When it comes to daily life we often get stuck in routines – and it’s no different at work.
It’s easier to stick with doing what we know – sending the same type of emails to the same people, avoiding the risk of changing in case it doesn’t work. You know what you’re doing may not be perfect but hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it… right?
But doing the same thing gets the same results – sometimes you need to try something new to move on. With this in mind, we’ve developed a way of tailoring our advice to our different clients’ needs, time and the resource they can dedicate to email marketing.
The Email Maturity Model is an industry-leading framework of email sophistication which allows you to pinpoint exactly what level of email marketing you’re at and what your next steps should be. The model identifies five ‘types’ of email marketer – all at different stages of sophistication.
In this blog post we’ll be looking at ways to help the type of email marketer we call ‘The Broadcaster’.
If you’re a Broadcaster then email marketing means sending one email to as many people as possible. You’re focused on sales and lead generation and work in a small team where time and resource is limited. You’re tired of hearing you need to segment, target and increase the relevancy of your email marketing – you know it probably makes sense in the long term but today you need to get that email out of the door and drive sales.
We hear a lot of questions from The Broadcaster on practical steps they can take to improve their results. Below we’ve answered some of the most common to help you develop beyond the typical ‘batch-and-blast’ approach to email marketing.
Question: How can I grow my email database?
Answer: Incentivise growth
The first step in developing your email marketing strategy is building your database. Sometimes the easiest way to build your database is to maximise the chances of your audience giving you their email address. It’s widely accepted that the average conversion rate of visitor to email subscriber rate is between 2-12% (Contently, 2015). Even if you’re successfully capturing 12% of your visitor’s email addresses that means that 88% of visitors to your website leave without you being able to contact them again. It’s a frustrating scenario as you know these people already know who you are, have shown an interest in what you’re offering and are most likely people to convert into new customers.
Our Viral Promotions tool gives you a quick and easy way to incentivise visitors to give you their email address, growing your database by up to 20% a year. By publishing competitions, sweepstakes, surveys and polls you can engage visitors and encourage them to submit their email address before leaving. Viral Promotions isn’t just limited to your website, you can also use the tool to publish to your Facebook page, encouraging social fans to give you their email address and growing your email database.
Question: How can I easily target customers when I’m limited on time and resource?
Answer: Retarget non-opens
Targeting customers will increase your conversion rate by up to 278% (Marketingsherpa, 2012). However we understand that as a Broadcaster you don’t have the time or resource to create multiple versions of emails – even if your database is big enough to do some basic segmentation. But targeting doesn’t always mean reinventing the wheel each time you set up a broadcast. You can even make your existing campaigns work harder and reduce your workload by simply making one small tweak to target a very valuable segment of people – the people who missed the email the first time it was sent.
It’s a common misconception but targeting customers doesn’t always mean creating tailored content. At the most basic level it simply means targeting the people who didn’t open your initial email. People don’t open emails for a variety of reasons and it’s too easy to dismiss them as ‘obviously not interested’ or blaming the content. In reality we don’t open emails because they arrive at the wrong time, get buried in our inboxes or the subject line just doesn’t appeal. These are easy things to fix and with one simple tweak you can resend an existing campaign to people that didn’t open the first time. Simply change the subject line or resend it at a different time. Both of these changes take minimal time and effort and they will result in more engagement.
We offer the option to set up a resend of your email campaign to non-opens when scheduling the campaign. It allows you to specify a different subject line, and the date when the campaign will be resent. Use this to your advantage and to increase your opens and engagement.
Question: What’s the biggest thing I can do to improve my email design?
Answer: Make your design mobile friendly
Email design gets blamed for a lot of things but how attractive the email is, often isn’t the deciding factor on whether the recipient engages with it. When you’re looking at why people open your emails but don’t click, then it’s best to start from the foundations up. The most rudimentary reason for people not clicking on your email is they can’t even see it properly.
Today 53% of people read emails on their phones (Litmus, 2015). If your email isn’t mobile friendly they either can’t read the content or can’t click on it. Creating mobile friendly designs so that your email appears as you’d want it to on both iPhones and androids isn’t a nice to have – it’s a must. It doesn’t just mean the look of the email either – to be mobile optimised your subject line must be 40 characters or less (including spaces) and once your recipients click through, make sure they can interact with your website on their mobiles too. Creating a good mobile experience isn’t just a nice customer experience – it’s business critical.
Our Drag and Drop Editor allows you to create great looking, fully responsive emails as standard, meaning they’ll look perfect on any device. You can also submit your email template for inbox testing, which renders your template on over 50 different email platforms and devices, allowing you to see how it will look over a variety of popular email clients and screens.
These are just a few basic topics but you can see that with some simple changes we can help increase your circulation, maximise engagement and make your email marketing more efficient. And regardless of your resource or times, there’s always opportunity to develop your email marketing to drive better results.
