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Make Your Email Marketing More Effective

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Sourced from Inc.

Email marketing is a delicate business. Email is an efficient way to stay in touch with potential and existing customers, but you don’t want to spam them. Here are some tips to strike the balance.

  1. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Boring, dry emails get old fast, and people will almost invariably unsubscribe (except your competitors). Be yourself, be conversational, and feel free to poke fun at yourself every now and then.
  2. Use email automation to cross-sell goods and services. If you’ve already converted a lead to a customer, then you will have the ability to potentially sell them other items in your portfolio.
  3. Don’t be too sales-y, but do have multiple campaigns–those for prospects at each stage of the sales funnel and those for organizations who are already customers at various maturity levels–so the content is fresh and pertinent to them.
  4. Be timely. If it’s tax season, for example, tell customers and leads how your product can help them file their return. If it’s April, talk about spring cleaning. If they’ve been a customer for three months, check in to see how they’re doing.
  5. Have a call to action. Let’s say you sent that email timed to tax season. Have a button with a call to action. A great way achieve this is to coordinate a blog post with a “Read more” button and then a call to action within that post. The longer you can keep a prospect’s or customer’s attention, the more likely they are to buy your product and stay with you.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

Sourced from Inc.

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Back to Basics: Email Marketing For B2B

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By Tobin Lehman

In the B2B space, we can sometimes get lost looking for the newest shiny objects and forget about the basics of digital marketing. Don’t let that happen to email. There’s a reason it’s tried and true – it still holds the highest ROI.

It’s time to go back to the basics.

The Basics of Email Marketing

For most B2B organizations, email is used in every aspect of their business. Your sales guys send emails. Your marketing team sends emails. Your customer service team sends emails. For most organizations, email is the number one touchpoint for communicating with customers. Your customers likely receive more email from you than they ever receive phone calls or in-person visits. So, the content and context of your email marketing should never be taken lightly.

That said: why do we think about email so little in our organization? We’re going to dive into three areas of our business to determine how to best use email to reach our goals.

Sales Team Emails

As I mentioned, your sales team should be sending a lot of email. The reason they do this is because with the advent of email marketing and CRM integration, you should be able to send a lot of emails that cut down a lot of time and increase productivity. But we still get asked this question often: “What kind of emails to our sales team be sending?”

Well, it’s a good question. The reality is that email offers more of a challenge for sales guys than it does for any other department. (If you’re a sales guy, you can quote me on that.)

The reason why it’s much more difficult is that you’re expected to be both personal and automated at the same time. In other words, you need to get a lot of emails out, but it can’t be willy-nilly, because your potential customer is looking for personal attention and customization. They want to feel that you’re paying attention to them – and so does everyone else. The problem is that you’ve only got so much attention to give.

Marketing helps with this a bit, but it can’t totally fill the role of “personal attention” for the customer. Yet, without that, the prospect can feel funneled, or herded, which would detract from the impact you are trying to have.

This means that from a sales perspective, an intelligent CRM-based email marketing with high customization is an absolute requirement. If you’re sending out templated emails but you are not using a system like HubSpot or Infusionsoft, you’re probably spending a lot of time doing it. Or, if you’re not, you’re definitely not doing it well.

If you’re just getting started, the key is to start slow and find the biggest bottleneck. Then, work to find the areas where email automation can have the biggest impact – places where it can really help you save time and increase your productivity. Create those templates first, and find easy ways to automate them. If you’re not using HubSpot Sequences, for example, this could be a real leverage point for you in the organization.

Marketing Emails

Marketing is the act of positioning your product or service within the marketplace. Advertising is the expression of that position to the targeted customer. So your goal, in a marketing context, is to continually position your firm or service within the mind of your potential customer.

When you think of a channel such as email, this could include such tactics as an email newsletters and drip campaigns, but on a bigger level, you should push thought leadership. The marketing message should focus on the unique differentiators of your firm or service within the market. This means you need to drive the value of your firm’s service every time you send an email.

So if you are a professional services firm, this positioning should include your expertise, which is really the summation of all your experiences being applied to a customer problem. Don’t just send your latest project; send some of the thinking that made your latest project successful.

The success of your communication will directly correlate to how well it helps customers solve their problems. If you’re constantly talking about yourself or your products and services without a correlation to your customer, or if you never tie in how your product or service will solve their problems, you’re just creating noise.

