Email marketing is a highly effective and high-ROI marketing channel. Through email, you can target your audience with personalized and relevant messages, which can improve customer acquisition and retention, improve customer loyalty, and drive higher revenues and profits. Of course, high-ROI email marketing does not happen automatically. For great results, you must a) invest in the right email service provider (ESP), and b) implement proven best practices to use and optimize that ESP.

If Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) is your ESP, you’re already on the right track with (a). This article will help you with (b). Keep reading to discover five Marketing Cloud best practices to increase your email marketing ROI in 2023. 

5 Salesforce Marketing Cloud Best Practices to Boost Your Email ROI in 2023

In one survey, 59% of respondents said that marketing emails influence their purchases and 50% said that they buy from marketing emails at least once a month. In another 2021 survey, 77% of marketers said that they had seen an increase in email engagement over the previous 12 months. This explains why 90% of them plan to either invest more in email or maintain their current investment in 2023.

But many of them will not be able to capture high ROI from their email programs. You will – if you follow the Salesforce Marketing Cloud best practices highlighted below. All these tips are validated by the expert Marketing Cloud email specialists at Email Uplers!

1. Clean up your email list

Your email list determines who will receive your brand’s marketing messages. It also determines your sender IP reputation. You can damage your IP reputation by:

• Purchasing an email list rather than building it organically
• Emailing people who did not explicitly sign on or “opt in” to receive your messages
• Send irrelevant or generic messages to the people on your email list
  

All these mistakes will also affect your email open rates and affect your email deliverability, meaning many of your messages will end up in spam folders. For all these reasons, it’s crucial to maintain your email list and keep it as clean as possible. List cleanup is about removing duplicate, fake, or temporary email addresses from your subscriber list so you only message real people who want to hear from you. A clean email list – which will be smaller than a larger but cluttered list – is also important because it can give a huge boost to your email marketing ROI.

Follow these best practices to optimize your email list:

• Review your email list every few months
• Periodically email everyone on your list to confirm that they still want to hear from you
• Retain only those email addresses that show the maximum engagement and open rates
• Remove disposable email addresses
• Include attractive offers to entice more subscribers to sign up for your messages and thus build your email list organically

2. Plan your email design

The design and layout of your emails will determine whether readers are attracted to it or whether they will simply ignore, delete, or worse, unsubscribe from them. SFMC provides numerous tools to help you create responsive, mobile-optimized designs for every email. Mobile optimization is important because research shows that 42.3% of users delete non-optimized emails.

You can also leverage built-in email templates in Salesforce Marketing Cloud  and make each template super creative with custom content blocks. Other capabilities like drag-and-drop functions, personalized scripting language, and interactive content like carousels and weather reports are also possible with SFMC for creating memorable designs that will delight your subscribers.

To make the most of SFMC, make sure to put some thought and planning into your email design. Add engaging elements to enhance the design and increase your email marketing ROI. Add animated visuals, GIFs, and live content to entice more subscribers to open your messages and improve your open and clickthrough rates.

But at the same time, don’t add too many elements that will clutter the email and confuse your readers. Make sure your textual and visual content are properly organized and every email is consumable and easy to navigate. Also, keep these best practices in mind:

• Use a limited number of typefaces and simple, readable fonts.
• Use a controlled color palette that matches your brand’s overall esthetics.
• Include an attention-grabbing headline, sub-headline, and pre-header.
• Add an unsubscribe button.
• Include your brand’s logo, website link, and social media links.
• Include relevant and brief calls-to-action (CTAs) and a catchy signature.
• Include white space strategically.

3. Segment your audience

Segmented campaigns have been shown to drive a revenue increase of 760% or more. Segmentation is about identifying the subgroups within your target audience. The goal is to understand the demographics and needs of each subgroup so you can create tailored messaging that is more likely to increase their brand engagement.

High-quality data is the key to effective segmentation for email marketing. Analyze this data to create relevant segments and adjust your email strategy accordingly. You can create various segments based on their locations, genders, ages, interests, jobs, and other characteristics that are common to one segment but not to others.

Following these best practices will help you make the most of SFMC’s segmentation capabilities, tailor the content in each email for each segment, and increase your email ROI:

• Collect and integrate customer data from a variety of sources to inform your segmentation efforts.
• Segment subscribers based on current engagement levels to better focus your email marketing efforts.
• Segment customers based on their shopping behaviors and target them for upsells or cross-sells.
• Use data about past behaviors to predict future behaviors and design new campaigns.

4. Personalize messages for your segmented audience

When it comes to email marketing, personalization matters. One survey found that brands that never or rarely include dynamic personalized content see a ROI of only 12:1 from email marketing. In contrast, brands that do include dynamic personalized content see ROI of 43:1.

After segmenting subscribers into relevant categories, it’s vital to craft and deliver personal experiences to each of them. Personalization will increase the likelihood that they will stay with your brand and reward you with their loyalty. Personalization will make your messages more relevant. By creating accurate segments and personalizing each email, you can nurture relationships with your audience and earn their trust. You will also see a positive impact in email opens, clickthroughs, conversion rates, and ultimately your email ROI.

Leverage demographic, behavioral, and other types of customer data to create segments and add personalization to email content. Also follow these Marketing Cloud API best practices for email personalization:

• Address subscribers using their names in the greeting or in the subject line.
• Personalize content depending on the subscriber’s lifecycle stage.
• Send birthday, anniversary, and holiday messages.
• Personalize content to address specific subscriber needs or concerns.

Leverage SFMC’s automation and AI-powered analytics capabilities to scale up and simplify your personalization efforts.

5. Test and optimize

SFMC includes numerous tools and features to create stunning, highly effective emails. Even so, it’s important to test every campaign and continuously optimize your email strategy. A/B test every email. Create two versions of each email and send each to a small subset of your larger audience. See which version performs better in terms of engagement and send that to the entire email list. In SFMC, you can A/B test subject lines, greetings, design, text, CTA, and many other elements to determine the “winning” version and increase the chances of campaign success.

Also preview and test all emails internally. Per one report, testing every email before sends can generate an average email marketing ROI of 40:1. If you don’t test emails, your ROI could fall to 34:1. Make sure to test all these elements:

• Are images loading properly?
• Did you add alt text to every image?
• Are links working?
• Is the copy error-free?
• Do messages look OK on every device and screen?
• Is the subject line correct and concise?
• Is the CTA specific, benefits-focused, brief, and easy to read?
• Did you add an Unsubscribe button?

You should also optimize your SFMC email marketing program by identifying some metrics. These tangible numbers will help you assess performance and uncover areas of improvement to increase ROI. At the very least, track all these metrics:

• Open rates
• Clickthrough rates
• Deliverability
• Bounce rates
• Unsubscribe rates
• List growth rate
• Email signup rate
• IP reputation
• Conversion rate

Set goals for yourself before each campaign and track how it is doing so you can take appropriate steps to maintain (or increase) your ROI with SFMC and email marketing.

Make SFMC Work Harder to Boost Your Email Marketing ROI

There’s no perfect formula to ensure the success of your SFMC email marketing program. However, by following the Marketing Cloud best practices highlighted here, you can create more winning campaigns in 2023 with SFMC.

If you need 1×1 support to capture the highest possible ROI from your SFMC email marketing program, talk to the SFMC email team at Email Uplers. Click here to get started.

The post Salesforce Marketing Cloud Best Practices for 2023 to Achieve High Email Marketing ROI appeared first on Email Uplers.

Designing an email template is no walk in the park. It takes immense dedication, perseverance, and a considerable grip over your craft to be able to whip up a pixel-perfect template that would, hopefully, appease your subscribers. But, every now and then, there comes across a template editor that strives to make this process a lot less intimidating for you. One such member in this coveted pantheon is Klaviyo’s email template editor. 

Klaviyo, of course, is no stranger to email marketing folks. While it harbors an array of elegant features in its suite, the one that’s going to be under the spotlight today is its template editor. Klaviyo presents you with two options- the classic template editor and the new template editor to design your email campaigns. Of late, the new template editor has garnered eyeballs, thanks to the fresh slate of features it has brought to the table- Undo/Redo buttons, Autosave, Custom fonts, Sections, and Background images, to name a few.

But, here’s the all-important question- How do you craft awe-inspiring emails using these editors? That’s exactly what we are going to help you out with today. In this blog, we are going to discuss a few best practices using which you can create pixel-perfect templates in Klaviyo with ease. Excited to find out what’s in store? Read on!

Features In Klaviyo Email Template Editor

Before we learn how to build jaw-dropping templates in Klaviyo, let us understand the tools we have at our disposal to give shape to the same. Content, Styles, Preview And Test– these are three broad options available to you in Klaviyo’s in-built editor. Let us take a closer look at each.

Content

• Offers you “Blocks” and “Layouts”, using which you can build your email template from scratch. With the help of blocks, you can add text, images, CTA buttons, social links, spacers, header bar, and other elements to the template. Layouts allow you to configure and arrange said blocks. One of the most endearing aspects of these blocks and layouts is that they can be saved, cloned, or deleted with ease. Should you want to shift any section or block in your template, just click on it and drag it around.
• In the Klaviyo editor, one can easily access the content they have designed in other templates (provided they have saved it).
• You can take two routes while adding products from your store to the email template- Static and Dynamic. Choosing the former lets you manually pick out the products you want to showcase in your email. On the other hand, upon selecting the latter, products will be automatically chosen from your website. This happens in accordance with some set parameters, such as the popularity of the product, the frequency with which they are browsed, and the like. 

Styles

Under the styles tab, you can utilize a host of styling options. Below, we have listed a few:

• Adding a background image
• Applying a background color to the template
• Selecting and implementing fonts of your choice (and modifying their attributes as well, such as font size, spacing, weight, and color)
• Defining horizontal spacing between individual letters and vertical spacing between lines
• Aligning text as per your requirement

Preview And Test

Your job in Klaviyo’s email template editor doesn’t end with designing the template, of course. Once done, you must scan it for bugs and also inspect how it is going to hold up across a variety of environments and devices. This, you can accomplish by using the editor’s Preview And Test feature.

There are two ways you can go about it:

1. If you are using a metric-triggered flow, click on “Preview data source” and select “Event”. After that, you’ll need to specify the event that will set the flow into motion.

2. If you are dealing with list-triggered, price drop, date-triggered, or segment-triggered flows, click “Search for a profile” and select one you deem fit. It’s not necessary that this profile be an existent contact on the list that’s going to receive said email. It could also be someone whom you think qualifies for it.

Now that we have addressed the editor’s different features, on to the next stop- tips and tricks.

1. Mindfully Curate The Email Header

The email header is a critical component of the template. Why? Because it is home to several essential elements such as the brand logo, navigation bar, social media links and, sometimes, social media links, even.

• Brand logo- The pillar of your brand identity, your logo is arguably the most tangible marker of your brand personality. Hence, it only makes sense to have it showcased extremely prominently in your template’s header. To ensure consistency, sync your logo’s placement in the email with that of your website. If on your page, the logo is sat on the extreme right, mete out the same treatment to it in your email as well.
• Social media links- We are in 2023, which means that omnichannel marketing is no longer a heady concept but very much a reality. Brands that have a solid grip over it, have risen head and shoulders above their competition. Leveraging emails to divert traffic to social media handles has become quite a common practice. One of the best ways to go about it is by placing links to your social media accounts in your email header itself. That way, your readers will instantly spot them as soon as they open the email. 
• Navigation bar- Besides links to your social media accounts, you can also add a bevy of other links in your template as well, like homepage, sales page, shopping cart, and products page. So, where do you place them? You guessed it- in the navigation bar. Klaviyo makes it very convenient for you to create anchor links in your template. All you have to do is add in a ‘#’ symbol and follow it up with a few descriptive words.

2. Build A Master Template

Churning out emails regularly and staying on top of your production volume is important, sure. But, you know what’s even more important? Maintaining consistency. You might be hitting up your audience with a variety of marketing emails, but they’ll fail to create an impact if no two of them seem to be originating from the same source.

The easiest way to ensure consistency? Create a master template and save it. Once that is done, all you have to do is slice and dice different components of it as per the requirements of a particular campaign. Klaviyo’s editor gives you the choice of crafting saved blocks, which makes this all the more easy. Analyze the elements you want to standardize and save them as a block in your master template. Your logo, headlines, and CTA buttons are some elements you can consider for the same. This also makes it easier for you to leverage dynamic content in your campaigns- using different types of content for different audience segments- and amp up your personalization game.

3. Pay Attention To Your Layout

Your email can contain a ton of important and insightful information and still get overlooked if all of it isn’t structured tastefully. This is why, your email layout plays a pivotal role in determining its readability. Content, when arranged tastefully, incentivizes your subscribers to engage with it, thereby doing a whole world of good to your conversions. Klaviyo’s template editor is an extremely user-friendly platform. So, feel free to let your imagination run amok. The editor’s diverse suite of functionalities will never fail to actualize your vision.

Most brands these days can be seen adopting the single-column layout, and rightfully so. Compared to their multi-column counterparts, single-column layout emails aren’t just easier to read but also render significantly better across mobile devices. They also help you steer clear of issues such as overlapping columns, shifting images, and overflowing text, which the multi-column layout invites. Lastly, single-column layout emails can easily be navigated by screen readers as well, thereby making your information accessible to everyone. However, if you do have to use a multi-column layout, try using split blocks while dealing with two-column sections and columns block for three-column sections; this will help enhance the visual appeal of the end product.

4. Embrace White Space

For your emails to grab attention, they need to be legible, indisputably so. To make that possible, every single element in your email must have ample breathing space. And to actualize that, in turn, you need to make white space the hallmark of your templates. 

Apart from lending harmony and sophistication to your design, white space also doubles up as a visual pointer for your readers- it helps them navigate from one element to another. The driving philosophy behind using white space is not just to present information to your audience but to deliver it in such a manner that they feel rewarded while engaging with it.

5. Be Judicious With CTAs

In a bid to shoot up their conversion rates, brands often pepper their emails with way too many CTA buttons. However, all that ends up doing is increasing the cognitive load of the email. At all times, your priority should be to design your email so that it is easy for your subscribers to scan through it. 

10 seconds– that’s the amount of time people spend on average on a brand email. So, the more cluttered your email is, the lesser your chances of making an impact. As per your CTA button, one is sufficient, should you design it keeping the following points in mind:

• The physical attributes of your CTA button- size, shape, color- are incredibly crucial, for they determine its visibility and, subsequently, the chances of it being easily spotted by the reader. Be very mindful while chalking out these parameters.
• Place your CTAs right. Now, there are no hard and fast rules for the same. Some prefer placing it above the fold, making sure that the subscriber notices it as soon as they open the email. Some place it below the fold; the motive behind this call is to introduce the CTA button only after the reader has entirely gone through and understood the offerings within the email.
• Avoid using generic CTA phrases- “Click Now”, “Try Now”, “Join Us”, and the like. Always attempt to use action words; this will help you offer clarity to your audience. Ideally, aim to coin your CTA such that it gives subscribers an idea about where they’ll be led to upon clicking it.

