All About E-Mail: SSM Thoughts Bridge Review

 I wanted to write about e-mail marketing for a while so finally here it goes. You must be wondering, in 2020 email marketing still matters? The answer is a resounding YES. According to Litmus, email marketing drives $38 for every $1 invested in it, meaning 3800% return on investment.

Over the past decade, social media visitors have grown at an exponential rate. Almost 4.6 billion of the global community are active internet users, 3.81 billion are active social media users with 3.76 billion being active mobile social media ones. It is clear that social media is a channel that can be used to reach the target audience. 83% of marketers say that social media is important for their business.

But there are approximately 3.9 billion global email users in 2019 with expected growth to around 4.5 billion in 2024. If that doesn’t establish the power of email marketing then here are some more:

• 59% of B2B marketers state that email is their most effective tool for revenue generation.
• 74% of people prefer email for B2C interactions.
• 44% of users check their email for a deal from a company they know, whereas only 4% will go to Facebook.
• 60% of consumers state that they have purchased as the result of a marketing message they received by email. On the flip side, only 12.5% of them even consider a buy button as a purchase driver on social media.
• Email has an inbox placement rate of 85% with an average email read rate of 25-30% while social media has an average read rate of 10% and an engagement rate of just 0.58%.

Email is the original “one-to-one channel”. It helps in delivering relevant and personalized content to the individual.

Now as the importance of email marketing is well established let’s dive into the ways to perfect an email marketing strategy and make it more data-driven.

Anatomy of an email.

1.    Subject Line: Introduction of email which states the reason to write the email.

2.    Pre-header: Summary of text following the subject line.

3.    Branded Graphics Header: The email body is always preceded by the header. Best practices are to use a responsive graphics header.

4.    Main message: The body of the email is referred to as the main message. It could be text, images, video, animation, or other media content.

5.    Call-to-action is an important part of any message copy. It should be effective help encourage the conversion.

6.    Supporting message: Supporting messages are sometimes part of the main message, and can either be used to clarify the main message or to talk about an entirely new message.

7.    Footer: Footer is the lowest part of every email. It often contains a business social media handler, address, and the snippet for opting out of an email subscription list.

The Dos and Don'ts of Email Marketing.

5 things to Do

Get Permission: The most primary and the most important part while developing an email marketing plan is to get the permission of the subscribers. It assures that when somebody agrees to receive emails from us, it’s because they permitted us and took an action to opt-in. It is illegal to harvest emails from websites and bombard emails to them without taking permission. We also need to get the user’s approval on the frequency of emails.

Adhere to CAN-SPAM Act: It establishes requirements for commercial mails, gives recipients the right to have you stop emailing them, and spells out tough penalties for violations. It varies based on the region( US: CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, Canada- CASL, EU- GDPR but the main requirements are :

1.     Do not use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.

2.    Do not use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.

3.    Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.

4.    Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address.

5.    Provide recipients a way to opt-out of receiving future emails from you. This could be done by providing an unsubscribe link.

Have a marketing plan ready: Make email a part of your organization’s content marketing strategy. Develop an effective content calendar taking into consideration business and individual campaign goals.

Test your emails against various metrics like deliverability, open rate, CTR, content, time of the mail, etc. However, do not plan to test every single email that you send out. As consider metrics like bounce rate, opt-outs, and complaints and work on it to reduce them.

 Unleash the power of DATA: Use the data for….

•  Personalization: Creating customized content like the one below by Spirit Airlines.

• Segmentation and Targeting
• Automation: Depending on the stage of the customer’s journey timed emails to reach out to them or using data of the subscribers to automate an email. Eg: Email series planned by water.org

• Optimization: Constantly improvising email by testing on different metrics.

 

5 things to Never Do

 Don’t start from scratch (Take content from your blog, best performing social media posts in your email campaigns rather)

Avoid using one single image or a bunch of smaller images. (Outlook, YahooMail, AOL have images turned off by default while Google and Apple mail have images turned on by default). Limit words in images or use “true text”

Don’t buy, rent, trade, or borrow lists: Do not harvest emails as Scraping emails from the web or guessing at them and auto-opting in is illegal. Instead invest in paid media campaigns, SEO, Register-to-Win promotions, and in-store sign ups to grow email lists.

Mobile First: Design your emails more ‘ mobile-friendly”

Conduct a preliminary check before sending the email. It is really important to check how the email looks on different inboxes, measure its deliverability. Tools like ReturnPath, 250ok, Litmus, and Email on Acid help in testing the emails on the aforementioned metrics.

Tools to consider:

ESP( Email Service Provider) : MailChimp, Emma

Marketing Automation Platform: Emfluence, Hubspot

Cross Channel Campaign Planning tool: Salesforce, Iterable

There is another point I would like to highlight which is how we can get growth in the list. Well, according to Jessica Best (VP of Data-Driven Marketing at Barkley and Speaker) there r 4 key ways to do this. Which are:

1. Prominence;

• Perfectly placed at the end of content consumption
• Requested an email address in exchange for larger content offers (e.g. ebooks, webinars etc.)
• At least one invite should be on the home page;

 2. Promise;

• Value (news education, coupons, downloads) 
• Set Frequency;
• Promise Privacy;

3. Proof;

• There can be testimonials and proofs of the value we are providing to end user;
• It’s a social proof;

 4. Progressive Profiling;

• allows us to continuously collect deeper insights about a consumer, while creating an engaging, interactive email experience that encourages subscribers to participate. For example, if you're in the travel industry, you can send out an email asking your customer what kind of vacationer they are. This article I wrote based on the learning from CXL Institute.

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Sheikh Shafi Mahmud is an Economics Graduate of Notre Dame, Digital Full Stack Marketer. Writes blog in SSM Thoughts Bridge. He is also the Co-Founder, Music Composer & Producer of Apeiruss. Can be reached at sheikhshafimahmud@gmail.com