E-Marketing Archives • Page 4 of 5 • TotalWeb Partners

June 9, 2016

How to Use Email Marketing to Strengthen Business Relationships

If you want to grow your business, you have to consider the role of email marketing in your promotional mix. It’s still one of the less expensive marketing vehicles to employ, and by following a few simple rules you can change your customers’ perceptions of your email (and your company), drive sales, and foster better relationships in the process. To get started, this column will talk about advanced opt-in options, newsletter dos and don’ts, and pairing your email with other marketing vehicles. Our next column continues the discussion by exploring educational offerings, email and online survey best practices, and how to engage your customers via email using loyalty programs and rewards.

Can You Go Beyond Simple Opt-In?
Most reputable companies ask for customer buy-in when they collect email addresses. Granted, to maximize opt-ins, your website might auto-check the box that says “Contact me about promotions and offers.” Hey, at least you’re giving customers a choice.

Opt-ins are good, but consider giving your customers a few specific options rather than one vague choice. You’ll want to keep your list of options short. After all, if you make customers think too much or take too much time, most will get bored and abandon the task. That said, I’m not recommending you include all of these; the list below is to get you thinking. Depending on the type of product or service you offer, not all will apply to you. For example, you can give customers the option to:

May 5, 2016

by TWP Publisher

Email Marketing Can Give Small Businesses a Boost

E-Marketing Email Marketing

Small businesses that are just getting off the ground likely won’t have large marketing budgets. Advertising campaigns and billboards are probably well down the road. But email marketing can be an effective and inexpensive way for small business owners to spread the word about what they have to offer. Here’s a look at some of the benefits.

Consider the Pros and Cons

There are positive and negative elements to email marketing. It’s more cost-effective than direct mail, for example, which can be significant in saving money on postage costs. It also gives small business owners a better idea of how their message is being received, as Chad Brooks writes for Business News Daily: “… Businesses can see which emails were received, which ones went to addresses that were no longer active, which ones were opened, which ones were deleted before they were read and which ones enticed clients to click through to the website and make a purchase.”

But there is a common complaint when it comes to email marketing, and it involves the dreaded word “spam.” As Brooks explains, “… Some consumers may consider the emails to be spam and hold it against a brand’s reputation. If customers feel they are being bombarded by unwanted emails from a business, they will be less likely to become new or repeat customers.”

Explore the Different Methods

There are several ways that a business can engage in email marketing. Newsletters, for example, are a way to reach customers on a regular basis. Emails can promote an upcoming sale, as Brooks writes, or be posed as an invitation for customers to attend an event. And “lead-nurturing” emails can “keep brands at the top of mind for prospective clients,” he says. “These emails are sent out regularly until a potential customer is converted into a paying customer.”

March 15, 2016

by TWP Publisher

3 Email Marketing Metrics for Mobile, Multi-device Consumers

E-Marketing Email Marketing

Email metrics provide critical, quick feedback for a campaign. This is key because most opens and clicks occur within 72 hours after a send.

But measuring opens and clicks is often just scratching the surface of the actual performance of a campaign. In this post, I’ll compare three traditional email marketing metrics to newer, more meaningful ones.

Open Rate vs. Open Rate Churn

Many email practitioners believe open rates are misleading. There are several reasons for this. First, for an “open” to register, the recipient of the email must download an image. Depending on the content and type of email, recipients who actually open and read it may never need to download images. Also, some preview screens will allow recipients to read an email without opening it.

Thus, open rates are oftentimes higher than what is reported. Despite this, the open rate has stuck around as the most popular benchmark for email engagement.

When I look at open rates across an email program, it’s important to understand who is opening. If a program consistently has a 15 percent open rate, does that mean the same 15 out of 100 people open every email? Or is it a new group of recipients each time? The answer is likely somewhere in the middle.

I call this the “open rate churn.” It’s the percentage of recipients who open every email versus those who seldom do.

Analyzing the open churn rate will produce a more complete picture of the overall engagement of a subscriber list. It will help determine the offer and frequency, too.

March 10, 2016

by TWP Publisher

The power of email marketing for building relationships

E-Marketing Email Marketing

If you want to build relationships, don’t forget the power of email marketing. Consumers may be addicted to social media but that doesn’t make it the best relationship marketing channel. While social is great for brand discovery and content sharing, it is an unreliable way to continually speak to your customers.

Even if someone goes so far as to like your Facebook page, essentially saying that they want to hear from you, there is no guarantee that they will see your message because of Facebook’s algorithms. A Facebook user could see something like 15,000 things in their newsfeed at any given time, so the social media user may never see all of the content shared by their friends and the fan pages they like. Facebook uses an algorithm to figure out the best content for each user. If somebody likes your brand’s Facebook page they only have a 6.5 percent chance of actually seeing one of your posts each time it comes out. So even though that consumer has liked you and told you that they want to hear from you, they won’t necessarily get every message that you put out there. The same is not true with email.

As long as you have a good deliverability score, if a consumer opts into your list, the chances are they are going to get your content in their inbox. This relationship is a lot more valuable because instead of catching you when they happen to be in their social news feed, your message exists in the inbox where consumers check all of their messages.

