Email Marketing Pro: Email Marketing And Your Business

Whether you have a digital Marketing agency managing all your accounts or an Email marketing pro working for you, both will agree important and email marketing plan is.

What’s one of the most common things you’ll hear many digital marketers say when they talk about marketing?Have you checked your email lately? How many emails do you have? How many email accounts do you have (personal, professional, and one just for something else, maybe?) Check your email, count how many you’ve received today, and then think about how “dead” email really is.

Email Isn’t Dead

A Millenial Email marketing Pro might say it isn’t the “new thing” like SnapChat. Even Facebook is “old school” now. But a lot has changed since we all started signing up for email accounts 20+ years ago. Marketing with email has evolved into a specific system that gets your message across to the right reader and the right inbox with some work before you even draft your message.

Email is still a major component of marketing and creating a successful business. Life has changed significantly for most people, including the way they live, work and shop. Email marketing has to change along with it.

Companies who used traditional marketing found their customers by just getting in front of as many people as possible. It’s inefficient, causing you to spend more money on advertising in front of a wide swath of people who aren’t your customers and sifting through the leads that do come through. Your best advertising campaign is at best nominally effective.

Technology makes those leads even more expensive and your ad even less effective. Sending your emails to people who aren’t interested interrupts their day, and doesn’t create a good user experience.

The Inbound Alternative

Instead of essentially standing on a street corner and shouting out your message to all the passersby, invite these prospects and leads to interact with you. Inbound marketing is all about empowering your visitors, leads and customers with pertinent, useful and helpful content that offers and provides them with value, even for free.

Rather than yelling your message out to everyone and trying to be heard above the din, you’ll start a conversation to pull them in, without interrupting their day.

Remember that marketing emails that someone didn’t ask for or opt-in for are considered spam (and in some countries, can get you into legal trouble.) There is a human receiving your email, so make it count with useful, valuable content that’s worth their time. Email has a big role in marketing if it’s done in a human-centric manner.

The System

Hubspot’s article on Email Marketing And Your Business (part of an entire Hubspot email marketing training course) explains the system for setting up and engaging your email marketing campaign. It’s all about getting the *right* people into your funnel and engaging with them along the way. No spam, no unwanted emails, no “hard-sell” copy that annoys people and turns them completely off your brand. Give them the choice to opt-in or keep going.  

The four points:

• Attract—turn strangers into visitors using blogs, social media and optimizing your website
• Convert—send these new visitors to your call to action (CTA), contact forms and landing pages, giving them the choice to opt-in for your valuable content
• Close—build your CRM, engage them with emails and workflows, turning new leads into customers
• Delight—engage your new customers with surveys, social monitoring and other smart content. Don’t abandon them once they’ve bought from you, continue to engage them and make them happy.

Again, give your visitors the choice to opt-in with their contact information in exchange for your content. Once they’ve become happy promoters of your product, service or brand, they’ll begin talking to others (strangers) about you, and the entire process starts over with new visitors sent by your happy customers. Email is a large part of this process.

Core Principles

These are parts of email marketing that you need to be aware of:

• The rise of mobile devices
• The significance of segmentation
• The power of personalization
• The importance of data-driven analysis and optimization

Email has been around for more than 20 years, and people are more prone to ignoring it. But email has repeatedly been shown to be the best and most popular way to keep in touch with people who have changed the way they consume and absorb information.

Mobile-Driven Optimization

According to email marketing pro, people read their emails on a mobile device much more often than their a computer. If they can’t read your email on a mobile device, they probably won’t. Since 54% of emails are read on a mobile device, they need to be optimized for mobile consumption to increase the chances that an email will actually be read by the recipient.  Shouldn’t yours?

A study by UK telecom regulator OfCon4 showed that 81% of smartphone users say that email is the main reason they use their phone (besides making calls.) Why? They read email more than they make phone calls. So it’s vitally important to optimize your email so that it can be clearly read on a smartphone.

Segmentation

In order to have a higher conversion rate, you must send the right message to the right person at the right time. If your message doesn’t resonate with the recipient, you’ve wasted your time and theirs. It’s not that your message and copy was bad. The people you sent it to simply weren’t interested, because it wasn’t relevant to them.  

As a permission-based form of advertising, you don’t waste your efforts broadcasting your message to everyone and anyone. Proper segmentation is a high-impact way to improve your email marketing. You wouldn’t send an email blast for a dog walking service to cat owners, would you? Put your message in front of the right people who want what you’re offering.