In Klaviyo, you can use the “Button” option under the “Blocks” section to customize your CTA as you deem fit. 

Wrapping It Up

The Klaviyo email template editor is a highly sophisticated tool, allowing you to create exquisite templates from scratch, all in a matter of a few clicks. We hope the insights shared above help you make the most of this powerful tool.

The post 5 Tips To Help You Build Stunning Templates In Klaviyo appeared first on Email Uplers.

4 billion– that’s the total number of daily email users, at present. That’s roughly half the global population, just to put things into perspective. The long and short of this is, almost everyone with an internet connection uses email. But, its primary use is not with respect to exchanging personal correspondences. It is in professional spheres where its stocks truly glisten. Irrespective of whether you’re plying your trade as an individual or as an organization, email is your go-to channel for communicating with your customers, isn’t it?

On a daily basis, your mailbox chimes with messages from a gazillion brands. However, you don’t really engage with them all, do you? You communicate with a select few, cherrypicked using mostly the following criteria:

• You find it easy to establish a dialogue with them
• You find them credible based on their industry know-how
• You feel your relationship with them is not strictly transactional
• You look up to them as your one-stop solution providers

In a nutshell, the warmer your perception of a brand, the better your engagement with them. Now, this perception isn’t an accidental thing. Brands put in a lot of painstaking yards to curate it. Why? Because this perception is what you’d also refer to as a business’ “Brand Personality” and is the very thing that allows them to stand out from the crowd. In a ubiquitous communication medium like email, its significance can’t possibly be overstated. You can be prolific with your email campaigns, but if your designs don’t have a distinctive brand personality, you’ll have a tough time outshining your competitors. 

Wondering how you can ace that? You’re just at the right place, then. 

How to maintain brand personality in email

There is a whole slew of techniques that will allow you to maintain brand personality in your email designs. Ready to find out? Let’s proceed.

1. Be Clear About Your Tone

This is, hands down, one of the most crucial components of your brand personality. The tone of your brand is the very voice with which you reach out to your audience. It is a manifestation of your character, a tangible entity belonging to your brand that your customers commit to their memories.

More often than not, brands tend to think in broad strokes while conceptualizing their tone. “Let’s aim for funny,” “We need to be a serious brand,” “Our target is to appeal to teenagers” are examples of the kind of briefs that get floated around during brand tone brainstorming sessions. I’m not saying these briefs are bad, but they’re incredibly vague. If you end up building on these directives, you’ll end up sounding just like your competitors. We don’t want that, of course, do we? So, what can we do? We get really specific while chalking out our brand tone blueprints.

Allow me to share an example so that you and I can get on the same page regarding this discussion.

Below, I’ve shared an email each by TUSHY and Pit Viper.

Now, both of them, on the surface, can be classified as funny. But, a close inspection of both would reveal that their brands of humor are somewhat contrasting. In the case of Pit Viper, the humor draws from a vein of irreverence; a sort of planned boorishness even, some might say. With TUSHY, the humor isn’t as off-kilter; it’s observational, witty, and charming. Even though both have humor at the core of their communication, their brand personalities are extremely distinctive, isn’t it? 

This is exactly what I’ve been alluding to so far. Don’t just settle with sounding “funny,” “angry,” “silly,” or “formal.” Keep deliberating until you discover the exact strand of a mood you want to weave into their messages. 

2. Align Your Design Language With Your Copy

Brand personality is a composite entity, comprising several individual components. To carve a memorable one, thus, you need all of these units to be in absolute sync with one another. Whatever tone you’re going for with your copy- formal, informal, friendly, crazy- make sure your visual elements (viz. pictures, illustrations, and GIFs) suitably complement it. 

The following examples will help you wrap your heads neatly around this concept. 

Let’s start by looking at an email by Magic Spoon.

Of course, reading this email’s copy will help you understand how Magic Spoon aims to position itself as a brand- friendly, informal, and reliable. But, here’s the thing- you get all of that information purely from their design language as well. A conscious choice to use vibrant colors, using wavy lines as section demarcations, the purposeful bleeding of images into text, the choice of typeface- all of that is coming together to reinforce the mood of the copy. Imagine the same copy but with much sombre colors, a more formal typeface, and images arranged in a grid-like fashion instead of how they are now. Paints an entirely different picture, doesn’t it? 

Next, take a look at this email from Klaviyo.

Makes a formal statement, even when you look past the copy. So, what makes that possible? Right off the bat, the sober shade of mauve that forms the email background. Next, the contents of the image used in the hero section. It’s set in an office setting, with the employees neatly sitting across one another, seemingly engrossed in a discussion. Now, imagine if the same picture would have had shown the employees in a different body language- sitting casually, suppose, their faces clad with ear-to-ear smiles, clearly engaged in banter. Wouldn’t that have undermined the formal vibe of the email? Lastly, the manner in which the content is organized, under distinct headings, in a columnar fashion, does its bit in reinforcing the formal tone too.

3. Ensure Consistency Across Channels

Brand personality is a challenging thing to cultivate; I’m sure you have picked that up on that much by now. Let me add something on top of that. You can’t expect to reap rich dividends if your efforts, no matter how concerted they might be, are directed toward just one channel. Sure, you maybe meticulously rolling out branded email templates, but if the landing pages they direct to seem incongruous with them, all your attempts at carving a formidable brand personality will be in vain. Remember, this is the age of omnichannel marketing, which essentially means that your brand personality is going to be a culmination of your efforts across every channel you’re active on.

Let’s take the example of Uncommon Goods over here.

This is the email they sent to promote their Valentine’s day offerings.

When you click on the first CTA button (titled “Sneak Peek”), you’re led to this page.

The visual language and tone over here are thoroughly consistent with that of their email.

Now, take a look at their Instagram feed. 

Even if I were to hide the display picture, you’d still end up guessing that this page belongs to Uncommon Goods.

Striving to deliver a unified experience to your audience across all channels is paramount, for it helps enhance your credibility, promotes brand awareness, and improves customer loyalty. 

4. Provide Clarity With Your CTAs

Your CTA button is, arguably, the most important part of your email. Everything you do with respect to your email design is consciously (or subconsciously) aimed at getting your subscribers to take action against your CTA. 

Previously, we talked about the importance of aligning your design language with your copy. In a similar vein, it is equally vital for your CTAs to resonate with the overall character and personality of your email. What’s even more important is that your CTAs should never fail to offer clarity to your readers. Besides your tone and visual flair, the clarity of your communication also contributes immensely to your brand personality. Hence, curate your CTAs as such so that your audience knows precisely where they’ll be led to upon clicking them.

Take a look at this email by Four Sigmatic to get an idea of what I am talking about.

5. Make Your Logo Prominent

Logos are priceless- in your audience’s mental maps, it’s the very thing that they associate with your brand. It wouldn’t be wrong to say, thus, that your logo is the pillar of your brand identity. Given just how priceless this bit of real estate is, it’s only logical that you should always strive to make its presence felt loud and clear in your email designs.

Your logo and its various attributes- shape, color, typography, tone- speak volumes about your brand. It is basically the marker of your brand personality. So, where should you place it in your emails? Right at the very top, much like the best in the business do. 

The examples below illustrate what I just mentioned.

Wrapping It Up

Email is an exciting and highly rewarding channel for businesses of every shape and hue, which means that its users will only keep growing in the days to come. And with that, the competition is all set to get much steeper than what it is at present. All this is, of course, not under your control. But, you know what is? Acing your brand personality in your email designs and soaring above your competitors! We hope the tips and tricks shared above will help you with that endeavor.

The post Maintaining Brand Personality In Email Designs: The Key To Cutting Through The Noise appeared first on Email Uplers.

When it comes to marketing and promoting your business, you can’t afford to ignore an approach as valuable as email marketing. Email marketing can be your brand’s most potent weapon if you customize your campaigns and make each message persuasive, unique, and compelling. Here’s where the right email marketing tool comes in. Enter Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC).

SFMC is one of the top email marketing platforms because it enables brands to power everything from email marketing and social media marketing, to marketing automation, digital advertising, audience segmentation, and loyalty management. SFMC makes it easy to create omnichannel customer journeys, execute compelling customer outreach programs, and deliver highly personalized content and experiences based on customers’ preferences and behaviors.

That said, SFMC can be a complex platform and dealing with it can quickly become overwhelming for in-house email marketing teams. The best way to reduce the overwhelm and take full advantage of SFMC is to outsource salesforce development and campaign management to experts. Working with salesforce outsourcing companies can also bring you many other benefits. Read on to discover these benefits for yourself.

The Benefits of Outsourcing SFMC Campaigns

Some companies prefer to take a DIY approach to SFMC email marketing. Although this approach can work, more often than not, it doesn’t, especially if the marketing program is growing and the inhouse team is not agile enough to make quick adjustments to customer needs or market dynamics. Often, marketing teams realize that using SFMC is not easy despite its user-friendly setup, automation capabilities, a comprehensive template library, and a built-in AI engine for email optimization.

So how can you make the most of these capabilities to set up memorable email campaigns without the associated complexity?

Answer: Outsource!

An external team of Salesforce email specialists, developers, campaign managers, and testers can help you build effective email marketing campaigns, impress target audiences, and gain an edge over your competitors. This is because they:

1. Bring advanced SFMC expertise to benefit your brand

Your in-house email marketing team may have designed small email campaigns in the past. However, creating a campaign for a small number of prospects, leads, or customers is not the same as designing a campaign that will go out to thousands of subscribers. Large campaigns require a lot of planning and effort. They also require people who specialize in all these areas of email marketing:

• Strategy and Planning
• Design
• Content
• A/B testing
• Deliverability
• Analytics
• Project Management

By outsourcing your SFMC program, you will get dedicated resources who specialize in these areas. You will get specialist coders, template designers, UI/UX experts, copywriters, email marketing strategists, campaign managers, and analytics experts who will deliver the best possible results with their expertise. More importantly, they will work together to plan and launch your campaigns and maximize your chances of success.

The best SFMC email marketing specialists keep themselves updated on all the new features and capabilities added to SFMC multiple times a year. They can thus continue to bring the SFMC expertise you need for successful campaigns, regardless of campaign goal, budget, or audience type.

2. Will help you save money

The cost of your SFMC email marketing program will include multiple aspects. One is the cost of the platform itself. For example, to implement personalized promotional email marketing, you will have to pay $400/month for the Marketing Cloud Engagement tool. The cost can go up to $1,250/month if you need personalized marketing automation with email solutions and $3,750/month for SFMC’s personalized cross-channel strategic marketing solutions.

You will also incur a cost for hiring SFMC specialists. According to Glassdoor, the estimated salary of a Salesforce email marketing specialist in the U.S. is $67,060 per year. A SFMC architect can earn between $67,000 and $150,000 per year while SFMC admins can earn $91,000 – $130,000 annually. Plus, you will incur costs related to hiring, onboarding, benefits, absenteeism/vacations, bench employees, equipment, and training. The more such people you have in your in-house team, the more you will spend on your email marketing program.

Then there are the other costs associated with your SFMC email program:

• Platform customization
• Data migration
• Integration with other systems
• Maintenance
• Subscriber list management

Outsourcing your SFMC email marketing program can help you avoid or minimize many of these costs. Plus, you will get access to SFMC professionals who will provide their expert services at much lower prices compared to in-house teams. Some outsourcing partners provide their services and experts for short-term engagements, meaning you won’t get tied down with a long-term (costly) contract. Others also provide predictable or tiered pricing models so you know exactly what you will pay without nasty surprises or unpredictable expenses.

3. Will hit the ground running

Your inhouse SFMC team will have to be trained on your business objectives, brand goals, and marketing processes. Training and onboarding can take time. It can take even longer for team members to reach a level of comfort and competence required to design and deliver effective SFMC campaigns. As a result, you cannot expect fast results from them. You may also have to put off some projects until they prove their ability.

Working with an outsourced team will cut out unnecessary waiting and onboarding time. Their learning curve is almost flat because they are both skilled in SFMC and highly experienced in a variety of deployments for many different companies and industries. Since they need little or no onboarding, you can get started on any kind of campaign right away.

The external team will also help your internal team with all these crucial email marketing tasks:

• Create a campaign plan
• Segment the target audience
• Design and optimize Salesforce HTML email templates
• Test email messages before sends
• Track and analyze campaign results
• Leverage SFMC’s Einstein AI to find campaign optimization opportunities (subject lines, send times, copy, etc.)
  
  Some SFMC outsourcing companies are available 24×7 so their experts are always standing by to quickly resolve issues and help you drive business growth with SFMC email marketing.

4. Will deliver measurable results

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. This is especially true of email marketing. In-house teams are sometimes unable to deliver measurable results because they are not motivated enough. For outsourced companies, their engagement contracts are often tied into the results they deliver, so they are definitely motivated to deliver measurable results for your email campaigns.

What are your email marketing objectives?

Increase opens and clickthroughs?

Boost email-led conversions?

Reduce bounces?

Minimize unsubscribes?

Grow your email list?

Increase overall ROI?

Generate more leads?

An outsourced email marketing firm will understand your goals and figure out which metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) must be tracked to assess progress towards that goal. They will also implement the processes and tools required to drive tangible results with every SFMC campaign for your brand.

5. Can scale with your growing email marketing program and brand

SFMC is a powerful platform to develop and distribute many kinds of email campaigns. You can set up automated triggered campaigns that go out in response to a specific customer action, such as sign up or purchase. You can also send regular newsletters to share useful branded content with your audience, engagement and re-engagement emails to stay connected with current and previous customers, abandoned cart emails to convert hesitant shoppers into enthusiastic buyers, and much more.

You might not be sending all these different campaigns. Now. But as your customer base expands and your brand grows, you may scale your email marketing program to include some or all these campaign types. The best Salesforce outsourcing companies can effortlessly handle the responsibilities of many types of campaigns, even larger, more complex campaigns, for your brand. Their SFMC email specialists, project managers, developers, copywriters, and designers will put their expertise to work in order to quickly scale up your email marketing program.

At the same time, they will give you the confidence to focus on your core marketing and branding initiatives. Leave all the campaign planning and execution to a team like Email Uplers so you effectively take care of the marketing tasks and activities that cannot be outsourced.

Over to You!

If you outsource Salesforce development, you can build smarter email campaigns and get them out faster. The right campaign partner will help you engage with your target audience and deliver useful email content that resonates with them. They will also set SMART goals for each campaign, personalize every message to appeal to your “audience of one”, track email performance, and in general, do everything possible to boost your marketing ROI.

