One of the most difficult things for any start-up is to attract new clients. Digital marketing offers a simple and affordable, contemporary solution. It’s helped to level the playing fields somewhat. Now you can reach a wide audience, spread over a diverse area quickly and easy.
It’s a huge step-up from more traditional marketing media. Twenty or thirty years ago, you’d have to pay some serious money to get an ad aired. Now all you need is a halfway decent mobile phone and a YouTube account.
The downside, naturally, is that everyone is taking advantage. The digital landscape is getting extremely crowded. To stand out, you need to do some serious prep work. That’s why I’d recommend revisiting an old favorite – Email marketing.
The Benefits of Email Marketing
Great reach
Inexpensive
Easy to customize
Can be scheduled at the optimal time
The Downside of Email Marketing
The downside is partly that they are so easy to ignore. People, in general, are becoming less tolerant of marketing. If they identify your email as too sales-oriented, or spammy, they’re bound to ignore it and possibly unsubscribe off your list.
That’s assuming, of course, that they even make it into the recipient’s inbox. According to one of the leading online security experts, EveryCloud, the main risk to your cybersecurity is human error.
As a result, the company has developed a cloud-based app that scans emails before they are delivered to the server. That’s great for the company wanting to avoid cyber threats, but it’s not great for the marketer.
How Can We Improve Our Email Campaigns?
In short, you want to make your email seem as legitimate as possible. Here are some dead giveaways that could land your email in the spam folder
Lots of links – If you’re creating a marketing email, you’ll want a link for your call of action and perhaps to some research. Aim for fewer links.
Sales language – Using words like ‘Sale’, ‘Promotion’, ‘Great Deal’, and so on will get you shot down fast.
A very large file – Marketing research proves that a picture really is worth a thousand words. The problem is that images are big files. Rethink the images you want to include. Do they add enough value for the bulk that they’re adding? When you’ve whittled it down to a couple of well-chosen images, be sure to compress them to save even more space.
Not mobile-friendly – When designing the layout for your email, tailor it for the mobile user. An email that displays well on a mobile device will look good on a desktop as well. The reverse is not necessarily true. Start by using larger, clearer fonts, single columns, and full-width pictures. Then work on getting the file as small as possible so that it loads fast.
Final Notes
Email marketing requires some serious planning on your part. In the end, though, you’ll find that the effort is well-rewarded. Put a little more thought and effort into your next email campaign, and you’ll see the improved results for yourself.
How many times have you opened and read an email from a company because the subject line was interesting and content in the email was personalized? That company could either be an e-commerce firm promoting discounts on products or company cross-selling products as per your purchase history or sending a reminder about the price increase in items left in the shopping cart. Such companies create effective & customized email drip campaigns with tools like Snov.io. Drip emails are extremely useful and bring a lot of profit to their users.
It is the era of hyper-personalization and the intent of making an important decision [buying, subscribing to a newsletter, etc.] is key when the email is personalized. As per a report, 86% of consumers who responded to the survey feel that personalization plays a major role in making purchase decisions.
Though social media marketing is an integral part of online marketing strategy, email marketing is still a vital piece as far as online marketing is concerned. It is also referred to as Drip Email Marketing which is a direct marketing strategy where promotional pieces are sent across to existing and prospective customers, details of which are captured in a lead nurturing campaign. The name is derived from drip irrigation where plants & crops are watered in small amounts over a long period of time to achieve the necessary results. Just the same is with drip emails: one by one, emails are sent to people with some pauses.
Why use Snov.io?
Snov.io is a leading platform using which customers can create effective email drip campaigns that can be sent at different phases of the sales funnel or campaign’s life-cycle. It follows a freemium model hence you can use the majority of the features before you plan to use the premium version. The primary benefit of drip campaigns is that it keeps the existing customers updated about the progress as far as the product is concerned and generates better opportunities to cross-sell products. Using drip emails from Snov.io, you can schedule, design, and send drip campaigns based on specific actions, triggers, or customer history. It is a great way to keep the customers and users engaged through the life-cycle that comprises stages – Awareness, Interest, Consideration, and Purchase [pre & post].