By building an effective email marketing pro strategy, your inbound marketing is focused on content that you send to interested users. Email offers a direct one-to-one relationship that social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) can’t offer you. If your main lead generation is on social media, and they change the rules—or worse, their algorithms as Google does occasionally—your exposure could evaporate overnight.

Personalization

Again, you wouldn’t just randomly send ads for a dog walking service to a list of cat owners. Unless, of course, you knew that they were also dog owners. User would indicate that they were dog and cat owners when they signed up for your emails or otherwise opted in.

Personalization is more than just speaking to someone and using their name. Email’s one-to-one relationship allows you to customize every part of the email they receive, from the salutation to the headline, lead, body copy and closing, and everything in between. Everything can be customized, and it doesn’t have to look like a mass message that you’ve sent to anywhere from 1,000 to 1,000,000 other people.

A “behavioral email” is one that’s connected to a database and lists everything each user has done. This allows you to personalize your email even more.

Data Analytics

The “science” part of your email marketing campaign. What’s working? What isn’t? Who’s paying attention? Data analytics will tell you the answers to all these questions. You can see what’s working, what isn’t, test things, identify the trends and use all of it to optimize your email marketing strategy.

What Do You Need?

Successful email marketing companies have these three things in common:

• Stakeholder buy-in and commitment—if your team isn’t on board with email marketing, it won’t work well. Without the belief that email marketing is viable, nobody will work on it. ROI  doesn’t happen immediately, and it takes time for results to show up. Buy-in gets you the time you need to find out what works, what doesn’t and test new things. Persistence is important, because it’s a long-haul project. You can’t quit after a few months.
• Software—there is a plethora of email contact software available that can help you do all manner of things. Your email marketing pro should, at minimum, be able to:

1. 1. Connect to your contact database and track both the behavior and qualities of your contacts. These are vital to both segmentation and personalization.
   2. Analyze the success of each of your sends. At minimum, it should track the deliverability engagement and return on investment (ROI) of each individual email as well as the entire channel.
   3. Send automated emails to your contacts based on their activity. Basing your sends on their actions and behaviors can help you send the right emails at the right time. That’s why it’s important to have this function automated.
   4. Have landing pages and forms for generating new leads. Alternately, it should integrate with other lead-capturing software. Generating new leads is essential, since your database will decay over time. 

• And an understanding of email’s role in their business.

The Contact Database

Your database should be up-to-date and well-maintained so that the inevitable decay doesn’t erode your marketing campaign. This will allow you to improve your email message’s effectiveness, personalize for a better targeted message, and keep your “deliverability score” high enough so that they keep reaching more inboxes.

Questions To Answer

You and your team should consider these questions and determine a solution for your campaigns:

• When is it right to send an email? When is it not?
• How often should we send emails?
• How many emails should a lead receive? How many should a customer receive?

Once you have the answers, you’ll be able to create a good user experience for your recipients, whether they’re leads or customers.

Conclusion

Any email marketing pro can tell you that marketing has evolved from broadcasting a message to anyone within earshot into a method of specific techniques to get your message into the right hands. Email marketing can be a part of inviting users into a conversation and interacting with them on the way to conversion. It takes some work on your part, and needs time and care to get started. But once you and your team begin the process and make it work for you, you’ll be able to reach the right kinds of leads and customers with less missed targets and more profitable conversions.

What Lifecycle Marketing Means To Your Email Campaign

The term Lifecycle Marketing in this context does not refer to the user’s actual lifecycle, but to where they are in your process. This post will help you with the email marketing lifecycle and how to optimize each step in the process.

This focus is on your brand “evangelists,” who have already bought from you, had a great experience and are happy to buy again. An important aspect of targeted email marketing is identifying your audience and crafting your message so that it resonates with them.

It’s easy to classify everyone as “leads” and “customers,” but it’s not that simple. Not all of them are the same. Some leads are still in the “investigation” phase, and some are interested and ready to buy.

Your emails for these individuals will speak to them differently than the ones you send to your new and established customers.

Turning Leads Into Customers

Your lifecycle marketing goal is to attract people to your site and convert them into leads by getting their email addresses and contact information, with their permission. Once you do, you can begin to share valuable content with them, and guide them through the process to become a customer.

You can also get their contact information offline (at places like trade shows, or simply on the phone), as long as you have their permission.

Hurry Up And. . .Wait

One thing you’ll need for your email marketing campaign is patience. Most leads aren’t going to be ready to buy when they receive your first email to them. You may get some initial sales, but 73% of those targeted leads won’t be ready to buy on the first “touch.” Some will not be suitable leads for your business, and they’ll opt out. You won’t continue to market to them.

