Email continues to grow because it delivers consistent and impressive results. For every dollar marketers spend on email marketing, they generate $36 in revenue, a Litmus survey of 2,000 email marketers found in 2020, the latest year for which data is available.

Depending on what industry you’re in, your company’s ROI could be even higher. Agencies in marketing, PR and advertising see a return of $42 for every $1 they spend on email, and businesses in retail, ecommerce and consumer goods are rewarded with $45 in revenue for each dollar spent.

The centrality of data and the need for updated technology

Email may have been around since the dawn of the internet, but the space doesn’t stand still. Email marketing, and the technology that enables it, have evolved to deal with challenges like spam and deliverability and also to take advantage of opportunities, such as the ever-increasing sophistication of data usage for hyper-personalization.

When MarTech surveyed marketers for the 2022 MarTech Replacement Survey, they said technologies for email distribution and for marketing automation (a chief component of which is email), were both in the top four software types replaced over the previous 18 months.

Dig deeper MarTech’s email marketing experts to follow

Marketing automation was the most replaced application, with 23% of respondents in 2022 saying they’d replaced it, versus 24% in 2021. Email distribution technologies were replaced by 21% of those surveyed in 2022, compared to 24% in 2021.

Most of the respondents who replaced email distribution systems were moving to a commercial application, either from another commercial vendor or a homegrown solution. The primary reason: to take advantage of new and better features.

Email marketing helps organizations acquire and retain customers, build businesses and make more money. Explore the platforms essential to email marketing in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

The latest generation of email technology

When it comes to technology, maturity can be a disadvantage. New businesses can more easily leverage the latest capabilities of software development, while established firms may be saddled with legacy technologies and architectures.

Of course, technology players often introduce new features – some at a higher rate than others. But doing that on top of an aging infrastructure, while also keeping things running for an existing customer base, can be challenging.

While the COVID-19 pandemic may have driven communications between business and customers to digital channels like email, that preference seems to hold up even now that the pandemic is waning. Fifty-seven percent of customers said they preferred to engage with businesses via email in 2022, down from 65% in 2020, according to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report.

Despite this preference, lots of emails land in inboxes without getting an open, much less a read or a click. Meanwhile, recipients spent an average of only 10 seconds reading brand emails in the first three quarters of 2021, a Litmus analysis of eight billion email opens found. That was down from 11.8 seconds in 2020 and 13.4 seconds in 2018.

These statistics explain why marketers, and the email marketing platform vendors serving them, are focusing on technologies to create more personalized, relevant and engaging messages that improve the odds of their content being read and acted on.

The personalization imperative amid data pressures

Meanwhile, other developments are changing the data landscape, making it harder to even gather statistics like these about users’ interactions with emails. Because of efforts to safeguard customer privacy, tech companies are making it harder for marketers to collect data about individual users.

In addition to the pending demise of third-party cookies, both Apple and Google are reducing the utility of mobile ad identifiers in an effort to safeguard customer privacy. Another change affecting email marketing, in particular, arose in mid-2021 when Apple announced Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) features in iOS, Mac OS and Watch OS that can limit the data available to marketers by concealing opens and IP addresses.

Another Apple feature, Hide My Email, lets users create their own unique random email addresses that forward to their inboxes. This means that a person could use a unique email address for every business with whom they have a relationship, foiling technologies that seek to tie together behavior from different sources to get a holistic view of a customer’s interests and needs.

These changes are spurring a dramatic shift to first-party data in all digital marketing disciplines, and they have led to the decline of the open rate as a meaningful email marketing metric, since MPP obscures whether, or when, emails are opened by using a cache.

Both the increased emphasis on data-driven personalization and the shifts in the data landscape have spurred vendors of email marketing platforms to augment the data available within their platforms and change the emphasis to metrics other than open rate.

Everything you need to know about email marketing deliverability that your customers want and that inboxes won’t block. Get MarTech’s Email Marketing Periodic Table.

Click here to check it out!

Enterprise email marketing platform capabilities

Email marketing platforms usually offer features for email creation and sending, but consolidation and integrations have added to what one might have once expected. Common capabilities of these platforms include:

• Message design and creation
• Workflow automation and collaboration
• Message previewing
• Email sending
• Deliverability management
• Data management
• Ecommerce capabilities
• Analytics and reporting
• Third-party integrations
• Automation and landing pages

Some providers may offer more advanced capabilities, such as:

• More full-featured customer data platform functionality
• Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities leveraged through different parts of the platform

The benefits of email marketing platforms

While any but the most nascent of businesses will likely have adopted some approach to email, given its centrality to business in general, adopting an enterprise solution offers many benefits. These may include:

• Data unification across channels. Some email marketing platforms include full-fledged customer data platforms, but, even if they don’t, the customer databases associated with these systems can serve as a single source of truth across an organization. Such unification can provide businesses with a complete portrait of their customers, permitting them to leverage data for marketing, customer service and product development purposes. Platforms can also assist with compliance with CAN-SPAM and other privacy regulations.
• A more unified technology stack overall. Most email marketing platforms offer extensive integrations with other business technologies, allowing companies to more easily work across silos.
• Ability to identify more profitable audiences and segmentation strategies. The unified data trove gives marketers the opportunity to get to know their customers better, and also to identify lookalike audiences by connecting to additional data sources. Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities can surface useful insights that marketers may not know to look for.
• More efficient workflows. Every email message that’s meant to be delivered to an audience or segment typically goes through an internal review and approval process. Some email marketing platforms feature the ability to collaborate and obtain approvals within the platform, which is especially helpful for larger more-distributed organizations and those in more regulated industries. Franchises and other multilocation businesses benefit from even more complex systems aimed at sharing useful assets and establishing guidelines, while also allowing those closest to the customers to add valuable customization.
• More personal and efficient communication with customers. Template design combined with data insights and segmentation can allow businesses to deliver more personalized, relevant and timely messaging. Automation and triggered-messaging features allow for more efficiency, as well. When systems include SMS or mobile notification options, this allows businesses to extend communications to those channels.
• Improved deliverability and design of email messages. Email marketing platforms’ deliverability systems – both technological and relationship-oriented – can help businesses ensure their messages make it to the inbox. Once they arrive, design and preview features give marketers more control over how their messages appear, no matter where they are viewed.
• Access to more advanced templating and interactivity. Interactive capabilities via AMP for email or CSS are more easily accessible with the help of email marketing platforms, allowing businesses to create more engaging messages with better return.
• Better ability to measure return on investment (ROI) and more. Data and reporting capabilities can tie email messages to specific business goals, allowing marketers to optimize content and targeting to achieve the best possible results.

Email marketing helps organizations acquire and retain customers, build businesses and make more money. Explore the platforms essential to email marketing in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

The post A guide to how email marketing platforms help brands succeed appeared first on MarTech.

Ryan Phelan has 25 years experience in email marketing and has written 83 articles for MarTech on that and other topics. He’s the co-founder of RPEOrigin.com, a digital marketing services company with an agnostic approach, and is the chairman emeritus of the Email Experience Council Advisory Board.

Q: How did you get into marketing?

A: I have a funny employment history! I went to college and studied to be a Catholic priest and decided, halfway through the program, that I didn’t want to be a priest. And so then I thought, well, I’m a pretty good DJ. So I worked at a nightclub for six years, being a DJ and running the club. And then I discovered DJing didn’t make any money, and that was during the dot-com boom. 

I got my first internet job with Giftpoint.com, which did gift certificates online. I worked in the affiliate world and I worked in email. And over the years I did a lot with affiliate marketing, and then decided that email is where I wanted to go. It was more fun, more exciting, more new. And that’s where I started my email career, back in 1998. It’s been a heck of a ride! I got a degree in psychology. Most marketers I know don’t have a degree in marketing, they have a degree in something else.

Q: From the DJs I know, it sounds like there’s a psychological component to hosting a party.

A: There is. There are two things I took away from being a nightclub DJ that I still use today that I think are great for marketers. I learned how to read a room. You’re up in the DJ booth putting on music and thinking: What is the crowd going to react to? What is the next song? And you get very attuned to what people are doing and the micro-movements around the room, who’s going up for drinks and so on. You read the entire room and that helps predict the energy level and where you go next. That customer-centric focus is really what I started back in ‘95, entertaining 600 people a night in a nightclub. Taking that into email, I think it’s really about putting the customer first and reading the room.

Q: In email marketing, there’s no single room where everybody is mingling together. Is that why it has to be data-centric?

A: The “room” in email is your reporting, your conversion rate, your online behavior, heat maps, all that kind of stuff. But it’s still this centric approach of reading the room and trying to figure out that everybody is different. 

When I was DJing we had a format, and it was a country nightclub. We developed, really, a science on how to play music in a nightclub. It started with a couple two-steps, a triple-step, which is a little faster-paced, and then another faster song, until you reach this crescendo. And different types of people come onto the dance floor based on what you’re playing. Then you crash it down to another two-step, bring it up again, play another slow song, and then start the whole thing over again. What that does is create a stream on and off the dance floor that is much like segmentation done in marketing. 

In today’s world, most marketers are doing one-to-many messages. They’re not doing any segmentation, it’s the same message to everybody. That’s like me playing the same music over and over again while I’m DJing. But what I’m doing, and what marketers should be doing, is using propensity, using demographic and geographic data, looking at persona-based models, and what you can do to differentiate your message to different archetypes and groups that you identify in the data.

Q: Why do you think email is still such an important marketing channel after all these years?