Manual sending emails is a challenging task and it will not yield the same results like email drip campaigns built with the help of Snov.io. Using Snov.io, you can set multiple-step hyper-personalized email campaigns with minimal effort and track results to measure effectiveness and perform necessary actions. To get started with the creation of drip campaigns on Snov.io, you need to create an account on the platform.
A step-by-step guide to creating an email drip campaign
Now that you are logged in, you are all set to create an email drip campaign on Snov.io. Below, there are some of the major steps you need to take.
1. You need to visit the Email Drip Campaigns section on the web application. In this section, you can see a list of all the email drip campaigns that you have created so far. Click the New drip campaign button and give an appropriate name to the campaign. The name should be in-line with the purpose of the campaign; names like Campaign-1, Campaign-2, etc. should be avoided.
2. You can choose one of the active accounts or set up a new one for sending emails. Once you have the list of contacts to which you plan to send an email drip campaign, you need to decide whether you want to send emails to only verified email addresses or to all. If a recipient has multiple email addresses, you have the option to choose whether the campaign should be sent to all of them or only to the first one.
3. Once you select the sender’s email account the users will reply to or feedback will be sent, you need to select the recipients of the drip campaign. It is better to create a list of recipients since it eases the task of managing the list. There are four types of elements to create an email drip campaign – Email, Trigger, Delay, and Goal. In the campaign created by us, we seek feedback about the blog from our subscribers.
4. It is recommended to add the elements of personalization in a drip campaign since they make the campaign more effective. By default, there are 11 system variables, though if you need more, you can manually add the ones you need.
5. You can set a Trigger condition [Contact opened email or Contact clicked on the link from email] after which the drip campaign will stop for certain time duration and the next email will be sent later.
6. You can add the Delay element that will pause the campaign for the specified time after the reply is received.
7. Your drip emails may have a certain goal or goals associated with it e.g. in our case, no further emails should be sent to the subscribers after the feedback is received. After the set Goal is achieved, no further emails are sent in the automation flow. This gives flexibility to the campaign creator since they need not monitor the goals all the time. Shown below is the final drip campaign that we’ve created for seeking feedback about the blog from our subscribers.
The effectiveness of any type of email campaign also depends on the time when the campaign is sent to the recipient. For example, if your users are predominantly from India, it makes sense that the campaign is scheduled according to Indian Standard Time [IST]. Snov.io Email Drip Campaigns tool also lets you schedule campaigns as per different zones that you can achieve the best Click Through Rate [CTR] or Click To Open Rate [CTOR].
Snov.io Email Drip Campaigns benefits
To persuade you, we’ve collected some benefits of using the Snov.io Email Drip Campaigns tool.
Drip email in minutes: You can create a highly-customized email drip campaign within minutes since the tool is easy-to-use and does not require any technical know-how.
Track campaign performance: You can send emails to your users and customers in one go and keep a track of the campaign performance. You also have the flexibility to fine-tune the campaign in case it does not show relevant results.
Schedule campaigns for better results: You can schedule campaigns based on your customer’s time zone so that the campaign reaches the intended recipients when it matters the most!
If you are an email marketer looking to improve the performance of the sales funnel, you should definitely give Snov.io Email Drip Campaigns a try.
Are you looking to double your profit with email marketing? Then you have landed on the right place. Here I am going to explain the most accurate and authentic information to make your efforts easier with email marketing. Commonly Email marketing is the action of sending an economic message, generally to a group of people using email. But a better definition of email marketing is the use of email to develop relationships with potential customers. It is gaining popularity among the trade for many good reasons, such as effective and easier to reach audience, low cost of marketing, etc. You can easily double your profits by adopting some simple practices that will take your email marketing to unprecedented levels. While it has become one of the best sources of generating opportunities and gains in the market, there is more you can do with email marketing.
The main two big advantages of email marketing are cost and ease of access. Emailing is a cost free method to advertise your company and its products and services compared to many other types of marketing. It is also utterly easy way to set up and route an email marketing campaign. So in this post, I would like to show you how to maximize your profit with 5 tips on email marketing.