This is where email campaigns come in. Over time, you’ll continue to send leads additional content that will educate them about your company, and your product or service. You’ll also learn more about your leads, which ones are best suited for your company, and figure out which messages resonate the best with them.

You’ll begin to have a conversation with your leads and prospects, and learn from them:

• Pain points
• What resonates with them
• Which customers respond to which offers, and which generate the best customers
• Data that helps you create better content

Lifecycle marketing emails help you better engage with your customers, find out what they need and like, and gather this information to advance your sales process.

Lifecycle Marketing With Email

There are two best practices to keep in mind when sending your leads an email:

• Create your email’s content to coincide with the buyer’s journey. The “buyer’s journey” is simply where they are in the process of their research, with three steps:
• Awareness (that they have a problem and begin research to resolve it)
• Consideration (they understand their problem, researched it and have a firm grasp of it)
• Decision (understanding the different solutions and now searching for a provider vendor)
• Identify the “touch points” in your marketing/sales process. What are you asking them to do? Things like subscribing to your blog, filling out your contact form, downloading the “free report” (or other useful thing) and/or requesting an audit or consultations are the first steps in starting the conversation with each of your leads. Easy ways to start the conversation are:
• A thank-you email
• Confirmation request (“click here to activate your email”)
• Instructions or tips on the product they’ve purchased
• Follow-up email letting them know how often you can expect to hear from them
• A few links to popular content they can access immediately

But don’t make these emails long, drawn out narratives or frequent, regular email blasts. Remember—most people are looking at your email on a phone or tablet, so they need to skim and catch the information quickly. You don’t want to annoy them with an email they don’t have time to finish reading.

One (Email) Size Doesn’t Fit All

There are different types of content that appeal to different users in these various lifecycle marketing stages. An email that you send to your new leads will not be the same as the content you mail to established, interested leads or customers who have bought from you at least once. Use the collected data to craft specific, relevant messages that will resonate with each specific group of recipients. Your email program should also be able to keep the wrong messages from going to the wrong people.

Delight Your Customers

While emphasis on attracting new leads is important to your business’ growth, you’ll also need to spend some time retaining the customers you already have.

Just because they’ve already purchased something doesn’t mean that’s the end of it. You’ll still need to do some work to make sure they see the value of the product or service they’ve spent money on.

How do you take them from the “customer” stage to the “delighted evangelist” stage? Start by using these two best practices:

• Capture the right data. You are tracking your customers, aren’t you? Accurate customer data allows you to segment and personalize your emails.
• Create a map of the important parts of your customer’s lifecycle. One you’ve done that, figure out how to integrate email communication in the process.

Customer tracking—from what they’ve bought, how often, how much they’ve spent, etc.—is critical in keeping up with your customer’s needs and marketing to them. Using this data will help you create better content and more personalized emails to send. You won’t be sending them the same emails as you would a lead, and your email software should be able to help you prevent that from happening.

Divide And Conquer (Segmentation) Lifecycle Marketing

Once you’ve collected your data, it’s time to segment your customers. You can start segmenting them like this:

• New Customers
• Ongoing Customers
• “Evangelists”

Some companies will segment them even further, and you can certainly do that too, if it’s appropriate for your business.

For the first group, you’ll concentrate on getting them on track with their purchase, and help them see the value of their purchase quickly and efficiently.

Subsequent emails can include a “thank you for your purchase” note, a confirmation email with the tracking number, or instructions for their purchase. If the purchase is something larger or more expensive, an appropriate email “touch” might also be an appointment confirmation or other relevant information.

Once they’ve realized the value of their purchase, it’s time to continue cultivating a relationship with them. Rather than seeing them as an income stream (which they’ll realize immediately), offer support or education to help them become successful with your product. They should always recognize the value of their purchase, and giving them help and support goes a long way in your company’s customer relations.

Next, pay attention to what they’re saying. Are their needs being met, or can you help with something else? Offering additional products that complement their shopping cart items, “favorite customer discounts” on repeat or similar purchases, or more email marketing based on your customer’s previous purchases with content such as case studies and testimonials.

Do be conscious of the timing and context of your emails. Sending out an email just because you can (or your coming up short this quarter) can still qualify as “spam” if it’s not wanted or relevant to your customers.

The Happy Campers

Finally, your “evangelists.”

They “like” every post on your Facebook page, re-tweet your posts on Twitter, and follow you on Pinterest, Instagram and/or LinkedIn. Evangelists are customers who are so happy with your company and product or service that they really do tell their friends and highly recommend you. These people are your best fans and are valuable to your marketing.

How do you turn customers into your evangelists? Ensure that their user experience is excellent, for starters. Email marketing is an easy, low-impact way to communicate with them. Offering exclusive discounts, referral or loyalty programs will spark interest in those who are already happy campers.

