Does your business nail email marketing?

Interview #2 with Matt Miller of Mogul

I have recently started working with Mogul as their Digital Growth Consultant and this is the second in a series of interviews with subject matter experts within the business. The intention is to bring you material you can learn from and apply in your own business.

Matt Miller is a co-founder of Mogul and he works as a digital consultant, strategist, and futurist. This time we are talking about the importance of email marketing.

Q: What is email marketing?

Email marketing, email newsletters or EDM (electronic direct mail) are all terms used to describe one of the most valuable ways in which you can reach out to your customers and grow your business.

Unlike advertising on social platforms, in print or on TV and radio, your subscribed audience has already shown an interest in your brand and your products or services – they are warm leads which you can nurture through personalised communications direct to their inbox. 

And it definitely works: three-quarters of companies agree that email offers “excellent” to “good” ROI.

 Q: What is an important trend we should be aware of?

One of the big trends in marketing in recent years has been the concept of ‘segment of one’ marketing – the ability to personalise messaging to an individual based on data gathered through tracking and understanding customer behaviour. Customers now expect personalised, real-time communications, and your direct email communications are a critical channel in this experience.

Q: So how do we create effective email marketing campaigns?

First of all, decide what you are hoping to achieve, keep it focused - and measure thoroughly. 

What is the key message or action you want to convey to your customer? It’s tempting to shove a whole lot of info into one EDM, but actually it just usually means your message is diluted (and deleted) so be crystal clear on what you want out of your efforts.

Q: OK. What should we measure when we do email marketing?

You need to determine what metrics are the most important to measure your success. Are you hoping for sales, page visits, open rates, clicks rate, or a combination of the above? If you are just starting out, look for industry benchmarks as a starting point.

Most EDM platforms offer analytics such as open and click rates. Additionally, if you’re hoping your readers will click through to your website, Google Analytics is a great tool to measure the real impact on your business (especially if you have set up goals in your analytics relevant to your email campaign).

You can use measurement to refine your email marketing efforts as you go, by testing variables such as different subject lines, amount of content or different calls to action. A/B testing is a great way to do this (sending the same email with a variant and comparing the response rates). Nearly half (47%) of marketers say they sometimes test alternate subject lines to optimize email performance.

Q. How do you define your audience?

Emailing everybody in your contact list is rarely your best choice. In fact, 83% of companies use at least basic segmentation for their emails. If you have not defined personas for your customers, you need to create some. A persona is a fictitious person who represents one of your customer types. You might call a persona “Anne the accountant” or “Bob the boss”. Try to flesh them out as much as possible, to make your team think of them as real people. Then you can craft your messages to match these personas. Write in the style that they would use, and try to anticipate the problems that they are looking to solve.

Q: What is a top tip you can share with us?

If you want to get serious about email marketing, there are some pretty amazing marketing automation tools out there which are designed to enable you to segment your mailing list automatically based on data gathered through their transactions and behaviour – they aren’t cheap but they can massively increase your effectiveness (and bottom line). Examples are Hubspot, Marketo, and Intercom.

And, no matter what system you use, you need to create great content.

Q: Creating great content... How do we do that?

Make it relevant – Your content should be a direct flow-on from what your goal is. Remembering the ‘segment-of-one’, craft content that is directly relevant to your message, your audience, and where possible, the individual.   

Make it eye-catching – cut the words to a minimum and aim for engaging imagery or graphics with prominent calls to action. Lots of businesses do email marketing so you need to stand out! You also need to ensure your template is beautifully designed to represent your brand, and is responsive across all devices and platforms.

Make sure it’s high quality – spend the time checking spelling, links and how your email displays on various browsers and devices. We use a tool called Litmus that helps with these tests and it’s invaluable.

Q: When should we send our email newsletters?

CoSchedule did some analysis of data from ten top email marketing platforms and came back with an analysis that the best day to send emails is Tuesday, and Thursday if you send more than one per week. The best time is a bit varied with mid-morning being the number one option, and 8pm till midnight the second best option. But it really can vary by industry so it pays to test this with each email campaign you send until you get a good picture of what works for your audience.

Q: What if we need help?

It can all sound a bit technical and involved, so that’s why we offer this service to our clients. If you want to talk about starting up EDM campaigns for your business, or you think they just aren’t performing as well as they could, then get in contact and we’ll get you sorted! 

Statistics courtesy of Hubspot.

Thanks for the great tips on how to use email marketing to grow our businesses Matt.

About Kate Nankivell

Kate is the new Digital Growth Consultant with Mogul based in Auckland.

With an extensive background in corporate business development across a variety of industries and in business ownership, Kate is here to help you grow your sales and business. Passionate about solving your business problems with the digital strategies and online solutions that will deliver sales and business growth. I am focused on getting to know your business so that we can offer you a solution that delivers results.

If you are serious about digital marketing, contact me for a chat about how we can be of help.?

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