A: I think there are two upsides for email currently. Number one, we still have a large majority of marketers that still aren’t doing the advanced stuff — segmentation or “reading the room.” There are still companies that are struggling with that. COVID was a great example of how companies finally realized they were underweight in their technology in order to execute email, either in their staff or tech stack. Email came in and saved the day again during COVID. 

The second thing is that with the availability of data, email has the opportunity to continue to grow in sophistication. From identification, to third-party data, to touching outside of email into social media or text or web — email continues to power those full-spectrum experiences. And so the same future I saw for email 25 years ago, I still see today. But it’s predicated on the fact that first we have to get more companies to buy in on the sophistication that email can achieve with data.

Read our Spotlight on contributor Stacey Ackerman here.

The post Ryan Phelan: Spotlight on the expert appeared first on MarTech.

But no matter the company size, moving from one platform to another is an intricate dance. You have to get all the steps right to succeed from the start.

Moving to a new platform can seem daunting because you don’t learn how to do it in college. You learn through experience. Not everyone has had that experience; if they did, it probably was bad. Every migration is different because every company has different needs and setups. 

COVID-19 spurred companies’ dissatisfaction with martech

Migrations are on my mind because more companies are now moving through the request-for-proposal process (RFPs) or migrating between platforms. 

Dig deeper: Download MarTech’s Annual Replacement Survey for the applications that are most frequently replaced

Many discovered their martech partners weren’t fast or innovative enough to support their demands for speed and flexibility in a changing COVID economy.

Pre-pandemic, companies switched martech platforms mainly because they were unhappy with the cost, features or support. Now their patience has expired with platforms that aren’t sophisticated enough. 

Getting realistic about migration

There exists the idea that migrations are simple and fast. I’ve had to counsel companies that think they can make a massive platform change in just four months. Sure, it can be done, but at four times the cost.

As I mentioned at the start, a migration has many steps, and you have to do them correctly if you want to succeed. You can plan on spending three to 18 months in a migration based on your program’s sophistication. Take that timeline into account in your planning. 

These are the four most common complaints from companies that want to investigate new technology. Which one applies to you?

• “My system is wonky.”
• “We need a lot of hacks, workarounds, and manual processes to make things work.”
• “I need Mary in IT to move data around for me.”
• “I need external processes to get the reporting I need.”

These happen because somebody hurried through the migration.

4 focus areas for successful migrations

Although every migration is different, at a minimum, you should focus on these four areas when you migrate your systems from one martech platform to another:

1. Discovery

This is the most important step and often the most overlooked. That’s because nobody ever thinks to look at internal systems first. I will spend a fair amount of time on this step because your success hinges on it.

Sure, you’re excited because you just signed a contract for a new shiny tool. You’re dreaming about everything you want to do with your new email service provider (ESP). And you can’t wait to start sending emails. But to use your new tool effectively, with all the features you drooled over in your demo, you must know what to do first as you migrate to your new platform.

Your first critical step is to inventory all your martech systems, using your team, consultants with your ESP or a third-party agency. This means deep diving into where your data lives, how it gets there, and your processes, APIs, data fields, access, and governance.

Ask many questions. Talk to everyone who touches your email process, from your data and creative teams to the people who push “Send” and your CMO. 

Don’t skip this step or rush through it. An effective discovery process ensures you can get the most from your new tool because it will reveal unexpected strengths, weaknesses, gaps and other things.

A proper discovery takes a global perspective of the entire operation. It’s not just individual teams in their silos and responsibilities. 

Also, document everything in a manual. This will identify your important integrations, what’s useful and what isn’t, what has to move to the new platform and what doesn’t. 

It takes time, and it must be comprehensive, but it’s critical for the success of your next steps.

Dig deeper: Martech stack documentation is vital, here are some tips to do it right

2. Moving to the new platform 

Your new ESP can use the manual you created in discovery to define business cases and identify processes to move. The discovery process also reveals the order in which to move things over. 

Migrating to a new platform isn’t about chucking all your triggers, templates and lists into your new platform and then hitting “Go.” It’s a systematic approach not driven by an IP warm-up plan. 

I laugh (to myself) if the first question I hear from a client after signing a new martech contract is if the ESP mentions an IP warm-up plan. That’s step 325 in the migration. We’re at step four. Let your integrations and planning come to fruition first before you plan your first campaign.

Maybe you think your new ESP will handle all this for you. Surprise! It likely can’t get into your current ESP to do any of this work for you. Your internal teams or external companies do the work, not just to meet migration timelines but also to avoid disrupting business during the move. 

Every business unit affected by the migration has its own objectives and KPIs. Migrating to a new platform means you’ve added to their work. You’re ripping data out of one place and putting it somewhere else. That takes planning, agreements and negotiations.

This becomes a systematic and precise orchestration of moving systems, processes and creative content from one platform to the other. Each element must be moved in the right order. I cannot emphasize this enough. Migration is not about speed; it’s about accuracy.

