All of us are clueless at one time or another. Clues for the Clueless Email Marketer is for kitchen table operations with big dreams. Mom and pop shops looking to remain a community staple for years to come. For small business owners wearing multiple hats or the designer or social media manager who…
andy.shore@benchmarkemail.com (andy.shore@benchmarkemail.com)
Holidays are an excellent time to seize an opportunity for email marketing. Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Christmas, Channukah, New Years, Valentine's Day and every other holiday give you an excuse to be in your subscribers' inbox. Your competitors will be there and you should be too.
One of the biggest advantages of email marketing is how timely it can be. You can create an email campaign quickly when there is a conversation taking place in the zeitgeist. Listen to learn how you can put this strategy to use!
Your email reports are an insight into the minds of your subscribers. It gives you invaluable information that is many times more honest than if you were to ask them a question. You can take the information from your reports and improve each next email campaign you send.
This sounds like it would be a scary topic, but it's a normal part of the email marketing experience. Learning how to manage unsubscribes and avoid abuse complaints will help you reduce list churn and grow your list more quickly.
One of the age-old questions with email marketing is "when is the best time to send an email?" Your email reports can help you with this information. You can see when your subscribers are opening your email campaigns.
Paying attention to what is happening after you hit send is an important part of email marketing. Click-through rate tells you if the content in your email is compelling enough to get them to go to your website and buy something.
Your email reports show what is (and isn't) working in your email campaigns. Open rates can show you if your Subject Line and From Name are working, as well as if your content is good.
These last two topics round out our focus on free resources for feedback. Listen and find out how you can use case studies and support documentation to attain better feedback on your customers and subscribers.
Search engines return the information that they deem most relevant to a query. So, you can find out what the Internet things about your business just by searching for it. Additionally, brands spend a lot of time and resources on creating eBooks, Manuals and Guides. You can turn there to learn what's going on in your space.
YouTube is the second largest search engine. So, it's not hard to see why you'd want to go there and other video sharing sites to watch reviews on your company and other related videos. Newsletters can also be an incredible resource for feedback.
There are places on the Internet dedicated to your customers sharing how they feel about your business. See what they're saying publicly about your brand.
There are conversations going on all over the Internet. One such place where you can get some insight into your business and your industry is through discussion forums and Q&A sites. Listen to find out what you should be looking for.
If there's a topic to be discussed, there's probably a blog (or 20 about it). You can turn to those niche blogs in your space to get feedback about your business or your customers and their needs.
There is no shortage of free resources available to marketers when it comes to the pursuit of feedback on your business. Social media is an incredible example. See how people feel about your brand, what questions they might have and more.
Customer feedback is an important channel in the pursuit of continual improvement. Part of doing customer-centric email marketing is asking them where they think you can do better.
One of the biggest questions in email marketing is when to send. You can test and review your reports ... or you can just ask. Send a survey and find out when your subscribers want to hear from you!
Do you know what problems you're solving for your customers? Sending out a survey via email is a great way to get feedback on what your clients need (or think they need). It's a window into their lives and what solutions they're seeking.
It's important to get feedback from your customers and surveys are a great way to get it. You can even get customer testimonials ore important data on how your products or services are being put to use.
Surveys can be an invaluable way to collect feedback from your customers. One great question to ask is how they feel about your business. Today, many businesses use a Net Promoter Score to gauge this. Listen to find out how.
Email marketing is a great channel for sending polls and surveys to get feedback from your customers. Learn all about polls and surveys and find out how you can get powerful info from your subscribers.
It's important that you get feedback from your subscribers. This can come in the form of polls and surveys or by paying attention to your data. Listen and find out what we mean.
A Call To Action (CTA) is one of the most important elements of your email marketing campaigns. CTAs are what gets subscribers from your email to your website or landing page. That's where the conversions happen. Listen to find out what makes a great CTA and how you can write them.
It's not just what you write. It's also how you write. Tone is the voice you hear when reading your emails.
As important as the words on the screen is the design of your emails. Listen and learn what you can focus on for improvement, testing design elements and creating a layout that works for you.
We've said it many times on the podcast: the only thing you can sell in your emails is a click. If the content of your email isn't good, you're never going to get the click-throughs you need to land conversions. Here are tips on creating better email content.
Your subject line is an email's first impression. It's the first Call To Action that leads them towards conversion. This episode has some tips to write better subject lines.
