Friday, 14 October 2016
Thursday, 13 October 2016
10 Ways to Boost Your Email Marketing Engagement
Reviewing the performance of your emails (like open rates and click-throughs) can tell you a lot about your subscribers and the type of content that interests them. But if your open rates aren’t as high as they once were, or you’ve noticed a spike in unsubscribes, it’s easy to understand why you might ask yourself, “Why aren’t people engaging with my emails?!”
While email marketing is one of the most effective tools you can use to build relationships with your community and grow your business, there’s a science to keeping subscribers engaged with the messages you send them.
To help you do so, let’s take a look at the top 10 ways to fuel subscriber engagement.
1. Set expectations before people subscribe to your email list.
To set a good foundation for your emails (and help your engagement rates start off on the right foot), you’ll want to make sure subscribers know what they’re signing up for before they give you their email address.
Whether it’s a monthly newsletter, weekly do-it-yourself tips or seasonal exclusive offers, being upfront about the kind of emails readers will receive helps attract the right people to your list. Plus, it sets expectations as to what you’ll be sending them – as a result, there shouldn’t be any unwanted surprises.
On the following sign up form, the apparel company Tailor Stitch clearly explains the kind of offers readers get in each email, when they can expect them, and the benefit that comes with subscribing:
By including this information in the sign up form, Tailor Stitch does a great job of setting expectations for those who subscribe to their email list.
As you set expectations in your sign up form, however, do note that it’s just as important that the content in your email lives up to the promise you made. Why? Because your emails are more likely to be marked as spam if you say you’ll send one thing and deliver another.
Managing subscribers’ expectations is critical to your campaign’s success, so be specific about the content of your emails from the get-go.
2. Engage subscribers with emails they’ll love.
Not sure what types of emails to send to your subscribers? While the sky’s the limit, there are some standard emails that can easily become the foundation for any strategy:
- Newsletters. Whether you choose to send on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis, you can use this email to convey all kinds of updates, such as upcoming events, industry news, recent blog posts, new ways to use your product or service and more.
- Product releases and updates. Whenever you update a product or create something brand new, it’s worth announcing to your subscribers. Your email should get your audience excited about it, so be sure to communicate why it’s great, any problem(s) it solves, how people can purchase it, and when it will be available.
- Limited-time sales and promotions. If you have a product or service to sell, be sure to offer regular promotions and discounts to incentivize people on your list to become customers. To do so effectively, provide a clear timeframe for the promotion, what they’ll get if they act now, and a call-to-action to sign up or make a purchase.
3. Spend extra time crafting a subject line.
Your email could contain the best content ever, but no one will read it if your subject line is weak.
A strong subject line immediately grabs your subscriber’s attention and entices them to open your email. Since many people skim through their inboxes, it’s best to keep your subject line short and catchy; Litmus suggests creating subject lines that are no longer than 50 characters.
With modern inboxes overflowing with promotions, work emails and personal messages, your subject line needs to stand out. Fortunately, there are a several types of subject lines you can use to catch your subscriber’s attention.
Adding a special offer, asking a question, or emphasizing a sense of urgency, for example, can all be effective ways to create a compelling subject line.
Just take a look at this example of a promotional email from our friends at Social Media Examiner:
Here they’ve implemented two best practices for engaging subject lines: including a discount and creating a sense of urgency by referencing the end date for the promotion. They also do a great job using personalization to address me by name!
4. Provide social links.
Allowing your subscribers to share the content in your email can have a big impact on subscriber engagement. In fact, emails that include social sharing links have a 158 percent higher click through rate than those that don’t.
And best of all? It’s super simple to set up. All you have to do is include social icons with links to your content so people can share it to their social channels. When you do, it can help you get even more eyes on your content, and potentially more subscribers on your email list.
To get the best results, make this step as simple as possible. These buttons should be highly visible and easy for your subscriber to click on. If it’s not the main action you want your subscribers to take, however, adding it to the footer of your email will work as well, like in this example from our blog email newsletter below:
5. Make your email visually appealing.
An email’s design should work together with the copy to delight your subscribers and help convey the message you want to get across. While you don’t have to be the next Rembrandt to create an effective design, you do need to think carefully about your email’s color scheme, layout and the images or videos you include.