Make sure that your emails can be symbolize
Email symbolization has proven greater results of improving transaction rates, conversion rates and more. So, it is the first and best way to double your profits using email marketing .The symbolized email can give you more revenue than non- symbolized email. The higher level of symbolization you use will boost up your emails.
You can easily add a symbolization token in your emails like a first name or location to your email subject lines that will also help you double your profits through emails. It also makes the customer feel comfort and familiarity when opening up about their desires and expectations with your business. You can symbolize your emails by using phrases/symbols like ‘top listener’ be the first one to get accesses’ as it provides a sense of exclusivity to the customer, making them feel important.
Make sure to keep your email brief and charming
Another important tip for email marketing is to make sure to keep your email short and charming. With the increase in the number of emails in the inboxes of the audience, people do not have time to read each and every one of the emails completely. Like this time, it is the best way to keep your emails brief and eye catching, so that the customers can read and understand what you have to deliver very easily.
Short and informative like charming emails easily snap attention of customers to the call to action button. Elegantly, emails should not be longer than a few sentences. You can annotate the important message as bullets in your emails. You can see the changes in your profit while sending very charming and attractive emails.
Make sure to send your emails regularly
Normally inboxes of your customers are being full filled with numerous emails everyday from anywhere in the world. So, it may cause to lose your client’s precious attention. You have to speak up and communicate with your clients regularly. Many marketers are afraid of making their list by emailing customers too often.
One of the most essential ways to create a profitable business is to get your prospects and customers to trust you. Most companies are less willing to send emails periodically to their customers, as they fear that their subscribers will be excluded from their list. To develop an impassable bond and a good relationship with customers, just as you slowly build a good relationship with a new person you know and who eventually becomes your trusted friend. It is the amazing way that client starts emailing their list more often.
Make sure to use unique content and give some offers to customers
Use unique and rare content is another method to improve your profit. Nowadays the number of emails getting in the inbox of customers increasing invariably, it has been observed that the email opening rates are falling rapidly. Hence, you have to work strong for audience to open your marketing emails.
One of the best ways to do this is to create an unconventional and stunning headline which is the brief description of the matter inside the email. If you are providing some offers to the customers like promotional gifts, discount codes, or coupons, then it will help to earn more profit for your business. Take use of more imagination while creating a headline, as these are the ones that represent your email. Your customer will decide whether to open your email or not from the heading and offer you provide. Brief and peculiar headings are easier to read and grasp the curiosity of the customer to know what is further written in your email.
Make sure to categorize your customers and collect feedback
Customer categorization is another method lead to increase your profit on email marketing. There are several methods to categorize the customers based on gender, language, location, age, behavioral, demographic, social data segmentation etc. By categorize your list and sending only relevant information to customers of each list.
Then you can see that the improvement in your profit. And also collect feedback from each and every customer. While collecting feedback from customers you will get an idea about what they need exact from your end. Then you can work for making changes in your email. Once you have made changes, announce it to your entire audience via email.
Though we have touched upon some of the important strategies of Email Marketing, it is very important to understand the Dont’s of email marketing. Though there would be plenty of resources available on the internet, it is always handy if the information comes in a very concise format, preferably an infographic. The handy infographic from Campaign Monitor details email marketing Do’s & Don’ts every marketer should know before the email campaigns are delivered to their customers.
According to my opinion these are the most five important tips to double your profit on email marketing. By following these tips you can see the change in your profit day by day. You can reach your target audiences directly in your inbox. Deliver personalized messages that drive more conversions than email. And giving some offers like promotional gifts, discount codes, or coupons to the customers, it will help to increase the audience attention and getting more profit. Email marketing strategies can be utilized by a small, medium and large scale business, and if done properly and regularly you might just find your customer doubling or tripling in size.
So start fixing the holes in your email marketing campaign…
About the Author
Jamie Alexander is a leading writer at HealthExeData, which delivers a full range of affordable sales and marketing solutions to help businesses acquire, manage and retain customers. His main affection is to help people in all forms of email marketing and content marketing.