You can also use email to communicate directly with these evangelists in your lifecycle marketing process, and ask them if they would like to be a part of your brand’s messaging. These can take the form of online reviews, case studies, social communities (i.e., dedicated Facebook groups) or even case studies (where applicable.)

Email Isn’t Everything

While email is a valuable part of marketing, it’s just one part of your total marketing strategy. Don’t send out emails just for the sake of sending them. If you don’t have something important to impart, or aren’t saying anything that resonates with the specific audience, it’s still spam, and you may experience churn, or at least, unsubscribing.

Using your gathered data, tailor your message to the individual in the right part of their marketing lifecycle. This helps to ensure that your content is relevant to the user. Better, more relevant content makes sure your lead is more likely to be interested and engaged. Eventually, they will become not only a customer, but an evangelist who will be an advocate for your company and tell more people, bringing in more leads and furthering your company’s growth.

Contact Management And Customer Segmentation

Managing your contacts and understanding customer segmentation are VERY important to the long-term success of any email marketing campaign. Every email campaign for inbound marketing needs one important thing to get started: a list. If you don’t have a list of leads and prospects, who’s going to see your campaign?

But it’s more than just getting a group of names and email addresses together and sending your email to each and every one of them. You need to know more about your prospect and what he or she is interested in, needs, and is looking for.

Most importantly—once you’ve converted them into a customer (and hopefully an enthusiastic brand evangelist), you don’t want to send them the same things you sent them as a prospect. The email that converted them to a customer isn’t going to work with them now that they are a customer.

Furthermore, pitching your lead generation messages to people who have already converted annoys them. Customer Segmentation helps you avoid that problem and get each of your targeted emails to the right audience.

Why Contacts And Lists Are Important

One of the first things you must have is a quality, clean and up-to date-database to market to. Without it, you either have nobody to email, or you’re spamming people with every email you send. Neither is a good marketing solution.

Your database should give you three major things:

1. A good “picture” of your contact, including all the touchpoints they’ve had with your company
2. Bring together Marketing and Sales, allowing marketers to easily segment, score and communicate with these leads. Your sales team should also have access and easily see and understand a how a contact has interfaced with your brand
3. Integrate well with additional tools your company may be using (such as your CRM)

Remember that there is a human who will be receiving your email when you send it. People don’t like to be marketed to as faceless entities, they prefer to be spoken to as individuals.

Segment Your List

Segmenting allows you to not only find a specific group of people you want to talk to, but also tailor your message to their needs, wants and pain points. Additionally, it stops you from sending your email to someone who doesn’t really want it.

Customer Segmentation is simply the “slicing and dicing” of your database by any number of factors. You can segment by:

• Age
• Geography
• Gender
• Education
• Persona
• Purchase interest
• Content Topic
• Interest level

And a lot more, including something that is relevant to your own company, such as purchase history.

You contact record is a one-stop-shop to finding everything you need to know about an individual who has any kind of relationship with your company. Each record should contain basic information as well as every touchpoint. You’ll continue to gather additional information as they move through the lifecycle from prospect to customer.

Each bit of information allows you to improve your marketing to them, personalize and contextualize, and help your marketing and sales team identify the best prospects for additional email marketing.

Building Your Customer Segmentation Strategy

Before you start anything, you must answer this important question:

Do You Have Permission From These Contacts To Email And Contact Them?

Purchasing a list from a broker isn’t really a good idea. When you send them something, you’re emailing people who didn’t give you their permission. And if you do, anything you send them is spam, no matter how well crafted and segmented it is. Why? They didn’t ask you for it.

Use these three best practices for customer segmentation:

1. Make sure your database is accurate and updated
2. Determine your customer segmentation strategy
3. Segment your contacts using explicit and implicit data
   1. Explicit data is the data that is intentionally shared between a contact and a company. Anything they send to you through your contact form, response to a survey, landing page or through Facebook LinkedIn or other social media outlets.
   2. Implicit data is what you gather from the contact’s behavior—social media engagement, email engagement, purchase history, etc.
   3. Your email database should include both types of data. Using them together will help you better segment your lists so you can improve your campaign’s targeting.

The Buyer Persona

You have to have a product or service to sell. Who are you going to sell them to? Who is your target market?

Don’t say “everybody.” Not everyone will be interested, or be able to use it. Sure, maybe your mother will buy one, whatever it is. But beyond your mom and maybe a few of her friends, you’ll need more prospects and leads.

