By Bill Mann | 5/6/2016 | General

5 Things You Need to Know About Email Marketing

5 Things You Need to Know About Email Marketing

Email marketing has been around for more than 20 years now and much has changed in the world of marketing. Social media is the hot new thing, and everyone is pushing social media marketing. The word on the street is that email itself is dead, and email marketing is a waste of time. But in this as in so many other areas, being a contrarian may be your best play. Here are five things you need to know about email marketing.

1. Email is NOT Dead

We’ve been hearing it for many years. “Email is dead because…” Spam was going to kill it. And instant messaging. And this and that and the other thing. Now social media is the newest email hit man. Yet somehow, email endures. And email marketing continues to be powerfully effective. Want some proof? Check out these facts:

  • In a 2015 MarketingSherpa survey, 72% of consumers said that email is their preferred way of communicating with companies
  • TargetMarketing’s “2015 Media Usage Survey” showed that 65% of respondents planned to increase spending on email marketing
  • A 2014 McKinsey & Company survey found that email is almost 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter
  • The Custora E-Commerce Pulse Dashboard stated that in March of 2016, email accounted for 18% of e-commerce purchasing. This was up from 16% in March of 2015.
  • A growing number of people use mobile devices as their primary connection to the Internet. Every one of those devices comes with an email client pre-installed. Some reports suggest that people actually check their email more often on mobile devices than on desktop computers.

As you can see from these stats, rumors of the death of email and email marketing have been greatly exaggerated. It has been, and remains, one of your most powerful online marketing tools. With that nasty rumor out of the way, let’s take a look at some other things you need to know about email marketing.

2. Consistency Pays

You probably know that people need to see your message numerous times before it really sinks in. That means you need to be consistent about emailing them your message at regular intervals. But for maximum effect you need to do more than mail once a week or once a month.

If you send your messages on the same day every week or every month, people will learn to expect them on that day. And when they expect your message to arrive the same day every time, they are more likely to read it.

You can even take this rule of consistency one step further. If you send your message at the same time of day each cycle, people will start looking for it at that time. I’ve seen this in myself, with a newsletter that arrives every day at 2pm. Because I find the information useful, I set aside a little time every afternoon at 2pm to read it. If you think about it, you probably do similar things.

The moral of this story is that the more consistent you are in your email marketing the better. From branding all the down to the time of day you send your messages, consistency pays off.

3. People Need a Reason to Care

Did you find yourself paying a little bit more attention at the end of the last item? Many people do. Why? Because humans communicate in stories. All those facts and figures I hit you with at the beginning of the article are useful, maybe even surprising. But do they really grab and hold your attention? Probably not.

Our ancestors were hard-wired to pay attention to stories by the need to survive in a hostile world. Stories about something that happened to another person had survival value and needed to be attended to. That automatic focus on stories about things that happened to other people is still within us.

That’s not to say that you need to include real life-or-death tales in your marketing campaign. It does mean your campaigns will get better results if they tell a story. Personal anecdotes and real-life customer experiences are what hold our attention. Give people a reason to care about what you are saying and they are more likely to respond.

4. Winners Segment and Target

There was once a time where email marketers blasted out generic messages to large, undifferentiated lists. I don’t know if they got good results that way. Whether they did or not, that doesn’t work any more. The best results today come from segmenting your list and targeting your messages properly.

Segmenting your list means dividing it into smaller lists based on certain criteria. The more information you have about your list, the more ways you can segment it. Some of the possibilities include:

  • Acquisition source
  • Past customer behavior
  • Subscription status
  • Geolocation

Figuring out the right criteria to use for a specific campaign can be a challenge. But doing so can greatly improve your results. We will touch on this more in the next section.

Targeting is the reason you segment your list. When you divide your list into useful segments, you can send customized, one-on-one messages to your list members. You know that people in a particular list segment have certain things in common. This allows you to tailor your message to only give them information they are likely to be interested in.