A good discovery process pays off here, too. If you do it well, you will have those things in place. Migration is a team effort, like an orchestra, and you’re the conductor.

3. User acceptance testing

This is another often-overlooked step. When you move from Place A to Place B, you must test to make sure everything is working correctly, with your old ESP as a backup if it doesn’t. That means you will need to have some runway with your soon-to-be old ESP. That gives you time to move everything over. 

Develop a plan for user acceptance testing that shows what’s being tested and approved. Test all 1,000 of your triggers. Test all iterations of your templates and all of your inbound APIs.

A disciplined testing regimen keeps you from breaking things on your new platform. User acceptance testing is a big step that gets you closer to pushing that “Go” button. But you’re still not ready to push it. 

4. Send an email campaign — but only at the right time

You might send an email early in the process to test the system or have a proof of concept. But don’t hurry this step. Do it when it’s safe and makes sense, not because a timetable says you should.

When sending an email campaign, don’t try every new feature on your platform all at once. Patience is a virtue in migration. Wait until you get to parity, or a bit beyond parity, when you do things you did on your old platform but do them faster, better or cheaper.

A new platform brings changes everywhere in your email operation. Phase in your new implementation, and rely on your new ESP partner to help. Pushing “Send” is the last step in this process, not the beginning.

Wrapping up

In the last 23 years of being involved in RFPs and migrations, I’ve seen just about everything. Three key concepts get overlooked:

• It takes a massive, coordinated internal effort.
• Plan your cutover from the old platform to the new one, and that means possibly renewing with the old ESP for a short time. 
• Give yourself enough time between the RFP and the end-contract date.

In our work with enterprise client migrations, we recommend a minimum two-year process between running an RFP and shutting down the old platform. ESPs are not great at extending contracts if the migration process takes longer than expected. It gets expensive, and it can be cumbersome.

Planning and partnerships can help you understand the innovation arc you want to be on and recognize the potential for your new program.

The pandemic showed us we must pivot quickly to stay ahead of changing business conditions. Maybe you saw right away that your old technology couldn’t meet the challenge, so you can be forgiven for wanting to step on the gas to switch platforms.

Don’t try to make the migration process from RFP to pushing “Go” move just as fast. 

The post 4 steps to take before hitting go on your new martech platform appeared first on MarTech.

Up to 91% of consumers are changing their shopping habits in response to bleak economic news, according to a new SheerID study. Furthermore, 76% of UK and 70% of U.S. consumers don’t expect their countries’ economies to improve over the next year.

As marketers, we know what this means. When times get tough, marketing budgets get cut. We also know businesses that keep investing in email marketing are better off when the economy improves. How do you make that happen with less money and fewer team members?

I can answer that question with six tips. They combine quick wins for short-term gains with longer-term strategic revisions designed to work now during economic uncertainty and later when times improve.

Besides my own recommendations, I also asked five other email experts for their best advice for recession-proof email marketing.

1. Go for quick wins to get more from your marketing now

Getting started can be the hardest part. These four approaches make your email marketing program more effective, build stronger customer relationships, and use your resources more wisely.

Do an email audit to uncover gaps and reveal opportunities

This is almost always my first step with clients because it can show you where you can act quickly using your current resources.

Create or update your strategic plan

Whether you have a spreadsheet full of strategy or a bare outline, having a plan can help you allocate time and energy more efficiently. If you don’t have one, come up with one, even if it’s just for the present quarter.

Establish or upgrade an email testing plan

An email testing plan will help you learn more about your customers and measure your email effectiveness. Go beyond subject lines and button colors.

Test one campaign-level approach against another, such as emotion versus urgency or value. This will give you deeper insights you can apply beyond your next campaign.

Get more email into your customers’ inboxes

How long has it been since you looked at a post-campaign delivery report? You might discover you’re blocked or restricted at a key ISP. Call a deliverability expert to help you break through a logjam and get seen by more customers.

2. Fine-tune your marketing program to show customers you know who they are

Think back to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and how your company shifted gears to reach customers. It’s an appropriate comparison, Adam Purslow of TheLoyaltyCo told me. 

“Similar to what we saw during COVID-19, people have less disposable income,” he says. “The key is to push on with engagement and speaking to customers and being aware that people aren’t going to spend as much. If people are going out to eat only once a year or so now, being the restaurant people go to becomes more important.”

Email retains its advantage over search, social and web marketing because we can message our customers at tactical times. We can gently nudge customers so they can act when their wallet allows. That’s why we need to be in their inboxes regularly with great deals and relevant content.

But we must continue with empathy and a customer-centric focus on our recipients. We are grappling with meeting KPIs, but that thinking is more about the brand and less about customers. When you help customers achieve their goals, they will help you achieve yours. 