There are too many product and service emails that simply talk about what’s being offered without ever considering the benefits that the end customers actually care about.

For example, you may have the highest-rated service on Yelp, yet that means nothing to me if you don’t address my pain points specifically.

This is a high-level review of marketing email, but hopefully it provides direction toward where you should push.

Customer Service Emails

The communications you have with your customers over requests, service calls, or even the day-to-day management of an account are sometimes just viewed as inconsequential. But how could we leave these major touch points to chance?

What’s most important is that every email that’s sent out of your firm is thought through in terms of how it affects the customer experience.

Have you reviewed your customer service rep’s email sent box recently? Think about what kind of information you could find in there. If they’re being polite, if they address the customer concerns, if there’s terseness – frankly, there could be a whole array of challenges or wonders inside of that email box in terms of who is winning and losing accounts when it comes to customer service.

Since every firm and company is different, let’s talk about this from a conceptual standpoint. You should determine your email communication standards from a customer service perspective on day one. This could include response times, response context, and other technical standards, all the way down to the signatures and closing remarks of emails.

A good email customer service strategy may need to be broad to encompass all situations; it could also be very narrow in terms of an escalation or communication policy around particular issues. If you’re setting up a meeting, for example (which seems minor), you could have templates for emails that are sent out to make sure all the details are covered. The alternative is to just ad hoc it, sending an email saying, “Hey we got a meeting tomorrow here’s the agenda see you then..”

Yikes.A properly thought-through strategy could include some reminders on directions and the more formalized greeting, for example.

Don’t Take Email For Granted

All this to be said, every email from your firm or your company is a piece of communication to your customer. Don’t leave it to chance.

Email should be thoughtful, purposeful, and measurable to make sure it’s having the best impact. The emails you send will be a large part of the communication experience your customer has with your firm.

ByTobin Lehman

Sourced from Business 2 Community

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Realistic Small Business Marketing: 5 Strategies for Branding and Sales

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By Jane Brown

There are countless marketing strategies one can explore as a small business owner. With that said, it’s unrealistic to explore all possibilities due to budgets, time, and resources. In fact, spreading too thin is a disservice to the marketing efforts as it never truly allows a realistic return on investment from a particular technique.

It’s the notion of “Jack of all trades, master of none”, or, “The shiny object syndrome”. A small business owner’s high impressionability and thirst to succeed often leads to hopping from topic to topic, never truly completing projects and marketing campaigns. Let’s dial it back and explore realistic small business marketing strategies worth exploring.

5 Small Business Marketing Strategies for Branding and Sales

Small Business Marketing Strategies for Branding and Sales

1. Social Media Marketing

Every business should create accounts on:

These provide free platforms to connect with the business’s audience. Their usage is 1-for-1 as done for personal accounts: find interested parties, start discussions, and share content. Except, a small business will inject promotional offers and sales on occasion.

These platforms should funnel users to one’s email newsletter as this mutes the social “noise”. The newsletter and social account work in tandem building brand awareness and lead generation.

Plus, it’s free.

2. Merchandising

Merchandising creates three awesome benefits:

  1. Unifies the workforce through branding
  2. Mobilizes employees and fans to passively promote the brand
  3. Provides incentives for contests, giveaways, and outreach

Utilizing customized business merchandise is the best option for providing items like branded work shirts for employees, gizmos for around the office, or novelty items for customers and fans. These items constantly remind others about the business brand, creating opportunities to bring past customers back into-the-fold between purchases.

3. Referral Systems

This is called by many names:

  • Word-of-Mouth
  • Affiliates/partners
  • Refer-a-Friend

The idea is creating an incentive when interested parties and customers help drive new leads and customers to the business. This is accomplished through low-tech flyers or business cards, or high-tech with referral systems and apps.

What you’ll need:

  1. A unique code for each, active participant
  2. A worthwhile incentive (cash, points, discounts)
  3. A way to track the referrals and participants

Give participants the tools and resources and they’ll help in several ways. Their methods could include writing online reviews about the business, sharing their code/links on social platforms, or distributing branded print materials to acquaintances.

The cost? A few bucks for cards or $10 – $20/mo for a simple tracking app/plugin.

4. Search Engine Marketing

There are two avenues. They are:

  • Improving organic traffic through optimization
  • Getting instant traffic & leads with advertising

Got a website? Good, the business is already halfway there.

