Introduction
Email marketing is an effective way for brands to drive engagement and conversions. However, a recent Swerve report found that nearly half (48%) of B2B marketers rely primarily on email marketing for new campaigns. That’s not surprising since email marketing has long been the go-to strategy for reaching and engaging customers.
Additionally, email marketing provides marketers with the opportunity to segment and target potential customers based on specific interests. More than 80 percent of marketers report using relevant industry interest groups to direct prospective buyers to relevant content. Many agencies and publishers also offer tools and resources to segment, engage, and segment email audiences.
That said, the high volume of traffic coming from the email can be a challenge for brands and advertisers.
“Millennials have surpassed baby boomers as the largest group of users on the Internet. And while some marketers continue to use age-based content segments to ensure that people receive the message. We’ve seen an increase in marketing teams turning to email capture technology to optimize campaigns,” writes Brad Bourn in Chief Marketer.
To ensure their campaigns are receiving the best ROI. Bourn recommends marketers test the campaigns they are running against various tests. To determine what messages work best on any platform. Here are some suggestions for testing email campaigns:
Automate Campaign Testing
Utilizing data analytics and user testing tools can be incredibly helpful when it comes to fine-tuning email campaigns.
One tool that Bourn recommends is Talkwalker and its Live Campaign Remarketing AI testing tool. This tool allows marketers to test their campaigns against the real-time comments or social media mentions on site like a conversation rather than polling for responses.
If you choose to build a campaign around a particular theme, think about your campaign and site and make sure you’re testing it against the best setting to ensure it’s reaching the audience it’s designed to.
Analyze the Results
Once you test a campaign, analyze what worked and what didn’t work.
Marketers can use their data to improve the campaigns that are running and to test new campaigns. They can then adjust any necessary elements based on the results.
For example, an example report from Engagement Labs shows how a campaign tested with a specific theme was able to increase engagement by 21 percent and Conversion Rate Optimization by 47 percent when it was tested against another theme that may not have been as successful.
Seek Out Quality Influencers For Email Marketing
Once you’ve determined what worked in your campaigns, it’s time to hunt for more influencers. A growing number of marketers are turning to influencer marketing as a means to engage and reach audiences, according to Bourn.
Influencer marketing is typically a more cost-effective and efficient way for brands to reach consumers, with users most likely to spread the word about a brand if their friends and family are following that influencer. So, instead of blasting a mass message to thousands of people, you’re looking for a social influencer with a loyal following who may be more likely to share a message they find to be relevant.
Here’s what it really takes to find high-quality influencers:
Look for people who are experts in the industry or have experience in the industry and are trusted.
Don’t go for anyone who is running a contest and trying to sell you something.
Make sure the influencer you’re looking for shares your message, and that the audiences that they interact with are very similar to the audiences you’re hoping to engage.
More than 2,300 marketers have signed up for the free Strata Conference happening in San Francisco from June 4-6. You can register for the event here.
Ari Wallach, co-founder and CEO of Wallach Advisors, contributed to this article.
In the wake of an email scandal that involved Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, email and its potential risks as a communication medium is a growing concern for marketers. Which in turns presents grave danger to the prospect of Email Marketing. It’s important for every brand campaign to have established communication medium. Likewise, when you have a system that’s necessary to a livid debate of internal vs external communication, and the adverse effects it’s effect could harbor. Something needs to be done.
Solution To Breaches
As, in fact, 75 percent of marketers have been reported to have expressed concern about using email in their marketing campaigns, according to a report from Orcona. One survey showed that only 35 percent of marketers were confident they had the right email marketing tools in place to get the right results.
Beyond the scrutiny Facebook has received from the public and the regulatory agencies, email offers challenges that are unique to the medium itself. Email requires a creative approach because it doesn’t take the place of any form of traditional marketing.
How can you protect your marketing campaigns from the dangers of spam? I spoke with Dan Bourn, co-founder and CEO of Unbounce, an email marketing tool, and author of Email Marketing for the Digital Age, to discuss the steps he took to improve his marketing campaigns after he discovered a flaw in his own system.
Bourn’s Email Marketing Problem
When Bourn started out as a marketer, he believed email campaigns were the future of digital marketing. At Unbounce, the platform Bourn co-founded and currently leads, he had no access to tools like testing software and analytics. He created his own email campaign testing tool called Cost Per Lead (CPL) that was free for small businesses.
“For the first time I could test the marketing results of each email campaign and tweak things as needed to see which emails were the most successful and could be used again,” Bourn said.
Cost Per Lead: A Better Way?
Cost Per Lead was designed to automate the process of finding the most cost-effective, efficient, and effective email campaigns, while also empowering businesses to see their sales and revenue results. It was a good tool, but it didn’t come with several features that a new marketer may not be able to afford.
In January 2017, Bourn realized that he was not receiving any CPL sales leads. When he checked his account, it showed only 11 out of 30 campaigns that had made an impression on the lead requester in the last month. He contacted CPL to request access to their platform’s analytics and the interface for requesting support. “What the customer support representative said made my jaw drop. ‘I am not able to help you here,’ the representative said, informing me that I should switch to Google Marketing Platform, the only paid tier,” he said.
Google Marketing Platform:
Google Marketing Platform (GMP) is a paid version of Google’s advertising suite that allows companies to better manage their email campaigns. By contacting Google Marketing Platform. Bourn was able to track the click rates of his emails. Which made it clear he was sending emails to the wrong people.
In the end, Bourn was able to bring the number of failed emails down to a minimum. And made changes to better run his campaigns going forward. But he learned an important lesson:
“There is no system in place to protect email marketers from the repercussions of an oversight. It would have been much smarter for me to just get one of the Gmail and Email Marketing tools. Like Google’s Mailbox, and test to see which ones worked best for my audience.” He said. “The tool I created was a lot more expensive than it should have been. And I got a lot more information in the process. But it had the same outcome as the free tools I tried. I wasn’t receiving any of the leads from my campaigns. I now spend more time analyzing and taking my campaigns to the next level.”