Your marketing program and company have a lot to gain by working with the SFMC email experts @ Email Uplers. Set the stage for SFMC email marketing success with a team that’s 100% invested in your success. 

The post 5 Powerful Reasons to Outsource your SFMC Campaigns in 2023 appeared first on Email Uplers.

Brands want their marketing campaigns to be the RMS Titanic, an engineering marvel, the very embodiment of sophistication, capable of arresting every gaze that is cast at it. But, thanks to history and James Cameron’s eponymous 1997 blockbuster, we all know how the story goes. A telling of the Titanic is incomplete without the mention of the baleful iceberg that brought about its unceremonious doom. Over time, the luxury ship and the iceberg have transcended their roles as historical entities to serve as metaphors- irrespective of how opulent your idea is, you must always take the effort to identify anything and everything that could potentially endanger it. Unless you do so, you’ll never be able to actualize it. 

So, in the context of your marketing campaigns, who, or rather what, is the iceberg? Abandoned carts. At present, the average cart abandonment rate across industries stands at a headache-inducing 69.57%. Imagine the amount of lost sales that figure represents! And get this, among mobile users this figure shoots up to 85.65%. Wait, wait, don’t let that bead of sweat escape your forehead yet. These numbers are troubling, I know, but know that you can circumvent them. How, you ask? By crafting effective cart abandonment emails. Need help getting started with those? We’ve got you covered. Here, we round up some of the finest abandoned cart email examples out there to get your creative gears swinging in full flow. Eager to see what’s in store? Let’s go!

1. Hallenstein Brothers

Subject line: Need inspo? We’ve got a few suggestions.

Image source

One of the foremost things that experts will ask you to keep in mind while crafting cart abandonment emails is this: Make the abandoned product the hero of the email. Hallenstein Brothers, over here, have taken this directive to heart, which is what makes it rank among the most effective email template examples in this genre. Their cart abandonment email has just the one visual element- a resplendent image of the product accompanied by an equally dapper copy. If earlier you didn’t have any incentive to finish the purchase of this item, you certainly have one now. The overall minimalism of the email must be credited as well, for it helps the central message of the email come across, loud and clear.

2. Built for Athletes

Subject line: Are you still thinking about me?…

 

 

Image source

If your subject lines are effective, you can’t nudge your subscribers toward opening your emails, no matter how dazzling your content is. This holds true of all varieties of marketing emails, be it cart abandonment, product recommendation, re-engagement, or customer feedback. And if you’re wondering what a good abandoned cart email subject line sounds like, you don’t have to look further than this email by Built for Athletes. 

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a visitor on their website. You browse through their products, shortlist a few, and add them to their cart. Then, for whatever reason, you fail to complete the purchase and eventually bounce from the page. A few hours later, you receive this email in your inbox, brandishing THIS subject line. Wouldn’t your curiosity be piqued? 

Now, coming to the contents of the email. It contains a generous and quite an aesthetic visual of the abandoned product accompanied by a simple yet pretty compelling copy. Below this, the price has been highlighted too, lest the visitor should have forgotten it post exiting the site. 

The CTA button hits all the right notes as well- the phrase is telling the readers what they’d accomplish upon clicking on it and its physical appearance curated as such to make it unambiguously prominent. I also like the fact that the “free shipping” nugget of information has also been clearly stated over here. It gives the buyer just that extra bit of incentive to go ahead with the purchase. 

 

3. Vanity Planet

Subject line: Did this catch your eye?…

 

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Right off the bat, one thing that I greatly appreciate about this cart abandonment email from Vanity Planet is that it hasn’t shed the brand’s design aesthetic, something that many brands do with their abandoned cart email campaigns. Businesses that tend to view these emails as mere reminders, and not an extension of their marketing or branding repertoire drive unenviable results from them. 

What makes this particular cart abandonment email super effective is Vanity Planet’s decision to add social proof in it. As a buyer, few things are as incentivizing as a glowing review from another fellow buyer, you’d agree? The email also invites the readers to check out the brand’s best sellers and other special offerings.

4. Animed Direct

Subject line: Did you forget something?

Image source

Including an animation, even if it’s as simple as the one in this cart abandonment email by Animed Direct, in your hero section is an excellent means of grabbing customer attention. Any agency dabbling with professional email template design services will give you this bit of advice. Pair it with an incontestably adorable image as is the case here and you’re sure to attract your audience’s eyeballs left, right, and center. 

In this case, Animed Direct hasn’t just reminded the customer of their abandoned cart. They have also extended a helping hand in an attempt to understand if there are any obstacles in their checkout experience which is potentially keeping their visitors from finishing their transactions. Quite a clever move, if you ask me. 

5. Pottery Barn

Subject line: A reminder about what you left in your cart (Plus, up to 40% off inside.)

 

Image source

Besides doing the obvious, Pottery Barn’s cart abandonment subject line contains additional information regarding the email’s content too. Now, some might deem it unnecessary, citing that this manoeuvre could end up distracting the readers, but I’m quite in favor of this. I’m a huge fan of setting expectations and that’s all Pottery Barn have done over here. If the cart abandonment email has a sale announcement, I’d much rather you apprise me of it in the subject line itself than spring it on me, first thing, as I open the email. 

Now, let’s shift our attention to what’s inside the email. The contents check all the right boxes- the spotlight is on the abandoned products, the copy is crisp and compelling, and there’s also an attempt at instilling an emergency in the subscriber’s mind. 

 

6. The Great Jones

Subject line: This The Starting Lineup belongs in your kitchen

There’s just something irresistibly charming about good wordplay, isn’t it? The header in The Great Jones’ abandoned cart email is a perfect testimony of that. Other than this, there are two other features here that are absolute standouts for me.

1. There’s an explicit mention of the business no-return’s policy. This is priceless messaging and goes a long way toward earning the trust of your customers.
2.The social proof section here doesn’t use reviews by customers but those by reputable publications, thereby boosting the brand’s credibility by leaps and bounds.

7. Uncommon Goods

Subject line: I’m almost yours…

 

The faux-emotional question posed by Uncommon Goods here is just the kind of simplistic humor you’d want to incorporate into your cart abandonment email to earn some very handy brownie points from your subscribers. Apart from highlighting the item in the abandoned cart, Uncommon Goods has also served up some product recommendations based on it. Pretty smart, right?

8. taylorstitch

Subject line: Leave something behind?

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If you had temporarily lost sight of just how vital email list segmentation is, let this email from taylorstitch serve as a timely reminder. The first line of this email is sufficient to tell you that this cart abandonment email is crafted explicitly for first-time visitors. The subsequent content of the email is crafted accordingly, aimed at demystifying features that could confuse new buyers. Here, too, the email contains recommendations centred around the item in the customer’s cart. 

Even though this email has relatively more text compared to the other entries on this list, it’s still not tiring to look at because the spacing between consecutive paragraphs is on-point. Besides that, every element in this email has ample breathing space around it, further enhancing its appeal. The font used here is Arial- a bonafide web-safe font. Both the manage preferences and unsubscribe links have been clearly highlighted in the email footer.

 

9.  Cotopaxi

Subject line: Don’t Leave A Good Cart Behind…

 

Image source

Wondering what you can do with your cart abandonment email’s hero section to drive maximum impact? Create a sense of emergency, much like Cotopaxi has done over here (special props to the photograph as well, it’s just so arrestingly chic, isn’t it?). One of my favorite parts of this email is how deftly Cotopaxi has leveraged their brand partnership. In succinct steps, they’ve illustrated to their buyers how using “Affirm” can significantly easen their purchasing.

10. The Sunday Collective

Subject line: Quality Over Quantity

Image source

Brands adopt various measures when it comes to offering incentives in their cart abandonment emails- free shipping, social proof, or monetary discount. But, I quite like the route The Sunday Collective has taken over here- establishing the brand vision. After all, if you don’t endorse the brand’s value system, would you ever consider engaging with them? By casting the spotlight on their mission statement, The Sunday Collective is effectively giving their subscribers a glimpse of the kind of community that awaits them should they choose to hop on their bandwagon. 

On the design front, the layout is absolutely clutter-free. This is on account of The Sunday Collective making ample use of white space. That, coupled with the superb text-to-image ratio of this email makes it visually pleasing and highly engaging. The unsubscribe link in the email can be easily spotted too.

Wrapping It Up

Designing the ideal abandoned cart email is no child’s play, certainly. However, I hope the email template examples shared above will fill you with ideas aplenty to recover your lost sales!

The post 10 Stunning Email Inspirations That Will Help You Resolve Your Carts’ Abandonment Issues! appeared first on Email Uplers.

More and more businesses are embracing the trend of hiring dedicated professionals for niche skills. Irrespective of the role, an offshore dedicated team helps streamline the processes and manage work better. If we talk about email marketing execution, it entails a number of technique-sensitive processes like designing emails, coding them, testing for rendering and responsiveness, and automating or scheduling them at the right time. 

Now, assume that you have to hire skilled professionals for all these roles. Wouldn’t it be a painstaking task? Going through the resumes, shortlisting the right candidates for your specific requirements, all those salary negotiations, and the onboarding process — Phew! That’s so much work. 

But you know the good news? There’s an easy workaround for this. You can go for hiring remote email resources. 

You can hire different experts according to your requirements, namely:

1. Email Developer

A dedicated email developer helps in creating flawlessly rendering email templates for your brand or clients. If you are an agency with a high volume of emails to churn, hire a dedicated developer team for all your email coding requirements. 

You can select from 3 levels of expertise according to the kind of emails you are looking for:

1. Junior level (1-3 years experience)

 With a basic understanding of email marketing practices, a junior level email developer can build editable email templates in DIY ESPs. They are well versed with Adobe Creative Suite and all the popular ESPs.

Pricing: USD 1750 per resource/month

2. Middle level (3-5 years experience)

A middle level dedicated developer has an intermediate understanding of email marketing practices. They can build editable email templates in all DIY and Enterprise ESPs like Salesforce and Marketo. Besides Adobe Creative Suite, they are proficient in Sketch, Invision, Figma, and Zaplin. They can build dynamic email templates and resolve complex rendering issues in email clients. Mid-level remote dedicated developers have a basic experience of AMPScripts and Velocity scripting. 

Pricing: USD 2500/resource

3. Senior level (5+ years experience)

Senior level dedicated offshore developers have an advanced understanding of email marketing practices. They can build reusable modules for modular email templates. Apart from the skills possessed by the mid-level dedicated programmers, senior level professionals can even lead a team and train developers. Also, they can set up marketing automation and journeys. 

Pricing: USD 3500/resource

2. Email Campaign Manager

Dedicated email campaign managers can efficiently manage your email marketing campaigns. They are skilled in popular ESPs and CRMs like SFMC and marketing automation platforms like Marketo. They work as an extended team and deliver end-to-end campaign operations like handling campaign assets, validation & scheduling, campaign setup, reporting, and analysis. If you hire a dedicated team from Email Uplers, you get it all done at a 99.98% error-free rate. 

Just like email developers, you can choose email campaign managers according to the level of expertise you are looking for. 

3. Email Automation Expert

Email automation specialists help you in setting up customized email automation workflows aligned with each stage of your customer’s journey. As there are no long-term contracts, you can hire dedicated team on an hourly, weekly, or monthly basis. 

There are 3 levels of expertise to choose from.

1. Junior level (1-3 years experience)

A junior level email automation expert has basic expertise in setting up and managing email scheduling, deployment of email campaigns, and QA process. They can segment the subscriber lists and work on data hygiene and validation. 

Pricing: USD 1750/resource

2. Middle level (3-5 years experience)

Besides all the skills stated above, a mid-level automation expert can drive results for every campaign. They can set up, execute, and manage multi-channel automation programs. These professionals are also able to manage production of emails, dynamic emails, landing pages, pop-ups, and banners in DIY ESP. 

Pricing: USD 2500/resource

3. Senior level (5+ years experience)

A senior level automation expert can strategize IP warming and help you set up a new account. They can also troubleshoot technical issues in HTML templates, list segmentation, and other email execution tasks. They can build custom digital solutions and are also familiar with different CRMs. 

Pricing: USD 3500/resource

4. Data Integration & Migration Manager

It is crucial to maintain data confidentiality, integrity, and availability across different channels and stakeholders. The same holds for ESP migration. Data integration and ESP migration is an exhausting job. Real-time data migration from legacy systems to more powerful marketing platforms takes technical expertise. It involves migration of email lists, content and templates, reports, automation workflows, unsubscribes, and several other assets. A dedicated team will help ensure seamless data integration and migration while providing the necessary documentation and training. 

So, which factors will you consider while hiring these dedicated resources? Let’s get started.

Things to Consider While Hiring an Offshore Dedicated Team

Based on the business type and skills you are looking for, you must consider several factors while hiring a dedicated email marketing expert.

1. Experience and expertise

Experience is the first thing to be considered while hiring dedicated resources. You must determine whether you are looking for an entry-level resource or an expert. Also, match the experience in terms of years with the skills and knowledge about the technological advancements. It is not necessary that an experienced resource will have more skills. So, look for more expertise in terms of training and skills. 

Depending on the profile you are looking for, ask the following questions:

Email Developer:

• What kind of emails have they created?
• Are they familiar with the ESP of your choice?
• Do they have any special certifications that could help you?
• Can they create dynamic email templates?
• Are they abreast with the latest email design and coding trends?
• Will they be able to resolve the rendering issues?

Email Campaign Manager: 

• Can they build effective email marketing strategies in line with the business goals?
• How will the campaign manager carry out the email programs?
• Will they be able to drive the email process flow and impart a cohesive customer experience across different channels?
• Are they open to creative thinking and strategic approach?
• How well can they forecast the email performance and analyze the ROI?

Email Automation Expert:

• Do you want the automation experts to manage the production of emails, dynamic emails, landing pages, pop-ups, or banners in the ESP?
• Are you seeking help with the deliverability issues?
• Will you need help in troubleshooting technical issues related to HTML templates, list segmentation, and other email execution aspects?
• Do you want the dedicated resource to drive business growth strategy too along with their KRAs?

Data Integration and Migration Expert

• Do you want to migrate the data from a legacy system to enterprise ESP?
• Do you need a special ESP certification for seamless data integration and migration?
• Are you looking for one-time integration or automated real-time integration between different data sources?

2. Past Clientele and Portfolio

If you want to hire dedicated developers or any other resources, go through their past clientele and portfolio. See if they have executed a similar project in the past. Check the case studies, testimonials, and customer reviews to decide whether the dedicated team is a good fit for your business. After you are sure about the expertise and past projects of the dedicated resources, next comes the payment options. 