With the right message, at the right moment, to the right person, you can achieve a lot with email marketing. Enter special occasion emails. Whether it's a holiday campaign, birthday message or any other moment that lets you partake in the zeitgeist, special occasion emails help you to capitalize on a moment.
A customer testimonial can go a long way towards offering social proof to the merit of your goods and services and help reduce any anxiety or friction a subscriber has about becoming a customer. In this episode, we tell you why it works and how to get customer testimonials if you don't have them already.
Getting feedback from your subscribers can be invaluable to your business. Sending polls and surveys via email is a great way to get it.
These emails can help you to onboard new customers and to build trust in your brand. They also help to deliver value to your subscribers. If your products or services might be difficult to explain or include a learning curve, product education emails can help ease the path for your new customers and subscribers.
All email marketing campaigns should deliver some sort of value, but there are some specifically tailored to do just that. Whether it's with a lead magnet such as an eBook or checklist or a gift card or another freebie, do something to engage your subscribers and create value for them in their inbox.
Newsletters are probably the most familiar form of email marketing to businesses. They're a great way to keep in touch with your subscribers and stay top of mind.
Nobody likes feeling marketed to. Sending follow-up emails based on subscriber engagement with your website and emails allows you to create a more personalized experience for your subscribers that will make them feel seen.
Promo emails are probably what you think of when you think about email marketing. In this episode, we discuss the importance of making all promos customer-focused and use them to tell your subscribers how you're going to solve problems for them.
This is the one email every single business should be sending their subscribers. No matter how small your list or how new your business is, sending a warm welcome to your subscribers is a good idea.
You can only sell a click in an email. That's it. So, the content of your emails needs to be good enough to get them to that next step where the sale can happen. That's why it's so important to create better content.
Email marketing probably isn't the only business tool or app that you're using. Chances are, you put quite a few to use for your business. Did you know it's possible to make them all work together to make them all more powerful? It is, thanks to integrations.
You can remove the guessing games from your email marketing with A/B Testing. Know how your subscribers are likely to react to your emails. The answer to almost everything in marketing is "it depends." That is unless you've done A/B Testing.
If you were launching a new version of a product, wouldn't it be nice to be able to promote it to all the people who had previously shown interest in that product? Well, with Targeted Emailing, you can follow-up with any segment of subscribers based on what links they have clicked on. They're telling you what they're interested in. Listen!
You only want to be sending to the people who want to hear from you. If you have a chunk of subscribers who aren't opening your emails, it's time to do something about it. Use targeted emailing to easily identify and segment that group and then try a re-engagement campaign.
Wouldn't it be great if, with a few clicks of a mouse, you could easily identify and segment your most loyal subscribers? Well, you can and it's super simple. Find out how and what you can do with that segment in this episode.
There are tools that make it easy for you to hit your email marketing bullseye. Targeted Emailing is one of those tools that helps you manage your list and identify specific segments with a few clicks of the mouse.
Marketing automation isn't only about sending emails. You can even automate list segmentation. Listen and learn about this under-utilized marketing automation tactic.
You can create a tailored user experience that feels one-to-one with your subscribers with the help of marketing automation. Opening an email, clicking on a link, visiting a specific page on your website and more can trigger automated follow-ups that are targeted and relevant to that subscribers.
There is a way to save time and do better email marketing and people still hesitate to do it. Isn't that crazy? Listen and find out how simple it is to accomplish.
Verifying an email list is a way to make your good list great. It lets you remove any addresses that may be problematic, even for things such as typos. It will help you maintain great email deliverability as well.
When it comes to your email list, it's a matter of quality and not quantity. Size doesn't matter. Listen to us as we make our case for saying goodbye to inactive subscribers.
It's 5x more costly to attract new customers than it is to bring back old ones. That's why a re-engagement strategy for your inactive subscribers is an important tactic.
When it comes to your email list, it's a matter of quality and not quantity. To achieve that, you need to perform some list maintenance. Learn all about what it means to clean your email list.
It's a good idea to let your subscribers manage the communications they receive from you. Especially when they're about to otherwise unsubscribe. That's what a preference center does. You can let them choose how often they hear from you and even the type of content they receive.
A click on a link in an email is like an upvote on Reddit. It signals that the reader likes that type of content. Use that data to segment your subscribers based on the content they're interested in.