Dig deeper: Authentic storytelling: 5 rules for the new frontier of marketing

3. Protect your profit margin by targeting the right customers

“Use segmentation and targeting to find the people who might have lapsed but are more likely to re-visit before customers who are slightly warmer,” Purslow says. “You have to be careful with your targets and not blanket them with money. Keep monitoring your uptake and reporting.” 

Scott Cohen of SmileDirectClub says the email channel has a target on its back “because we’re [perceived as] cheap. We are also the channel to nurture and market to the purchase cycle, which gets longer. We have to balance that longer cycle against immediate returns.”

According to Tom Ricards of Bloomreach, we must also be aware that customer segments are fluid. “Understanding the customers is absolutely everything,” he says. “We need to be able to respond to changing segments in real time.”

4. Gather more customer and transactional data and listen to what they’re telling you

As I mentioned in my previous MarTech article (3 ways data can steer you wrong — and how to glean better insights), we need more than data. We need the insights we get from the data we have.

As email strategist Jennifer Hoth told me, “Now is a great time to gather first-party and zero-party data to understand why they’re buying and to get to know them better, to go beyond just the transactional data to know them personally. 

“We need to understand who they are, what their world is like now, what’s keeping them engaged, and to be sure with your data that you’re sending relevant communications.”

5. Don’t let fear hold you back

In my 24 years of doing email audits, I have found that most marketers leave money on the table because they aren’t sending emails often enough. That’s because of fear of deliverability issues. 

I’m not saying, “Forget the fear and blast your list!” You have to be smart and work out the best frequency or cadence for your product or service and audience. Don’t refrain from sending out of fear because you could make things harder for yourself.

You might even have more leeway with frequency than you realize, says fractional CMO Skip Fidura. “You know every email you send out. Your recipients don’t know every email they receive. You might feel as if you’re sending out a lot, but it might not feel like that to your recipients.”

An email program that relies on an unending stream of “buy this now” emails will be even less effective if your customers have cut back on spending, no matter how many incentives you tack on. This is the time to put your data and insights to work for more personalized and personal emails.

“A client of ours sent out a small amount of highly personalized emails,” Purslow says. “Deliverability and open rates were great because the emails made subscribers feel like we were talking to them. As long as you’re clever with personalization, deliverability will not be an issue.”

6. Keep testing and learning

“It’s very important to know your audience and to always be testing,” Hoth says. “[Your audience] is always changing, especially in times like these. I appreciate being able to do A/B testing and to find out what tone works best with customers is genius, and it doesn’t cost what it would take to install a new technology.”

I’m just as passionate about testing, especially beyond campaign-level factors like subject lines. In both tough times and prosperity, it can pinpoint what moves your customers to act and whether your strategies and tactics effectively achieve your objectives. 

Dig deeper: 7 common problems that derail A/B/n email testing success

What these tips have in common

Yes, they do take time, and you might not have that luxury if you’re under more pressure to meet your goals. 

But these six tactics also force you to learn more about your customers: whether they’re stressed, looking for bargains, buying regularly or less often, or even disengaging. This gives you the knowledge to email more effectively now without shifting gears when prosperity returns for your customers. 

Email is the only tool you can adjust on the fly like this for quick results. Invest some of your precious time now to understand what’s happening and where you can adjust for short-term gains and long-term success.

The post 6 tactics to create recession-proof email marketing appeared first on MarTech.

It’s one of the most popular marketing and sales channels, but email isn’t as easy to leverage as it seems. For your emails to convert, it takes more than writing a few lines and hitting send. Everything plays a role in your email success, from the health of your email database to your copywriting skills. 

If your email marketing feels stale, these tactics are sure to help you:

• Understand how email deliverability works – and how email verification helps
• Craft emails that feel tailor-made for your ideal prospects
• Improve your metrics and increase email revenue.

How to make more sales with email: assess your current performance

Before you  drastically change your email marketing strategy, it pays to take a step back and assess how your emails have been performing. That will allow you to identify what resonates most with your audience so you can create more similar emails.

Take a close look at your metrics and notice what stands out. Your past three to six months’ performance will be a good indicator. Plan to double down on those approaches to boost engagement and conversions. Then, consider these tactics below to ensure your email marketing has the highest chance to succeed. 

Are your emails reaching the inbox? Check your email list

You might be spending significant resources on email marketing. Writing and designing great emails isn’t easy. But are those emails landing in your prospects’ inboxes? Low engagement can often be caused by an outdated email list and a poor sender reputation.

Your sender reputation is a score that internet service providers assign to you as a sender, much like a credit score. Everything you do determines your score, but  your email list health dramatically impacts it. For instance, whenever your bounce rate exceeds 2%, your score takes a hit. Spam complaints and fake emails also affect your reputation. When that happens, your newsletters and campaigns will  go to the spam folder. 

