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Email marketing trends to expect in 2019

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This year the email marketing landscape will continue to focus on personalization with a focus on quality over quantity as well as expanding loyalty programs.

Many exciting trends and developments hit the world of email marketing in 2018 as email turned 40 years old – from the emergence of AMP for Gmail to mobile email reaching its long-awaited tipping point.

As we head into 2019 and marketing budgets “refill,” it’s our chance to give our email programs a restart and refocus our efforts on innovation and speed to keep pace with the demanding customer. In 2019 we can expect consumer expectations for quality content to increase – it’s become an annual tradition. Marketers will need to leverage new technologies and disciplines to continue to push the boundaries. Email programs will become even more personalized and more interactive, and as a result, more effective at driving revenue and brand loyalty.

To achieve these lofty goals and marketing dreams, below are my predictions for 2019 changes in the email marketing landscape you should be most aware of.

Personalization will put the right content in front of the right customers

Email marketing content can and should be more deliberate based on customers behavior, and I believe in 2019 we will see this become more prevalent in marketing strategies. Marketers have no excuse not to personalize email content based on the plethora of data they capture from browsing, purchase histories and email preferences.

The use of this data is becoming less “creepy” and using it in a deliberate way can deliver success. If you haven’t done so already, you should make it a priority to collect and use more data for personalization in content execution. Marketers should implement/expand their current preference centers for content choices or follow browse, purchase, click and open behavior to identify the content that piques subscribers’ interest most.

This process will get even more scientific as marketers push vendors for perfection. In 2019, marketers will continue to test AI platforms, while pushing vendors to handle their AI needs and automate at a larger scale. This innovation in technology should enable marketers to identify content combinations that perform better, faster and more efficiently.

The growth of mobile average order value

Historically, mobile average order value (AOV) has lagged behind its desktop counterpart because consumers are less likely to make big-ticket purchases (e.g., large, expensive items) on-the-go. In 2019, we’ll see this gap close. In fact, Yes Marketing data from Q3 shows significant growth in mobile average order value (AOV) for the first time in a long time. In Q3 of 2018 mobile AOV was $66.40, just $20 less than the $86.20 desktop AOV – and this is just the start.

In the year ahead, it will become more common for subscribers to purchase larger orders on mobile devices as the user experience gets better. To take advantage of this trend, brands will need to gain subscribers’ trust by offering detailed product content, more images and videos, or customer testimonials to push subscribers over the edge.

The continued rise of interactive content

As in 2018, I’m a firm believer in interactive content and I’m predicting it will continue to take off in 2019. Emails that contain games, quizzes, image carousels or simply “fun’” clickability (my word for 2019) allow users to interact with the brand without leaving the email itself. The more brands allow subscribers to engage within emails in new ways – whether it’s a personality quiz or the ability to book hotels without leaving email – the more engaged and ready to purchase subscribers will be with the brand.

The use of interactive content can help boost sales or simply educate and entertain. Fun games are a great way to get subscribers in the habit of opening your emails. The ability to actually make purchases within email makes the buying process even faster, and will boost sales for the brands that embrace interactivity.

Quality over quantity (deliverability + greater spend in targeted digital acquisition)

Deliverability has become a serious concern for marketers. Due to poor data management and increased standards from major ISPs like Gmail, Yahoo and AOL, emails can quickly land in the SPAM folder, making all that hard work in creative useless. To reach the inbox every time and maximize revenue from email marketing campaigns, marketers need to ensure they are sending relevant content to high quality value email subscribers and stop focusing on the total quantity of emails sent. In the coming year, that means embracing best practices even more, such as segmentation, data hygiene, email verification and preference centers.

In addition to reaching current subscribers/customers, smart marketers will use data to drive their digital acquisition efforts and better target new subscribers. Again, quality over quantity in acquiring new subscribers will pay dividends for your email program down the road. Model out your digital acquisition by appending the right types of data and finding look-a-like versions of your best customers instead of just paying your standard cost per lead. Yes, this approach may and most likely will cost more to successfully acquire quality subscribers. But in the end the lifetime value of higher quality customers is worth the additional investment. Smarter acquisition = greater ROI.

Loyalty programs will further expand to collect customer data

Many marketers already embrace loyalty programs and in 2019 these programs will become much more sophisticated. Smart marketers will use loyalty programs to collect customer data and better understand customer behavior, allowing them to reach loyal customers with better personalization and acquire new customers with the same characteristics.

What will this look like? Email marketers can track the behavior of their most loyal customers (e.g., those who engage with loyalty emails most frequently) and better understand their needs when it comes to email. What time of day do they want to receive emails? What types of products do they typically browse and purchase? What promotions work best for them? Then, marketers can take this data to encourage subscribers with similar behavior to join the loyalty program. Additionally, strong brands are already leveraging loyalty points as an incentive to receive data from their customers. This combination will lead to greater engagement in the inbox and more revenue for brands who execute flawlessly.

Over the past year, it’s been fun watching email marketing turn 40. While many in the past have claimed email is dead and ready for replacement by a shiny new channel (*cough* Sheryl Sandberg *cough*), we’ve yet to see a true successor. That’s why I’m challenging all marketers to keep up the strong work in 2019 to make it even better.

As you ring in the new year, consider tactics such as AI for personalization, interactive content, improved loyalty programs and spending a little bit more in acquisition so next year at this time, you can give yourself the greatest gift of the holiday season – a bonus or raise.

By 

Kyle Henderick is Director of Client Services at Yes Marketing, a single solution provider who delivers relevant communications across all channels for mid and enterprise-sized companies. Kyle is responsible for helping major clients implement new programs, processes, and data-driven strategies to create campaigns that truly drive revenue. With a passion for technology implementation and a background in database, email, web, and social media marketing, Kyle turns his real-world experience into executable tactics to help clients see an incremental lift in revenue, subscriber engagement, and customer retention. A lover of all things Chicago, when Kyle is not reading up on latest marketing practices or focusing on improving client programs, he can be found enjoying the city’s great restaurants or wearing his heart on his sleeve while rooting for all Chicago-based sports teams. A curious individual willing to try any and every food that does not include raw onions, he is always looking for exciting dining options and new adventures around the city.

Sourced from Marketing Land

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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 

Sourced from Business 2 Community

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