Guide to Email Marketing
Why Email Marketing? Isn t Email Dead? Email is not dead. In fact, it s very much alive. More and more businesses are using email as an effective form of communication, and more importantly, to drive ROI. Compared to other digital channels such as social media or banner advertising, emails have a longer life span. This means that there is more time for businesses to leverage email for making a direct sale or closing a deal. In fact, by the end of 2017, it is expected that there will be 4.9 billion business email accounts! Email is also credited for bringing in 23% of total sales. THE AVERAGE TIME SPENT READING AN EMAIL INCREASED BY NEARLY 7% TO JUST OVER 11 SECONDS BETWEEN 2011 AND 2016. Source: Econsultancy, Litmus
One-to-one. Not one-to-many. Mass email marketing is not only ineffective, but it s also taboo in the industry. The most successful email marketers deliver engaging content, messages and offers to targeted contact lists. If you have a large list, or don t know how to start segmenting, engaging a scoring system or data scientist is recommended. Establishing your business as a thought leader includes understanding how to serve up your value proposition to multiple segments. A product, service or even a pricing bundle may be extremely appealing to a segment of your database, and not so relevant to others. In an age where customers and prospects expect you to know them, it s critical to send the right message. Scoring, profiling, data hygiene and appending are all ways to make your current database richer. Better data leads to better insight for targeting, and ultimately better results. For example, a professional development company may have mul ple audience segments, with mul ple messages selling the exact same product or service. What s my target audience s pain point? How do I fix it? Segment A Time/Resources Technology- Scalability Save me Segment B Professional Development Educa on-thought Leadership Segment C Cost/Budget Introductory Offer Low Price What is my message? Learning opportunity
Best Practices Checklist. Customize the From line. Write clear subject lines. Address your reader by name. Brand your company. Personalize your content. Send HTML and plain text emails. Make it easy to unsubscribe. Pre-populate customer information. Disclose your location. Throttle large sends. Deliver a strong call to action. Most email service providers will throttle back the number of sends based on ISP s preferences to protect the sender's reputation and deliverability. As a marketer, we want to get our message out to as many people as quickly as possible, but ISPs don t think that way. Work with an email service provider who understands large and small sends and can provide an articulate recommendation on how much to send on a daily basis.
It s A Two Way Street. Email is a powerful tool for communication, but it should be much more than a one-way form of communication. By having a no-reply email address as the reply-to address in your marketing email, it s sending a signal to your customers that you don t want to hear from them. Doesn t send a great message, right? By allowing your customers to reply directly to an email campaign, you re opening up opportunities for conversations you may have never been able to start before.
Scan and Read. As businesses send more and more emails to subscribers in 2017, you ll end up facing more competition. And that only means one thing: it ll be even more difficult to get your emails opened and clicked. To cut through the clutter and immediately catch and maintain your reader s attention, your emails will need to be easy to read and scan-able. Write short paragraphs and sentences. Use a balance of images and whitespace. Use dynamic content and personalization.
Take Advantage of Automation Automation is a simple way to utilize technology to generate a high tech, low touch engagement. Automation frees up marketers time to develop and build out other goal-oriented campaigns and promotions. Messages most frequently automated include welcome, transactional, re-engagement and content downloads.
Mobile Means Business! By now, you should already know that the vast majority of web users do most of their browsing on mobile devices. That includes reading emails. If the messages you send out aren t easy to open and read on a smartphone or tablet, you re alienating a large portion of your customers and they are also more likely to hit the spam button!
Mobile Tips. Reduce the size of your images through compression. Make use of an email HTML editor to alter the style of your email so that the images are sized by screen rather than by pixel. Increase the size of your buttons and links. Consider investing in a responsive email template.
Manage Your Reputation. Get to know and learn about these critical issues that shape your reputation: Your domain or IP address. Recipient feedback (spam or fraud complaints). Open and click action or inaction. Traffic patterns (sending to Invalid addresses, spam traps). List hygiene. Longevity of your domain or IP. Location. How you process unsubscribes. Use of authentication. Your affiliate and partnership relationships. Privacy policy. Bounced emails (process immediately). Feedback loops (actively manage).
Blend Email and Social! Consumers are multi-channel, and marketers should be, too! Statistics yield that a consistent message across multiple channels reinforces the benefits and drives awareness of the brand. Simple Suggestions Upload your email list to social media and create a seamless message experience by creating a custom audience. Ask a question in your email that drives people to your social networks. Create emails around some of your most popular social posts. If you ask, be sure to listen and respond!
Let s Talk Tech! Technical Development Best Practices: Make sure your email is less than 102kb to prevent clipping in Gmail. Avoid bad tags, too many closing tags, or incorrectly nested tags. Avoid font color too similar to background color, which hides text in your email. No Embedded Javascript. Avoid large font sizes. Avoid use of an iframe. Eliminate HTML comments in your code. Don t provide attachments. Avoid using characters that are not standard ASCII characters. Eliminate any blank lines in base64 coding. Don t paste directly from a Word document into an HTML editor.
Let the Data Decide! Use campaign data to inform your future strategy, refine your messaging and optimize details like send time and audience segments. Testing is a must. Remember, it s not about which option you like best, it s about which option generates the highest level of audience engagement. Common areas to test include subject lines, call to action messages and offers. At the onset of any new campaign, it s critical to leverage any current trends, data, profile or scoring information. Building your campaign with clean, accurate data is the foundation for success.
MCH Resources and Services erespond TM Reach hot email leads faster with MCH s erespond product. Our proprietary email scoring solution uses real-time data to rank and score individuals in institutions most likely to respond to email offers. Target smarter, eliminate inefficiencies and improve email engagement and deliverability. Data Hygiene Accurate data is the foundation for sales and marketing programs. Improve your data accuracy by working with the experts in our Response Lab. Services include; append and reverse append, CASS, File cleaning, and validating email address formats. Channel_e TM Email Services MCH can deploy your email campaign for you. We use state-of-the-art inbox placement tools to help you get into the inbox. Our optimized reports will help you make the best decisions for future campaigns.
About MCH Strategic Data Since 1928, MCH has consistently delivered quality data and information to the institution market. We invest in U.S.- based data experts to deliver quality data every day. We know that every data element clients have to power their operations, sales engagements and marketing programs improves results. For more information about our data and information services and the markets we serve, go to mchdata.com.