Growing your email list has benefits beyond the obvious increase in size. For example, new subscribers are often more active than older ones. They just signed up for your emails and want to click and open them.
For this reason (and many others) you should always strive to grow your email list. Doing so will help keep your engagement numbers healthy and ensure your brand is connecting with new prospects.
Growing your database can seem daunting, though, with the number of tactics at your disposal. Thankfully, marketers have been running list growth campaigns for years. Here is a chart of 10 popular tactics, starting with the most effective on top. The chart is pulled from the all new MarketingSherpa 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report.
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Triggered emails are rarely discussed as a standalone tactic. Buzzwords like “marketing automation” and “shopping cart recovery” are everywhere, but the automated messages behind them seem to be taken for granted.
After 2011, I am no longer taking triggered emails for granted. I interviewed scores of marketers that used them to achieve fantastic results by:
Through these and many similar campaigns, I have noticed that triggered messages have tremendously higher engagement rates than most other emails. Why is that?
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Editor’s Note: Since MarketingSherpa recently formed an affiliate partnership with ClickMail to help the value-added reseller of ESPs get more attention for its nifty ESPinator tool, we thought it might be worthwhile to rerun this blog post to give you ideas for using a Web-based tool in your own content marketing. (Original publication date: Feb. 22, 2011)
Content marketing goes well beyond publishing whitepapers and blogs. Your company can provide videos, slide decks, webinars and even Web-based tools — like ClickMail’s ESPinator.
ClickMail pairs companies with email service providers (ESPs) and helps them establish effective programs. For years, its marketers have published a blog and an annual PDF guide on how to select an ESP.
“We’ve always felt that we had a clear view of the strengths and weaknesses of the various ESPs,” says Marco Marini, CEO, ClickMail. “From that, we evolved into an annual guide on selecting the best one. It’s completely vendor-neutral. It doesn’t talk about any vendors at all, just what the factors are.”
The ESPinator is the next step in that strategy, Marini says. Launched in early 2011, the tool asks users a series of questions and suggests up to three ESPs that are well-suited to their needs.
“Every vendor at a trade show says their solution is the best. There truly isn’t a best solution. It all depends on what your specific needs are,” Marini says. “There are more than 30 ESPs in the tool, and we don’t have a relationship with the vast majority of them. So this is truly more for the email marketing audience.” Read more…
What if I told you 42% of U.S. cell phone owners used their phones to fight boredom? Who cares, right? It’s a factoid. It should pass through one ear and out the other.
But, let me tell you about a completely fictional teenager named Jamal. Jamal wakes up every day at 6:00 a.m. and eats breakfast while checking his phone. He plays Angry Birds on the school bus, and checks his Facebook page in the bathroom during class.
“I use it when I get bored,” Jamal says. “Most of my friends are the same way.”
This little anecdote adds life to the stat. It shows us that 42% is not just a number on a screen. It represents something real.
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Have you ever watched a movie that was happy from beginning to end? Just sunshine and roses and everyone was happy and lovely the whole time? Probably not, but if you have, I’m sorry because it must have been terrible. Every good story needs struggle.
In a good story, no one is happy for more than a few seconds (usually at the end). Cinderella and Snow White struggle. Odysseus struggles. Snooki struggles. What engages us is our connection to the character’s feelings. We relate to them and we want the character to win.
This is why customer testimonials are powerful. People see the quote and think, “This is a real person, just like me! And look, they love this thing!” A good testimonial wonderfully illustrates why someone should buy your product, and it resonates because people relate to the customer.
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You test subject lines. I know you do. Nearly every email marketer I ask tests subject lines. You can’t imagine the number of times I’ve heard: “Yes, we test our emails. We test the subject lines every week.”
The fact is the subject line is only a tiny fraction of what you can test. It reaps only a tiny fraction of what you can achieve. There is so much more. Let’s look at the five most effective variables you can test in email campaigns, pulled from a chart in our brand-spankin’-new 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report.
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For years, the debate on social media marketing centered on ROI. Marketers asked themselves “How can we measure the impact of social media?” “What’s the ROI on Twitter?” “How do we know if LinkedIn is worthwhile?”
Thankfully, those days are behind us. Data is available from tools both paid and free. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, not every marketer has taken advantage, as you can see in the chart below from Adobe and Econsultancy, which we pulled from The Social Media Data Stacks e-book.
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Five of the six metrics listed above have a greater number of marketers saying they’re important than the number of marketers tracking them. This is like saying it’s important to eat right and exercise while eating chili cheese fries and canceling your gym membership. It just doesn’t make sense.
But don’t worry — we have you covered. Here is a list of free tools you can use to start measuring each social media metric.
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Search engine marketers have based entire careers on improving rankings. They fight tooth and nail to reach the top of the page, win more traffic, and push all their competitors down a notch.
But what if you could get more traffic by pushing your competitors down a few more notches? Or pushing them down on more keywords? By focusing on universal search, you can do just that.
Search engines do not strictly deliver links to webpages anymore. They deliver links to images, videos, products, news and more. This is called “universal search.” Just check out the results from this recent Bing search for “storage shed.”
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This page links to five different types of content. If you become a master at creating and search-optimizing this content, then you can claim not just higher rankings — but more rankings.
Here are some key categories of content and tactics pulled from MarketingSherpa research: Read more…
I enjoy contributing to webinars. They give me a chance to immerse myself in research and talk shop. They also force me to shut off Outlook, Skype and anything else that might distract me, which is great when we have a good co-presenter. I can give them my undivided attention (which frankly isn’t possible when I’m an attendee).
Last week, I had the pleasure of co-presenting a webinar on email deliverability with Tom Sather, Director of Professional Services at Return Path, the webinar’s sponsor. Sather is a top-shelf deliverability expert, and he presented data from a global study his team conducted during the first half of this year. I was glad I paid attention.
Sather noted the average inbox placement rate (the percentage of emails sent that make it to the inbox) is somewhat low across the globe.
Global deliverability stats
- 81% inbox placement rate
- 7% spam placement rate
- 12% missing rate
This data was compiled from about 140 ISPs across the globe, Sather mentioned. As you can see from the webinar slide below, emails in North America fared a little better in the study. Read more…
Problems in your marketing can be tricky to identify. They might seem isolated, but they can also have a single root cause.
Brian Carroll, Executive Director of Applied Research, MECLABS, believes a central problem for many B2B marketers is a lack of effective data.
“Everything connects to your data,” Carroll said. “Your data represents relationships, and that’s the hub.”
Carroll touched on this issue at the MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011 in San Francisco this week. He described how seven of the most common problems that B2B marketers face have their roots in poor data optimization. We’ll go through each of these below.
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