If you’ve never scrubbed your database, consider using a free email validation service first. With ZeroBounce, you can check 100 email addresses for free every month to ensure you’re adding only genuine contacts to your list. 

Segment your database for higher engagement

Your email subscribers are in different stages of their buyer journey with your company. While some may be long-term customers, others are still on the fence about purchasing. Each segment has different needs and expectations, and creating emails that speak directly to these groups should be high on your list.

Segmentation can be challenging for many marketers, but you can start with basic filters. Use criteria such as gender, location, and purchase history, then think of ways  to engage these prospects with the most relevant offers. Personalize every email campaign using available data, and remember that one email is usually not enough to make a sale. Drip campaigns are more effective as they periodically nudge your prospects and build familiarity with your brand.

Make your emails highly educational

When email conversions drop, many marketers tend to try a more aggressive approach – more emails, more direct offers and higher discounts. But could you benefit more from inbound tactics instead? 

Instead of pushing for sales, inbound marketing focuses on attracting prospects with relevant, helpful resources and experiences. Creating content that answers questions, solves problems, and makes people’s lives better is a great way to strengthen your brand. 

Even if you’re running a direct marketing campaign, you can still present your offers in an educational way. Instead of leading with a “buy now” approach, focus on the benefits of your products and services. Build loyalty with your audience by establishing your brand as a reliable, relevant source of information and education. 

Bonus tip: send your emails consistently

One final tip to  increase sales with your emails is to providea steady sending schedule. Whether you set up automated drip campaigns or send a newsletter, be consistent in your efforts. Sending emails regularly helps your reputation, boosts email deliverability, and keeps your business relevant to your prospects. 

So, if you have an email newsletter, remember to send it on time, ideally on the same day every week or month. Your nurturing campaigns should also be timely – check and update your automations to confirm each trigger works correctly. Staying on top of these details and sending useful emails to a healthy email list will boost your email marketing results quickly.

Explore ZeroBounce’s email validation and deliverability tools.

The post 3 ways to drive sales with email appeared first on MarTech.

Modern marketing is a many-headed beast. Nobody, surely, is competent to meet all its demands, from campaign design and execution, through data analytics and measurement, to mobile and location strategies and social media engagement. The solution? A team — or even several teams.

But what if you’re in Paaske’s position, running a small-to-medium business with a marketing organization comprising one or two full-time employees?

Paaske explained Boomer Baby’s business model. “You become eligible for Medicare at 65 most often,” she said, “so what we do is help people navigate that process — it’s not so straightforward. We help match people with the right insurance plan and get paid a commission by the insurance carrier when we help people enroll.”

Keeping up with marketing needs

With new marketing technologies continually emerging, it’s hard for Paaske and the Boomer Baby team to keep up. “It’s hard unless you have a full-time marketing expert,” she said. “As a new technology pops up — even just email marketing; I mean, back in the day Mailchimp was new, ‘How do I use Mailchimp?’ Whereas if you have access to somebody, you hire them or contract out, they’re like, ‘Just send me the list and I’ll do everything else.'”

For Boomer Baby, hiring an expert in each new marketing strategy and technology is not an option. Contracting niche experts for limited projects is another matter. “Having access to GrowTal and being able to find an expert on demand — not having to have them on your payroll — is awesome. I’ve been asking for something like this for years.”

A pre-vetted network of marketing talent

GrowTal offers access to a network of marketers with a wide range of skills. One main benefit, said Paaske, is the flexibility it offers in staffing marketing projects. “Even if you hire full-time marketing staff,” she continued, “marketing is a huge umbrella term. There are so many specialties it’s almost impossible to expect one person to have strong capabilities in the different areas you might need, from automation to content production.”

It’s possible to have an ongoing relationship with selected contractors too. “We do establish relationships,” Paaske confirmed. “Initially, when we wanted to get automated email campaigns going we worked with an email marketing specialist; when we wanted to run some digital ads we worked with someone else; when we wanted to look at our branding and our messaging, they had someone else they matched us with.” Working with someone on a finite project doesn’t mean you can’t circle back when you need them again.

Digging into business needs

Of course, the concept of marketplaces for freelance talent is not new. Fiverr, Upwork and other sites offer what is essentially self-serve access to many different kinds of contractors (including digital marketers, for example). GrowTal, which focuses exclusively on marketing talent, takes a more bespoke approach to supplying talent both to brands and agencies.

“We hop on a call to get the best understanding of what the client needs,” said Sarah Little, GrowTal’s marketing and operations manager. “This is a benefit because we are truly able to dig into the needs for their business, source the exact expert that has expertise for what they are looking for — whether it’s a more junior expert for execution purposes or a more senior expert to work through strategy — and find the expert that has direct experience in the specific field of a client.” GrowTal can tailor its recommendations to specific verticals like healthcare, clothing, luxury or food.