DIY or outsource SEO work to improve the website’s page by including its relevant keywords, expanding its content, and building backlinks from relatable, trusted websites. Then, conduct outreach efforts to create an online presence increasing its odds of being shared, linked to, and being the topic of discussion.

Likewise, leverage website & business data to develop an advertising campaign on popular channels like Google Ads. Or, advertise directly on relevant websites in the business’s industry & market. This involves writing ad copy, developing creative banners, and funding the PPC/CPA platform.

Search marketing costs vary but range from free (DIY methods) to thousands (professional). A middle ground, about $500 – $1000/mo, provides ample, realistic returns.

5. Email Marketing

Starting an email marketing campaign begins with:

  1. Subscribing to an email marketing provider
  2. Creating and populating an autoresponder
  3. Adding opt-in forms to the website or landing page(s)
  4. (Optional) Creating an incentive to increase list building efforts

Email marketing campaigns are among the best forms of outreach and sales. Your continual effort to collect emails creates a hedge against wild swings your website may experience from search engine algorithm changes (as we see often).

Email marketing costs anywhere between $0 – $20 to begin with most providers. The setup process is easy enough for any small business owner — requiring little to no technical skill as it provides WSYWIG form builders. Once set up, the opt-in form is placed in strategic areas of interest enticing visitors to sign up for a newsletter.

What can you do with an email list? Consider regular discounts & deals or blog updates & exclusive content.

Treating the email list as its separate business entity transforms the platform from a passive feed to a marketing machine. Sending an email takes less than 10 minutes but can deliver thousands of site visitors and potential sales!

 Realistic Marketing Methods Grounded in Reality

These marketing methods are fundamental strategies used throughout the business world for good reason: they work. Reexamine the business’s efforts and investments — is it chasing shiny objects or trying to do everything without succeeding at any?

Get realistic with marketing strategies.

By Jane Brown

Sourced from FINCYTE

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This May Be the Best Piece of Email Marketing You’ll See This Week (and Maybe Even This Year)

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By Chris Matyszczyk

Anyone who opened this email must have been startled.

Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek. 

Sell, sell, sell.

That’s America.

The problem is that poor Americans have to put up with sales pitches more often than they have to put up with breathing unhealthy air.

So when a sales pitch somehow finds its way to your more malleable regions, it should be admired.

Which brings us to this piece of email marketing from the L.A. Galaxy.

The soccer team that once hosted the diminished, never-in-the-class-of-Messi, skills of David Beckham has a new star.

The aging and endearingly arrogant Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

Despite his Musketeerish presence, the Galaxy is a middling team that might scrape into the playoffs.

How, then, could its marketing department excite existing fans into renewing their season tickets?

Well, like this.

The team sent an email that reflected Ibrahimovic’s character.

The subject line was: “A message from Zlatan.” The content was very Zlatan.

So many pieces of marketing could come from any brand.

Marketing directors think certain messages “work,” regardless of who might be emitting them.

This, though, could only have come from this team and this star.

I wonder how many people, suitably amused and intimidated, clicked on the link and handed their money over instantly.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Chris Matyszczyk

Owner, Howard Raucous LLC@ChrisMatyszczyk

Sourced from Inc.

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7 Secrets Of Email Marketing

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By Vivek Dubey

Email marketing is basically marketing done on the basis of sending e-mails to some limited people or industries. It works like broadcasting or advertising. Email marketing can be used to build relationships with people from different fields and to build loyalty and trust with others. Marketing these days has made a very good influence on people and here are the key secrets of Email Marketing.

  1. How to make the recipient feel special

It all starts with whom we are sending the Email. As for human nature, they like it when they are appreciated and treated nicely; so it involves recognizing and appreciating. When we send the mail, if it has the name of the recipient, they will feel special. By this simple act, we will have the attention of the recipient.

  1. Emails should be relevant

The main point of sending Mails is they should not have any irrelevant content. It’s common when emails are designed; the content is likely to address specific needs of the recipient. People like it when emails contain the information that matches their interests and gives them the best possible solution.

  1. Emails should have Brands

Branding Emails with company logo and designing them professionally will enhance the effect of emails and give them an authentic feel. This is going to help mails stand out more in an inbox and increase their probability of being read. Different things like banners or quotations can be also used. These things are eye-catching and make people interested in reading the mail.