3. Payment Options

Clarify the billing method at the outset itself. How should you complete the payment? Do they charge in advance or at the end of the month? Inquire about any taxes or hidden charges that need to be paid. Some agencies like Email Uplers also allow you to opt for the wallet model. It is a good deal as you get some discount too based on the order value. For example: If you add USD 2500 to your wallet, you get services worth USD 2700. Now, isn’t that a great bargain?

4. Communication

When you are hiring an offshore dedicated team, communication is one of the most important aspects. Ask the dedicated team about the language and medium of communication. Also, confirm whether the resources will communicate in your time zone and how the tasks will be allotted. Ask them how they will send you the project updates — will they send the updates daily or weekly? Discuss all these points before you make the decision. 

5. Access to Account Manager

An account manager works as a single point of contact and makes communication easier in a remote working setup. If you have too many people working on your project without an account manager, it will cause a hell lot of confusion. Too many cooks spoil the broth, remember?

Hiring a dedicated team should make things simpler for you and allow you to focus on the bigger picture of business growth. So, make sure you get an account manager who is great at communicating and proactive enough to keep you updated. 

6. Security

When you decide to hire a dedicated team, it is obvious that you will be apprehensive about the security. The dedicated team will have access to all your critical data and intellectual property. So, it is prudent to get an NDA signed. You must also mention it upfront if you are looking for white label services. You can define different roles for the dedicated resources according to the information they have access to. 

Wrapping Up

A dedicated email team worth its salt can boast of impeccable campaign management, coding, automation, and data integration services. They include pre-vetted resources who come with the benefits of affordability, flexibility, and exceptional skills. Irrespective of the duration of your project, this model can work wonders if you make the right choice. 

If you are convinced to try out a dedicated team model for your business, we would love to hear from you.

The post 6 Factors to Consider While Hiring Dedicated Email Resources appeared first on Email Uplers.

A strong sender reputation is the basis of optimum email deliverability and competent email performance. Sender reputation is determined based on the perception of your mailbox providers and subscriber engagement. In other words, if people engage with your emails and fetch you a higher click-through rate, you will have a strong sender reputation. Contrarily, if people don’t open your emails, unsubscribe, and mark them as spam, it will have a negative effect on your sender reputation.

Surprisingly, your sender reputation will be variable across all mailbox providers. It’s not an absolute value. An Internet Service Provider (ISP) gives you a score by weighing down your email sending behavior and evaluating the conformance to ISP’s guidelines. It considers complex statistics to reach this score. Email sender reputation is a combined figure obtained from IP and domain reputation.

To start with, let’s understand IP reputation and domain reputation, and then the differences between the two.

What is IP Reputation?

An IP address is a unique number used to recognize computers on the Internet. It serves as an address used by other computers to search for your computer. While sending an email, ESPs use the IP address linked to your sending domain to figure out the source of the email. 

IP reputation refers to the IP address through which the emails are deployed. It helps determine if email servers can receive emails that are sent for the particular address. There are two types of IP address you can use:

1. Dedicated IP address
2. Shared IP address

In case of dedicated IPs, you don’t have to worry about the other senders. The IP reputation will be in accordance with your  email sending habits. Contrary to this, if you are using a shared IP, the sender reputation will be a reflection of how everyone using it is sending emails. Unfortunately, some mailbox providers are unforgiving and they blacklist you even if the spammy email is done by someone else using your shared IP. 

Interestingly, you can reset the IP reputation by updating the domain’s IP address.

What is Domain Reputation?

A domain is the name given to your sending email server. Email servers use it to find your IP address. Domain reputation is the rank of your email sending domain, determined by your past email sending patterns and the engagement rate. You cannot reset the domain reputation as it is linked to the domain name. So, domain reputation can be considered somewhat indelible in comparison to IP reputation. 

You have to consider three types of domains for email sending. 

a. From Address
b. Return-Path domain
c. DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)

All these three domains influence the domain reputation. Therefore, you must manage them well if you want to improve your domain reputation.

Calculating Email Domain Reputation

Just like you have a credit score according to your spending habits, you have email domain reputation according to your email sending habits. Wow, that rhymed! 

ISPs take the help of complex, secret algorithms to score a domain from 0 to 100.

The higher your score, the more trustworthy your emails are. 

They keep a tab of the domain’s usage in an email and how the email looks in the inbox. Also, they authenticate the score while scanning the future emails.

The good news is that we have figured out the parameters considered by Email Service Providers to calculate domain reputation. 

They are:
1. Spam placement rate
2. Email forwarding rate
3. Spam complaint rate
4. “Marked as not spam” rate
5. Read rate
6. Deleted for reading rate
7. Open rate
8. Click rate
9. Reply rate
10. Hard bounces 
11. Spam traps

All these parameters count and make a difference to your domain reputation. The email recipient behavior governs these factors. So, it will be a challenge to rectify a low domain reputation. It hurts to write this but even your transactional emails will go to the spam folder. Your email strategy will make almost no sense if you have a bad domain reputation. 

So, how will you check your reputation score?

Tools to Assess Email Sender Reputation

I am sure you are curious to know how to improve your sender reputation and what to do if it goes for a toss. We shall discuss it but before that here are some tools that will let you check email domain reputation. 

1. SenderScore.org

Validity provides free email reputation evaluation service. The Sender Score shows you the reliability of the email sender’s IP address. It is a score given from 0 to 100. A higher email reputation score reflects better email sender reputation and an optimum deliverability rate. It is calculated considering a 30-day average and reflects how your IP address performs in comparison to the other IP addresses. 

2. BarracudaCentral

BarracudaCentral allows you to learn about your IP as well as domain reputation. The email reputation service uses a real-time database to sort the IP addresses into good or bad. It evaluates the sending history associated with the IP addresses of all the sending mail servers. This helps identify the likelihood of authentic communications deployed through the addresses. Accordingly, the Barracuda Spam and Virus Firewall will deny or enable the email, considering the sender’s IP address. 

3. MxToolbox

MxToolbox informs you about who is sending email through your domain, their IP’s reputation, and location. It will also let you know about the problems with your domain, based on Blacklists, Web Server, DNS, and Mailserver. In case there’s a variation in the email reputation, the system will immediately update you. 

You can either go for the free version or the paid package. The free version includes a single blacklist monitor and weekly blacklist monitoring. The premium versions start at USD 129 per month. You get dedicated expert support and regular email delivery performance reports along with several other useful features. If you are looking for advanced email delivery threat tools and SPF flattening features, the plan starts at USD 399 per month. 

4. Google Postmaster Tools

Google offers enormous data on the delivery rate of emails. It uses Google Postmaster Tools to reveal how they interpret certain domains on receiving an email from them. They offer information about the IP reputation, domain reputation, Gmail delivery issues, and several other details like spam reports, email encryption, and authentication. 

5. MailTester

If you are looking for a complete report on your content, mail server, and sender IP address, MailTester is the best tool for you. It is an affordable way to check mail server reputation online. The free version of MailTester gives access to the results for seven days while the paid one allows you to keep the results for 30 days. 

6. Ipvoid

APIVoid’s Domain Reputation API created Ipvoid, which assesses your domain reputation by comparing the IP address with blacklisting engines. A number of popular domain blacklists like ThreatLog, PhishTank, OpenPhish, etc. will notify you in case a domain name is put in the malicious or phishing list. For people looking for instant analysis of their domain, Ipvoid is the safest bet for you. 

With an insight into the tools to measure the email sender reputation, we shall now shed light on how to improve it. 

5 Tips to Improve Your Sender Reputation

1. Warm up your IP address

When you get a new IP address, it has no sender reputation. The modus operandi of malicious agents is to keep switching IP addresses to bypass spam filters and blacklists. If you start sending mass emails from a new IP address, the ESPs and ISPs will consider it as spammy behavior. 

So, as a best practice, you should slowly increase your email send volume over around 15 days. You can send out 100 emails initially and then increase the number till you reach the number of your subscribers. 

If this isn’t your forte, you can avail email marketing management services from Email Uplers. 

2. Set up email authentication protocols

Email authentication protocols let the email servers know that your emails are genuine. If you need help with setting them up, you can approach an email marketing agency for the same. 

a. SPF

SPF verifies that the email sender is genuine and who they are claiming to be. It keeps the email recipients safe from malicious intentions. 

b. DKIM

DKIM authentication protocol prevents any alteration of the email during the transit. It protects people from man-in-the-middle attacks and malicious agents who swap the emails when they transition to the subscriber. 

c. DMARC

DMARC authentication lets the receiving mail servers know the authentication process of your emails. So, the mailbox providers get an idea about the authentication protocols that should be mentioned. In case of a missing authentication standard, mail servers will be warned that the email is not from you. 

3. Maintain a proper list hygiene

Regular pruning of your email lists is imperative if you want to have a good deliverability rate. Remove any invalid email addresses or email ids with typos as they have a negative effect on your deliverability rate. Try to re-engage the dormant email subscribers and remove them if they don’t respond even after a series of 2 or 3 winback emails. 

4. Take a double opt-in approach to build the email list

A double opt-in method will help ensure that your email list gets subscribers who are genuinely interested in hearing from you. It will also reduce the unsubscribes, thereby maintaining your deliverability rate.

5. Craft relevant and personalized emails

Send valuable content in your emails that will compel the users to read till the end and even forward it. Personalize them according to the user’s preferences and buying behavior. You can also incorporate attractive visuals and interactivity to encourage more subscribers to engage with it. In addition, go for an email template audit and incorporate the suggested changes.

Now, suppose you check the reputation score and get a score of 40. So, how will you improve it?

We have your back. Here are some easy and actionable tips to help you. 

1. Check the feedback loops

Feedback loops will let you know whether you have a good or bad sender reputation. You will be able to see a feedback header in the email provider. It will give you detailed insights into the deliverability issues. Based on that, you can resolve the problems and stop sending emails that negatively influence your sender reputation. 

2. Invest in a subdomain for sending email

Having an exclusive subdomain will make your subscribers identify your brand and mark your emails as not spam in case they land in the spam folder. Moreover, it is worth investing in a dedicated IP address so that your sender reputation is not influenced by others.

3. At the outset, use the email subdomain to send transactional emails exclusively

As transactional emails have a high open rate and click-through rate, they will contribute to building a good sender reputation. When you are just starting off, use the subdomain to send only transactional emails. Once your subscribers start marking your emails as not spam and your email reputation improves, you can send promotional emails from the subdomain. Subsequently, get a new IP address for sending the transactional emails. Follow the warm up strategy as mentioned earlier in the article. 

4. Keep an eye on the number of emails you send

You will need to send more than 100 emails per day to get noticed and build the sender reputation. Your email cadence is a crucial parameter impacting sender reputation. So, avoid sending too many emails if you want to eliminate sending any negative signals to ESPs. 

Wrapping Up

High email deliverability → Better sender reputation → More profitable email campaigns 

If your emails are not performing according to your expectations, there is a  possibility that your IP address or domain is blacklisted. Note that you won’t be notified if your domain name IP gets blacklisted. So, you must monitor the blacklist database services and use the tools stated in the previous section. 

And if you are still unsure how to go about it, get in touch with an expert and seek help. 

The post Email Sender Reputation: Learn The Art of Improving Email Deliverability appeared first on Email Uplers.

Landing pages are the powerhouse of business growth. When done right, they can take your conversion rate to the next level. If not, all your effort and time will go in vain. You can have different landing pages according to the purpose of the campaign and the source channel. One such landing page that is often overlooked and needs your attention right away is the PPC landing page. 

So, let’s get started…

Defining PPC Landing Page

A PPC or pay per click landing page is a dedicated web page that is used for paid campaigns on platforms such as AdWords and Bing Ads. You can target your prospects with specific phrases and demographics and they will land on the respective landing page. 

For example: If you search for the term best project management tool, you will see this ad:

As the ad adheres to the PPC best practices, the users will be keen to read more.

When you click on it, you will see the landing page shown below.

This web page is the PPC landing page. You must conform to certain best practices for landing pages to get maximum clicks and make it work. 

Here’s a detailed insight into PPC landing page best practices:

1. Your PPC landing page should be relevant

Irrespective of the source channel, your landing page should always be relevant to the user’s needs. When a user clicks on your ad, it means that they have found something they are looking for. As an instance, suppose you are looking forward to buying a domain name. 

Here are the PPC ads you will see when you search for the keywords “buying domain name”. 

When you click on the ad, you will be redirected to this landing page:

It perfectly matches the requirements of the users and serves them what they are looking for. Also, do you notice that it includes the keywords they want to bid on? For example: Domain name, website, choose a new domain name, etc. 

2. Write the copy for the buyer personas you want to target

Your landing page content and visuals should be in line with the intent of the target audience. The best PPC landing pages should address all the concerns that the user might be having before making the purchase decision. For example: When you search for SEO services, you will see this ad by Bluehost.

On clicking the ad, you will see the landing page shown below:

It clearly communicates how the reader can make the most of their services.

3. Focus on a minimalistic design

Your users are busy people. They won’t have time to read long essays and they are looking for quick information. If the landing page offers them easy resolution of their issues, they are likely to convert. So, take a minimalistic design approach to make the message stand out. Write a succinct copy and incorporate plenty of white space.

Take a look at this PPC landing page design by Wix.

It is a minimalistic landing page that conveys all the necessary information without any distractions. They have included a single field form that will help generate leads faster. You can then ask for more information in the subsequent forms. Multi-step forms work the best as they help you target the users with personalized content. 

Now, if you look at their website home page, it is visually richer and much more comprehensive. 

Many brands use the website home page as the PPC landing page, which might affect their conversions. Since the user has landed on your PPC landing page after clicking on your ad, their intent is pretty clear. So, it should simply focus on converting them rather than educating them. 

4. Present your value proposition to the readers

You are not selling just a product to your prospects. You are selling an experience, an assurance of making their lives easier. The PPC landing pages should underscore all the salient features and benefits of using your products. 

Take a look at this PPC landing page example by Messagebird that has highlighted all their features and explained how it will strengthen communication between businesses and customers. The headline is enough to pique the reader’s interest and get them scroll till the end. 

5. Add testimonials to support your claims

When I was in Los Angeles last year, I didn’t have access to private transport. That’s when I searched for car service in LA and the PPC ad by Executive Car Service LA.com caught my eye. I clicked on it and landed on the landing page shown below. It is one of the best PPC landing page examples I have come across. 

As I was new in the city, initially I was a bit reluctant to avail their services. But, the testimonials on their landing page, affordable pricing, and instant booking relieved me of all the apprehension. Needless to say, their landing page played a big role in instilling trust and driving my decision. Similarly, if you are in the SaaS or B2B industry, you can use case studies, awards, certifications, social media mentions, and reviews on TrustPilot, G2, or Clutch to gain your customer’s confidence. 