The experts on GrowTal’s roster come pre-vetted — and it’s a tight community with about 100 experts currently on platform. “We have made our process in-depth to ensure our clients are getting top-tier talent,” said Little. “We get many referrals from people in our marketing community, in addition to experts that have worked at very well known brands such as Meta, Google and TikTok, and we have experts that apply through our website.”

A resume or portfolio review is followed by what Little called “an intensive interview with a thought leader in the specific area of expertise.” Candidates for quantitive roles (like paid social and search) take quizzes; candidates for more qualitative, creative roles have their existing work reviewed. Boomer Baby interviews the candidates GrowTal recommends.

Opportunities for marketers

In addition to meeting the needs of clients, GrowTal clearly offers marketing experts an opportunity to build a flexible freelance career. Experts are paid an hourly rate, work the hours they choose and can decline to work for a client if they don’t see a good fit.

Another big advantage for freelancers is that GrowTal finds the clients. The process of applying to join the GrowTal community is said to take “a few weeks” from initial application to scheduling an interview.

Dig deeper: MarTech Salary and Career survey shows a profession coming into its own

The post Working with freelance marketing talent appeared first on MarTech.

The aim is to deliver visual content that renders for each individual customer at the moment of impression. This builds on Movable Ink’s experience with providing dynamic content for emails that renders at moment of opening, and a similar offering for web pages and landing pages.

Why we care. Two reasons. First, it’s yet another example of a vendor originally known for innovation in one niche channel — in this case email — gradually expanding their offerings to encompass the much wider range of channels marketers need to address today.

Second, there’s a recognition that the way to stand out from the endless noise of mindless and predictable re-targeting is to send rich messages designed to engage users in the moment.

Dig deeper: Email creation platform Stensul expands its offering to landing pages

Based on SMS in beta. This development is supported by data from an SMS beta trial in the U.S. and the U.K. that showed lifts in click-throughs, conversions and average order value.

The mobile suite enables the following capabilities:

• Capture behavioral data within apps and use it to generate 1:1 personalized content across mobile and other channels.
• Deep linking to allow seamless connections between, for example, email and mobile messages and specific locations in the mobile app.
• Improved attribution in mobile channels.

The post Movable Ink unveils mobile suite appeared first on MarTech.

The Builder is based on templates and no-code modules allowing non-technical staff to collaborate on landing page creation. Stensul is emphasizing that this is not a repurposed email creation tool but a separate solution.

Why we care. The trend is for vendors who built their business on offering solutions for niche parts of the customer experience to seek its broader application. We have already seen vendors offering sophisticated email content capabilities pivot to offering those capabilities to experiences beyond email. Stensul’s territory is creation rather than content, but it makes sense that the Stensul platform would look to support creation and collaboration in other areas.

This reflects, of course, the need for marketers to think and strategize across multiple channels rather than one, no matter how important the email channel might be.

Dig deeper: Stensul is first email creation platform to integrate with Pardot

Marketo Engage integration. Stensul’s email creation capabilities have for some time been integrated with Adobe Marketo. It’s now announcing an API that will allow users within Stensul to embed Marketo forms in landing pages and upload the HTML to Marketo Marketing Activities with a single click.

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Consider this: 17% of companies are planning RFPs this year, according to the 2023 State of the ESP RFP. You might not think that sounds like a large number, but it is if you scale that number to industries. So, that doesn’t sound like a pullback to me.

Among the clients for whom we manage RFPs, we see more requests for technology platforms that help marketers execute and innovate faster. They ask, “What can I do to insulate myself from the coming economic apocalypse if it happens by being innovative and agile?”

Below are smart decisions to improve your business, whether the economy goes sour or not.

1. Rethink that RFP

Before you replace or add technology, ask yourself whether you maxed out your current functionality. Whenever anybody asks me to start an RFP, my first question is, “Are you using everything the platform gives you right now?”

Dig deeper: Economic uncertainty means marketers will re-evaluate ad buys more frequently in 2023

A rule of thumb holds that marketers use only about 20% to 30% of what a tech platform offers. Maybe they didn’t have time to learn how to use the really cool stuff. Or the vendor didn’t offer training. Or they couldn’t get the platform to integrate with external data sources. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how innovative the platform is. It has so many other deficits that you still need to switch.

Today’s vendor marketplace makes the RFP process much more challenging if you don’t have someone to do the work. Look at what you’re paying for now but not using before beginning the time-consuming and potentially disruptive process of finding something new.

2. Develop a plan to shift your marketing priorities

Remember when, at the height of COVID, email saved ecommerce? That’s not an exaggeration. Many companies rediscovered how well email drives sales and revenue and builds customer relationships, especially during a crisis.

Your CEO might remember that. If the CEO asks how the company could change its marketing approach, what would you say?

If your email program became your company’s hero this past few years, it’s even more likely that your CEO will seek your input now. But even if it just kept on keepin’ on, you should still have a plan for the next few months that lays out your options and how you could use them for marketing against a downturn.