  1. Content should be Different and Impressive every time

Well, people also get bored if the content of the mail is same every time they are receiving a mail. So, every single time the content should be different. Nowadays email is not just for texting anymore but a variety of contents like photos, short videos, memes, etc. Emails should always be short. Well, readers nowadays hate long paragraphs containing images and videos. Content should always be presented in such a way that the reader cannot resist.

  1. Timing has always been the critical part

Defining both timing and frequency can affect our email open and click-through rates. If the offer is best, the content is good but the timing is off it will go waste when it comes to your mail efforts. A strategy should be made from the beginning like on which days and time and how often the emails should be sent. If you don’t want all of your efforts to not be wasted you should send your content ahead of time to be seen later on weekends or holidays.

  1. Fonts have their impacts too

Yes, it’s a brand image and you have to show some of your texts in gothic fonts let’s say. Well, this font thing can turn into a disaster, as the customer might not have the standard fonts installed on their computer and browser so this could be a bad idea. So we should stick to conventional fonts e.g. Arial, Times New Roman etc. Using simple fonts make the Emailer even more attractive.

  1. Giving Feedback plays an important role

There should always be a link within the templates for marketing emails as the recipient can give us the feedback on the emails received. Well, this will lead to great opportunities to know what the recipient has liked and what he hasn’t. Well, this will create an impact on the recipient that we not only care about their needs but we do care about their likes and dislikes.

The most effective marketing e-mailers are simple, contains a lot of information in short notes. Follow the tips given above, so that you also excel and use the true power of effective email marketing in no time.

By Vivek Dubey

Sourced from Digital Doughnut

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Email Marketing and Online Advertising – The Perfect Duo

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By Kevin George 

Being a marketer is tough. From identifying the different sources for capturing prospects and onboarding them to nurturing and motiving them to convert, a marketer needs to jump through a lot of hoops to win a loyal customer. To make matters worse, there are a million marketers globally striving to capture the attention of a prospective lead, making the marketing realm heavily competitive.

Thankfully, owing to the different channels available for marketers to reach out to their target audience, they can analyze the performance of each channel and improvise their marketing strategies accordingly. While ROI is the prima facto for analyzing the performance, it indirectly depends on how well you managed to acquire your customers and how well you retain them.

As per a survey done in 2017 by Targetmarketing, email was observed to be the most preferred source for both. Interestingly, online advertising has seen a substantial growth in acquiring new customers (i.e. from 43% in 2016 to 56% in 2017).

 

 

(Source)

What if we managed to combine the customer acquisition ability of online advertising with the already sky-rocketing statistics of email? Would it help create a better customer journey ending in better conversions? Let’s check out.

How online advertising can benefit email marketing

The global availability of internet means while everyone may not have an email address, they surely access popular websites on a daily basis. This means, while you need the email address of your lead to send an email, an online ad is easily viewable by your prospect on a website that they are currently browsing without you needing to collect any data of them beforehand. Moreover, the overall reach of a display ad, strategically placed on a website, has a greater chance of reaching your audience than a cold email sent to a prospect. Online advertising can help the email marketing realm in the following three ways:

  • List Growth: By displaying ads to prompt the viewer to subscribe to your email newsletters is the most prime application of online ads. You begin with identifying your target audience, building your customer persona based on common interests, provide an alluring incentive in your ad and BOOM! Your ads are displayed on webpages that your potential subscribers are visiting. Based on whether your ad copy resonates with their pain point and the incentive is a solution that they are looking for, you receive the email address of those prospects.In fact, Time Magazine used 9 banner ads based on the devices used to visit their website to generate email leads. The results were great as the CTR of the displayed banners went from 0.01$ to 0.08% all traffic.
  • Campaign-specific tone: Online ads have an advantage of being customized based on age, sex, location and behavioral By amalgamating your subscribers’ email addresses with the stored cookies, you can monitor the kind of ads the subscribers engage with and customize the email message tone for better engagements.
  • Setting email sending time based on ad viewing: Every email marketer has looked for the optimal sending time for ensuring maximum open rates before realizing that there is no specific sending time that is one-size-fits-all. Based on the time when you get maximum clicks on your display banner in a specific geographic zone, you can have an estimated time window when your subscribers might open your emails. Although this might not pin-point the best time for sending an email, with trial and error, you can experiment.