Figure out who they are by creating a buyer persona for each one of them, and creating a marketing strategy to them. A buyer persona is simply a fictional individual you create to represent your real-life customers, and help you better market to them.

For instance: if you have a newly designed and more comfortable baby car seat, you’ll want to market it primarily to new mothers, and show them why your car seat is a better value, solution, etc. Start by asking questions of the people you’re preparing to market to, and go from there. Questions that collect specific information, like:

• Is this your first child? How many children do you have?
• Is this your first car seat, or are you replacing an older one?
• Did you buy this for yourself, or was it a gift?

Ask them anything (within reason) that can help refine your buyer’s persona. Once you’ve created your ideal buyer, begin working on the buyer’s persona  and start your marketing to that person.

Using the baby car seat example, you could have more than one ideal buyer persona—new fathers, grandparents, and related individuals—and you’ll have additional lists for your email campaign.

If you’re marketing to absolutely everyone, your campaign will reach more than your intended audience. But will be much less effective because it will always be “hit and miss,” with more “miss” than “hit.”

Here are some questions to help refine your buyer persona, as well as a template.

Successful Customer Segmentation Strategy—What It Takes

First, your lists—you’ll have separate lists for your subscribers, leads and customers. (You can also segment these lists further if you need to.)  Dividing your database up like this identifies who you want to email, but sometimes, who you do not want to email. If you’re sending an exclusive offer to your customers, you’ll want to prevent that same email from going to leads and prospects.

Each persona will give you a clear idea of who you’re marketing to, and help you write better headlines, better copy and create the right call to action (CTA.)

Offer Engagement

Create an additional list based on tracking engagement with core offers. Engaging with your offers is a great indication of their interest and a good time to start a conversation with them. Anytime a lead downloads your free e-book or white paper, signs up for your webinar, visits your booth at a trade show or otherwise engages with your company, you have another segment.

Depending on how your company is organized, you may need to create additional lists. Consider what kind of specific information you may need to gather.

Your overall marketing plan may involve more than just email. A company blog, social media and a website are probably a big part of the rest of your campaigns. Consider creating an engagement-based list of people who have:

• Visited your blog in the last 30 days
  • People who have read one specific article in that time frame
• Leads who have visiting your pricing page
• Leads who have opened your email in the last 30 days
• Leads who found you through a particular source, i.e., organic traffic via search engine, social media, etc.

This kind of customer segmentation works a couple of different ways.

• Create another list of those who have not engaged with your brand in any way. You can suppress emails to these individuals, and stop marketing to them, since they are not interacting and may not be interested, or be suitable leads.
• Do you have users who you haven’t heard from in a while? Consider creating a re-engagement list, and send them a unique offer, or create an open appeal for them to come back and re-engage with your company

Decaying Databases

Your databases will degrade over time, through churn, bounces and unsubscribers, so you should always be working on getting new leads and prospects.

To keep track of who’s coming and going, create a few lists that will help you oversee the strength of your databases. You’ll see immediately when something isn’t working. Things like buying behavior and content engagement are potential indicators that your campaign may need some re-tooling.

• Unsubscribers
• Hard-bounced contacts (rejected by the mail server)
• Ineligible contacts
• Recipients who haven’t opened any of your emails in the previous 12-month period

These are part of the essential lists to build that can help your email marketing campaign become and stay successful.

Big Undertaking, Big Return

Email segmentation and contact management are very involved tasks, but they’re vital for successful inbound marketing. Not every marketer is committed to this much work, and their results, or lack thereof, may speak for themselves.

But when the DMA’s research shows that 77% of email marketing ROI in 2015 came from segmented, targeted and triggered marketing, it’s worth the time and effort you spend. With multiple ways to segment your list for a successful email marketing campaign, it’s time to get started.

Email Emarketing Essentials

Pay close attention to the email emarketing essentials if you think you’re ready to start your email marketing campaign. You’ve got great content, great design, it looks good, and you can’t wait to email everyone on your list.

Once you hit “send,” the email will land in dozens (or hundreds) of email inboxes worldwide. Everyone will be is happy to see it, open it, click on the link and engage, right?

Maybe.

Your email could be opened, ignored, bounced, or even treated like (or worse, marked as) spam. While there’s no magic formula for deliverability, there are things you can do to get your email into the inboxes of interested readers if you read these email emarketing essentials.

You Do Have Control

You may think that you can’t control what happens after you hit “send,” but that’s not entirely true. The prep work you do before you send a marketing email piece can greatly impact deliverability as well as opens, clicks and engagements.

If you’ve already done a send, and feel like something is off, use your previous metrics to figure out what happened, and improve your next campaign.

Who Are These People?

