E-telligence

Email marketing isn't dead, the way you're using it is

Kate Barrett

• Publisher: Librotas
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781916489417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

Is email marketing dead? This topic has been debated for many years but if anything, it’s thriving and becoming an even more critical part of your marketing strategy.

Email underpins all other marketing efforts, by taking prospects from just becoming aware of your brand to developing a relationship with you, so that they become loyal customers and advocates.

But many organisations struggle with a lack of cohesive strategy, limited internal resources and budgets, inefficient processes and outdated technology.

To increase your email marketing results, you have to be clever with the communications you’re sending.

To stand out, you need to make sure that your potential customers’ needs, wants and desires are put at the forefront of your strategy. You need to be customer centric.

In this book, Kate will teach you to use email marketing more intelligently – hence ‘E-telligence’!

You’ll get a roadmap taking you through the five key stages to make a positive impact on your email marketing campaigns and to address the struggles you’re facing.

Through the knowledge imparted, including email marketing best practices and a range of examples, you will get a solid foundation on which to build your strategy and discover how to…

1. KNOW What You’ve Already Got – Conduct an email marketing audit
You’ll discover the importance of conducting an email marketing audit and key areas of your programme to analyse. These include your email marketing send strategy, data structure, use of segmentation and personalisation, automated campaign strategy (marketing automation), email design, results tracking, email marketing split testing approach and the importance of your technology and processes.

2. IMPROVE What You’re Doing – Optimise your email marketing
The #1 way you can take control of your email marketing and start making a difference to your results TODAY: optimise what you’re already doing!

Revisiting the same sections as in Chapter 1, in this chapter we go on to explore how you can make the most of your current strategy and increase the results you’re already seeing.

3. FILL IN Your Gaps – Build on your email marketing strategy
Chapter 3 allows you to build on your current efforts and consider how you can further optimise your email marketing strategy, through the implementation of customer centric campaigns, including enhancing the customer journey and multichannel marketing considerations.

4. GROW Your Audience – Email marketing list growth
In order to have a successful email marketing programme, you need to be communicating with the right kind of people. In this chapter we explore the email sign-up process, from being able to accurately quantify your email list, to analysing and optimising your current process, making y

CHAPTER 1

KNOW

What You’ve
Already Got

In order to start improving your email
marketing strategy, the best place to focus
your attention is not on what’s new and fancy
or shiny, but on what you’re already doing.

You’re probably already using email marketing to varying degrees of success within your business.

But do you know exactly what you’re sending, when and to whom?

Is it well documented and consistently reviewed?

If you have a programme just sending a couple of promotional emails a week to your list, for example, and nothing much else, you may be pretty confident that you do know exactly what you already have in place.

For those with more complex programmes already in place, even if you think you do, it’s so easy to miss something. For example, to not realise exactly how a trigger is working, that an email isn’t sending when/to whom you thought it was, or an unsubscribe link isn’t working.

Whichever end of the scale you’re at, I want you to start your journey to an amazingly successful, comprehensive email programme on the right foot, by knowing EXACTLY where you are now and, more importantly, where you want to go next.

The way to do this is to conduct an audit of your current strategy before you jump into any optimisation or addition of new campaigns (individual emails or a series of emails that work towards achieving your goals).

‘You can’t know where you’re going until
you know where you’ve been.’

Conducting an audit – a full review of exactly what’s happening with your email marketing right now – can seem like a big task.

But it is absolutely critical to help you pinpoint the areas where you’re not best serving your subscribers, and fill those gaps to create a better programme, as well as increase your results.

This audit document is something you should regularly keep up-to-date and be checking in with – a ‘living document’ if you will.

It will be something that other team members can pick up and understand exactly what’s going on in your business, and can be updated as you introduce additional campaigns to your strategy or pinpoint key learnings.

It will keep you moving forward and ensure you see results.

I’ve worked for many brands in the past and know what it’s like when you have so many responsibilities in your day-to-day role but also have senior management pressuring for more results, faster!

This document will help you to manage all of that and more. It will allow you to see the results of the work you are doing and provide a record, a baseline, for your next move.

So, where do you start?

The aim of the audit is not only to create a documented record of your current strategy, but also to pinpoint areas of strength and weakness in your current programme.

Using this information, you can then find solutions to problems (some you may not even have known existed, such as information being outdated) and improve your results.

To analyse your programme, you’ll need to pull together a wealth of data, including:

• campaign and segment performance data, including all statistics available to you such as opens, clicks, complaints, unsubscribes and conversion data.

• a list of all campaigns set up to send to subscribers. Don’t forget that these may not all be in one ESP (Email Service Provider – the technology you are using to create and send your emails); some may be triggered from internal systems, your CRM (Customer Relationship Management system) or your eCommerce platform, for example. Make sure you ask other people in your organisation (specifically IT) about ANY emails that are sent to subscribers.

You’ll also need to get:

○ screenshots of each of these emails

○ campaign details (such as when the emails are sent and the main purpose of them)

○ why they are sent from each system (if applicable – for example, transactional emails sent from your eCommerce platform may be set up in this way as there is not currently a link between it and your ESP)

○ and any other information that will allow you to analyse what you already have in place.

• different responses to your programme within the business. To do this, conduct a questionnaire with different departments (for example, customer services) and find out what their experience of the company email programme has been, as well as any feedback, comments or complaints they have received from customers and prospects about it. What do they think needs to be changed/added to make the communications better?

• your subscribers’ view of your current campaigns – send a short questionnaire to subscribers or use an in-email poll to gain valuable feedback! What do they most like/dislike about your emails? Do they find them interesting and relevant? Are they too long? Ask questions that will help to delve into the mind of the customer and use this information at each stage of your audit to better understand the impact different areas have in real life. But don’t forget to keep it short; no one likes long surveys so try and keep it to 5 questions or less in order to maximise response.

Over the following eight sections of this chapter, we’ll evaluate the key areas of your programme, drawing on the knowledge you’ve gathered from these sources.

The areas we will look at include:

Follow this as a framework of key elements to analyse when reviewing your current strategy.

The additional section you should also be evaluating is your list acquisition process – we will look at this separately in Chapter 4.

TAKE ACTION

As you work through each section in this chapter, rate yourself with a score between 0 and 10 for each of the eight areas depending on how you view your programme now (with 0 being no strategy in place within that area, and 10 being a complete, comprehensive strategy with no improvements needed).

This will highlight the areas where you have the most work to do.

It is also useful as a benchmark to come back to as you improve each section, and to monitor your progress going forward.

You can download a copy of this chart to fill in for your business here:
www.etelligencebook.com/members/step1/benchmark/

1.1

Send Strategy

‘A goal without a plan is just a wish.’
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

As I mentioned in the Introduction, a lack of strategy is one of the most significant challenges to successfully executing email marketing programmes and is the first place to start when it comes to reviewing your current processes.

Do You Have a Clear, Documented Email Marketing Strategy?

Having a documented plan of where you want to go and how you’re going to get there is essential and can offer a multitude of benefits.

A well thought-out strategy will allow you to:

• identify your best customers and help you to better understand their needs.

• implement the most relevant and targeted campaigns to gain the best possible results.

• identify prospects/customers at different stages of the customer journey, giving you insights into how best to serve the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1: KNOW What You’ve Already Got
• CHAPTER 2: IMPROVE What You’re Doing
• CHAPTER 3:FILL IN Your Gaps
• CHAPTER 4: GROW Your Audience
• CHAPTER 5: REACH Your Audience
• Email Marketing Isn’T Dead, The Way You’Re Using It Is…
• Acknowledgements
• About eFocus Marketing
• Appendices
• References