You've Got (Junk) Mail

Spam... No, not the ubiquitous, preserved, salty can of pork shoulder (I'm the only one in my family who despises it) that fed our soldiers during WWII. It's the massive amount of unsolicited messages sent through emails to people who may or may not be interested in what's being sold. With this, it's reasonable to assume Email Marketing is ineffectual; yet, statistics seem to prove our suppositions wrong. Email marketing can prove to be one of your greatest assets in reaching customers and driving revenue. In today's business world, I believe it's imperative for marketers to understand the value of inbound marketing: drawing customers to products or services that they want or need. Traditional methods of email marketing will put you at a huge disadvantage compared to your competitors, turning your long list of email addresses into an insufficient amount. So, to kick this off, let's go ahead and define Email Marketing: "email marketing entails sending one message to many people—dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people. It's permission-based, which means your readers must opt in to your newsletter, and you need to explain to them why they're receiving it."

Time to spoil you guys with some statistics. Email marketing is proven to have the most effective ROI (4,300%) for being one of the most inexpensive marketing tactics. With over 4 billion email accounts, 2.5 billion email users, and 122,500,000,000 emails sent every hour, email marketing is over 40x more efficient at acquiring new customers over social media because customers prefer the opt-in communication. 91% of consumers check their email daily, and 77% of consumers prefer email for marketing communications. Also, with the inherent rise of mobile devices, research suggests 30% of consumers now read their email exclusively on their digital apparatuses. For more informative information on email marketing statistics, check out this site!

When it comes down to it, the primary function of email is to close and nurture your leads into customers. It's about sending the right email, to the right audience, at the right time. Providing your leads with helpful, relevant content helps you develop a meaningful relationship with them as they're seeking information that can enhance some aspect of their life. However, email marketing doesn't stop there. After you've converted your lead into a customer, you can continue delighting your customer with pertinent emails (i.e. occasional check-in, or special customer-only extras), making them your biggest advocates.

Here are 10 best practices to effective email marketing:

1. Only send emails to the people who know you—Permission-based email marketing is the key route to increasing your subscription rate and decreasing your churn rate. It's imperative to ask for permission before adding a new contact to your email list. This also keeps you in compliance with President Bush's Can-Spam act.
2. Treat your contacts like they're people, not just names on a list—When someone opts in to your email list, they're eager for more information about your business. This could range from new individuals who are curious about what you're offering to repeat customers who want to stay up-to-date on your awesome services. This could be an opportunity to reward returning customers with a special offer. A typical email list will have a churn rate of 25-30% per year as they're constantly changing email addresses and such.
3. Send relevant content that adds value to your recipient—Remember, email marketing isn't about blasting every customer on your list with the same information you're offering. It's about listening to what your audience is interested in, and tailoring your content to drive a relevant and valuable experience for them. You can view what's most interesting by viewing your email reports to see which emails are being opened and which pieces of content are generating the most clicks.
4. Engage your audience with your content—Once you've figured out what content your contacts are looking for, then you can create even more engaging content. "Great content starts with having a well thought-out content plan, a list of reliable content sources, and a commitment to knowing your audience." This is where your creative landing pages appeal to the masses.
5. Maximize your delivery rate—This is where you keep an eye out for your spam reports. If someone on your contact list reports your email as unsolicited, it will be marked as spam. You should aim to keep your spam reports as low as possible. If failed to do so, it may be time to review the content your sending. It's also important to keep your unsubscribe rate as low as possible as well. A typical unsubscribe rate is between 0% and 0.5%.
6. Never share your email list—This is a big no no. Your customers are entrusting you with their privacy. It can be easy to damage your reputation and burn relationships you've worked so hard to build. Also, don't buy email lists from third-party vendors. You're ultimately paying for access to people who will most likely be uninteresting in what you have to sell.
7. Set expectations and follow through—Your leads are subscribing for a reason. They are expecting you to deliver something of value to them. If you fail to clarify what you're delivering, you may find them hitting the unsubscribe button. Also, Making it easy to unsubscribe is just as important—there's a chance they may come back in the future.
8. Look professional whenever you communicate—Having professionally designed email templates to represent your brand is an effective way of being professional for your contacts.
9. Review your results on a regular basis—Your most effective quantitative metrics are your open and click-through rates. Keep this in mind as you're adjusting your content and filtering your email list.
10. Go beyond the inbox—Integrate other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter into your emails to reach new customers and extend those relationships.

With all of this work and having accrued such a large list of email leads, you may be wondering if there's a simplified process to email marketing. Having worked your 9 to 5 with meetings and non-stop phone calls, where is the time for sending personalized emails? Well, that's where Marketing Automation comes in handy. Marketo gives us a brief definition for better understanding: "Marketing automation is a category of technology that allows companies to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows, so they can increase operational efficiency and grow revenue faster." Implementing such a system doesn't make you irrelevant as a marketer, it just makes you more effective at your job. According to Hubspot, it will "free up some of your time, while not compromising the authenticity of the content you’re producing. And it will help you reach your goals faster." Marketing automation allows you to nurture your leads through the conversion funnel and deliver highly-personalized messages that address your contacts specific barriers to purchase. In a nutshell, you're sending information based on your audience's behavior while aiding in easing their buying decision. As a marketer, it allows you to streamline the process of testing, analyzing, and optimizing while providing greater visibility into what your visitors and leads are actually doing.

Here are some companies that use these tools well:

Hubspot

Hubspot sets the par for small business marketing automation. They offer a wide variety of features geared toward small businesses eager to engage inbound marketing. Priced around $800 a month, they offer goal-based nurturing, custom workflows, salesforce integration, A/B test emails, and much more

Pardot

Pardot, by Salesforce, is ideal for B2B marketing automation. As a bigger contender, their standard marketing automation package starts at $1000 a month. They're more costly than some of their competitors, but that's because they're a bigger player in email marketing software.

Marketo

Where Hubspot takes the lead as a gold standard in small business marketing automation, Marketo is the instrument for larger scale operations. They offer a larger knowledge base with email marketing campaigns and CRM software. It's not as user friendly and is intended for larger companies with IT personnel. Reporting is available through a library of standard report formats.

For more information on email marketing, check out this e-book by Mailchimp.

Also, go ahead and watch this 1970 Monty Python sketch to gain a fuller understanding on "Spam Mail". The canned meat is portrayed as inescapable—kind of like the billions of junk emails we receive everyday.

Until next time,

Jonah Neuss