6. Add the right visuals

Apart from reviews, testimonials, and case studies, there’s something else too that can make or break the reader’s trust. It is the visual elements you have used. Succinct copy and right visuals go hand in hand. Choosing relevant pictures will eliminate the need to write any lengthy copy while making the landing page more impactful. 
Avoid using overused stock images or royalty-free photos from the Internet. Your readers have already seen enough of that. Instead, go a step above and invest in illustrations, 3D images, or animations that will strengthen your value proposition.
If it is a PPC landing page for a product, add animated photographs that offer a better understanding to the users. 
To illustrate, take a look at this PPC landing page by Apple.com. It gives the users detailed information about their iPhone 14 Pro model. Users can choose the model of their choice and the imagery will be adjusted accordingly.

Another thing that is commendable about this page is that they have given the option to connect with a support executive in case the user needs help. It will eliminate any barrier to conversion. 

7. Make the landing page interactive

PPC landing pages need not be over-informative and boring. You can incorporate some interactivity to encourage reader engagement. It will also draw their attention and keep them from bouncing away. You don’t need to go overboard with complicated interactivity. It can be as simple as in the landing page shown below:

The post 10 PPC Landing Page Best Practices Every Marketer Must Know (with examples) appeared first on Email Uplers.

Valentine’s- that time of the year when winged cherubs announce themselves en masse, coloring the streets red with their inimitable resplendence and wreaking delightful havoc inside everyone who has a beating heart. It’s the most romantic time of the year, sure, but did you also know that it’s among the most financially lucrative season for brands as well? Valentine’s day spending in the US in 2022 amounted to a whopping 23.9 billion dollars. After all, who wants to leave a stone unturned when it comes to shopping for their sweethearts? 

As you might have already guessed, brands vie, incredibly passionately, for their audience’s attention during this period. So, how do you sweep them off their feet and inch ahead? By designing stunning custom email templates for Valentine’s Day, of course. To get your creative juices flowing, today we have rounded up a collection of 10 of the most eye-popping Valentine’s email template examples out there. Can’t wait to check these inspirations out? Well, dive right in!

1. Starbucks

Subject line: Happy Heart Day!

Starbucks’ Valentine’s email is extremely minimal on text, to the extent that its CTAs are the only embodiment of them. Otherwise, this email thrives entirely on visuals- glorious high-resolution images that strongly communicate to the reader that Starbucks will be their perfect Valentine, no matter if they choose to visit their nearest outlet or avail of its offerings from the comfort of their homes. 

Most of the backgrounds in the email use soft gradients to add a degree of visual flair. Stick to the practices Starbucks has used over here, and your Valentine’s day campaign is sure to stand out.

2. Magic Spoon

Subject line: Love you to the Spoon and back

Short and sweet- that’s the approach Magic Spoon has taken with their Valentine’s email. It also flaunts one of the most catchy Valentine’s day email subject lines as well. A catchy header, followed by a crisp yet delightful copy and topped off with a gorgeous image (trust Magic Spoon to take something as staple as cereal and turn it into something utterly tempting!). 

My favorite part of this email, however, is undoubtedly its CTA game. Crafted in a color that contrasts sharply against the background, the button is undeniably prominent. Secondly, the phrase is amiable and inviting, a cent percent capable of nudging the reader into taking action. And lastly, the small bit of animation that is accorded to it- not only does it help reaffirm the theme of the email but also enhances the button’s conspicuity. 

3. Rigby

Subject line: GIVEAWAY An Extra Special Valentine’s Day

Hosting giveaways during high-traffic periods is a clever way of getting your Valentine’s day email campaigns to claim the spotlight. That said, you need an effective email as well to make sure your contest grabs as many eyeballs as it deserves, too, much as the one Rigby has produced over here. 

The email’s hero section is a collage, comprising pictures of all the various kinds of gifts one would be able to earn should one decide to participate. Notice how in the email copy, Rigby has made use of emojis as context clues while listing down the prizes that are to be won; quite an ingenious touch, in my opinion.

4. Walmart

Subject line: Valentine’s Day is here

I’ll actually doff my hat to you if you manage to overlook the hero section of Walmart’s Valentine’s email. No matter where your cute benchmark lies, you and I can both agree that this image is an absolute top-tier entry. 

In this product recommendation email, Walmart guides its readers toward building a curated cart for their loved ones. The color palette of the email uses different shades of pink, perfectly keeping in line with the occasion at hand. Since every section in the email has a uniform color, the title of each functions as a divider over here. 

Image source

5. French Connection

Subject line: The Valentines Day edit

This Valentine’s Day email from French Connection has one of the most chic-looking hero images you’ll ever come across. This is followed by a charming copy which, in turn, is followed by my favorite section of the email- to establish a personal connect with their readers, French Connection has included a “meet our creator” section as well, the said creator’s custom-designed Valentine’s top being the attraction of the hour (displayed with the help of a captivating GIF). The footer of the email discloses the minimum amount required for free shipping- a good touch to maintain transparency with the customers. 

Image source

6. Paws

Subject line: The ways our pets show us affection

Paws, in their Valentine’s email, decided to capture their readers’ eyeballs by sharing a read that is relevant to the occasion. One look at the title, and you’d agree that it is, indeed, quite compelling. If at all you had any second thoughts regarding opening it, I’m sure that hero image will help resolve all of that. Additionally, they also put up a masterclass in writing CTA phrases- they’re short, witty, and, most importantly, tell the reader what they’ll achieve upon clicking it. 

7. Peloton

Subject line: Happy Valentine’s Day! Workouts for Your Mind and Your Body

Although written to serve as the header for their Valentine’s email, Peloton gives you a phrase that you wouldn’t really mind framing and putting on your wall. 

Using the theme of self-love as a thread, they deftly outline the various benefits one can avail of by hopping onto their bandwagon. To seal the deal, Peloton leverages a statistic in conclusion. You may look past words, but numbers are hard to ignore, aren’t they?

8. Framebridge

Subject line: Valentine’s Day is Monday!

Want your customers to act quickly on your Valentine’s day deals? No better way to instill an emergency in their minds than by incorporating a countdown timer in your email, just as Framebridge has done over here. To give their buyers an additional incentive, they’ve also added a social proof section. Seeing glowing reviews from satisfied customers really makes it difficult for you not to click on the “Buy Now” button, you’d agree? Well, the folks at Framebridge are certainly aware of that. 

Image source

9. Kate Spade New York

Subject line: you’ve got (valentine’s day) mail

If you needed any encouragement to mould your Valentine’s day email subject lines after a pop culture reference, you’d find it over here (Don’t think twice before adding You’ve Got Mail to your Christmas movie playlist if you haven’t watched it already!). Now, I’m a bit of a miser when it comes to using “absorbing” as an adjective, for I feel it holds a lot of gravity and is often squandered on things that don’t usually merit it. 

However, I’ve no qualms about using it for the hero section GIF Kate Spade New York has conjured up for their Valentine’s Day email. You pop something like that at me just as I open the email, you can certainly bet on the fact that I’ll scroll right down to the very bottom. Here, the brand looks to build on the “last-minute shopping” pulse (something that they unflinchingly reflect across their CTA) and drop recommendations accordingly for their subscribers. 

Image source

10. Alex and Ani

Subject line: RE: Your 30% OFF Gal-Pal Styles

What I particularly appreciate about this Valentine’s email from Alex and Ani is that they have made it super convenient for their readers to spot the important details. Firstly, there’s the recommended ordering date right at the very top. Next is the brand’s Valentine’s special offer, which flashes loud and clear at the subscriber courtesy of the eye-catching animation. 

And last but not least, the offerings themselves, displayed stunningly in a GIF accompanied by a smart copy. If you happen to be someone who has trouble deciding on a gift (welcome to the club), Alex and Ani have included a separate gift finder section, which makes this rank among the most innovative Valentine’s email template examples. 

Wrapping It Up

We hope the examples shared above have been able to give you ideas galore regarding your Valentine’s day email campaigns. Don’t forget to share them with us once you are done!

The post 10 Valentine’s Day Email Inspirations That Will Get You Swooning! appeared first on Email Uplers.

[This blog was originally posted on May 18, 2021 and has been updated to showcase new examples.]

The first thing that the professor teaches in the psychology class is the importance of addressing someone with his or her name. Despite the changing customer behavior, one thing that has stayed constant throughout the years is that we all still love being called by our name. After all, the sound of our own name is a heart-warming feeling.

That’s exactly the psychology behind email personalization. The only difference is that besides the first name, we consider several other parameters to impart a holistic personalized experience to the email subscribers.  

• What is email personalization?
• What makes email personalization so important?
• How to personalize- Tips and tricks to Swear by
• Elements to personalize in your email campaigns
• Understanding Different Data Components and Their Usage
• Advanced Email Personalization Techniques
• Key Takeaways to Make Personalization More Powerful
• Wrapping Up

What is email personalization?

Email personalization is not just about using “Hey (first_name)” instead of “Hey there”. Personalized email marketing involves gathering relevant data of your customers and drafting exclusive messages that match their challenges and goals. It is about imparting a customized experience through every email and striking the right chord with them. Use them right, and your professional email templates will stand out from the crowd.

“Data” is the key here. The effectiveness of your email campaigns relies on how satisfactorily you can collect different types of data from the users. Depending on the business type and industry, you must create different customer personas or avatars to reach out to them with relevant messages.   

What makes email personalization so important?

It takes quite a lot of effort to execute a fully personalized 1:1 email marketing strategy but it is all worth the hard work it takes. 

Here’s why:

1. It helps you to target different segments of audiences more effectively.

Personalization in emails allows you to reach out to different segments of audiences with relevant information that they would be interested in. For example: See how Nordstrom has personalized their email for the different segments according to their geographical location. 

2. Personalization helps to send out more impactful content.

Imagine searching for a red dress on Amazon and receiving an email sharing similar product recommendations. Wouldn’t it facilitate your decision making process? That’s exactly how personalization works. It lends an additional edge to your business email templates and helps you cut through the noise of random batch and blast emails and leave an impact on the subscriber’s mind, thereby encouraging them to convert. 

3. Personalized emails will strengthen your relationship with the customer.

Personalizing your email marketing will show your customer that you care for them and not just your business. It will allow you to build a stronger rapport with the prospective clients as well as the existing ones. For instance: You can send out a personalized welcome HTML email to the new subscribers talking more about the services they have expressed interest in. 

4. Customizing your emails will impart a personal touch to your business.

Personalization is not just limited to the email copy. It also applies to your sender email address and subject line. This will give an identity to your company and show the human side to customers. Avoid a noreply address at all costs. Send the emails from an email address your subscribers can reply to in case they have any questions or grievances. It is a good idea to use an email address like kevin@uplers.com with the sender name as Kevin from Email Uplers rather than noreply@uplers.com. 

5. Personalization will allow you to send more relevant (and tempting) offers. 

By collecting customer information regarding their past purchases, kind of products searched for, and total purchase value, you can send out more relevant offers and recommendations. To illustrate: If a customer has purchased non-fiction or mythology books from your eCommerce store, you can send a personalized HTML email suggesting similar books. 

6. Personalized email marketing will skyrocket your sales and conversions.

As personalized emails offer valuable information that the customer might be looking for, they are likely to see improved click-throughs and a higher conversion rate. You must keep an eye on the customer behavior and send out emails that are best aligned to their preferences. 

How to personalize- Tips and tricks to Swear by

1. Start by asking the right questions.

The first question that comes to a marketer’s mind before employing personalization is: How to collect data.

The simplest answer is to ask the right questions to your subscribers. Ask them the reasons for visiting your website, what they are looking for, and what challenges are they facing. These answers will give you enormous information about the users.   

For example: If you are into the fitness industry, there might be several reasons why a customer signs up on your site. They might be looking for:

• Weight gain tips
• Ways to get rid of obesity
• Actionable tips to stay fit
• Specific “how to” guides to overcome a lifestyle disorder

Each subscriber must be targeted with a different message that matches their end goals. Therefore, you must ask what they are looking for, in the sign-up form itself. Sending out the same email template to everyone would hardly leave an impact or get you conversions. 

The same logic applies to all businesses, large and small. 

Take a look at this email from Scratch. After collecting the relevant details from the visitor via their signup form, they’ve utilized them all in their onboarding email.

2. Segment your list and create customer personas (avatars).

According to the insights you already have, you must segment your email list. To start with, you can segment according to the basic parameters like age, gender, geographical location, and demographics. Gradually, you must try to get more information from them through subsequent emails. Once you have enough information, you must build customer personas by using a combination of preferences and actions taken by them. 

For instance: Suppose you have an online digital marketing training institute. To customize the experience of all the students, you must ask them the following questions:

1. Are you a student, freelancer, solopreneur, working employee, homemaker, or a retired professional?
2. What are the main challenges that you are facing in learning digital marketing or executing it?
3.  After learning digital marketing, do you plan to pursue digital freelancing, affiliate marketing, digital marketing, or land a full-time job?

According to the user’s answers, you can create different customer personas. It will also help you understand your target audience better and craft a personalized experience for the users. 

3. A/B testing is another smart way to understand your customer. 

Try A/B testing to understand what kind of emails do your customers like in the inbox. Pick a segment and divide it into two sets. Send different emails to both these sets and see which one performs the best. Just make sure that you use just one variable element so that it is easy to analyze the results. 

You must use the same tactic to figure out the best time to send your emails. Take into account the user’s geographical location while scheduling the emails, especially when you have a global target audience. 

While some customers prefer checking their emails in the morning, some others might like to do so in their lunch break or after office. A/B test by sending out emails at different times of the day to determine what works for you. Also, pay attention to the time zones of the subscribers to send the email at the right time. If you have personalized the email with the right message but it does not reach the subscriber at the optimum timing, all your efforts will go down the drain. 

4. Use triggered email workflows.

Remember that email by Google Maps that lands in your inbox at the end of every month? That’s a bot but it still imparts such a personalized experience to the readers. These emails serve as a great means to keep users engaged to your offerings.

To send such emails, you need to track the user’s behavior and target them with helpful information that will get them to take action.  

The perfect example of a triggered email workflow that brings results is cart abandonment emails used by eCommerce marketers. Triggered emails are the most useful personalization tool that help you to ascertain how your customers are interacting with your brand. 

5. Personalize your landing pages.

Getting people to provide their information is quite a challenging task, more so because of the extremely competitive marketplace. Therefore, you must invest enough time in creating a landing page and sign-up forms that would entice the user to fill in the details and learn more about you. 

Make sure that your landing pages are personalized according to the user’s needs. For example: If you own a digital marketing agency and a user has clicked on the ad promoting your content marketing services, you must redirect him or her to the respective landing page rather than your website home page. You can even incorporate personalized videos in the landing page to further enhance the customer experience.

Besides, you must also bear in mind that your emails are aligned with the landing pages. That will render a consistent experience to the users and brighten the chance of conversions. 