Think about it—who are you sending your emails to in the first place? Where did they come from? Do you have their permission to email them? Do they know you’re going to send emails? What does your ESP (email service provider) say when your emails bounce back? Has anyone reported your email as spam? All these factors have a direct impact on deliverability.

Ideally, each individual on your list should have given you permission by opting in. You, ideally, would also have communicated that you would be sending periodic emails, and they should have understood that.

If you’ve purchased a list, or been given a list by someone to use, there’s a good chance that’s at least part of the problem. A purchased or rented list is a list of people who probably haven’t given you permission to email them. They are probably only on that list because they opted in somewhere else for a company that sold their contact information to you and other people.

If you bought or rented some or all of your mailing list, there’s a good chance they’re not interested. Your well-written and well-designed emails are not only going unnoticed, because according to the email emarketing essentials they’re spam. Your ISP will notice as well as every ESP around, and they may block your emails completely, before anyone even sees them to unsubscribe or mark them as spam. That’s the last thing you want.

Content Is King (Or At Least, A Prince)

Another really important email emarketing essential is “What are you sending to your email lists?” You still need to create good copy and make your email look good. Your list also needs to be segmented so that you’re sending relevant, valuable content to everyone who gets your messages. But if you’re sending out one email to your entire list, chances are you aren’t engaging well with your audiences—because, after all, each list is one.

During any email campaign, you should expect a few bounces and maybe a few unsubscribes. But your metrics are the key to making your campaign successful. You’ll have two sets:

• Engagements
• Churns, bounces, list atrophy and other “losses.”

Both of these will show you your deliverability, and what you need to correct. Clicks mean that someone has opened your email, and decided to check you out. If your content and/or offer is good, and it’s relevant to them, you’ll also have engagement.

The Churn

This is the opposite end of the spectrum, when you lose contacts. However, it’s not entirely a bad thing. Why would you continue to try and market to people who aren’t interested? Yet, many marketers continue to do so to keep an inflated number on their list—but that can backfire.

Churning occurs for one of three reasons:

• An individual opts-out or unsubscribes completely
• An email address bounces
• An individual marks your email as spam

An unsubscribe can mean that the user doesn’t find the content relevant anymore, or they never signed up in the first place. If it’s an unsubscribe, it’s time to figure out why. Did your content not meet their needs, or was your offer not quite good enough to make them act?

Are you seeing an increase in unsubscribes? Offer additional ways to connect (i.e., social media) if they are simply receiving too much email. You can also solicit feedback from unsubscribers, so that you can make better offers to them, or to the rest of your subscriber base.

Look for trends in your previous send metrics so you can fix what’s wrong before your next mailing.

Bounce Types

While it seems unimportant, there are ways to figure out why your email was bounced. Once you do, you can work on recovery and increasing your chances of deliverability.

There are a number of bounce types, but the four most common are:

• Recipient bounces—a bad email, a.k.a., “user not found.” This email is one that was either good when it was used, or a bogus email that was never valid. When people sign up for mailing lists using their work emails, or shut down a personal email address, they may not update their profile, leaving you with a hard bounce. Some use bogus emails just for free content. Remove these emails from your list immediately.
• Content bounces—the mail server, software protecting the mail server or the spam protection took issue with your email for some of the reasons listed above, or there is something in your email that it doesn’t like.
• Reputation bounces—somewhere between your system and theirs is a “reputation” that the recipient’s email client doesn’t like. This includes your company domain, an IP address you’re sending from, or the ESP’s reputation that you’re sending from.
• Temporary failures—also called “soft bounces,” or something that the server doesn’t understand. It takes a “wait and see” approach and takes more time to check out your email. A large number of soft bounces may also indicate a content issue. They may eventually deliver, but you don’t have to do anything unless you see that they aren’t. Your ESP, as a rule, automatically handles these.

Decoding these bounces will tell you what happened. These number codes start with a 4 or a 5 that appear in the return email you get.

• Anything with a 4—temporary or “soft” bounces.
• 500 or 550—these codes indicate a recipient failure (“hard bounce.”) Remove these emails from your list, because they don’t work.
• 571 or 554—these are the “content bounces” discussed earlier, where the server doesn’t like something in the content. They’re also “reputation bounces,” and occasionally have a 471 code.

Once you get the relevant code, you can go about fixing the problem. Removing bouncers will pare your list down—but they weren’t getting your emails anyway.

Getting A Reputation

Over time, ESPs examine your emails and how they perform once they arrive. Emails are also checked for spam-like qualities. If your emails have any of these characteristics, they’ll likely be rejected or at least tossed into spam folders everywhere.

