In college, I had a class that really helped me develop a greater understanding of content. We studied how content affects individuals differently and evaluated how and why people engage more with varying types of content. One area of focus was interactive content.
Executing an advertising campaign using any medium can be significantly challenging. The question of whom to target, how to target them, and what message to convey can sometimes leave an advertiser with too many questions to handle. As the inherent nature of the online community is to be wary of promotions or messages on the Internet, it makes the task of delivering the communication even more challenging for the online marketer.
Emails selling private jets, Lasik eye surgery, financing, professional training, software and more, have worked their way into the inboxes of Tribute Media employees in the past year. Some of this is decent marketing--in the sense that it all applies to us (although the private jets may just be wishful thinking)--but what isn’t decent about these emails is that we did opt-in to receive these messages.
Unlike personal emails, company emails (more specifically, those sent for marketing or sales reasons) are not guaranteed access into recipients' inboxes. There are a plethora of reasons for this, which we’ll go into more detail about in this blog, but the important thing to keep in mind through all of this is: you are a guest in someone’s inbox. Don’t abuse it.
Email can be created in a variety of ways, but the key to a successful email includes (and is largely dependent on) deliverability. If you can’t get your email into someone’s inbox, the rest of it doesn’t really matter anyway.
To get into an email inbox, you must understand what could keep you out. There are rules to email sends, and if you don’t abide by them, you’ll find your emails in junk or SPAM folders, or you’ll actually have recipients mark you as SPAM (and believe us when we say, you don’t want that).
It’s no secret that emails have become a major tool in marketers’ arsenals. According to research, marketers sent out more than 800 billion emails in 2013 alone.
But many question the validity of it:
These are fair questions to ask. And the simple answer is: yes, email marketing works, as long as you follow email marketing best practices. And it works very, very well.
As a top marketing channel, email provides the perfect platform for generating and nurturing leads, delighting customers, and keeping open communication with your contacts.
Email marketing isn’t rocket science, but it also isn’t elementary addition. If you’re feeling lost and don’t know where to begin, we’ve got you covered.
The first thing you want to do is segment your contact lists. Initially, this will take quite a bit of time. However, once you set guidelines for segmenting, it becomes an automated process for future email sends.
Segmentation is one of the key elements to sending the right email to the right persona at the right time. This is not a step you want to skip.
Too often, business owners believe that if they create a website and put it on the world wide web, that customers will start flooding in.
This is usually not the case.
Sadly, some people get discouraged and give up on making their website a tool for converting visitors into leads and even customers. Others (namely you, because why else are you doing research) embrace the opportunity to make changes to their website to create a lead generating machine.
Where does one start to turn their website into the 24/7 sales person they know it can be?
If you are looking for a way to test the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, A/B testing (or split testing) is the way to go. A/B testing can be used with emails, web pages, calls-to-action (CTAs), etc. Essentially, you take one copy of a marketing material, and you tweak it enough to create two versions. You then experiment at random with users (or target specific user segments) to find which version they engage with the most or which variation performs better for a specified conversion goal.
Within the complex and uncertain business climate we all work in, the biggest challenges often rest on the shoulders of C-level officers and managers. They are left to deal with significant issues that affect their company such as globalization, demographic changes, corporate social responsibility, and the impacts of innovation and digitization.
That's some heavy stuff.
If you are one of these individuals faced with such high-level issues, the last thing you want to add to your plate is the task of strategizing and implementing marketing campaigns. Maybe you've been tasked with finding a marketing solution for your company; you've done your research, and the deeper you go, the more certain you are that there is more to marketing--especially on the web--than you want to deal with and you need professional help to move forward.
