Email: Digital Marketing Bread and Butter

Moving From Spam To Inbox Relevance

Effective email marketing can turn 10% of subscribers into customers. 

Various digital channels are great for increasing brand awareness, growing traffic, engaging audience and much more. Email, on the other hand, is where the action happens.

​It is the digital channel that permits genuine business to take place. But, in order to maximize ROI, many variables must be aligned in the best possible way.

 Email marketing involves the regular delivery of information to subscribers. Email is a great way to enhance conversion. They are useful for:

• List Nurturing Emails: Emails that gain subscriber trust in order to later make a purchase, or take action.
• Emotional Selling: Emails that tap into emotion and move subscribers to make buying decisions.
• Pre-Launch Emails: Emails that build anticipation, ahead of your product or event launch.
• Discount Offer Emails: Discount and time limited offer emails to push your subscribers to buy or take action.
• Product Launch Emails: Ready to launch your product or service? Use these emails to encourage subscribers to purchase.
• Re-engagement Emails: This type of emails reawakens dead email lists and make subscribers responsive.
• Story-Telling Emails: Emails that use story-base content to engage audience and pitch product at the end.

Opt-In/Opt-Out
An opt-in email list is a collection of emails from subscribers who have given you permission to contact them via email. This means they are aware that you have added them to your mailing list and have accepted to receive communications from you.

If you want new subscribers to sign up for email communication, make it simple for them to do so. Remove the informational stumbling blocks. Ask for as little information as possible. Most of the time, all you need is an email address. That, together with the assurance of complete confidentiality and non-disclosure of email addresses, should be enough to attract subscribers.

Never send emails to those who haven't expressed an interest in receiving them. In every email correspondence, subscribers should be able to unsubscribe from the list. This is usually done by including an opt-out link in every email.

Building an opt-in email list ensures that a larger percentage of your subscribers are interested in what you have to offer. As a result, you'll have a very engaged (and profitable) list. One of the key reasons you should avoid unethical tactics like renting or purchasing lists is because they rarely engage.

Double Opt-In: A double opt-in simply means that a new subscriber will receive a confirmation email with a link that they must click to confirm that they truly want to be included to your mailing list.

Data Privacy: Because rules governing the acquisition and use of personal data are constantly changing, it's now more important than ever to use a double opt-in method while building your email list. Data privacy is a large topic that cannot be fully addressed in this document. The items they include are GDPR compliance, EU-based data servers, and the CLOUD Act. Data privacy laws exist in a number of states, including California and New York. Make sure you're following them if you have audiences in those areas.

Audience Selection
Depending on what your goals are, you need to select audience based certain variables. This is a very important first step that is often overlooked. Some of the questions that factor in are:

• What demographic based on location, age, gender, behavior, and interests etc. are you targeting?
• What buying stage, are they customers/donors or prospects?
• How long have they been subscribers?
• Have they engage in prior communications?
• What is their propensity to give or take action on the offer?

Once you've answered these basic questions, you are now ready to pull a list of subscribers that a more likely to respond to your email communication. 

Smart segments help provide tailored information to your target audience. That way, you can be sure your audience is only getting what they actually want to receive. It also shapes content to deliver emails with the type of content they like. Either by providing them through known preferences or advanced analytics.

Content
Content is king. This is true of email as anywhere else. When you create email, provide useful information. Keep it short and simple. If there is too much content, break it up into an email series of more than one email. Take a look at your competitors. Sign up for the competition's email newsletter. Find and close the gaps in their content offerings. What better way to take that first step?

Messaging: Bring a brand voice in your email content to resonate with subscribers. Also, keep in mind that subscribers want useful information in a way that is easy to digest.

Subject Line: A good subject line is the difference between spam and good reading. Write a subject line that encourages recipients to read open the email.

Snippets: Some email clients offer a preview window which allows recipients to read the pre-header before opening the email. Use this as shop display window to pull in the audience. If you are sending a discount offer email. Show the discount in the pre-header such as "20% off on all first orders". If you are doing a fundraiser with a match, include copy such as "Your Gift Double Today"

Layout: Most users now access email through their phone. Ensure your email layout is designed to fit well in smaller devices. “A picture is worth a thousand words.” You want to place images and text in a layout that tells the narrative in a way that leads to action. For instance, An image at the top tend to increase readership of the rest of the email content.

It's important to provide the main call-to-action on the email offer. Typically in three places. At the top, middle and bottom of the email. This is because some readers don't read the full email and most are pressed for time, while others want to read the entire email before acting on anything; you want to accommodate everyone to improve your conversion.

Calls-to-Action
What you want the subscriber to perform is called a call-to-action. Watch a video, buy something, donate, show your support, read an article, and so on. Subscribers should not need to guess at what you want them to do next. Make sure the email messaging and calls-to-action are included and visible. 

There are more ways to use email to convert subscribers. They can also be amplifiers to get more of your offer to more people. You can do this by:

Tell-a-friend: Make it simple for your subscribers to forward your email to their friends and colleagues. By incorporating a send-to-a-friend link in your email, you can directly invite subscribers to share your content.

Social media share: Your subscribers are your best advocates. They are already dedicated fans of your brand. Integrate social share buttons inside your email campaigns. Consider including links to share the email offer on social media. And when your subscribers share with their friends, these friends are more likely to join your list and become supporters too.

Signature Line
Signature lines are often ignored for its importance. This element of email marketing can validate the authenticity of the offer. Not just a close, it is a part of every step of your buyer’s journey. It can be the last pitch to convince a recipient or provide a follow up engagement to surveys, more information, social media and other steps in the journey.

Deliverability
The capacity to successfully send emails to subscribers' inboxes is known as email deliverability. With a delivery rate of 99 percent, it's a good sign. Anything less should be checked for bounced emails, which can be a temporary delivery issue (soft bounce) caused by a server outage or a permanent error (hard bounce) caused by an invalid email address.

Maintaining the email file on a regular basis will increase deliverability and prevent your email domain from being blacklisted as a result of spam reports. The cleaner the list, the higher the deliverability rate.​

Email KPIs
Email marketing platforms allow you to access the effectiveness of your email campaigns. It provides a slew of metrics to obtain intel on not just the performance but the behavior of the reader. From whether they opened it and clicked through to your offer, or never even received or let alone read it. The five most important KPIs to look at for any email communication are:

1. # of emails delivered: How many emails made it to the recipients inbox
2. # of emails opened: How many recipients opened the email
3. Click-through rate: How many recipients clicked on a link in the email
4. Click-to-open rate:  How many recipients opened the email vs how many clicked on a link
5. Unsubscribe rate: How many recipients opt-outed of receiving further email communication

Doing email marketing right can get the cash registers jingling all the way to the bank. With a little effort, email delivers benefits that a much more expensive digital campaign would normally.

To get more from your email marketing efforts, visit ☛ DigitXIntegrated