Email Campaign Tips

Drip campaigns take the set it and forget approach - which may seem a bit counter-intuitive when it comes to being proactive with subscribers and clients, but hear us out. They are the best way to keep a subscriber engaged over time, while not worrying about how many emails you have to send out. There are however tips and tricks to having a great email drip campaign. 

I came across an interesting list of don'ts when it comes to drip marketing - and getting started. This is a list of 10 things to avoid for every excited marketer embarking on a new drip marketing journey on a newly acquired marketing automation platform. Afterall, tools are as good as processes defined and decisions made by the people behind it.

1. Don’t keep dripping the prospects who are sales ready
2. Don’t overlap the lists for different drip marketing tracks
3. Don’t over-drip a prospect to annoy him/her- don’t give a chance to hit unsubscribe
4. Don’t make the drip marketing template ‘salesy’ in content
5. Don’t drip a contact who is not even remotely interested- don’t give a chance to hit spam
6. Don’t repeat messages/themes in drip campaigns
7. Don’t repeat HTML rich emails
8. Don’t make it impersonal- as drip campaign is a series of emails, it is easy to get lost
9. Don’t make a list too long – segment your list and have multiple drip marketing tracks
10. Don’t just send a ‘Thank You’ email in drip campaign- attach interesting content to engage further

I think that the list above are great things to avoid to keep your campaign fresh, and to really use a set it and forget to your benefit. It's all about making a subscriber seem that you are genuinely interested in them - and that you actually want their business, and not just to spam them.

Check out some of the drip marketing campaigns we have put together for our clients here.

Email marketing offers a great opportunity for brands to increase subscriber satisfaction and retention, and drive results, if used correctly. There is no better way to understand and analyze what your subscribers want and enjoy better than split testing. The small changes that you can add to an email can make your emails go from SPAM fodder to an inbox star. An e-marketer must look at a multitude of different places in an email that can be tweaked to find the perfect combination. 

 

In this day and age, most people check their email on their iPads, cellphones, and smartphones - because of this all of our clients want to know what they can do to make their emails mobile friendly. We work with each client to taylor their email campaigns to look fantastic across all email platforms, including mobile devices. In lieu of a personal consultation with an email marketing agency, check out some basic tips to help make your emails more mobile friendly. 

Via WebTraffic ROI: E-mail marketing, with 92% of the U.S. internet users sending and reading e-mail, according to Pew Internet and American Life Project, it’s a no brainer.

Right? Yes and no. E-mail marketing no longer reaches your audience the way it used to. People used to sit at their Gateway desktops every night, dial into their Netscape and check e-mails while watching Family Matters.

The story is now a bit different. One in five marketing e-mails is opened on a smart phone. This changes a few things for your e-mail marketing campaign. Though you may have to modify a bit, you can and should make it work in your favor.

Give Your Newsletter a Mobile Lift

More than ever, it’s now important that you design your newsletter in a way that can be read easily on a smart phone.

As more people get into smart phones, studies show it has become the predominant way to check e-mail. Comscore said that 70.1 million U.S. users check their e-mail via smart phone every year.

Luckily for you, as smart phone technology grows, so does the phone’s ability to properly display a regular e-mail. Simply changing the coding and creating a narrower design may be enough.

Provide Interesting Snippets

There is a certain amount of scan and move on that happens when the e-mail immediately pops into someone’s inbox. People are most likely to read your business newsletters while they wait to get their hair cut or meet with someone. Thus, by getting your most important information into the intro clip, you can avoid the immediate deletion.

Then later, while they are watching TV on the couch, or sitting in traffic, they’ll take the time to click through the full article.

Offer Discounts, Coupons, Etc

Now that you know you’re readers are often out and about while checking e-mail, take this opportunity to get them shopping. Offering coupons that can be used right off the smart phone will make their decision to buy your product much easier.

This in turn gives them more incentive to buy. Scoutmob, a growing mobile application, offers their deals directly off the smart phone, giving users easy access to the coupons. I once went to a restaurant simply because Scoutmob offered a deal I couldn’t pass up. With easy access I was in and out.

Make it Convenient to Complete Online Transactions Later

When someone is lazily reading through your e-mail before a meeting, it isn’t likely that they’ll make a purchase from their phone. Online purchasing holds a large spot in the e-commerce world, 80% of people in their early thirties to mid forties make frequent online purchases, according to FifthGear.

However, this has yet to take hold on the mobile platform. On the newsletter, provide your customer care phone number in a click to call manner, give them access to their “shopping cart” to buy later, or allow a sharing feature to make it easy for them to share products.

E-mail marketing still holds an important spot in every company’s business marketing plan, as it should. We are seeing, though, that it’s time to shift the model a bit.

As with everything, technology is changing the way your customers function, which means you must make a slight shift as well.

To read the article on their website - please click here

Our platform has implemented an amazing new A/B Testing feature in each account in the past year. This feature has helped our clients decide which email campaigns are doing the best - from subject line comparison to send time, this feature gives tracking information you can use. In addition to testing your email campaigns, it's also a great idea to test out your landing pages. B2C.com has compiled a short list of the top tips for effective testing---

A/B testing is one of the best ways to raise your landing page conversion rates and overall online marketing ROI.  A/B testing or split testing is a testing method where a control landing page is compared to a variety of test pages.  Testing landing page experiences against one another with A/B testing offers the opportunity to create and test wildly different things – think in terms of testing apples and oranges.

Here are five tips to help you effectively plan and run landing page A/B tests:

This past September the ListEngage team traveled to Indianapolis to be part of one the largest interactive marketing conferences in the world - ExactTarget's "Connections 2011" user conference. The event was host to email and digital marketers from around the globe and touched upon online marketing techniques, email campaign tips, social media marketing and B2B marketing.