To craft a visually engaging email, the copy and design should complement one another. Opt for a clean, intuitive layout that draws attention to your call-to-action (CTA). Make sure it looks great on all devices and screen sizes, and refrain from using too many graphics or pictures.
Let’s look at this email from Uber, which uses a cityscape graphic and short, skimmable copy to draw your eye to its CTA:
By putting white space between the graphic and copy, limiting its color scheme to three shades and building content around the CTA, Uber crafts an email that’s effective and visually appealing. (Plus, who doesn’t love a free ride from Uber?)
Even if you’re not a designer, that’s okay, too. To simplify the process of creating a visually stunning email, try using a pre-made mobile-responsive email template. This way, you get the email design you want without the hassle of hiring a professional or attempting to create one yourself.
6. Personalize your automated email campaigns.
Including a subscriber’s name in an email can make the message feel personal, but building a lasting connection with them requires more work. Personalizing emails according to your audience’s interests, location, activity or occupation can help you engage with them more effectively.
Personalization is the future of marketing; 94 percent of businesses believe it’s critical to their current and future success, according to Econsultancy and Monetate. Fortunately, you can start reaping the benefits of personalization by setting up an automated email campaign.
When you do, you can create a series of autoresponder emails based on specific actions your subscribers take or interests they select in your sign up form.
A professional photography blogger who has multiple email courses, for example, might write content that covers a lot of different aspects of photography. If they wanted to send targeted content to subscribers based on what they were most interested in, they could add custom fields to their sign up form and ask them to choose what they want to learn more about.
The blogger could then create automated email campaigns to trigger based on what people select in the sign up form. Or, he could send broadcast emails based on their interests. In this way, she’s able to send targeted relevant content to those who want it most.
7. Segment subscribers and send targeted messages.
When you segment your email list, you can divide subscribers into groups of like-minded people based on past purchases, geographic location, age, occupation, interests and more. When you do, it can increase the likelihood that they’ll open your messages and click your calls-to-action.
After segmenting, think about the content your subscribers want and use it to craft your next email. Send messages that answer your customers’ questions and address their pain points. The more targeted the content, the more attention it receives, which can increase your engagement and revenue over time.
In the email below, the home goods catalogue retailer Domestications used a voting system to gauge what customers were interested in:
The message lets subscribers choose items they would prefer to see on sale. When readers clicked through, they were directed to the sales page for that product. With the results from the voting system, Domestications could segment subscribers based on the products they chose.
8. Write an irresistible call-to-action.
After subscribers have read your email, do you want them to follow you on Twitter, sign up for a webinar or purchase your product? Whatever the goal is for your email, be sure to identify it before you start writing. Make that objective your call-to-action (CTA), and craft the content of your message around that purpose.
Your CTA should offer something of value to your subscriber — whether it’s an ebook download, a how-to guide, or a discount on your product or service. It should visually stand out and be easy to follow, so make sure you remove any content, images, or links that could distract your reader.
9. Experiment with the frequency and timing of your emails.
Depending on your target audience and the content they prefer, the frequency and timing of your messages could vary greatly.
For most businesses, a weekly email newsletter is a great place to start. Eventually, you can increase the frequency of your emails to promote your product, share content or break your newsletter into smaller chunks. There’s no magic number for how many emails to send, but you can always vary the send time to determine what’s best for your business. Or, ask your subscribers what cadence they prefer.
We also recommend experimenting with time frames to figure out when your audience is most likely to read your email. For example, if business people are your target audience, you may get the best results if you email them during work hours. However, some people only have time to check their emails during lunch or when they first wake up. You can use analytics to determine when people are most likely to open your emails and plan your campaign accordingly.
10. Track your results.
Once you’ve implemented these tactics, check your analytics to see what’s working and what’s not. With this insight, you can look for areas where you can fine tune your email marketing campaign for the best results.