How email marketing can benefit online advertising

An average person is served around 1700 banner ads per month yet 85% of display ads clicked are by 8% of internet users (Source). This means that:

  • Your subscribers might not be getting relevant ads based on their purchase history.
  • Your subscribers might be suffering from banner blindness owing to the high volume of ads on a different website they had visited.

Email marketing can be helpful in such cases by providing relevance based on the preferences of the subscribers. Email marketing can be the leverage for your online advertisements in the following scenarios:

  • Increasing brand visibility: Online ads are displayed based on the search criteria which can be as broad as “Men” or “Men of 30-35 age” and as specific as “Men of 30-35 age from San Francisco Bay area looking for Hiking boots”. When you already have a buyer persona built purely from the online behavior of your subscribers, you can target your ads to only those prospects who come under your buyer persona. This way you tend to use your existing emailing list to identify and target more such people and thereby increase your brand visibility.
  • Retargeting ads: A rough adaptation of the conventional site retargeting, you can target email subscribers using email-based retargeting. Email retargeting depends on placing a tracking pixel or tracking cookie within the email body. Depending on which was the last email opened by your subscribers, you can display custom online banners and ads that serve as a reminder for the subscriber. This is especially useful in a situation where a subscriber has abandoned their cart and opened the relevant cart abandonment emails but not yet returned to their cart.
    1. Social media ads using email lists: Social media ads are where you build an audience segment based on their social interactions. The core advantage is that re-targeting options are already supported by social media platforms such as Facebook Custom Audiences, Twitter Tailored Audiences, Google’s Customer Match and LinkedIn’s Advertisers.

Wrapping Up:

Sometimes, the amount of boost you get from one marketing platform might not be sufficient and dabbling with two different platforms may consume a great deal of time to set up. However, the disadvantage of one platform being countered by the second one may work wonders in the longer run. Do you agree with the article above or not? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

By Kevin George 

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Sourced from Business 2 Community

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Email Marketing Tips From the Experts

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Email is still the most powerful medium for sending promotions, newsletters, updates and offers to your leads and customers. However, with its popularity comes a lot of misuse and misunderstandings about how to best employ email marketing to achieve your goals.To clear things up and find sage advice, we asked a group of ONTRAPORT Certified Consultants, who work with entrepreneurs and small business owners daily to implement marketing strategies, to give us their best email marketing tips for ONTRAPORT users.

Check out their responses. Apply them to your business, and let us know how it goes in the comments.

Meet the Experts

For Best Results, Make Your Important Emails Actionable

When you’re busy and scrolling through your inbox, you’re likely not looking for emails to leisure-read — more often than not, you only have time to engage with messages that seem important and urgent or have a purpose behind them. If you really want your emails read, Chad Root recommends that you “keep them directly connected to a contact’s ACTIONS. CTA follow-ups outperform general blog notices and newsletters by three times the engagement.”

To encourage engagement, “Always add a verb in the subject heading to get your subscribers in the mindset of taking ACTION. Also, don’t forget to add the P.S. for skimmers.” — Maria Richard

Maintain a One-to-One Ratio: One Intent for Every Email

Too many CTAs in one email can quickly become overwhelming for the reader. Neil Kristianson says a good rule of thumb to follow is “One email — one action. You can’t ask someone to do 10 things in an email and expect them to do any of them.”

Having one focus per email can also make each message feel more personal to your list. Consultant Ali A. Alqhtani says, “I always tell clients to keep it real. Keep it simple. And really just talk to your list with intent, and make it conversational.”

Make the Email Engaging and Readable

Have you ever saved a message in your inbox for later because it seemed like too much effort on-the-go? These are the kinds of messages Brian Bargiel advises against sending in your marketing emails. He says, “Big blocks of text are boring and difficult to read. Furthermore, they look like a lot of hard work to digest. People have really short attention spans, so they need to be able to skim. Think of it this way — so many people can’t listen to a whole song without skipping to the next one. Not to say that paragraphs don’t have their place — I’d save ’em for other places where you have their attention.”

There are times when the most suitable approach to email marketing is being able to relate to your audience on a very personal level. There are many ways to do this, and what better way than to give your own experience in the form of a story?

