Email marketing is constantly evolving. You need only watch the headlines to see that. But as the market adapts, it also reveals different ways in which you can improve your email marketing strategy one tweak at a time — and identifies the true best practices.
Here’s a look at four common email marketing pain points and the data you need to see to make educated decisions about your campaigns.
Who has time to follow up on all of the web leads you’re getting? Why not automate it?
“Help, we’re getting so many leads from our website!”
You are one of the fortunate companies that gets several leads and business opportunities from your website each day. You aren’t equipped to handle the volume of leads that you’re getting from your website, so how do you follow up and still have time in your day to manage everything else?
Enter marketing automation — a technique that can help you recapture time in your schedule or reduce a staffing burden.
The fact of the matter is that many web leads don’t need personal follow-up.
If you’re in the midst of an inbound marketing program, you probably have several landing pages on your website that offer detailed guides, checklists, ebooks, demos or other “premium” content.
Because many people on your website are probably in the early stages of the sales process, you probably get as many (if not more) web leads/contacts from people downloading these materials as people requesting price quotes or a sales call.
These web leads should go into a marketing automation queue for follow-up.
Marketing automation is a buzzword in the marketing industry that really boils down to the process of automating follow-up with leads.
It’s quite simply the process of nurturing your potential customers to a point of sale. This can happen through email, social media, and other contact points. It’s most traditionally done through email.
Marketing automation isn’t a sure-fire fix for all of your marketing problems. It’s not a completely automated process that will instantly generate new business leads with absolutely no work from your marketing team.
Marketing automation supports all steps in the marketing funnel — the points where potential customers are researching your company’s product/service and have indicated that they have some interest in your solution. It’s not a tool to fill the top of your sales funnel with new leads.
It also doesn’t work with email lists you’ve purchased from advertisers or third-party sources. Don’t expect to “drip” emails to your rented email list and expect that those contacts will eventually be sales ready.
For companies producing great content and getting a steady flow of leads from their websites, marketing automation could be a good solution to the problem of timely, effective follow-up. Here’s a list of things that you should consider when deciding if marketing automation is right for your company:
If you answered “yes” to most of these questions, marketing automation might be right for you.
If you think marketing automation might be a good fit for your company, would you like us to show you how it might work for you? Let us know.
Google recently announced it will include a prominent unsubscribe button to all incoming marketing emails in its email service used by millions, Gmail. This news caused many B2B businesses that use email marketing to become concerned about the performance of their campaigns and subscriber lists.
Essentially: if it’s easier and more prominent to unsubscribe, will more subscribers do so?
While it’s understandable that this update may be intimidating, we think the best approach is to embrace the challenge (you really don’t have much of a choice, after all). If email marketing worked for you before, it will continue to do so, and here’s why.
While some say that email isn’t an effective marketing tool anymore, research shows that it still has the highest ROI of any online marketing tactic.
One reason is that email is still a dominant avenue of communication in business. In fact, 91 percent check their email daily. Email subscriptions to websites for updates and information is growing at the fastest rate ever, with 74 percent of consumers actually preferring to receive commercial communications by email.
We talk with several companies that are doing email marketing, only to find out they’re missing out on some significant opportunities. If you’re wondering how your company stacks up, read the checklist below and evaluate your email marketing.
I read a timely report on Marketing Charts this week. It was timely because I was speaking with someone who commented, “we tried email and it doesn’t work.”
I’ve heard that “email doesn’t work” several times (just like I hear “we’ve tried paid search and it doesn’t work, or just about any other marketing tactic). Perhaps you’ve even thought the same thing or had your own struggles with email. It’s certainly not uncommon.
Another popular criticism of email is “I don’t want to spam my prospects or customers.”
My conclusion is that people say or think these things because they may have tried email marketing but didn’t send something that’s relevant to their ideal customer.
With social media, mobile marketing, and other newer and sexier marketing alternatives, a lot of people say that email is losing its luster. The fact remains, however, that email marketing is still one of the most effective online marketing activities that your company can engage in. The Direct Marketing Association says that for every $1 a company spends on email, they get $40.56 in revenue.
Today we are going to look at some rules, that when followed, will make you an exceptional email marketer, and will help you get more ROI from the email you’re sending.
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