Don’t wait for the perfect time or tool to end batch and blast emails and, instead, send prospects and customers relevant information now. That’s the word from Diana Primeau, Director of Membership Services, CBS Interactive, parent company of CNET, the world’s largest tech media source for news, reviews and downloads.
Primeau offered these tips:
Have you ever been at a social event and a person, unknown to you, eagerly greets you by name? Recall the creepy feeling you got in that situation.
It leaves you thinking — who is this person and how do they know this personal information?
Thanks to the Internet, marketers have the ability to collect and use an absurd amount of personal consumer data. As marketers, we’ve used this data to guide consumers to ideal products and services without them even knowing. Well, let me revise that last statement — we used to do this without consumers knowing.
Avoid This: Personalization
As personalization has become a buzzword over the last few years, efforts to connect with consumers have gone haywire. Every day, I receive emails from companies who promote products similar to those I’ve pinned on Pinterest and address me by my name, or at least attempt to:
Sometimes people fall out of love … with your newsletters and email marketing.
Or change jobs. Or email providers. There are a million reasons why they stop reading and engaging with your emails.
This is why email marketers need to run win-back campaigns. That is, reaching out to inactive subscribers and compelling or convincing them to re-engage with your email sends.
If they don’t re-engage, it’s time for a list cleansing — no longer sending emails to this group.
A smaller, but higher-quality, email list
The end result can be painful in some ways; it will likely result in a smaller email list (and the older the list is, the more shrinkage you will experience).
This is only painful because we all like big numbers. We like to tell our CMO, our clients and brag to our childhood friends at the high school reunion (hey, when they’re all doctors, you gotta brag about something) about how we run email marketing to a list of 1,000 … 10,000 … no … one million email subscribers.
At the Media Center at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015, we interviewed your successful brand-side marketing peers, along with researchers and industry thought leaders.
One interview stuck out from the rest because we interviewed someone who’s title was “customer.”
Jill DAmato, the wife of our own Brian DAmato, Senior Vice President of Partner Solutions, MECLABS Institute (parent research organization of MarketingSherpa), agreed to sit down and answer a few questions.
We had recently fielded a survey with 2,057 American consumers about their email preferences, and it was interesting to sit down with a representative customer to help bring that survey data to life …
“Email is great, because it’s very quick and easy. But it does have to be something very catchy and very relevant and timely. Because if it’s not, I’m not going to open that,” Jill said.
The best way for anyone to stay on top of any news, events and information around almost any topic imaginable in the 21st century is Reddit. Hands down. Most digital marketers know this already so I won’t waste too much time proving the point here. If you don’t know this, it’s okay. Here’s a five minute synopsis to get you up to speed.
The real trouble with Reddit, even for marketers who are familiar with the platform, is its unfriendly UX and search feature.
It’s very difficult to find the subreddits you should be following.
To help give you a head start with finding marketing subreddits, here’s a list of 21 you should probably be subscribed to if you’re not already …
The Kentucky Derby is a once a year event worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It has been held annually on the first Saturday of May at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky since 1875.
It’s a race like no other, filled with traditions like the sweet taste of a mint julep dancing over the ice of a frozen silver cup, women in lavish hats ringed in a halo of soft glowing pearls and the victorious aroma of 554 red roses dripping across the backs of the winners.
Even with its long traditions, it takes a lot of effort and hard work to give the Kentucky Derby’s spectators exactly what they come to expect year after year as those expectations change through time.
To find out how the Kentucky Derby consistently makes this high level event continually more successful, Courtney Eckerle, Manager of Editorial Content, MarketingSherpa, sat down with Kate Ellis, Marketing Analyst, and Jeff Koleba, Vice President of Marketing and Programming, both of the Kentucky Derby, at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015 Media Center to discuss how the Kentucky Derby keeps its customers engaged all year long for an annual event.
The impulse to share something new with someone else is a natural and universal trait.