6. Add a face to your business.

Time and again, I come across questions like: “What to do if I do not have access to subscriber information just yet?”

It is quite natural that when you are just starting off your business, you might not have access to enough data. In such cases, you must focus on building your brand and establish a personal connection with the users. 

You can introduce your team in the onboarding email or add behind-the-scenes photographs to add a personal touch to your emails. This will give a visual voice to the company. 

Use the first-person and second-person narrative like “I”, “we”, and “you” with a conversational tone. You will surely see a difference in the way your customers respond.

You will be able to see the founders of De Soi, Katy Perry and Morgan McLachlan, in their welcome email. 

Elements to personalize in your email campaigns

1. Subject line personalization

You must already be aware that the email subject line is the most important aspect when it comes to email open rates. In addition to the sender name, the subject line works as the deciding factor whether the user will be interested in opening your email or not. 

Subject line personalization comes into the picture here. 

Let’s take a look at some tips that will help you in personalizing your email subject lines.

First name

The most extensively used way to personalize the subject lines is by adding the subscriber’s first name in it. Amidst all that chaos in the email inbox, you are more likely to pay attention to the ones that have your name in the subject line. Your subscribers are no different. 

Interests and preferences

What if you receive a custom email with a subject line that has nothing to do with your interests and goals? In most likelihood, you will either delete it or simply mark it as read and move on. That’s exactly why it is important to consider the subscriber’s interests and past interactions while sending them emails and drafting the subject line. Make your email look like it is created exclusively for the reader. The subject line should reflect that the email has something relevant for the reader. 

Past purchase history

If a user has purchased home decor items from your eCommerce store, it is a great idea to send them a custom email with the subject line that focuses on similar products that they might be interested in. For such a user, it would hardly make sense if you draft an email subject line promoting fashion accessories. Again, the concept of multiple attributes and segmentation based on age and gender comes into play here. That’s the basis of effective personalization. 

Combine personalization with urgency

Sometimes I feel most of the purchases I make are impulsive in nature, driven by Fear of Missing Out. I hate to confess this, but I purchased a number of courses just because they sent me an email saying “Hey Kevin, only 5 hours left…”. 

That’s the power of using personalization along with an element of urgency. If you are in the eCommerce industry, you can use the same trick and create a subject line like: “Last 4 items to go” or “The offer ends today”.

2. Email copy personalization

Once you have collected the data that you would need, you are all set to send out personalized emails. Just like first name personalization in email subject lines, you can do the same in the body of your email too. However, be mindful of the fact that it can get creepy if you use it too much. It should appear friendly, but not forced. 

Now, let’s reiterate all the segmentation parameters before we understand how to personalize email copy:

• Age
• Gender
• Geographical location
• Demographics
• Past purchases
• Total purchase value of the past transactions
• Stage of the buyer’s journey
• Resources downloaded
• Products or services searched for
• Events attended

You must choose the most suitable segmentation parameters according to your business type and industry. For example: Events attended is not a segmentation parameter for eCommerce industry marketers.  

Having said that, let us see how you can personalize your email copy. 

Offers

Your offers would be of no use to the email recipient if they are not in line with the interests and needs of the target audience. What if you offer the job of a business development executive to an academic or technical content writer? The same analogy fits here. Someone who has searched for crockery on your website would hardly appreciate discount offers on mobile phone accessories. Therefore, you must make sure that you send out offers that are most relevant for the recipient.

Product recommendations

Just like offers, your product recommendations must complement the previous purchases made by the customer. Suppose a customer has purchased dog food a couple of days ago, you can send out a personalized email featuring relevant recommendations like dog treats or toys. This would delight the pet owner and get you a happy customer again.

Features of the product or service they have purchased

Recently, I purchased LinkedIn Sales Navigator for my side hustle but I could hardly find time to use it to its maximum potential. So, LinkedIn sent me a personalized email sharing details about all the features that I was missing out on. Now, that is a great marketing tactic to win the customer’s trust and encourage them to continue using your service. B2B companies and SaaS owners can reap huge benefits of such customized emails. 

See how Grammarly uses the same tactic to win over their users. 

3. Personalized Imagery

It is a proven fact that images or other rich media elements like GIFs leave a deeper impact on customers rather than plain text. Now, what if you bring together personalization and visual marketing? It will take the entire customer experience to the next level. Adding personalized images will draw the subscriber’s attention and pique their curiosity too. 

Here’s an example from Travelocity that uses the subscriber’s name in the hero image to grab their eyeballs. It will also get the users interested in what the email wants to convey. 

4. Behavior-based triggered emails

Most of the businesses are using advanced CRM tools like Marketo and Salesforce these days. By using them, it is possible to integrate the customer’s data into the CRM system and set automation workflows according to the triggers. Whether it is your customer’s browsing history or the past purchases, you can add all this information into the database. You can send out more relevant emails by setting behavioral triggers in the CRM. 

For instance: As soon as a subscriber signs up to your email list, he or she must receive the welcome email (or a series of two to three welcome emails). 

If you are a B2B email marketer, the next step is to send them relevant lead nurturing emails that would convince them to purchase from you. Just make sure that you have segmented the subscribers according to their buyer’s journey. Otherwise, your drip email campaigns will be meaningless. Divide the customer’s journey into awareness, consideration, and decision stage, and accordingly, send out different emails to each set of subscribers. 

On the other hand, eCommerce email marketers must send out promotional emails, considering all the segmentation attributes. Don’t use batch and blast email marketing as it does not work anymore. 

Other behavioral triggers for eCommerce stores are cart abandonment, stock replenishment, and back-in-stock emails. 

The behavioral triggers that you can use for any and every industry are: Post-purchase feedback emails, survey emails, cross-sell or upsell emails, and re-engagement emails. 

These behavioral triggers are the best in bringing passive revenue for your business. Once you have set these workflows, it does not need any manual intervention. However, you must regularly monitor the performance of these emails and keep optimizing it for best results. 

You can also integrate your social media and email marketing to send out behavior triggers based on the engagement on social media posts. 

5. Occasion-based Emails

Take a look at this email by Dutch Bros. They have sent this email on the subscriber’s birthday to declare their present- a free drink. It’s a wonderful gesture to gather some brownie points. 

You can send personalized birthday emails to the subscribers and make their day more special. 

In addition, you can also send out milestone emails that celebrate big days like the customer’s first anniversary with you or your company’s first 10,000 customers. 

Here’s an example to give you a better idea about how to do it:

There are some Holidays too for which you can send out promotional emails. Just make sure that you do not mess up with dates. For example: Mother’s Day falls in the month of March in the UK, while the US celebrates it in the month of May. 

You would not want to see someone tweet like this about you. 

If you have a subscriber base in both these geographical locations, you must see to it that you impart an inclusive experience to them and send these emails on the right day. 

Understanding Different Data Components and Their Usage

1. The contact’s name can be used in the subject line and email copy. 
2. You can personalize your emails according to the contact’s first touchpoint.

For example: If a user has signed up to your website through the PPC ads promoting a discount, you can send out a welcome email with the same offer. On the other hand, if someone has visited your website through organic search results and then signed up for your emails, you can send out a welcome email without any discount offer. This is because the latter would have a higher purchase intent. Therefore, you can expect a higher margin on their first purchase. 

3. Next comes the email engagement activity. 

You must consider the following points while utilizing the email engagement activity. 

• First of all, define your active audience by setting a threshold of the open rate and click-through rate within a specific period of time. 
• The second step is to determine the dormant leads for re-engagement. You must set a threshold for those subscribers who have not engaged with any of your past emails. According to your business type and industry, the time period for this can either be 30 days, 60 days, or 90 days, or more. 
• Thirdly, use the click data to figure out what kind of products interest the subscribers the most. For example: Contacts who have clicked on discount or offer links in your emails would be more interested in learning about similar sale or clearance offers. You must retarget them with follow-ups regarding such offers. 
• Lastly, you must keep a close eye on the open, click, and purchase data. It will give you an insight into the time when the users are most likely to convert. However, bear in mind that the times when the users open the email can be different from the times when they make the purchase. 

4. Your purchaser data is also an important aspect to consider while personalizing emails. 

• At the outset, you must define the active shoppers by keeping track of the past purchases. If a contact has engaged with your emails and also placed an order in the recent past, you can conveniently retarget them. Send out relevant product recommendations and entice them to make another purchase.
• Make a list of the non-purchasers and add them to the segment that “needs to be nurtured”. You can modify your email marketing strategy and try incentivizing them to convince them to convert. An assertive approach, without sounding too pushy can help. 
• Loyalty programs are also a salient feature that facilitates email personalization. Discover the common attributes and preferences of repeat purchasers. Also, analyze the favorite product categories and promotions that have brought maximum people to purchase from you. All these insights, combined together, will form the foundation of an effective loyalty program. 
• You can set up an automated email workflow to create cross-sell offers with complementary product recommendations. For example: Someone who has purchased a mobile phone can be retargeted with an email recommending mobile accessories like earphones or screen guard. 

5. Milestone data can be used most effectively in the celebratory automated campaigns. 

To illustrate, you must always send out a series of birthday emails. The first email should reach the user on the first day of the birthday month. The second email can be sent on the birthday, followed by the third email a couple of days later. 

YYou can also celebrate small occasions like purchase anniversary and create a re-engagement email campaign around it in case the leads get inactive.. 

Advanced Email Personalization Techniques

All the strategies discussed above are quite easy to use and widely employed by marketers all over the world. Besides these, there are some advanced personalization techniques that you can use for your email marketing strategy. 

1. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

In the previous section, we have gone through the conventional methods to personalize different elements of an email. 

Now, we shall see how you can employ AI to hyper-personalize your emails. 

Subject line optimization

While you might need the help of a copywriter to draft appealing subject lines personalized for each subscriber, an AI tool like Phrasee can generate engaging subject lines with the help of powerful algorithms. It uses NLP (Natural Language Processing) which unites the principles of AI, computer science, and computational linguistics. Through this technology, computers can understand natural human language and even recreate it at times. 

It evaluates the performance of every marketing campaign and then optimizes your subject lines with every analysis. 

Automated email workflows

Employing AI in emails is not just limited to email subject lines. You can also incorporate it in your automated emails. You can use AI-driven software to use pre-written copy, visual elements, blog post snippets, promotional offers, and curated content to bring a high engagement rate. 

Apart from improving the email campaign performance, these emails help to minimize human intervention, thereby allowing you and your team to focus better on business growth.    

Amazon and Netflix are two brands that have nailed this tactic in their emails. 

Take a look at this reminder email by Netflix, with the subject line: Don’t forget to finish Marcella.

2. Predictive Analytics

Another exciting technology is predictive analytics. It allows you to predict the most significant customer behaviors, namely:

• Customer lifetime value
• Popular products
• Next purchase timeline
• Purchase intent
• Risk of churn

Let’s understand this concept better. 

i. Purchase intent

Understanding the purchase intent will allow you to customize the copy of your messages and their frequency. If someone has a greater purchase intent, a simple reminder might work better. On the other hand, some others would need repeated follow-ups and incentives to be convinced to make the purchase. 

ii. Favorite category

As I have mentioned in one of the preceding sections, record the product category that is preferred the most by every user. Based on this, you can produce tailormade emails, exclusive for those customers. For example: A company created exclusive emails for full figure shoppers and included images of plus-sized models which led to a 105% increase in conversion rate. This was possible with the help of preferred category data. 

iii.  Predicted date of next order

Advanced ESPs and CRM tools can give you a holistic view of your customers’ buying habits and anticipate the timeline of their next order. Subsequently, you can send out an automated email with relevant product recommendations at the right time. 

iv. Predicted lifetime value

You can predict the lifetime value of a customer by analyzing the customer’s purchase history, its frequency, and predicted date of repurchase. It will let you know which customers are more likely to purchase at a higher average order value (AOV). You will also get an idea about customer loyalty.

To illustrate: If a customer is predicted to spend $150 or less, you might have to incentivize them to drive conversions. 

Contrarily, if a customer is predicted to spend a much higher amount like $500, a simple promotional email with a gentle reminder will make them purchase from you.   

3. Lead Scoring Model

Lead scoring model allows you to track the prospect activity and optimize the marketing communications. You only need to integrate the lead scoring workflow with the marketing automation. 

Sendinblue, Marketo, and Salesforce offer such functionalities to their users. 

Here is a basic lead scoring example for you. 

It means that if a user clicks on your promotional email, he or she will get five points for the activity. 

In other words, it goes to show that such users are keener to hear from you when compared to others who do not click. 

You can apply the same logic for your event invitation emails. A user who clicks through the email and registers for the event will get some extra points when compared to someone else who does not respond to the invite. 

4. Integration with Third-party Apps

You can send out hyper-personalized emails by integrating your email marketing tool with the eCommerce platform, CRM, or accounting software. This will help you in importing useful information like the total purchase value of the past orders and all other details about their previous interactions. All these details will play a crucial role in imparting a personalized experience to the readers. 

5. Preference Centers

Preference centers are another great way to retrieve data for email personalization. You can use them to determine the email frequency for every customer or advanced details about their purchase preferences. It will, in turn, help you send tailormade emails to every customer.

6. Dynamic Content

You can make use of geographic and demographic data to add dynamic content blocks that change according to the individual customer. Consequently, every subscriber will receive offers and product recommendations most relevant to them. Campaign Monitor used this technology and improved the click-through rates by 29%. 

Key Takeaways to Make Personalization More Powerful

• Focus on data collection and try to get maximum relevant information from the user. 
• Approach every segment of the subscribers with the right tone of empathy and make it look like a dialogue rather than a sales pitch monologue. 
• Research well about what your customers would be interested in, according to the stage of their journey. 
• Let the users set their own preferences. 
• Make sure that your emails do not look like you are stalking the user’s activity. Subtle personalization is the key. 
• Always test the email before hitting the “Send” button.
• Monitor the results of your personalized emails and keep optimizing them for the best results.  
• Needless to say, allow your subscribers to unsubscribe from your emails.

Wrapping Up

There is a lot that you can do to personalize emails. You can get enormous information about it on the Internet and we’ve attempted to collate everything in this article. 

That will save you the time of browsing through different websites across multiple tabs and give you a complete picture- all at one place.  

Bingo! You are now all set to send out hyper-personalized emails and up your email marketing game. 

Oh, and did you bookmark this guide? 

The post The Email Personalization Guide You’ll Want to Bookmark appeared first on Email Uplers.

[This blog was originally posted on Aug 20, 2019 and has been updated to showcase new examples]

When you design an email for the campaign you are planning, what is the first thought that comes to your mind? The message, the tone of the email or the email design are some of the first thoughts that you tend to have when creating your email. But, have you ever thought of the email header or the footer design?