In case you didn’t know, social media is still the primary method used by marketers to boost sales and keep people engaged. Marketing has relocated to the online environment completely, and if you haven’t started using the web to promote your brand and product, you should start right away. The competition is fierce, and it is becoming increasingly difficult for companies to stand above the crowd. Yet, it’s not impossible to make yourself noticed, if you know how to do it. According to a report issued by Fast Company, nearly 93% of marketers today use social media channels to promote their startups.
Social media-a powerful marketing tool
It’s no longer a secret that the key to success in business is guaranteed if you know how to use social media. For the average marketer, social media is a channel that opens a lot of possibilities. Platforms like Google+, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest have millions of users. More than a half use the online environment to get information and buy things. We want to stay connected, and we use advanced technology every day. This means that the best way to increase brand awareness is to go online.
Craft a marketing plan
The best way to settle on a marketing strategy is to set up a plan first. Make a website, connect it to social media platforms, and start promoting your business. But don’t focus on selling too much. In the beginning, it is smarter to center your attention on building a target audience. Write quality content people can relate to, and stick to organic likes and shares. Don’t opt for paid ads just yet. You need time for your content to be indexed in Google, and the more patient you are the better chances you have to boost engagement.
Targeted customers
Before doing anything else, you need to have a target audience for your business. What’s the purpose of your brand? To whom you’re addressing your products? It is fundamental to be disciplined and craft a plan first. For example, if your business sells anti-wrinkle beauty products, then you need to target your audience at mature women with ages between 25 and 40. Teens won’t have an interest to buy, and to men, your products are useless. Plan very carefully, and stay focused on your brand’s mission and end goals.
If you focus on spending money and time on marketing, but your attempts are not driving sales, then you’ve probably targeted the wrong audience. Narrow down your search and focus on your niche. Write content that directly links to your products and mission, and learn to say NO. Your brand will eventually become popular on the web, and companies will want to pay you to place ads on your site. But if your brand targets anti-wrinkle products for women, ads on men’s products won’t bring any value to your brand. Learn to prioritize!
Assess the competition
Assessing the competition is yet another efficient way you can use to boost sales and increase brand awareness. Sadly, many marketers today don’t even bother looking at the competition, and they wrongfully assume that their strategy is the best. How do you know that? It is frustrating and infuriating to see that people would rather buy from others than you. But why? There must be a reason. Perform a thorough analysis on your main competitor, and check to see what they can offer that you can’t. For example, they might have better prices and package deals. Maybe they offer better discounts, or maybe their products are more visually appealing than yours. Have a look on their website, and find a way to stand out. Offer incentives that they haven’t thought of yet.
The world of marketing has changed a lot in the past 10 years. With the advent of technology and social media, exposure is no longer achieved offline. The online world is the future of marketing. You might be tempted to believe that conventional ads, banners, and even a membership card print are powerful marketing methods. You’re right, they are. But for a seamless experience, you need to blend offline marketing tactics with online approaches to appeal to a wider, more focused target audience.
Marketing is an essential part of any new start-up or business. To succeed in whatever domain you’re targeting, you need to pay more attention to direct mail marketing as it is still a fundamental marketing tool. Without it, you won’t be able to diversify your customer base. Today’s competitive business environment makes it hard for companies to stand out. And yet, it’s not something impossible to achieve. In spite of the fact that many have ditched email in favour of social media, email marketing remains one of the most productive ways to win over customers. Here are some guidelines to help you leverage your power and grow your business using direct mail marketing.
Augmented reality
Direct mail is probably one of the oldest (but also most effective) forms of marketing a business. In the last couple of years, advanced technology and social media has made this strategy go extinct. Believe it or not, very few companies still use emails to appeal to customers; and that’s because many rely on sponsored Facebook ads and tweets. The good news is there’s still great power in direct mail; you just have to learn how to use it and make it work for your business goals. For your business to stand out and make itself different from all other emails people get in their inboxes, you need to blend email marketing with augmented reality apps, thus bring your products and services to life. There are sensible ways companies can use to integrate technology into their marketing campaign and win over valuable customers.
Incentives
People love getting stuff for free, whether we’re talking about discounts, vouchers, or any other freebies. Truth be told, you can’t get your product out there without offering some free samples to people; because free samples might be exactly what people need to buy, and even spread the word. However, you shouldn’t just send emails with subject lines titled “Click here to get X for free” because nobody will want it. You have to be creative and craft a message that sounds interesting and attention-grabbing. To appeal to your customers, you have to stand out from your competition.
Put some thought into your emails
Believe it or not, some of the world’s biggest brands make one huge mistake when sending emails to customers – they don’t put enough thought into the creation of their message. Whether you want to offer something to customers for free or invite them to read your latest post, it is important to make sure your email sounds well – it has to be both structurally and grammatically correct. If you’re not the most experienced writer, hire someone to handle the copy-writing. Innovative engaging and creative emails work the best
Be different
The power of direct mail marketing can be outstanding. To make your emails stand out, you have to be different. Your approach has to be unique and ingenious for people to want to know more. Direct mail might be one of the oldest and most used marketing forms out there, but for an email to be memorable it has to engage. Think outside the box for once, and dare to come up with the most out of the ordinary subject lines. Make your emails persuasive and you’ll be able to appeal to a wider audience. Don’t rely solely on social media, as social media is no personal and it doesn’t make customers feel special and appreciated.
Combined campaigns
The finest companies out there abide by more than one technique to market their business. Direct mail marketing can work miracles; however it must be integrated into additional campaigns to provide you with the best results. Email marketing doesn’t work alone; it has to be used together with direct mail and social media to boost your company’s bottom line and yield dividends.
Whatever business objectives you might have for this 2016, make sure to implement the best strategies. Increase brand awareness with social media, but make your potential customers feel that you can about them with email and direct mail marketing. Have a target audience in mind before getting started, and focus on a group of people that might actually have an interest to buy whatever you’re selling.
How many times, have we as consumers un-subscribed from emailer’s sent by e-commerce companies, Banks etc. since it clogs the mail-box & “un-subscription” was the only option left for the consumer 🙂 Today we have a guest-article by Varun John of iCubes, a firm specializing in Email-Marketing where he gives insights into “Email-Marketing”.
For the email marketer, the top priority would be to get as many promotional emails into the inbox as possible. But have you ever considered that you might be over-doing it? Shooting campaigns by the dozens can be a huge turn off for your clients. Continue the practice & they will soon vanish from your mailing list. Don’t want such a scenario? It’s time to adopt an optimum frequency for your mailing.
If someone opts to receive your campaigns, newsletters and offer mails your first priority must be to make them appreciate and antedate your campaigns. This isn’t as simple a task as it looks. You need regular analysis, constant innovation in content and smart segmentation to ensure email fatigue does not happen.
Obviously, you want to engage customers as much as possible but you risk running into email fatigue. So you need to weigh in the pros and cons and make an intelligent move from therein.
What is the optimum frequency for my campaigns ?
Sorry to break the bad news, but there is no optimum frequency to send your mails. You can only optimize the frequency with which you target inboxes separately but as a collective there is no frequency that could please everyone. Some might want more mails from your side while othere may require only a few. Irrespective of how often your mails reach your audience, engagment solely relies on how relevant and engaging the content within your mails are.
A thorough understanding of your audience using demo-graphical and behavioral data can get you better insights on customer profiles. This will make your frequency customized and intelligent. You end sending fewer mails than before but the engagment and ROI you gather off doesn’t nosedive. In fact, with a custom frequency you are more likely to get an increased ROI & better customer engagement and loyalty.
Determining the ideal frequency
Before you fiddle about getting the optimal frequency another question needs to be answered. Are you mails reaching inbox? Email fatigue is usually understood when you see a decline in open and click rates. But beware, this might be solely because your deliverability has been affected severely.