In the age of the Internet, why are some things shared while others are not? What causes a piece of content to go viral? To help answer this, Courtney Eckerle, Manager of Editorial Content, MarketingSherpa, sat down with Jonah Berger, author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On, at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015 to learn how an email marketer can create a viral environment.
Word-of-mouth is extremely important in creating a viral environment. You have a subscriber list but to grow that list you have to get people to share your content. We all know word-of-mouth marketing matters. What’s less clear is how to get it.
There is a science to word-of-mouth, and the key is to think about it internally and externally while keeping the customer at the center. Too often we find ourselves focusing on the product — but how in-depth do we go thinking about the users? What drives them? What is that underlying behavior that triggers them to share content?
After spending 15 years studying the science of why things catch on, Jonah Berger developed the S.T.E.P.P.S. framework, which is a series of psychological factors that drive and trigger the sharing mechanism.
Deliverability should be a concern for any email marketer. If you can’t get into the inbox, your email send might as well not have even happened.
Deliverability can be a challenge. A bad reputation score can significantly impact your ability to reach the inbox. An ESP (email service provider) with other clients behaving poorly on a shared IP also hurts you. Getting off of a spam or junk mail blacklist can be a Kafka-esque experience of not really being sure who or what will get you off that list.
To help you with deliverability issues, I reached out to three industry experts to find out what they considered to be the biggest deliverability challenges facing marketers today.
Understand why you have a deliverability problem
Tom Sather, Senior Director of Research, Return Path, said, “The biggest challenge that marketers have today is gaining awareness and understanding why they’re having a problem. Email providers like Gmail and Yahoo!, as well as spam filters, make real-time, data-driven decisions based on their users’ behaviors and actions.”
He said understanding the data behind your email program is going to do more towards solving a deliverability issue than following any list of tips or best practices.
Tom explained, “Most email marketers lack this fundamental data that the email providers have access to and are essentially in the dark ages when it comes to finding a solution. As a result, we hear experts touting general best practices — which is more like alchemy and doesn’t provide the desired results or can make the situation worse. Marketers who have access[to] and analyze the data will see the highest inbox placement rates and happier and more engaged subscribers as a result.”
At MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015, Mary Abrahamson, Email Marketing Specialist, Ferguson Enterprises, not only spoke onstage in front of 1,000 of her peers but she was also awarded the Best B2B Campaign.
The video below was recorded at Email Summit, and I recently had the privilege of talking to Mary about how speaking has impacted her career and what other marketers can do to find success through public speaking.
“When I was doing the [interview at Email Summit], that’s exactly how I feel, still exactly how I feel [about speaking at events],” said Mary, describing the importance of public speaking events.
With the Call for Speakers for MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 ending Monday, June 15, I asked Mary what advice she had for marketers selected to speak at industry events.
“You will get out of the experience what you put into it. It will bring you tremendous growth both personally and professionally — don’t take a moment of the experience for granted. Also, just like you do in your daily job, think about your ‘customer’ — the attendee — first. What do they want to hear about? That is the key,” she said.
Since MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015, Mary has had two other speaking opportunities and continues to find ways to improve the quality of her email program.
What assumptions do you make about your customers? Your competitors? Your industry in general? More importantly, what do those assumptions cost you?
At MarketingSherpa, we write case studies to help you execute your marketing strategy.
We also talk to writers, researchers and, well, renegades to help you challenge those assumptions and create an effective strategy to begin with.
I’m talking about people like Stephen J. Dubner. Not only has Dubner learned about economic theory and customer behavior as co-author of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything and, more recently, Think Like a Freak, but he’s also a very successful digital content creator in his own right as host of the Freakonomics Radio podcast, which nets more than 5 million downloads per month.
Customer behavior. Digital content. Sounds like a guy who could offer a few words of wisdom to email marketers to help them challenge their potentially costly assumptions. I sat down with Dubner at the Media Center at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015 before his featured speaker session later that morning:
