Email marketing is a key component of most lead generation campaigns. Leveraging a strong email data base via a competent marketing automation system allows a campaign to closely track every recipient’s actions as they move through the sales funnel, and target content and tactics that convert that interest to a sale. But how target audiences respond to email marketing campaigns can mean the difference between a new lead and a lost opportunity. A recent survey by Marketing Sherpa has some valuable insights that, while some might seem obvious, are too often ignored. Here’s a sample:
- Frequency. By far and away, customers and prospects prefer an email marketing cadence of no more than once a week. A smaller number believe monthly is the right amount.
- Content. It should go without saying, but apparently it needs to be repeated: Content that isn’t relevant to the prospect’s needs is not helpful. Nor are emails that only push a sales messages or are repetitive, or simply boring. Emails in this category are likely to elicit an unsubscribe.
- Conversion Strategy. The survey found that more than half of recipients rarely or never found emails to be useful to them. And while that may seem like a bad sign, the good news is that 44 percent found them to always, often or sometimes to be useful when it came to purchasing decisions. That’s a sizable pool of prospects to reach and convert with a good list.
The lessons for marketers are clear:
- Have a cadence that meets the preferences of your target audiences. That means no more than one email per week. If you are seeing an increase in unsubscribes, consider decreasing the frequency with a test sample to assess whether that’s a factor.
- A strong call-to-action is important, but too much of sales or marketing content is a turn-off.
- Make sure the content is interesting. Repetitive content or boring messaging is a wasted opportunity.
A well-designed email campaign can produce solid results. But it must meet the preferences of customers and prospects to deliver the right results.
Attention all you marketers out there…ever sat in a meeting not wanting to raise your hand to ask someone for clarification on what they mean? Concerned that your colleagues or manager will think less of you? Gearing up for your next marketing campaign and need to include some new thinking?
Let’s face it – you are not alone. No one wants to be that person who raises their hand in those situations.
The world of digital marketing is moving very fast with new terms and concepts emerging everyday. From SERP to lead scoring to SEO to responsive design, it is getting harder to keep up.
If you are p
The marketing and communications business is at a bewildering junction, with two simultaneous models vying for brains and assets. Most marketing campaigns look at personas of their buyers and determine what is the best path to the promise land.
Bottom-up marketing is a concept with no single definition, but a few distinct components that set it apart from traditional top-down marketing strategies. Unlike traditional marketing, where executives create a marketing plan and a strategy to promote a company’s products and services, bottom-up marketing is mainly driven by the employees of a company. Employees recognize one specific customer need the company can meet and create a marketing strategy around that single idea.
A great example is Dropbox. Dropbox rose to $10 Billion valuation through its connection with the end user. Dropbox focused on providing the masses of end users (both personal and professional) a block of cloud storage that elegantly and brilliantly stayed synchronized on your local hard drive and your collaborative peers hard drives. Dropbox didn’t sell the CFO on cost benefits and the CTO on the power of the cloud. Dropbox simply delivered a great service with a viral approach to a roll out that created an ever growing desire for more and more storage in the cloud. In the end so many businesses had hundreds and thousands of BYOS (bring your own storage) and they needed to take control of this corporate intellectual property, and reached out to Dropbox for the suite of tools and administration to make managing the cloud instances so much more manageable, secure, and scale-able.
The top-down marketing plan contains four principal sections: situation analysis, marketing objectives, marketing strategy, and tactics. A company’s marketing objectives should be logical deductions from an analysis of its current situation, its prediction of future trends, and its understanding of corporate objectives. In the end, a top down marketing approach focuses on the top executive personas most often. The constituent who controls the purse strings. All SaaS and Enterprise technology companies are always looking for the high and mighty inside an enterprise that has the power to sign on the dotted line. Top down marketing focuses its message and offers so they should relate to the needs of specific target markets and specify sales objectives. Marketing-target objectives should be specific, quantitative, and realistic. The messaging of a top down approach often caters to the fears and dreams of that influential executive.
A great example of top-down marketing is the hyper growth industry of cyber-security. Every executive fears waking up to their employer’s brand on the headlines of major media outlets next to the word breach or hacked. Years and years of customer loyalty and brand preference can be washed away overnight. Cyber security companies are preying on these executives with a top down marketing approach that strikes fear into their hearts and minds and forces them to strike the check and implement countless solutions to help them sleep easy at night as they try to appease key constituencies including public markets.
Does your business ever wonder how to harness its precious marketing and communications budget to achieve its short and long term goals? Contact Bluetext. We are a top marketing agency that delivers results whether your campaign is focused top down or bottom up. Let us use our proprietary methodologies to define the right method, and then develop the campaigns, platforms, and content assets to knock the cover off the ball.
I don’t know what happened with the supposed “do not call” list, but lately I’ve been bombarded with nonstop robocalls purporting to be from my credit card company. The friendly robovoice assures me right off the bat that, “there is nothing wrong with my account, I should not be alarmed, but that I’m running out of time to lower my rate…”
It’s right at that point where I disconnect the call. Brands are getting more clever (or devious) with phone marketing for sure; I’ve noticed that credit card firms now use a local area code in the caller ID, expecting that people will be more inclined to answer a call from a local unknown number than an unknown 800 number. Earlier this week, the caller ID on my mobile phone suggested that the incoming call was from none other than…myself – which feels more like the plot for Scream 5 than savvy marketing.
While phone marketing seems to be sliding down a slope to irrelevance, email marketing remains an effective tool for brands. A 2016 study by Selligent/StrongView charts that 60 percent of brands plan to increase spending on email marketing this year compared to 2015, and in a separate eConsultancy 2015 survey, nearly three-quarters of marketing teams still believe email communication will be one of the channels with the highest ROI in 2020.
While signs point to email marketing enduring in the coming years, it may not look the same as it does today. That is because a fierce battle is being waged between art and science. There is an undeniable “art” to crafting email marketing content and subject lines that grab a prospect’s attention and drives them to action. At the same time, email marketing has become a “science” driven by machine learning that draws on big data analytics beyond what any human is capable of.
Startups and emerging technology providers are increasingly betting on “science.” Persado, for example, is a self-described “cognitive content platform” that last week announced a $30 million investment led by Goldman Sachs. Persado’s software utilizes machine learning and performance information of millions of messages to help brands select optimal language for email subject lines and other campaigns. It is an approach that Persado Founder & CEO Alex Vratskides refers to as “persuasion automation.”
While Persado and similar software offerings can be an effective tool in the marketer’s toolbox, creative teams will not replaced anytime soon. Only 13% of respondents in the eConsultancy survey “strongly agree” that all email marketing will be automated by 2020, though 40% “somewhat agree” with this statement – signaling that CMOs will continue to look for the right mix of automation and human creative teams to develop and execute these programs.
Ultimately, creative teams will remain vital for not only developing email subject line language that drives desired action, but also for ensuring each program reflects and remains consistent with the brand vibe (humor, provocative, direct, etc.). This input augments, rather than replaces, the value that high performance marketing language software tools can deliver when it comes to improving conversion and ROI.