An example will make this clearer. Let’s say you work for a chain of stores that sells antique cuckoo clocks. These stores are located throughout the United States and Canada. It’s likely that everyone on your mailing list likes antique cuckoo clocks. So you could send general information about antique cuckoo clocks to everyone on the list.

But now your store in Dallas is planning to have a special 24 hour sale. It wouldn’t make sense to send a message about it to your entire list. Most of the people on your list live hundreds or thousands of miles away from the store. Most of the recipients wouldn’t care about that message. Some of them will even be annoyed that you are sending them something that is clearly of no use to them.

The solution is segmenting your list. In this case, you would segment your list by geographic location. Then you could send a targeted email message to only those people on your list who are near enough to the Dallas store to care about the sale.

Campaign Monitor

Studies have shown that targeted email marketing gets better results. People are much more likely to read your emails if they know that the contents are going to be relevant to them. The more targeted your emails, the happier your customers are. And the happier your customers are, the better the results of your campaign.

5. Test, Test, and Test Some More

In this article we’ve talked about some things that can make your email marketing more effective. But every campaign involves unique circumstances and fickle human beings. You can’t take anything for granted.

Back in the early days of direct mail, marketers and copywriters made some discoveries. They learned that small changes to their mailings could greatly affect the response. For example, they learned that:

  • Small changes in the terms of the offer could double or triple the response rate
  • Changes to the timing of the mailing could double the response rate
  • Changing a single word in the headline of their offer could significantly increase or decrease response

We are talking about email marketing, not direct mail, but the concept is the same. Tiny changes to your campaign can greatly increase or decrease your results.

The way to deal with this is through testing. A/B testing involves sending two different mailings to see which one gets the better response. To get the most valid results from our testing, you need to control all the variables as best you can.

That means you need to test with a group of people who are as alike as possible, except that half the group receives one message and half the other message. Then you can measure the response rates to see which message was more effective.

Campaign Monitor

Your ability to segment your list and target custom messages to a segment make this possible. You can set up and run this kind of test manually, but it can be time consuming. Choosing email marketing software that supports automated A/B testing makes adding regular testing into your marketing process easy.

In Short

Despite persistent rumors to the contrary, email is not dead. Email marketing remains one of the most powerful tools available for marketing your business to current and future customers. To maximize the benefit your organization gets from email marketing, you should consider these fine products:

Campaign Monitor – Drag-and-drop design tools and automated workflows, plus list segmentation and A/B testing for personalized and effective emails. The tool for creating elegant campaigns that get results. Used by over 150,000 companies around the world, including over 50,000 agencies.

MailChimp – A responsive email marketing campaign app that’s has more than 6 million users. Automatically handles sign-ups, un-subscribes, and bounce-backs while continually monitoring campaign performance. Supports A/B testing and campaign automation.

Active Trail – Multi-lingual email system with automated tools and reports, plus A/B testing. Now free for lists of under 500 people.

By Bill Mann | 5/6/2016 | General

{{CommentsModel.TotalCount}} Comments

Your Comment

{{CommentsModel.Message}}

Recent Stories

Email Marketing leading tools

Performers
Apex Players
New Comers
Luminaries

Top DiscoverCloud Experts

User photo
90
Cory Mayo
Cory Mayo is the Lead Consultant (President/CEO) of Coastal Life LLC.
Sales and Marketing | Customer Management and 5 more
View Profile
User photo
50
Deepak Chauhan
Digital Business Strategist, CEO & Founder of VOCSO Technologies
Sales and Marketing | Software Development and 20 more
View Profile
User photo
20
Mohan kumar
Director of Latlon Technologies.
Sales and Marketing | Software Development and 16 more
View Profile
Show All
X

Compare Products

Select up to three two products to compare by clicking on the compare icon () of each product.

{{compareToolModel.Error}}

Now comparing:

{{product.ProductName | createSubstring:25}} X
Compare Now