Magnet 360

Thoughts on Email Marketing – Part 2 of 2
Evolving from CTAs and CTRs to Curation and Automation

Last month, we shared recommendations for building a solid foundation to support email marketing within your marketing organization. Beyond the basics, however, the question becomes this: How can email play a more sophisticated role within your marketing efforts? Here are some recommendations that we believe can help shape the right kind of plan:

Content Strategy - Simply stated, it starts by having a clear plan to define, create (or in some cases, curate), maintain, and consistently deliver the right kind of content to your customers.

Suppose your plan suggests that you update the home page every week, post to a blog once per month, and create a video tutorial every two months. Each of these items are perfect opportunities to share with your email subscribers. In addition to content you author, consider leveraging content created by your social sphere, by directly pulling in posts from Facebook or Twitter, or by curating the vast amounts of social content with tools such as Curation Station.

Another important factor of a solid content strategy is how content is aligned across multiple digital properties. It is fair, and expected, that the content that is created for one channel will be used in others. What's important, however, is that the content is not simply a "copy & paste"; rather, it is tuned to the channel and to the audience that uses that channel to interact with your brand.

And speaking of multiple digital properties, we also recommend that you use your email communications to promote your participation in other digital channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others. Given that these channels will be used for more frequent and timely updates, use this call-to-action as a way to engage with your customers on more of an ongoing basis.

Automation - What's better than email campaigns that just run themselves? Well, maybe it's not that simple, but event-based email can be highly effective at engaging your customers based on their actions.

For example, much like re-targeting, automated follow-up emails can be sent to subscribers who click-through to view products on your website, inviting them to check out that specific product again, creating another opportunity to convert. Taking this even further, automated email can be effectively used to reach out to customers who have abandoned their carts in an effort to convert one or many items into a sale. Other automation techniques include creating decision trees that automatically feed follow-up emails based on whether or not a subscriber responds to the initial campaign.

Re-Engagement - Do you have a high percentage of un-opens? Re-engagement campaigns are a great way to remind your customers of the promise you made when they opted in and can be an opportunity to re-engage them in future communications (or dropping them from your list and improving your open rates!) This type of campaign starts by segmenting the list based on a duration of inactivity (for example, subscribers that have not opened for the past 120 days), and sending an email to rekindle their interest. A click-through is the desired outcome, which keeps them on the list. But for those who don't respond to two or three cycles, they will be removed from your list.

We appreciate your reading our thoughts on email marketing, it is a marketing channel that we believe has great yields for modest expense. In your own efforts, whether you are just ramping up or looking for more advanced tactics, we'd appreciate the opportunity to talk with you and see if we can help you take your efforts to the next level.