While the content and design are important, it is the email’s header and the footer that complete it and make it whole. The header is the first thing that the subscriber sees when they open your email, and hence it needs to be attractive and well thought.

The footer, though not many people are going to look at it, is important to those who plan to unsubscribe or, wish to see your social media channels.

According to Hatchbuck.com, consumers who purchase products through email spend 138% more than those that don’t receive email offers.

Therefore, it is important you take into consideration all parameters before designing an email.

Here, we will look at the objectives of both header and footer, and the things you need to consider when designing them.

#1 Designing an Email Header

If we were to describe the email header in one line, it is the teaser to the movie that you are about to watch. The header helps set the expectations for the email. The following questions are answered in the header

• What is the email about?
• Which brand has sent the email, and on what occasion?
• What are they offering, and who are they targeting for the particular offer?

The objective of the header is to indicate the various elements of the email and persuade you to read the email and probably take the action as well. In some cases, the call-to-action is present in the header itself.

Why do you need a strong header for your email?

• The header helps the user process the information already available in your email in a simplified way. They can get to know what the email is going to be about and decide whether to read it or not.
• A good header will represent your brand. It will inform the recipient about the sender.

Elements that are present within a header

Now that you know why you need a header, let’s move on to the elements that make up a good header.

• You should have your business name and logo as part of the header. As mentioned, it will help identify who sent the email. It will also help building your brand’s image and retention.
• A good email header should always come with a navigation menu, which will help the users move back and forth within the email to check on the promotions or other offers within the email
• Header that is visual is nature can help with skimming and better understanding. Make sure you make it visually appealing with high quality pictures
• Along with the main line that attracts attention, there should be a secondary preview line that elaborates on the headline.
• Make sure to include the link to “view in browser” as it helps the users to click and see the live email in browser, in case the images don’t open in their email client.

If you have included all these elements in your header, then you are ready with the perfect one for your email template. Make sure you use this header as part of all your email campaigns. The more standardized your email header is, the better it helps with brand retention.

Email design header tips

• An interesting email header design is one that contains personalization. If you can include the subscriber’s name in the header, then you can enjoy greater open rates.
• It is important you introduce short, yet convincing headers.
• The message, as to what the email is all about, should be passed on to the readers as effectively as possible.
• Try to abide by the brand’s guidelines while designing the headers. Don’t introduce colors or fonts that don’t go with your brand’s image. If you have always reflected bold personality as part of your brand image, then try to incorporate the same in the header as well.
• Make sure the header design has enough whitespace and integrate the menu feature with the header.
• Finally, try multiple designs before you zero down on a particular header image for the email campaign you are designing.

Some email examples with interesting header

Below, we have listed a few stunning email header examples. Take a look.

The header includes the brand’s name and it is clear that it is a welcome email and is meant for on-boarding purposes.

What makes this feature among the finest email header examples is that it highlights the central message of the email- Restream’s Halloween-special deal.

This email from Martie contains yet another fine example of an interesting email header design where the brand has chosen to incorporate its important links in it.

#2 Designing an Email Footer

The footer is often ignored while designing an email. You tend to forget the footer altogether. However, it is an important email element because you certainly want people to leave your email with a good impression about you.

The main objective of the footer is to give your email a good closure. Your subscriber could gain access to connecting with you in the future or, your subscriber could get details about where to find more information about your brand.

The objective of the footer is to keep up with the interest that the users are showing in the brand. In case, someone does not want to keep the subscription to your emails, then the footer ought to take care of that as well.

Why you need a strong footer for your email?

• A strong footer should give the users an alternative to communicate through different channels, other than email.
• It should let the recipient know about your physical presence and privacy policy. (not to forget, the copyright details)

Elements that should be present in a footer

• The main purpose of the footer is to share information that can help the subscriber contact the brand. So, you need to share your address, phone number and other details in the footer.
• The footer should also let the user know about other platforms from where they can get more information about you. For instance, make sure you add your social media details as well as the link to your blog and website in the footer.
• The unsubscribe link is an important consideration for those who are designing the footer. Make sure you design it in sync with the GDPR and CAN-SPAM legislation.

Footer design tips that leave a better impact

The final impression should be as good as the first impression. So, make sure you follow these tips when designing the footer for your email.

• The idea is to use minimalism when designing the email footer. You don’t need to include everything in the footer. Just add the basic and necessary things and keep the footer information as minimal as possible.
• The information should be represented in chronological order. You need to research and identify what resonates with your user’s needs most and add it to the footer accordingly.
• Choose a background and text font that you believe matches your brand’s image most. You should choose colors that reflect the email’s personality.

Some winning email footer designs

This email by Tattly has the perfectly articulated footer. You will see that the entire spread is chronologically arranged. Although there is ample whitespace, it does not miss out on any important information. Also, there is a link that allows you to unsubscribe to the mail.

Uncommon Goods’ footer is animated, making sure that they are able to cast a memorable impression on their readers even as they exit the email.

Wrapping It Up

If you ignore the email header and footer, you might not be able to deliver a memorable subscriber experience. Make sure to use the same header and footer throughout all campaigns. The color, fonts and even the design elements should be consistent so that it helps in brand retention.

In a nutshell, the devil is in the detail and email header or footer are no exception.

The post Email Header and Footer Design Tips to Swear By appeared first on Email Uplers.

Table of Contents

• Introduction 
• How Does Creating Urgency in Emails Help?
• Some Use Cases For Creating Urgency in Emails       
• Urgency in Email Subject Lines
• Urgency in Email Copy
• Urgency in Email Design
• Urgency in Email CTA
• Points to Remember While Creating Urgency Emails
• Wrapping Up

Introduction

What’s the ultimate mantra to get an instant conversion?

Well, there are five mantras that can help.

1. Make the offer clear and relevant
2. Establish your value proposition
3. Increase trust and mitigate apprehension
4. Eliminate any distractions
5. Add a sense of urgency

Once you have nailed the first four, creating a sense of urgency would work wonders in getting the conversions you have aimed for.  This applies to email marketing as well. The best way to get conversions and drive faster business growth is to set a deadline and build on the vibe that time is running out. Besides segmentation and personalization, it is important to write a compelling copy that helps customers make quick decisions.

That said, let’s understand why you need to create urgency in your emails? 

How Does Creating Urgency in Emails Help?

• People often get stuck between choices and dilemmas, which delays the decision. Creating urgency facilitates the decision making process and prevents procrastination. 

For instance: Suppose a user is checking and comparing the prices of a mobile phone on two different websites. Now, if one of the websites displays the message “10% Off, Just for today”, the user might get “FOMO” and is more likely to convert. That’s the magic of infusing a sense of urgency around the entire shopping experience. It will make the users choose you over your competitors. After all, FOMO works! 

Now, consider the same scenario in email marketing. Two brands have promoted a similar product through their emails. The user will be keener to purchase from the one who has added an element of urgency in their emails. 

• It increases the perceived value of a product. If you add a phrase “Only 4 left” or “Last 2 items”, people will see it as a highly coveted product and consider buying it. 
• Urgency-generating phrases increase the desire for your products. Imagine you want to book a hotel in Paris and you see a popup “Only 1 room left” for the hotel you want to stay in. Wouldn’t it trigger the FOMO response and make you complete the booking instantly?
• Creating urgency reduces the chances of alternate purchase decisions.

Some Use Cases For Creating Urgency in Emails

There are some instances when it is especially useful to create urgency and get the results you wish to achieve. 

Here’s a low-down on the subject.

1. Get more attendees for your event or webinar

Let the readers know how many days they have left to register for the event. You can promote an early bird offer to get instant registrations. Also, offer an incentive or free giveaway to attract more visitors.  

2. Drive more conversions for the Holidays

The Holiday season is a good time to generate higher conversions. By creating urgency in the Holiday emails, you give the users a reason to act fast. Combine scarcity with urgency to encourage more people to purchase from you.    

3. Remind the users to take immediate action

If you are in the eCommerce sector, you can send out reminders about the expiring offer. You can also create urgency through the cart abandonment emails and bring back the cart abandoners. Promote a limited-time discount coupon code to make them complete the purchase. 

4. Re-engage the inactive customers

You can win back the inactive customers by incentivizing them with a fleeting offer. Give them something they cannot say no to and couple it with urgency or scarcity. It will persuade them to engage with your email and take action. 

Now, we shall discuss how you can incorporate urgency in emails, starting with the subject lines and then moving on to the copy and CTA. 

1. Email Subject Lines

Urgency email subject lines should comprise of words that reflect the purpose of the email and the action to be taken. 

Take a look at this image. 

Army General and former US President, Dwight D. Eisenhower has created this time management model. It holds true for your email subject lines too. Write subject lines that appear both important and urgent. When the subject line reflects urgency and importance, the users will avoid procrastinating and take action right away.  

Let’s take a look at some urgency-generating phrases that can work in your favor. 

1. Deadline approaching
2. Deadline today
3. Buy now
4. Limited-time offer
5. Till stocks last
6. Hurry
7. Time’s flying
8. Time’s running out
9. Don’t miss this offer
10. Today only
11. Till midnight only
12. Ends tomorrow/today
13. Instant savings
14. Free shipping for today
15. Next-day delivery for today only
16. Save today
17. Limited items available
18. Last chance
19. 1 day left
20. Today is the day
21. [URGENT] You’ve got a day
22. Few hours only
23. 2 days left
24. Deals will disappear at midnight
25. The products are getting sold out fast
26. Your trial is ending today
27. Your trial has expired
28. Our last email to you
29. Just 3 seats left
30. A day to go for the webinar
31. We’re starting (the webinar) in 15 minutes
32. Get it now before it’s too late
33. The timer’s going off 
34. Weekend only sale- Your chance is NOW
35. Alert! You need to act now

The 35th example can get somewhat intimidating for the readers but it might work for banks and financial institutions where the user has to take action immediately. In other cases, it comes off as clickbait. It reflects disrespect for the readers. Avoid using words like “ASAP” that depict informality. It would create a feeling that you can always call the person if it is such an urgent situation.    

According to a 2015 study by Return Path, ‘still time’ was the best performing phrase. It worked better than the word “extended”. 

Rather than using the day of the week, use the word “tomorrow” in the subject lines. Select specific date and time like “Avail of the offer by 12th December 2022, 12 AM PST”. 

You can also add emojis in the subject line that depict time is running out. Here are a few examples:

Some marketers also experiment with capitalization and exclamation marks. If you want to take this route, make sure you don’t overdo it. Avoid capitalizing the entire subject line as it might trigger spam filters. Exclamation points are good to depict urgency but using too many of them can come off as someone shouting at the reader. So, it is best avoided. 

Here are some urgent email subject line examples, according to the points discussed above — capitalization, emojis, exclamation mark, urgency-generating phrases, and tapping on the FOMO.

We shall now discuss how to create urgency through the email copy.

Urgency-generating Email Copy

Once you have conveyed the sense of urgency through your email subject line, convey the same through your email copy. Let’s see how you can achieve this. 

1. Add the deadline in the copy

Incorporate the deadline in the email headline or hero image. Phrases like “Offer expires tomorrow” or “Sale is till midnight only” can help. Make sure you mention the correct deadline with the time zone. The user should not be confused about the offer deadline. For example: If the offer is ending at 00:00 AM PST on 12th December, include all these details. Make it clearly visible to the readers so that they don’t have to look for it. Adding the time zone adds further clarity about the deadline, especially when you have a global audience. It is not a good idea to add the deadline details only in the footer. 

Anthropologie has added the deadline right at the top so that it doesn’t go unnoticed by any chance. 

2. Use your language and tone correctly

Draft the copy in such a way that it inspires the subscribers to take action but doesn’t come off as pressurizing them. Just like you did in subject lines, add time-related words like now, hurry, don’t miss out, last chance, clearance, and today only in your copy. 

Maintain brevity in the emails. Your subscribers are busy people. So, they would not have time to read long blocks of text. 

Take a look at this email by Food52 that has used a clever way to put forth their gifts under $100. (A toast to showstopping gifts that don’t break the bank…)

3. Offer something that will be useful to the readers`

Creating urgency will be effective only for products that people are looking for, something that will make their lives easier. If your product doesn’t pique the subscriber’s interest, all your tactics will go in vain. Urgency doesn’t work if the user doesn’t want the product in the first place. Understand the user’s purchase intent and journey in the sales funnel to promote a relevant product. Create a personalized offer according to the subscriber’s actions. For instance: If a user has searched for jewelry items on your eCommerce store, share customized offers related to those products. Or send reminder emails to the cart abandoners to notify them that they have a limited time to buy the items in the cart. 

Pottery Barn has used a nice cart recovery email saying that the item is almost yours. We always have a feeling of loss aversion and we hate “almosts” in life. That’s exactly why this email would work well to bring conversions. 

4. Unite scarcity with urgency

If there’s a dearth of something, people are more likely to want it. Supply and demand are inversely proportional to each other. Let the users know that the product is available in a limited quantity. It will trigger their fear of losing out on it and inspire them to take action. eCommerce businesses can create an entire campaign by announcing that there are only a few items left in stock. The illusion that the product will go out of their hand will compel people to click and convert before anyone else. Use this strategy in your cart abandonment email and let users know how many people are viewing the item at the moment. It will create a sense of competition with other customers and drive purchase. 

Take a look at this email by Flat Tummy Co in which they have highlighted the low stock of their flat tummy tea product with a succinct, engaging copy. Also, did you notice the green CTA buttons that perfectly depict urgency? And the social proof to build the reader’s confidence? 10/10, isn’t it?

If you are a freelancer, consider sending an email that says – “I am almost booked for the month. I can still accommodate 2 more clients. Get in touch if you have any <insert service name> needs.”

Businesses can also follow this practice in their out-of-office emails. Inform the customers about your limited availability and that you will be taking only urgent orders during the Holiday season. It will give people the required push to place an order. 

5. Combine the offer with an attractive incentive

A reason to purchase, personalized offer, close deadline, and scarcity are all good tactics to increase your conversions. The cherry on the top is an extra incentive like free shipping or a surprise gift to the first few buyers. People are always game for such incentives. So, it increases the likelihood of conversions.  

Pizza Hut has incentivized their buyer with a chance to win the grand prize of $20,000 and instant prizes like:

Check out their email below.

6. Put the potential savings in the spotlight

While promoting a sale, highlight the potential savings. Let the readers know how much they will save by availing of the deal. Use the header section to include all these important details. 

ArtistWorks, Inc has sent a brilliant email that informs the user about the potential savings and how it will take their playing to new heights.

7. Include social proof in the emails

Just adding urgency is not enough. You must also share the benefits of your product and customer success stories. Feature customer testimonials in the emails as proof and instill trust in the subscriber’s mind. It will also reflect your brand credibility and make more people click through. 

You must have seen how to use social proof in the email by Flat Tummy Co. Alternatively, you can do it like Purple.