To do so, you’ll want to look at your open rates, click-through rates, unsubscribes, traffic to your site and more.
If the idea of combing through data and using that to tweak your campaign sounds intimidating, no need to worry; understanding your email performance is easier than you think.
If your open rates are low, for example, that might have been the result of an uninteresting subject line. In this case, you can change your approach to writing subject lines (maybe using one of the tips mentioned above), and see if your open rates increase as a result.
Or if you find your click-through rates are high, that means you’re doing something right with your call-to-action. So to continue that success, you’ll want to replicate this in future emails.
Happy subscribers, happy life
If customers don’t respond to your emails like they once did, a few simple tweaks to your campaign can boost engagement and deliver the results you want. These ten email marketing tactics can send engagement through the roof, so be sure to test them out when crafting your next message.
What steps do you plan on taking to boost subscriber engagement? Tell us about it in the comments below!
For more tips on what to write in your emails, be sure to sign up for our free email course, What to Write in Your Emails!
The post 10 Ways to Boost Your Email Marketing Engagement appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.
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Wednesday, 12 October 2016
Tuesday, 11 October 2016
How We Created Personalized Campaigns for an Email Course
Personalization is everything these days. And no, I’m not talking about monogramming your clothes or etching you and your sweetheart’s name onto a picture frame.
I’m talking about the kind of personalization as it relates to the content you create for your audience.
When you send personalized (or contextual) email content the moment a person subscribes to your list, you’re able to kick things off on a really, really good note. Not only does this allow you to provide a relevant experience to your subscriber community, it also can have a powerful impact on email engagement – in fact, one study found personalized emails receive 9 percent higher unique open rates and 41 percent higher unique click rates than those that were written for a broad audience!
While there are a number of ways to send the right content to the right people at the right time, today we’re diving deeper into creating multiple automated email campaigns from a single sign up form.
Personalized emails from the moment you say “Hello”
Here at AWeber, we’re big fans of the phrase, “eating your own dog food” (or, the more more familiar idiom, “practicing what you preach”). We believe that if we’re going to tell others to try a specific email strategy, we should be able to implement it as well.
And that’s why I wanted to share with you the approach we took in order to personalize our own email campaigns.
When the team here at AWeber set out to create our “What to Write in Your Emails” course, we had one goal: to help people figure out what to write in their emails, whether they’re just getting started or want to improve what they currently have.
The more we talked about the concept, the more we realized this audience could be broken down even further into two groups: those who are AWeber customers, and those who had never even heard of us before.
We decided it’d be beneficial to create two different targeted courses for each audience. The course content would remain the same for both, but we would have the flexibility of addressing each group in different ways to make it feel more relevant.
Initially, we set out by outlining and writing the email content for the course with one audience in mind: our customers.
As we did this, we wrote the course content knowing that our audience would be familiar with our brand and product. When we encouraged them to put what they just learned into practice, we included a call-to-action that had them log into their account and get started.
When it came time to adjust the course for those unfamiliar with AWeber, we copied over the content and made small tweaks to make it relevant to this audience. This meant including more information about our service, adding calls-to-action for them to get started with their own email service provider, or to try AWeber free for 30 days.
Using Campaigns to set up the course
To make sure that our course functioned the way we wanted it to, we used our automation platform, Campaigns.
With Campaigns, we were able to quickly and easily set up the course and targeted campaigns. Plus, we knew that it would open up additional possibilities if we decided to expand upon our course in the future.
Once the content was complete, we were ready to build our two email campaigns from our one list in AWeber:
Within Campaigns, we were able to easily set up the functionality we wanted for our course, including time delays, subscriber tags and more.
After the campaigns were set up and ready to go, it was time to create our sign up form for the course. In addition to asking for a subscriber’s name and email address, we included a field that asks if they’re an AWeber customer:
By adding this, it ensured that the right email series was triggered for the right people.
(Try this yourself! Learn how you can use tags in Campaigns to create multiple campaigns from a single list.)
And with that, our course was all set up!
Not only were we excited to see the results of sending even more relevant content to our email community, it also sparked a ton of new ideas for future personalized campaigns, too!
