Email Marketing & Newsletters

There are over 2.5 billion email users worldwide, and when they check their inbox, many of them expect to communicate with businesses. In fact, 72% of email users call it their favourite way to receive business communications.

Database Segmentation

The success of your email marketing efforts will inevitably be impacted by the people on your email list. Segmenting your audience and tailoring the content in your emails to individual groups can markedly improve your email campaigns.

It’s important to sort your database in accordance with:

• Customer Segment. What are your objectives for this customer persona?
• Customer Lifecycle. At which point in the Conversion Funnel are they?
• Location. Where are they located?
• Device. What device do they typically use?
• Demographics. Where relevant, what is their age, gender, topic preference, etc.?

With this information, you’ll understand how to treat various groups of people on your list in different ways, in order to optimise their experience.

Database Cleaning

In order to achieve the best email marketing results, you need to maintain clean email lists.

Database cleaning involves the removal of inactive contacts (or ‘bounce’ email addresses) and unengaged users from your lists.

Unengaged users are people that delete your email without opening it. It’s fair to assume that these users no longer desire the content you provide, so it’s much better to remove them or they could impact the success of your future email marketing campaigns.

Email Template Design, Development & Testing

Take your emails a step further with customised content and branding, consistent with your other digital marketing channels (for example, your website).

Custom email templates allow for a more stylistic approach, resulting in improved brand recognition, as well as ease of use for the creator. The template will allow the sender to simply change the content, whilst keeping the look and feel of the email consistent with previous emails.

Testing of a custom email template is important, to ensure compatibility with multiple email providers. Successful testing will also mean that the email will display correctly across desktop and mobile devices.

Drip/Trigger Campaign Strategy

An email marketing campaign should continually push customer leads through the Funnel towards conversion and referral. This process is known as lead nurturing.

The series of emails driving this push are called drip campaigns or trigger campaigns, whereby carefully measured content is automatically sent on a scheduled basis.

Drip email campaigns are so effective because they are timely, personalised and hyper-relevant to the reader. As a result, they are opened and clicked more frequently and drive traffic for your website.

Similarly, trigger email campaigns send automated messages whenever your subscribers perform certain actions. With triggers, you can reach your customers at exactly the right moment, for example, persuading on-the-fence shoppers to make a purchase by reinforcing your brand’s commitment to customer service.

Common triggers include, but are not limited to, when customers:

• Complete a purchase
• Sign up for your email list
• Download a document
• Abandon a shopping cart
• Stop opening your emails
• Have a birthday

Triggered email campaigns are responsible for more than 75% of all email revenue.

Retention Campaign Strategy

It’s easy to get wrapped up in efforts to gain new customers, but keeping existing customers is just as important. Retention Marketing is the process of converting first-time customers into longer term, loyal customers.

Email marketing is one of the greatest tools you can utilise in your retention marketing efforts, as it enables you to stay in contact with you customers, keeping them informed and interested. Examples of retention marketing emails include:

Welcome. Onboarding emails that welcome a user and describe what you have to offer.
Newsletters. Periodic emails that keep users engaged and up-to-date on current events, stories and relevant information.
Engagement. Announcement emails that pique a user’s interest.

Your email list is a goldmine of prospects, leads and existing customers. The best part is, your subscribers actually want to hear from you – over 60% want promotional emails every week.

Management

To engage and succeed, your marketing emails must be:

1. Trustworthy
2. Always Relevant
3. Conversational
4. Coordinated Across Channels
5. Strategic

We will work with you to develop, design, implement and manage various email campaigns, with these requirements in mind.

Our email management service also includes ongoing management of your subscriber list in accordance with spam laws and email marketing best practice (such as database cleaning – as previously referred to).

Optimisation

Maximisation of your email marketing efforts is made possible by closely monitoring the results of A/B Testing.

A/B Testing (or split testing) enables us to compare the outcomes of our email experiments and choose the winning variation. Elements that are important to optimise include:

• Subject Line. Capture your audience’s attention and convince them to open your email to read more.
• Calls-to-Action (CTA). Get more of your readers to click and convert into a lead.
• Sender Details. Build a sense of trust in your name and allow readers to recognise your emails.
• Timing. Establish the times during the day and week when the majority of your readers are online and receptive to your emails.
• Content (copy, headlines or images). Get your language, tone and layout right in order to increase the likelihood that your readers will click through.

You can never really know what’s going to work with your audience until you A/B test it. The results are often incredibly surprising.

Reporting

Your email marketing progress explained in a monthly report. The report monitors how your users engage with your content, including:

• Open Rate. One of the most important metrics in email marketing. Represents the percentage of recipients who actually open your emails.
• Delivery Rate. Number of emails successfully delivered.
• Click Rate. Number of people who click a link in your email.
• Spam Rate. Number of people reporting your email as spam.
• Unsubscribe Rate. Number of people who unsubscribe from your list.
• Bounce Rate. Number of email addresses that didn’t receive your message because it was returned by the recipient’s mail server.

It is crucial to track and understand these metrics, as open rates and click-through rates directly affect your opportunity to convert email recipients into leads.