• “Short” links or a link the ESP didn’t like
• Something linked to in the email
• Misspelled words (especially a lot of them)
• Not enough content text in the email body, or images
• The company’s domain
• The IP address you’re sending from
• The ESP’s reputation that you’re sending from
• An unprofessional look about the email, or it looks like email or content previously marked as spam

Any one of these factors can cause your email to bounce, to be sent directly to the spam folder, or marked as spam by the recipient. However, once you clear them up, you can email the affected people again.

Spam Complaints

This is one of the most important problems to deal with. These are from actually people who went through the trouble to report your email as spam. These complaints can harm your deliverability and reputation. Now you’ll need to examine why you were marked as spam, and correct it.

Many of these complaints are permission based. That is, whether they gave you permission to email them in the first place. If a number of complaints come from one source, fix it immediately! If there are people who came from that source before you did, suppress them from future sends. You can also create a separate campaign for these people with clear reasoning and explicit details of why they’re receiving your emails and why it may be of value to them. If it doesn’t work, that’s a list for the “delete” file.

Graymail

Graymail isn’t spam, but it might as well be. It’s an email that is delivered without a problem, but is never opened, read or clicked. No engagement. It’s just there in someone’s email box. They’ve given you permission to email, and they may have been reading your emails for a while. But eventually they stopped reading for whatever reason, and you’re sending them emails that have never even been touched.

If you find a number of these, the best thing to do is stop sending email to them. It may be time to trim your list, or do more segmenting. You can also suppress anyone who hasn’t engaged in the last year so that they don’t continually receive your emails to leave them languish unopened in inbox purgatory.

It Can Only Get Worse Until You Fix it

If you continually ignore spam complaints, bounces and other email issues, the problem will simply multiply. Without engagement, many ISPs will bounce your email (or move it to the spam folder) because nobody is clicking on it. Your emails may be received, but if your open/click/engagement rates are declining, they’re not being seen.

Once you’ve fixed your source/permission/expectation issues, pay attention to your successes, and stop sending email to uninterested parties. Trimming your list to people who open, click and engage will improve deliverability as well as engagement, and your emails will be seen by people who genuinely want to see them.

Focusing on the engaged readers will not only help your mailings, but also your scores with ISPs, inbox providers and spam filters, ensuring future deliverability.

Conclusion

The work you do on the front end for your email campaign can reduce the extra work you have to do on the back end. Ensuring that your list is valid and contains people who are interested in your emails goes a long way in making sure your emails are being seen by those who are glad to receive them. Just try and take these email emarketing essentials into consideration when creating a campaign.

Email Functions And Design

Most people don’t think about the email functions and design ideas that go into creating a successful high-converting email campaign. “Designing” an email is one of those things that will help improve your email’s messaging and performance. More than just something to make your email “pretty,” design helps you communicate your message quickly and easily.

Good design helps deliver your message and drive conversion with less friction. Design can also offer your recipients a consistent experience and lets you take advantage of branding recognition. Great content matters, but so does design. This is especially true where it really counts: when someone is reading your email on a mobile device.

With more than 54% of users reading email on their smartphones, design counts more than ever. Email needs to be consistent across all platforms, and look great while conveying your message.

Best Practices For Email Functions and Design

Start with these:

• Pick a primary goal—what do you want the reader to do? Ideally, there should be just one goal in this email. Whether it’s downloading a white paper, subscribing to a blog or anything else, you should articulate this goal clearly and quickly. (Note: opens and clicks are not goals, just metrics.) Multiple choice of actions can confuse the reader, or stop them from taking any action at all. Unless you’re sending a newsletter, keep it at one goal and one click.
• Write and design the copy—this is your pitch, so offer them value here. Tell your reader why he or she should take this action and click through. Add formatting, white space, headlines and other design elements to make it easier to read and understand quickly.
• Avoid the “wall of text.” A large block of copy is a big turn-off to any reader on a mobile. It’s difficult to read, and looks like a book to them. Formatting breaks up your copy and makes it easier to digest in small bits.
• Create a consistent experience—your readers should be able to see the same thing no matter where they are reading your email. In theory, they should—but with more emails being read on smartphones, an email may or may not look the same across different mail apps. Design for the mobile screen, using less but more powerful wording, consistent in the email and on the landing page.

The Inverted Pyramid For Email

This modified version of the Pyramid explains designing and writing an email for any platform.

Structure the email in this fashion (including an image as needed) and keep the white space in and around your copy. Put the most important part of the content first, add some less-important info, then a CTA button to click. This short-and-sweet format helps keep the focus on your message, and leads them to the CTA without long, distracting copy that’s hard to read on mobile.

