Despite its past success, did you know only 64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach their customers? There are a lot of ways email marketing can fit into your business and HubSpot is a great tool to help facilitate those efforts. Whether you’re a nonprofit looking to connect with donors, a technology company looking to nurture leads, or a small business simply wanting to have better conversations with customers, email marketing is your friend.
Did you know Tribute Media hasn't had a real "salesperson" for more than a year now? While I wouldn't recommend that for most businesses, it works for us (as of this writing) because we've invested years of effort and expertise into building an inbound marketing machine that brings in enough leads who are already qualified, well-educated, and nurtured. From there, it's much easier for me to see them through to "closing the deal." As president of the agency, I wear many other hats and have much more responsibility beyond selling, so keeping track of active leads in HubSpot's CRM and using automation tools is essential to sustaining this model.
When we talk about algorithms, it's usually in the context of the factors you need to consider for ranking in the search engines. But did you know that email also has algorithms that determine whether or not you get into someone's email inbox? Say you write an email to send to many of your leads. You've drafted (what you think) is an incredibly persuasive email--perhaps one of the best you've ever written. You send it out, excitedly anticipating a great response to it. A few days go by, and you haven't gotten a single response.
What happened? Did anyone get it? Did they read it if they did get it? Are they upset that I sent that email?
It can be hard not to take the lack of response personally.
If you have HubSpot software, you're able to see this kind of info after an email has been sent out. You'll see exactly who opened, who clicked through, who didn't receive it and why, as well as additional helpful information. If you don't have access to that kind of info (because you don't utilize software that provides it), you're just left guessing at what happened, and that can be unnerving.
Whether or not you have access to these kinds of analytics, there are a few things that are important to know when it comes to sending emails and how to conquer email algorithms.
In the Elements of an Inbound Marketing Campaign, we covered:
With all of those basics laid out, we wanted to delve deeper into the email marketing portion. Although many businesses (maybe even yours) may dismiss email as simple one-on-one digital communication that doesn't require strategy, it is actually a powerful tool that too many businesses miss out on because they don't understand how it can be used for so much more.
"When I was assigned our weekly Tuesday Tips blogging task, for the first month, I just did what had always been done: I wrote a compelling marketing tip in blog form. The only thing was… no one was engaging, and we weren't seeing results.
I quickly realized that we needed to revamp our Tuesday Tips."
-Sarah Wai, Inbound Marketing Specialist
Email marketing and social media may serve different purposes in your overall marketing strategy, but when it comes to lead generation, one comes out on top: Email marketing.
Both are beneficial and critical to any marketing campaign, but once you get a grip on the differences, you’ll get a better feel for how you should be utilizing email and social media in your campaigns to gain a higher ROI.
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.