February 11, 2016

by TWP Publisher

4 Common Mistakes With Your Email Marketing Campaign

E-Marketing Email Marketing

An email campaign seems simple enough. You compile a list, slap together some content and tag it with a quick subject line and then blast away!! That’s how many businesses owners approach their email marketing campaign: the quicker the better.

Unfortunately, this isn’t going to produce a successful email marketing campaign. If anything, it’ll probably hurt your overall marketing efforts. So instead of showing you what to do, we’ve decided to compile a list of common errors when it comes to email marketing. Let’s take a look.

Not Getting Consent

Before you even begin thinking about content, subject lines and other strategies, you have to compile a list of email addresses. This list should consist of people who are genuinely interested in your product or service. But if you don’t get the proper permission, you’re getting off on the wrong foot, and that wrong foot is about to get broken.

You see, not only are you going to turn off people by sending them email without their permission — these people will view it as spam — but you’re going to find yourself looking for a lawyer real quick. If you’re adding people to your list without their permission, that’s probably going to break some anti-spam regulation. Not exactly the start you were probably looking for.

December 24, 2015

by TWP Publisher

The 5 D’s (Transformational Trends) of Email and Marketing

E-Marketing Email Marketing

“We live in a D-world,” stated Thomas Le Thierry d’Ennequin from Vizeum at this year’s Golden Hammer conference. While listening to the talks, I counted five D’s: disruption, deconstruction, de-planning, de-materialization, and de-creativity.

We are now living in a marketing world characterized by 5 D’s. So let’s explore those D forces and how they make up new email and marketing trends.

1. Disruption: Unlearn everything you know

These days, it seems that wherever you look, an industry is being disrupted. Established businesses are always looking over their shoulders to make sure some app isn’t trying to revolutionize their industries and way of life.

However, not only traditional businesses should be wary—email marketers should, too.

Joanna Bakas, the managing partner of LHBS Consulting in Germany, encourages marketers to “unlearn everything we have learned.” Email marketers can’t be complacent when people’s daily lives online and offline continue to evolve. You won’t attract clients’ attention by sticking to old methods.

Email marketing (and every other kind of marketing, too) is still adapting to the mobile surge that began a few years ago.

One of the hot email marketing trends at the moment is extreme email personalization. Email marketing is moving away from bulk emails, and so we have to unlearn old strategies of “communicating to the masses” and instead learn the art of having intimate conversations with individuals.

Read more: https://www.marketingprofs.com/opinions/2015/28892/the-5d-transformational-trends-of-email-and-marketing#ixzz3vTKvPsDM

November 27, 2015

by TWP Publisher

3 Steps To Integrate Video With Email Marketing Automation

E-Marketing Email Marketing

Many marketers have found that adding video to their email programs drives increased engagement and customer loyalty. People love watching videos online (4 billion video views on Facebook alone in 2014), and they aren’t all cat videos and sport bloopers.

Emails with “video” in the subject line have a 65% higher click-through rate on average, according to Vidcaster. When video is a central part of your email campaign, the CTR can be 200% higher than a similar campaign without video.

Email Video Strategies: Two B2C Examples

Video can help you cut costs and increase customer satisfaction as well as identify prospects and move them closer to a purchase decision when you integrate your email video strategy with your marketing automation and ecommerce platforms.

November 19, 2015

by TWP Publisher

5 rules for the new era of email marketing

E-Marketing Email Marketing

Even amid the explosion of digital marketing technologies over the past few years, marketers keep returning to email. The reason is clear — for the 10th consecutive year, email is the highest ROI-generating channel for marketers. For every $1 invested, email marketing returns $38. It’s 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter combined.

That said, email marketing today is far different than it was in 1995 when everyone was using AOL and Gmail was just a sparkle in two young engineers’ eyes. Modern marketers looking to engage customers, differentiate their brand, and grow their businesses need to live and breathe these five new rules of email marketing.

Long live the DIY marketer
The rule goes something like this: first technology makes things possible, then it makes things easy. We’ve hit that point in the marketing technology continuum. Sophisticated technology processes that were once left to the IT professionals are now possible for every marketer in any business or industry. Companies like Optimizely, Squarespace, Unbounce, and Shopify are leading the DIY marketing revolution. Complex tasks that used to take weeks (or even months) and an entire IT staff to accomplish can now be done in minutes. Marketers now own their destiny — and that means there’s no excuse for any marketing communications, including email, to be off-brand or off-message.

November 12, 2015

by TWP Publisher

5 Fast Fixes to Jumpstart Your Email Marketing Strategy

E-Marketing Email Marketing

Sending out an email newsletter may seem like an easy task, but if you think that all you have to do is make a template, add in new content and hit send, you’re not likely to see the results you want.

Email marketing requires a lot of careful planning and work to be effective, but when it’s done right, it can drive traffic to your website, increase your customer base and boost sales. So how can you make the most of your email marketing campaigns? It’s all about getting to know what your subscribers want, creating quality content and taking advantage of all the great email marketing tools at your disposal.

Ready to improve your email campaigns? Here are five great email marketing tips from entrepreneurs and digital marketing experts.

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