Use a minimum of a 14-point font that’s visible on both types of email clients. Finding the visible CTA button (minimum: 44 pixels square) at the bottom allows them to click on it right away. With short, strong copy for your CTA, you’re ready to go.

You can also ensure readability by using a mobile-friendly template with a single-column layout. Most email providers offer pre-approved templates that automatically re-size text for each platform. You can concentrate on your copy and not worry as much about your design.

Across Clients

Using images can be a great idea, or cause a lot of problems. With so many different email clients available, an email that looks perfect in Outlook may look completely different in the Gmail web page, or on mobile. Use these guidelines to design your email:

• Always provide an external link in your email, so that the reader can click to a web browser version if their email client mangles it.
• Keep your emails under 600 pixels to ensure that they “fit.” Anything over that may not work.
• Use a table-structured positioning of elements, which are universally accepted.
• Add alt text to your email. Some email clients automatically block images, so having alt text ensures that your message will get through.
• Make sure that your email message makes sense without any images.
• Don’t create your email as an image. If a client doesn’t allow images, your message will be lost and possibly tossed into the spam folder.
• Avoid using background images for the same reason.

Testing

Again, testing is always important before you send your email. Send yourself a test message, proofread it, and review it on a PC email client as well as a smartphone to ensure readability for the recipient. Once you’re satisfied that it will work on multiple email clients, you’re ready to send it out.

Conclusion

Email functions and design doesn’t have to be difficult. But it is important to your reader, your message and your brand. Spend a little extra time on the email design. See how the copy, image, CTA and other pieces fit together to offer value to the reader but doesn’t waste their time getting there. Ensure that the email and any images are properly structured, and you’ll increase your chances of your message being seen and opened.

Email Lead Developer

Finding and keeping good leads can be one of the most mystifying parts of marketing and sales and requires a nurturing relationship by an experienced email lead developer.

The term “marketing automation” does not mean creating one email and blasting it out to a purchased list of “guaranteed” prospect. That’s spam–don’t do that!

A full 72% of B2B buyers are not ready to make a purchase from a first email, and neither are most B2C leads, either. Lead generation isn’t the same as lead nurturing. An estimated 98% of MQLs (marketing qualified leads) never convert to closed business.

Email marketing can be an effective way to communicate with your leads, if it’s used correctly. But marketing automation isn’t something you “set and forget.” You still need to create useful, valuable content that your leads will find interesting, educate them and offer them value before you start sending out anything.

Think about it–would you buy a product from a salesperson after one random email, phone call or direct mail piece? Probably not. It’s like sending out one email that tells prospects to BUY TODAY! and you’re ready to magically make sales. It’s not going to work. These are leads that may not know:

• Who you are
• Your company’s name, or who your company is
• What kind of products or services your company sells
• What value your company can provide to them
• What you can do to address their pain points or solve their problems

Why should they even give your email a second thought?

 Inbound Marketing is an excellent Lead Developer

The process of lead nurturing involves building trust and relationships through conversations with your prospects. You’ll educate them about your company through these conversations so you eventually earn their business when they’re ready to buy. Offering and providing relevant information at each stage of the buyer’s journey keeps them informed and engaged until conversion.

The first rule of email marketing is to make sure that anyone you send email to has given you permission to send it. Once that’s done, you can use email marketing to establish an ongoing  relationship.

Using inbound instead of outbound marketing draws interested leads to you. From there, you’ll initiate the conversation that lets you inform, educate, engage and eventually convert. Leads who are nurtured with targeted content produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities, and 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% less cost.

Best Practices as an Email Lead Developer

1. Decide how to use lead nurturing for your business. After you acquire leads online or offline (i.e., trade shows), you’ll use email to determine if it’s a good lead for your business, and if this lead is interested in your offer. If a lead is ready to buy, then your sales reps take over. If not, then the lead is “nurtured” by your marketing reps until they are ready to buy. These leads can be nurtured with relevant, appropriate information and content. If you determine that the lead isn’t interested, their plans have changed or they aren’t a solid, qualified lead, that’s the time to terminate communications completely.
2. Learn to build a great individual workflow:
3. Figure out who you would like to nurture
4. Select your marketing goa
5. Create and send relevant email content to them to help establish that goal

Once you’ve decided on who and what, it’s time to figure out what you’ll be sending them. How many emails is the right amount?  A general rule to start with is 3 to 4 emails per workflow, and you can always add in or remove emails if you need to.

How often are you going to send emails to this group? Too few, and they’ll forget. Too many, and they may unsubscribe, especially if the content isn’t r