What to put in your plan

It shouldn’t begin and end with “Send more email.” If your customers don’t have the money to buy more often or to fill larger carts, sending more offers won’t move the revenue needle.

Look at your targeting. Consider your segmentation program. Review your price structure on promotions. What should it look like to stimulate more sales?

Dig deeper: 5 tips to get more value from your tech stack

Identify segments that can be more lucrative to target, such as regular buyers, people who buy at full price instead of waiting for sales and shoppers who send you clear purchase or upgrade intent signals. 

Look for propensity to purchase. Consider developing a next-logical-purchase plan that moves beyond cross-selling or upselling.

If your CEO asks for your advice, that’s as much of a blue-sky question as you’ll ever get. So be ready to jump. Don’t stop to think about the process. Be able to respond quickly with a plan. 

It could go like this: “We need to structure campaigns around our best customers’ propensity to buy in these lines. Here’s what those email campaigns would look like.”

Develop your plan now, and have it ready to go when the CEO or another high-ranking executive comes calling. But even if that call never comes, if the recession doesn’t happen, or if your customers keep buying, why not execute your plan anyway instead of doing business as usual? This is an excellent opportunity to think strategically without getting bogged down or distracted by tactics.

If you’re unsure where to start, begin with an email audit. This can help you find gaps and other weaknesses in your messaging strategy. (Get background information and details in this earlier MarTech column: 10 questions to ask when auditing your email program.)

3. Educate yourself and reach out to your community

Think about all the advice — in columns like this on MarTech, during webinars, in white papers and guides — that poured out as the business world shifted gears during the pandemic. Expect the same if the economy stutters.

Besides these thought leadership sources, you can call on your email communities for advice and ideas. These communities thrive because the members feed off each other for support and advice. 

Watch the news every day. Raise your sights and educate yourself about what’s happening in the broader economy beyond your vertical. Maybe you weren’t directly affected by the mass layoffs that have rolled through the tech industry, but the repercussions could affect your company or industry.

Spend at least an hour a week reading up on everything that’s happening in email, social media and mobile marketing, in privacy legislation and customer expectations. Add to this cauldron of content news about changes in consumer behavior, the unemployment rate and the economic impact they could have.

Be informed so that when your CEO asks for your advice, you can report what’s happening in your immediate market. CEOs can call on higher-level business forecasts, but you will be the expert on your market conditions.

Wrapping up

Use these suggestions to jumpstart your own thinking. If you want to tap into the added functionalities a new vendor can provide so you can increase your business, then go for it. Suppose implementing propensity is the right strategy to improve your marketing results; get it done. 

The one thing that marks a potential recession is what we saw during COVID: fast-reaction pivots that scale to a new market condition. A recession doesn’t have to be scary. But now is not the time to rely on the adage that email is recession-proof. 

Keep your eye on the future. Think back to November 2019. How would you have prepared if you had known that the world would shut down three months later? You have that time now. What’s your plan?

The post 3 recession-defeating marketing strategies appeared first on MarTech.

In the modern e-commerce world, personalization is everything. It’s what engages customers, inspires them, and keeps them coming back. As the global economy remains uncertain, it’s important to apply those personalization tactics to your tried-and-true customer communication strategy — email marketing.

Simply put, first-party data is the fuel you need to drive successful email personalization initiatives and strategies in e-commerce. Specifically, first-party data is customer information that your company collects directly via its own channels and sources with the customer’s consent. These channels include email, mobile apps, websites, social media, SMS and more. Since you are collecting this data yourself, it makes the data unique, as no other company can collect these specific data points. Advancements in modern marketing technology make it possible to centrally access this information and use it in marketing automation campaigns.

You can comfortably rely on this data for one massive reason — you’ve sourced it yourself. You know you’ve collected it compliantly and can now use it to strategize and scale winning customer journeys with your brand.

Building your email personalization around first-party data guarantees that your personalization efforts are all-encompassing. It ensures that your company is using its collected customer data to transform the customer experience and drive brand loyalty meaningfully.

Perhaps the most important right now, relying on the channel (email) consistently recognized as the highest-ROI medium for any marketing team is the most financially savvy move your company can make. Creating personalized email campaigns with the right all-in-one platform will allow your company to generate fast ROI at scale without adding additional resources and overburdening your team and can also save your practitioners time when creating those emails. An all-in-one platform will be especially essential if your company needs to cut ties with outside agencies and start handling all marketing initiatives in-house, all while cutting back on advertising spend across the board.

Just because recession-like conditions are on the horizon, that doesn’t mean that your company’s marketing and revenue-generating efforts must suffer. Investing more of your budget into email can result in your company getting significantly more in return. Find out more about preparing your marketing for economic uncertainty by reading this insightful guide.

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