Tell a story. This starts with the subject of your email. Your average person gets 90+ emails per day. Make your story one of entertainment that will draw them in. Don’t make it just about the thing. Make it relatable and exciting.
– James Simpson

“Tell a story. This starts with the subject of your email. Your average person gets 90+ emails per day. Make your story one of entertainment that will draw them in. Don’t make it just about the thing. Make it relatable and exciting.” — James Simpson

Make Sure Your Email Fits the Relationship

For every email you send, consider your intended audience and write to it. James Simpson says, “Have them nodding their head in agreement while reading it. Make sure you know what phase of business you are in with your customer. If they don’t know you or trust you, then you haven’t earned the right to ask for the sell. In short, provide value through an amazing storyline. Build trust with these ongoing stories, and earn the right to sell to your customer.”

Sourced from ONTRAPORT

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The Stressful Email Marketing Tactic That Will Not Die

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By Eliza Brooke

Glossier, Reformation, and Seamless have all tapped into it, for better or worse.

Another day, another complaint I feel compelled to lodge against brands in a public forum. Brands feed us, and they clothe us. And yet they betray our trust! Again and again we are forced to reckon with the fact that brands are not our friends. They never have been, and they never will be.

Today I would like to discuss the phenomenon that is brands trying to dupe people into opening their marketing emails by putting “FWD:” or “Re:” in the subject line. The message looks like it’s coming from a friend or like you’re already engaged in the conversation, which can be incredibly alarming when the subject is something urgent. Here are a few real emails that members of the Racked team have received recently:

A subject line that reads: “Re: Satisfying that craving.”

A weirdly sexual message from Seamless.

A subject line that reads: “RE: YOUR PTO REQUEST.”

What? I didn’t request time off! Is my boss mad at me? A moment of professional stress brought to you by Reformation!

A subject line that reads, “Re: Your Flight Confirmation.”

SHEER PANIC!!! (From Barry’s Boot Camp.)

A subject line that reads, “Thank you for your email. I am out of office until...”

An OOO riff from Glossier

This tactic totally works, especially if you’re not paying close attention to who sent the email. (I often am not.) What makes it doubly annoying is that brands have been doing it for years, and shoppers have been complaining about it for just as long. Yet nothing has changed.

Let’s look at some historical tweets.

Given how clogged most people’s inboxes are, brands have to get clever with their email marketing. Fair enough. And the results can be effective: President Obama’s re-election campaign famously used subject lines like “Wow,” “Rain check?” and “Hey” to get people to click through. (Some people found Obama’s approach charming. The Hairpin compared them to notes from a stalker.) What’s definitely not cute, though, is making your customers feel stressed, dumb, or distrustful. The world is overwhelming enough already.

Perhaps one day brands will go around the bend and over-deliver by sending marketing emails with subjects like, “No rush on this,” “We’re having a sale right now, but you have a week to get to it, so take your time,” and “Would you like to unsubscribe? There is a large link at the top of this email.”

Until then, our cortisol levels will lurch into overdrive, we will angrily tweet, and we will get distracted and forget to unsubscribe.

Feature Image Credit: EyesWideOpen/Getty Images

By Eliza Brooke

Sourced from RACKED

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GDPR – The Email Marketing Red Herring

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By Mike Parry 

Have I got your attention? I’m going to say something else controversial, GDPR is not about email marketing! GDPR doesn’t cover email and the ICO doesn’t care how many times you email your data, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, once a day, once a week or once in a blue moon. It simply isn’t relevant. They don’t care when the last time a name on your email list opened an email, it isn’t in their remit. That’s right, GDPR is not about email marketing! It does reference the currently-under-review PECR but more as a make sure you also follow these regulations, which you should have been doing for years now. Now don’t get me wrong, anyone undertaking email marketing must adhere to the data processing principles outlined by GDPR and imho that is a good thing. However, GDPR is about processing personal data not email marketing!

OK so what is it about?

GDPR is about personal data, specifically, “any information relating to an identifiable person who can be directly or indirectly identified in particular by reference to an identifier”. Confused? Exactly, GDPR is shrouded in confusion and mystery and as such has business running scared, particularly the threat of BIG FINES.

Now the ICO has a job to do in protecting people’s data rights but history suggests it carries out its job in a fair and business friendly manner. Sure, repeat offenders who deliberately flaunt the regulation and don’t try and get their house in order will face its wrath and rightly so but it’s a myth to say that the ICO will come after every business who is trying to follow the regulation with a big fine right off the bat. In fact in its series of blogs GDPR myths the ICO address this very issue stating the GDPR is about citizens not fines.