As ISPs restlessly and relentlessly change their algorithms to improve customer experience, they take into account a whole lot of factors to determine whom to block. One of the latest additions is checking into average read time that a mail gets. If your emails remain stale, then your mails would soon be making trips to the Junk folder. Keep shooting campaigns on an aggressive pace, your domain reputation will soon get trashed !!!
If deliverability is not the concern, your content most definitely is. Would you like to see the same movie over and over again in just a few days ? Not likely. Your mails are just the same. If your content isn’t fresh and trendy, plus your mails bombard people’s inbox getting blocked is inevitable. Regular monitoring of data can help you resolve many doubts about what your clients are looking for.
Have you ever shared a profile update mailer ?
No, send one right away so you give the control back to the customer. When someone joins your subscriber list, always send a profile update mailer which askes the following questions:
What sort of content would they like?
How often they would like to connect?
In fact, you could have a “Click Option” to update preferences of content and frequency in every campaign. The more control that goes to the customer, the faster & smarter you can implement suitable strategies.
Let them go
One of the major disappointments that email marketers face is when someone unsubscribes from the list. However, there is a silver lining. Inactive users distort your performance metrics so it’s good to have only those people who love your mails.
Your mailing frequency should change according to the season because expectations vary around the year. In the wake of the holiday season, it is advisable to back down on your offer mailers. Give your subscribers time to detox and rejuvenate.
To continue engagement over this period, set up an automated series of campaigns. The content for each segment you create can vary according to preferences and tastes. A capability one must nurture here is the ability to predict email fatigue across the different demographics. A little bit of experimentation and a whole lot of analysis can help you achieve smart and intuitive prediction models.
About the author
Varun John is a content and social media marketer for iCubes, an ESP provider dedicated towards creating an Email marketing India ecosystem. He is always hunting for new ways for companies to engage with people using innovative technology, insightful data & intelligent marketing. He loves to spend time on his guitar and is an avid reader of advertising techniques, human psychology & history.
If you have a business which provides goods or services, you’re probably no stranger to the power of Email Marketing. It’s an incredibly powerful tool for any marketing you do – not only is it very cheap compared with printed material, it’s highly targeted & very measurable. With a little bit of forward planning, email marketing can ensure you’re speaking to the right people, at the right time, giving the right message. Do it right & with just a few clicks of a button you’ll reap the rewards. But when it comes to selling branded products, email marketing really does come into its own.
In this article, email marketing provider Little Green Plane will share some top tips to make sure your branded products fly off the shelf. For more information about how you can create great email campaigns, please visit the website.
Selling your wares
Believe it or not, you don’t need to sell through email marketing to get sales. Sounds funny right?
From a personal point of view, your email inbox is probably creaking at the seams with emails offering you products and discounts – but just how often do you choose to buy? The first rule of email marketing should be to keep in touch with your fans and share your world. Connect and keep in touch, Communicate and let them know what’s happening at your business, Curate and invite them to get involved with you, and Create engaging content. These four Cs are vital when it comes to selling branded products, because the more you communicate the more likely people will connect with you. Once they do they’ll be more likely to buy!
Nurture your friends
For a business selling branded products, loyalty is key. After all, why would people be interested in buying your products if they don’t like you?
Nurturing your friends is crucial if you want to get sales – and that’s where email marketing can really help because it lets you send messages to the right people at the right time [this is called segmenting]. If you send out a powerful message to targeted groups you’ll be more likely to get a response. As point #1 says, create something worth sharing with your emails and give people something they find interesting and want to share on social media. If you can prove that you are a business worth following through a highly targeted email, you’ll be thought of as a business worth spending money on.
Theme your emails
The beauty of email marketing is that you can make sure your message, like your branded products, convey your business colors and brand perfectly. With a little bit of design work you can make your emails stand out. Most email marketing software lets you change the font, font size and text color – and you can change the color of the background, and add nice footers, headers and more! If you change your mind, you can always select a different theme option and it will change and keep all your content too.
If you treat your emails like your branded products you’ll build confidence and trust. Remember – the simpler the better.
