ‘VIP female customers’ that buy from you regularly.

2. Better engagement through self-segmentation

Customers are embracing the idea of self-segmentation too. Rather than segment email contacts yourself, why not let subscribers do it for you?


Marketers are using email preference centers to give subscribers the power to select their interests. Penguin Random House directs its subscribers to the preference center below. It gives subscribers the power to self-select the book genres they’re most interested in. In return, subscribers receive emails that provide book suggestions they’re excited about.

Penquin Random House Preference Center

Marketers are also giving website visitors the ability to join specific newsletters. BuzzFeed, gives visitors the chance to sign up for newsletters that are based on the content they read. For instance, if a visitor reads an article about cats, a form pops up asking the visitor to join a specific cat newsletter.

BuzzFeed Newsletter signup

This kind of self-segmentation removes any doubt about categorizing a subscriber. As a result, engagement climbs because subscribers see content they want in their inbox.

3. Stronger relationships built through dynamic content

Marketers have figured out how to create personalized emails without spending a ton of time manually tweaking emails. How? Dynamic content.


Dynamic content allows marketers to create one email, but customize blocks of it for certain subscribers. Let’s say you’re hosting a sale at both of your stores in Fresno and Los Angeles. Through dynamic content, you can localize the images and content. The subscribers in Fresno see a picture of their local store and those in LA see their hometown store.


Dynamic content is personalized. When subscribers open the email they think, “This company gets me.” With every dynamically personalized email, you build a stronger relationship with your customer.

4. Eased workload via automation and integrations

The need to create more personalized content sounds like more work for marketers, right? It doesn’t have to be, if you’re using an email service provider that has automation features and useful integrations.


Automation is a must for marketers looking to save time. Using automation, you can send emails automatically. That’s right. You can set up triggers so emails that you pre-make are sent to subscribers when they meet a certain condition.


For instance, when a subscriber joins your newsletter that action can trigger a welcome email. When a subscriber makes a purchase, a confirmation email is triggered. You can even trigger emails based on a specific date, so a Valentine’s Day email can arrive in inboxes a week before the holiday.


In addition, marketers should lean into integrations.  Integrations let you sync platforms for ease of use. 


It’s these simplified processes that have become crucial to marketers as they’re asked to personalize more and more campaigns.

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5. An increasing need to collect data

To personalize emails, you have to know your customers. That means you have to collect data on an ongoing basis.


Marketers are getting more sophisticated when it comes to data collection. When a customer signs up for a webinar, downloads a white paper, makes a purchase, or interacts with a social ad, they’re asking for new pieces of information.


As information rolls in, marketers use the data to build customer personas. These personas are meant to help marketers visualize real customers with details that specify age, location, interest, buying activity, etc.


Every new piece of information strengthens a persona and helps marketers create tailored content.

Marketers weigh in: How personalization and segmentation are impacting campaigns

We asked marketers to tell us how personalization and segmentation are changing their strategies. From increased conversion rates to connecting with customers, here’s how these two tactics are improving the ROI of email marketing:

• Instead of a “spray and pray” email strategy, we now segment our database by emotional target or a reason why they contacted us. Personalizing all emails with content that is geared towards customers’ concerns creates a lasting bond between our brand and our potential audience._

-Brannan Glessner, Express Homebuyers

• What truly drives awesome email performance is a more personalized messaging strategy, one that adjusts the timing, cadence, and content of emails to segments built off our users’ captured behavioral data. With this approach, email is part of a conversation that begins at the inbox, but doesn’t end there.

-Stephen Hammill, Anvil Media Inc.

• We put a lot of strategy into segmenting our email, starting with detailed persona building to determine messaging. From there, we have in-depth interviews with our client’s sales side to identify common questions, concerns and pain points – and we’ve had great response rates as a result.

-Louise Armstrong, Bonafide

• As a higher education institution, we have multiple offices emailing prospective students. By adjusting our email strategy to be more personalized and sending emails segmented by age, location, and level of interest, we have seen a massive increase in open and click rates.

-Lexi Carter, Southern Utah University

• Personalization-at-scale is one of the most important digital trends in 2018. Brands can use the new breed of email marketing automation tools to capture audience attention at the right time, with personalized engagement for every touch-point in the customer journey. It’s still “selling,” but selling in a very efficient yet personalized way.

-Alessio De Luca, Florence Consulting Group

Wrap up

As you can see, marketers are reaching new heights as they incorporate personalization and segmentation into their strategies. The two tactics have become a necessity for marketers looking to connect with customers in a digital world. In 2018, the trend will continue as customers’ expectations continue rise.

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!