So when I say GDPR is about personal data and not email marketing I am only being slightly disingenuous. Not once in the GDPR regulations does it state the word email, but it does reference marketing and email does fall into this. However, as mentioned above in a more sensationalised way, the legislation is not about how many times you email your data, or when you decide to remove people from your list or whether data that hasn’t opened an email for x, y or z months should be removed. These things are actually business decisions and fall under best practice not GDPR complianc

Under GDPR you must have a valid lawful basis in order to process personal data and the GDPR regulation clearly states that not one of the six lawful bases is better or more important than the others. However, most lawful bases will require that processing is necessary. If you can reasonably achieve the same purpose without processing then you wont have a legal basis. So if we relate that to email marketing the capture and processing of email addresses is essential for the purpose. That being said it then comes down to your lawful basis for processing that data and for this I will copy and paste directly from the guide to the general data protection regulation GDPR document.

What are the lawful bases for processing?

“The lawful bases for processing are set out in Article 6 of the GDPR. At least one of these must apply whenever you process personal data:

  1. Consent: the individual has given clear consent for you to process their personal data for a specific purpose.
  2. Contract: the processing is necessary for a contract you have with the individual, or because they have asked you to take specific steps before entering into a contract.
  3. Legal obligation: the processing is necessary for you to comply with the law (not including contractual obligations).
  4. Vital interests: the processing is necessary to protect someone’s life.
  5. Public task: the processing is necessary for you to perform a task in the public interest or for your official functions, and the task or function has a clear basis in law.
  6. Legitimate interests: the processing is necessary for your legitimate interests or the legitimate interests of a third party unless there is a good reason to protect the individual’s personal data which overrides those legitimate interests. (This cannot apply if you are a public authority processing data to perform your official tasks.)

So in conclusion if you wish to continue with your email marketing program under GDPR you either need consent or legitimate interest. Consent is specific consent, not bundled in with other offers, warranties, discounts, member clubs etc.. The act of consent needs to be specified not pre ticked and the user must know what they are getting into. Legitimate interest is where the recipient could reasonably expect you to process their data for email marketing purposes when they gave it to you and the act of email marketing doesn’t violate any individual personal data interests. Please don’t take this the wrong way, I am not saying that GDPR and how you process data isn’t important. I think it is of paramount importance, not only to stay the right side of GDPR but for best practice. What I am saying is GDPR is important across the board and not specifically for email marketers.

Legal Waiver

I would like to point out that this is not legal advice, before undertaking any personal data processing please seek your own legal counsel

By Mike Parry 

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Email Marketing Essentials for every small business

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Email marketing provides the most direct line of communication to your target market. Your email database is full of potential and current customers as well as possible future customers; or at least it should be, especially in light of GDPR. This database should then essentially be warm leads, providing an ever-growing pool of warm leads which should be easier to convert in in the future and provide a cost-effective source of sales as your small business grows. So the question is, what do you need to know for your business to benefit from all of the best outcomes of an effective email marketing campaign?

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Build Your Email Lists

The first port of call is to build and develop your email list, after all the basis of a successful email marketing campaign or strategy, are the recipients. However, it’s not enough to blindly build up the number of email addresses on your list; you need to ensure the quality also.

You can do this by segmenting your lists or splitting out into separate lists the email addresses you collect. Segmenting your lists will allow you to keep track of the sources of emails, whether they’ve come through an ebook campaign or are past customers. By segmenting these lists out, you’re able to ensure members only get emails that are targeted and relevant to them.

Above all ensure you receive Opt-in consent from all members of any lists if you’d like to avoid a potential 20 million euro fine when the EU GDPR kicks in. Seeking Opt-in, which is essentially informed consent of joining an emailing list also helps to improve the quality of your list, as your campaigns will be viewed by only those who are actively interested in your business and what you offer.

Software

Pick the software you use for your email marketing wisely as switching can be a hassle and can damage your brand consistency, as well as leading to errors such as duplication.

The best option for small businesses would be MailChimp as it offers an easy interface and has a very shallow learning curve. Of course, the main reason many small businesses use MailChimp for their email marketing is the cost. MailChimp is free for up to 2,000 subscribers and up to 12,000 emails a month.