Once we started promoting the course, for example, we decided to create additional campaigns based on ads that drove traffic to the course. As a result, we were able to create an even more contextual experience for our subscribers!
Creating your own personalized email campaigns
While this is just one example of how you can create multiple contextual campaigns from a single sign up form, there are a number of other ways you can get started. Here are a few more ideas to get your creativity flowing:
- An automated welcome email series
- Multiple email campaigns for different incentives you offer
- Linked campaigns to move subscribers from one automated series to another
- Campaigns for conferences and events you attend that funnel into a single campaign
- An educational email course
- And more!
Is there a campaign you’d like us to write about? Tell us about it in the comments, and we might just feature it in an upcoming post!
The post How We Created Personalized Campaigns for an Email Course appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.
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Open Communication & Coffee
Alan Boyce, the VP of Engineering at Sprout Social, averages three coffees a day. You might think he’s just a run of the mill office caffeine junky, or perhaps that he’s attempting to dodge his work with frequent coffee breaks.
The truth is, Alan doesn’t even drink coffee. He’s one of the hardest workers at Sprout Social and one of its premier leaders. So what’s this all about?
Former Intel CEO Andy Grove is widely regarded as one of the top management minds of the tech world. He described the job of any manager as a cycle of acquiring information, disseminating information and decision making.
“Much of my day is spent acquiring information,” Grove noted, and the remainder is spent steering those at the company toward the company vision, which he described as “nudging.” This applies all the way up to the CEO.
Here at Sprout, we have found that successful Product Managers and Engineering Managers match Grove’s managerial description. They are particularly skilled at acquiring and disseminating information across individuals and teams throughout the company.
So what does any of this have to do with coffee?
Alan, like other leaders across our engineering organization, has found that coffee dates are one of the quintessential tools managers can use to achieve a high level of effective communication. Look around our office at any time of day and you’ll see managers across our engineering and product organizations coming and going from coffee dates with those they manage, their own managers, their peers, engineers, designers and QAers.
Topics discussed over coffee include current projects, challenges with those projects, future projects, career goals and aspirations, current frustrations or roadblocks, weekend plans, personal relationships and everything in between. Every organization has a forum where similar topics are covered, often in scheduled one-on-one meetings. While Sprout has one-on-ones as well, we’ve found the coffee date to be a much superior medium for regular communication for the following reasons:
- While some of the coffee dates are regularly scheduled, most happen on-demand. This means information can be exchanged proactively and quickly as problems, conflicts, or any other needs arise. Many problems can be squashed if they are addressed before they balloon.
- They feel informal. They do not feel like meetings, therefore they are much more enjoyable to take part in, especially in an engineering culture typically allergic to traditional management overhead.
- They happen outside of the office. Because they do not feel formal and happen outside of our everyday work environment, it’s easier to have honest, unabridged conversations about sensitive topics.
- They feel like a break. Even though value is created for the company, for those who spend their days sitting in front of a computer, heading out for coffee and conversation feels like a break. Even when you’re excited about your work, it’s nice to get out of the office.
- Their length is flexible depending on what needs to be discussed. They can be reduced to a quick 10 minute check-in or extended to a couple of hours. Steve Jobs famously held most of his meetings while taking walks. At Sprout, when folks need to continue digging into deep issues together after a coffee date, they can walk around the city of Chicago until everything has been fully discussed.
Finally, coffee dates help our staff establish closer relationships with each other. Richard Winters, an outstanding military leader and author, includes “get to know your people” as one of his key leadership tenets. Much of the time we spend on coffee dates is spent hanging out and chatting about matters that might seem insignificant. However, this is time well-spent, as the better we know and respect each other on a personal level, the stronger our team will be.
If you’re an aspiring leader and you find yourself struggling with open and timely communication or getting bogged down in formal meetings, the coffee date might be a great fit for your tool belt. For many of us at Sprout, it can be kicked off with only two characters in Slack: “☕?”
This post Open Communication & Coffee originally appeared on Sprout Social.
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