The downside is however once you start to grow your email lists the costs can begin to jump quite rapidly; though this may not be so much of an issue for you at that point. The other aspect to consider is appearance. Many MailChimp templates can look repetitive and can be recognised as a MailChimp template, even by the casual reader. The monotonous look is something of a casualty of MailChimp’s success; so many businesses use the service that it’s now highly recognisable. Consider opting for custom HTML templates that you can have designed for your business.

Auto-Responses

When users opt-in for your email lists, they should receive an email notification. Auto-responses can help to reduce your unsubscribe rate as users have a reference point. Within the auto-response, you should detail the reason they subscribed and what they can expect. These automated emails help them to remember and reference why they signed up, and the fact that they did sign up.

Sticking to the activities you outline in this opt-in is also very important as you do not shock your audience with your emails or their regularity. This avoids situations in which recipients of your emails feel they have been misleading.

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Email Design

Good visuals keep readers engaged with the content and message of your emails. People naturally respond more positively to well-designed pieces of content. So nailing down a quality design for your email campaign that sells your brand as reliable and well-put-together as well as making clear what’s on offer.

Think about the flow of information and the logic of the order in which data you deliver. Consider the story you’re attempting to telling with each email and the best way of doing so. The visual design has a large part to play in setting the tone of the message that is received.

Also, Make sure Calls to action are clearly discernible. Within most emails, you’ll have multiple ‘calls to action’, some of which will be softer conversions. Making this evident in the design is essential. Conversions that will offer your business the most value need highlighting the most provided this makes sense in the context of the campaign.

Email content

Providing value should be the foundation of every email campaign. Recipients need an incentive to review the email and ideally convert into a sale. You can offer value by sharing your content, providing discounts and free or exclusive services. The key here is making membership to your businesses email list seem worthwhile and desirable. This keeps recipients opening future emails and paying attention to the contents of them as a pose to unsubscribing.

The primary goal of most email marketing campaigns will be to sell your product or service, so by all means, do so, sell!  Selling is to some degree expected by most users, but don’t be too forceful with this. Make it clear as to why readers need what you’re selling but don’t be repetitive. If you convey your message well enough, readers will recognise if they need what you are offering.

Timing (Frequency)

Scheduling is also crucial to email marketing. Setting out what day of the week or month you launch your email campaigns will help with regulating the frequency of them. You will be walking a fine line between staying in regular contact with your mailing list to nurture them as leads, and not saturating their inboxes, which often leads to poor feedback and unsubscriptions.

A default frequency of weekly tends to be touted to small businesses but keep in consideration how much content you currently have and your capacity. It is vital to avoid being repetitive, and at times to keep up with a weekly newsletter message and material can get reused to the point where they become monotonous and mediocre.

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A/B Testing

The best way to improve your email marketing campaigns is to test them. And where conversions are at stake, testing every element of your emails to find out what works and what doesn’t can help to transform a poorly performing campaign into a successful one.

Test everything from the Subject line of your emails to the mobile responsiveness. Remember 61% of emails get viewed on mobile devices.

Try A/B testing some of these components of your emails:

  • The Subject Line
  • The Offer/promotion or Call-to-action
  • The Layout of the email
  • The Design of the mailer including the images or colours used
  • The Level of personalisation. E.g. Using generics Vs First name’s.
  • The Content formats; e.g. written or visual content
  • The Headline of the mailer

Consistently testing all of these aspects of your email campaigns will allow you to pull together a better campaign in future; resulting in what will be your ultimate format and campaign. This feeds directly into the final essential aspect of email marketing.

Analytics and Measuring

There’s no use tinkering and testing your email marketing campaigns if you’re not gathering and measuring the analytics. These key indicators, like the number of opens or click-throughs, will help to benchmark and assess the success of each campaign. Making changes and testing needs to be based on the analytics collected and measured purely.

Do not underestimate how important it is to measure every action and change in your email marketing campaigns, these activities are numbers based at their core after all, so keeping this in mind will be the deciding factor in making your email marketing campaigns a success.

Final Thoughts

You’re now equipped with everything you need to know to run effective email marketing campaigns for your small business. Like anything in business remember to keep up to date with the latest new tools and methods to keep at the forefront. We highly recommend you review the General Data Protection Regulations to ensure you avoid any potential fines and keep your email marketing activities completely compliant.

As always, Happy Small Business Marketing!

 

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