They have redirected the user to the testimonials section to show how they are better than their competitors.

8. Repeat the time-sensitiveness throughout the email

Power of repetition is extensively used in promotional campaigns across all channels and industries (including political campaigns). Email marketing is no exception. Repeat the main message, offer, deadline, and potential savings throughout the email. Add key phrases that stress on the time-sensitiveness and uphold the idea that the user needs to act fast. 

See how Hip Kids has emphasized throughout the email that it is the last chance to get the discounted products. 

9. Urgency + Referral marketing strategy = Compounded conversions

If you want to drive faster business growth, promote your referral marketing strategy and offer rewards to the people who bring the first few referrals. As an example: Send an email that informs the readers that they stand a chance to win an Amazon gift card of USD 1000 if they bring in referrals by 25th December 2022. It will help you with word-of-mouth publicity and get you new customers while retaining the existing ones. 

Scott’s Cheap Flights sends out an excellent referral email incorporating a sense of urgency. The referral has to join before 31st January to qualify. It will make the referrals keener to sign up for their free trial and get instant conversions for your business. 

How to Design Urgency-generating Emails?

As important as it is to create suitable subject lines and copy, your overall email design is equally important.

Let’s see which are the design best practices to create urgency-generating emails.

1. Design with a warm color scheme

The overall color scheme has a huge impact on how the readers perceive your emails. Whether or not they will take action depends on the kind of vibe it created in the reader’s mind. For example: Using a warm color scheme will exude an inviting feel. 

Shades of cool colors like blue and green stand less chance of getting clicks when compared to warm ones. 

Pick bright colors to surround the urgent message. It will have a greater impact in comparison to muted colors. 

This also holds for the CTA button. (We shall discuss it in later section)

2. Utilize the power of GIFs

GIFs have an upper hand in drawing the reader’s attention. As compared to static images, users are likely to notice animations in the emails. You can animate the typography, countdown timer, or product images to entice the users to make the purchase. Use the zoom in-zoom out effect to zero in on the offer.

J.Crew has created a nice GIF to promote their extended sale ending at midnight. 

3. Incorporate interactivity

The most effective interactivity that I can think of is a countdown timer. It lets the users know about the time left for the offer to expire and prompts them to make the purchase. eCommerce sites with a huge churn of products can use countdown timers to reinforce the fast-approaching deadline and the message that “time is NOW”. Other industries like banking, travel, and B2B services can also use this interactive element to promote their products. It can also be used to pique curiosity before the launch of something new. Before launching the new range of Fall outfits, you can send out a countdown timer email that allows the users to register and get early access to the store.    

Macy’s uses a countdown timer in almost all their promotional emails, as seen in the example below.

You can reach out to Email Uplers for custom email design services at the fastest turnaround time.

How to Create Urgency-generating CTAs in Emails?

Ultimately, it is the CTA that acts as the gateway of conversions and brings business for you. Here’s how you can generate a sense of urgency through CTAs in emails. 

1. Include the CTA in the first fold

Keeping the CTA above the fold along with all the deadline details will make the users more inclined to make the purchase. It will also ensure that the users don’t miss out on it. Your emails will be easy to scan and call attention to the action that needs to be taken. It will highlight the primary message or offer that your email conveys. 

Shapermint has included a clearly visible CTA in the first fold. Also, they have used a warm color scheme with pink shades in the background to radiate urgency. 

2. Write an actionable copy with time-sensitive words

Of course, you cannot make the copy of the CTA button too long. But you can always add words like NOW and Today only to convey urgency. Couple these words with an action verb depending on the purpose of the email and the action you want the users to take. To make the button more impactful, add some negative space surrounding it. Also, write in the first person. For example: “Reserve my spot now” performs better than “Reserve your spot now”. 

See this webinar invitation email by Validity in which they have adhered to all these best practices. 

3. Maintain a visual hierarchy

In all probability, your urgency-generating email has a hero image with a countdown timer, some copy, and a few relevant visuals in addition to the primary CTA. Make sure that the CTA stands out from the rest of the elements and draws maximum attention from the readers. If you are sending out a webinar invitation email talking about limited slots left, you must highlight the limited availability at the top, let the reader know why they should attend it, and then put a “Register now” button for them to take action. You can even add testimonials, photographs, and video links to the past event to make the email more convincing. Following a natural progression from the headline, copy, and CTA is of utmost importance while creating such emails. 

Head Kandy has perfectly demonstrated these practices and followed visual hierarchy in their email.

4. Use bright and warm colors

The CTA colors should be chosen in such a way that they catch the reader’s eye without being too flashy. Green and orange colors are the most effective when it comes to driving click-through rates. Consider your brand personality and business type while picking the color. Use a contrasting color that is most noticeable in the email. 

La Colombe Coffee has used a red CTA button to bring the reader’s attention and make them purchase in a flash. 

Points to Remember While Creating Urgency Emails

1. Never come off as desperate

Everyone wants sales and ROI, and that too instantly. But it is important to remember that even after incorporating urgency in emails, people might not buy immediately from you. Some people are innately immune to FOMO or perhaps, they don’t need your products at that moment. Business won’t grow overnight and leads might not convert as you expect. Amidst all this, it is natural that you panic. No matter how hopeless you feel, never let your emails deliver that message. It will turn off your subscribers and make them unsubscribe or mark your emails as spam. 

2. Address any obstacles that might be hindering the conversion

When you send an urgency email, be prepared to solve the challenges that a customer might be facing. For instance: The subscriber could be having certain questions before making the purchase or encountering technical issues during payment or checkout. In the B2B model, they could be having pricing concerns and needing onboarding help. Make sure you share your customer support email address or toll-free contact number so that the prospects can get in touch with you and convert. 

3. Schedule the follow-ups considering your sales cycle

Follow-up emails with urgency and valuable information help increase sales. Often, the subscribers are interested in making the purchase but they have gotten distracted or stuck in something else. Remind them about any time-sensitive or scarce aspect of purchasing from you and why they should do it immediately. Answer the question: What’s the advantage of purchasing the product NOW? If the answer carries the conviction the user is looking for, congratulations, you just closed a deal. 

4. Do away with misleading urgency messages

Some brands make the grave mistake of sending out urgency emails on a daily basis. It will make the readers resistant and they might ignore your offers. Another tactic we come across on a regular basis is the “sale extended” emails. While it helps in bringing customers sometimes, this technique has also become stale. Readers find such repetitive urgent offers boring and avoid clicking. Your product should actually be a best seller or selling out fast. Remember that your customers are street smart and you cannot mislead them with any clickbait urgent emails anymore. 

5. Put on your thinking caps 

We have discussed all the best practices and some pro-tips to create urgency emails. You can definitely apply them but think of innovative ideas too. Try to create urgency by using humor or any other creative ways you can think of. As email clients are getting more receptive to advanced design elements, you can always incorporate AMP technology, gamification, or APNG animations to rise above the noise in the inbox. Every other brand is adding a countdown in emails and using time-sensitive phrases. So, what else can you do? Think about it and test how it goes. 

Wrapping Up

Once you have crafted a time-sensitive or urgent subject line, your email is likely to get opened. What’s more important is that it gets click-throughs too. And that will happen only if the offer is genuinely urgent, relevant, and has something that can help the user. 

In case you need help with creating a visually rich email for your urgency email campaigns, feel free to reach out to us and we would love to help you out. 

The post Urgency Emails: An All-inclusive Guide for Marketers To Drive Maximum Conversions appeared first on Email Uplers.

In 2021, an estimated 319.6 billion emails were exchanged daily across the globe. This year, that figure has shot up to approximately 333.2 billion. And in the years to follow, it will only balloon up further. The point of stating this is to underline just how vital emails are as a mode of communication. For businesses, it serves as the primary means to reach out to their customers. Given our overwhelming reliance on emails, ensuring that they get dispatched and are delivered soundly to your customer’s inboxes is downright imperative. It is in this very endeavor that an SMTP (Single Mail Transfer Protocol) server comes in handy. 

What is that, you ask? Well, it is a communication protocol that allows you to send and receive emails. Additionally, it also checks if a particular email account sending a message is active or not. I’m sure each one of us has sent an email to an incorrect address at one point or the other. But the real question to ask here is, how did we discover that the address in question was invalid? Because when our email returned back to us, it also informed us that the address we entered was either wrong or didn’t exist. Whose work do you think that is? You guessed it, SMTP servers. With it, you can elevate your email campaign management to the next level. Want to get one for your business? Well, you’re just at the right place. No, we don’t provide SMTP email services, but in this blog, we are going to give you a complete lowdown regarding everything you need to keep in mind while selecting one. 

Before that, however, let us address a few fundamentals. 

How does an SMTP server work?

Ever wondered how this communication protocol actually functions? The points below break it down for you. You can always get in touch with an agency imparting email marketing services to get a complete understanding as well.

• To send an email, you use an email client, right? This client connects to the SMTP server through a port. By default, port 25 is used.
• Next, the mail client conveys all the details of the message, such as the email body and the email addresses of both the sender and receiver, to the SMTP server for verification.
• Only after authenticating the sender does the server allow the message to be transmitted to the recipient’s inbox. 
• Now, here’s an interesting thing that the SMTP server carries out- it dissects your email address into name and domain name. For instance, if your email address is kevin@xyz.com, it gets split into kevin and xyz.com.
• Should the receiver also have xyz.com as their domain, the email is sent immediately. However, if they have a different domain, the server passes it on to another incoming server, one that is closer to the recipient.
• Your recipient’s server may not always be available. On occasions when it is busy, the email is forwarded to a backup server by the SMTP host. And if the backup servers are also occupied, the message is held, and delivery is attempted later at periodic intervals. If none of those attempts manage to bear fruit, it is classified as undelivered eventually. 
• There will also be cases where the recipient’s address will be incorrect. We already discussed earlier what the outcome in that scenario would be. 

What Is The Significance Of SMTP Servers?

SMTP servers are an indispensable component of your email marketing toolkit, for they are largely responsible for making sure your emails reach your contacts without fail. Upon hitting the send button, your email morphs into a string of code. Without an SMTP server, this would never get processed and delivered to your recipients. However, their virtues run way richer than that. Let’s take a detailed look at them below. 

• They make it easy for you to send bulk emails. It allows you to set up dedicated systems that support the same. While the blast-and-batch approach is much frowned upon in today’s climate, bulk email clients still have their fair share of pros. For starters, they are arguably the best way to reach out to a larger number of subscribers within a limited time span, something that proves to be extremely nifty during high-traffic times such as the holiday season. Bulk email campaigns are also marketers’ go-to tactic when it comes to sending invitations and product updates. Lastly, if you track your campaigns effectively, you will end up having a handsome volume of data at your disposal, which in turn can arm you with a slew of penetrating insights about your audience. In a nutshell, bulk campaigns are not all that bad. So, it doesn’t really hurt to define a formal structure for them with the help of SMTP servers.
• It is common knowledge that emails marked as spam fail to make their way into your subscriber’s inboxes. An SMTP server can help you steer clear of this fate, improving your deliverability by leaps and bounds in the process.
• While deploying an SMTP service, you also make yourself privy to the technical support of your service provider. Besides making sure that your mail account is set up properly, they will help resolve any queries or obstacles that might arise in subsequent times.
• You have the choice of creating a contingency option in the form of a local server by using an existing SMTP address (you can find the address of your SMTP server by accessing your email client’s settings or account section). While the delivery, in this case, will be significantly slower, having a backup does give you a certain degree of flexibility. 

How To Select The Ideal SMTP Service

In this section, we list out all the critical factors you must take into account while picking out an SMTP service.

Complexity

Ultimately, the kind of SMTP service you choose needs to boil down to one fundamental requirement- your business needs. If you are a small or mid-sized business, you might not need to purchase a sophisticated server that has a vast suite of features. While the pros of a feature-intensive server are many, do keep in mind the fact that complex servers lean towards the slower side. Not to mention the steep learning curve that they demand. So, if your objectives are being met by a relatively modest server, you should invest in it sans any second thought. Similarly, if you are running a multinational conglomerate, opting for a complex server will prove to be the ideal course of action for you. 

Scalability

If there’s any sentiment that unites all business owners out there, it’s the desire to grow their business perpetually. As your business goes from strength to strength, it is extremely crucial that it is supported by the appropriate hardware as well. Hence, when choosing an SMTP service, scalability must be one of your foremost concerns. It must be able to function as desired in the face of your customers and send volume growing manifold.

Support

If you’re not from a technical background, wrapping your head around SMTP servers can prove to be pretty challenging. Therefore, before locking in on an SMTP service, research the kind of support they offer. Go through online reviews and customer testimonials to get a clearer picture. It is also ideal to try and identify experts in your area who are fluent with the SMTP system you are planning to invest in. 

Reporting Metrics

If you are prudent with the selection of your SMTP service, you can really get on top of your campaign’s performance. The best services out there share with you a plethora of essential insights, including the number of messages delivered, click percentages, bounce rates, and opening percentages. These metrics help you understand how your customers are responding to and interacting with your messages, allowing you to gauge the efficacy of their campaigns.

Data Security

Data is your business’s primary currency; thus, its integrity and safety need to be guaranteed at all times. Certain SMTP services offer server infrastructures hosted in countries where your data, both physical and digital, are protected by federal laws and absolutely impervious to any requests made to access it, irrespective of who has issued it (Switzerland is an example of one such country).

Best SMTP Services In The Market

Below, we mention a few SMTP services that are highly popular among businesses at present.

Sendinblue

• Contains a dedicated transactional email service (Sendinblue SMTP) which enables you to send a wide range of transactional emails, including signup and order confirmations, password recovery emails, payment confirmation emails, and the like.
• Gives you the choice of segmenting promotional and transactional emails by sender or IP address, thereby making sure your sender reputation remains uncompromised.
• Offers integrations for eCommerce platforms.

SMTP.com

• Facilitates super-fast delivery.
• Supports both shared and dedicated IPs.
• Scans and blocks spam consistently, making sure a high delivery rate is maintained.

Mailgun

• Offers real-time reporting letting you access hourly data.
• Contains a restful API that has libraries and code examples in several languages, making it a great option for developers.
• Allows you to create a custom enterprise-grade solution for sending bulk emails.

Amazon SES

• Provides you with reputation and deliverability dashboards which helps you keep an eye on issues that could potentially hamper them. 
• With little help from WordPress plugins, it can be easily integrated into your site.
• Contains a mailbox simulator where you can run tests to examine how your application responds to different scenarios, such as unsubscribes, bounces, or complaints. 

To help you make the most of your selected SMTP server, you can always consider partnering up with a dedicated agency that specializes in email campaign management. 

Wrapping It Up

While choosing the right SMTP service is, no doubt, a tricky affair, we hope the insights shared above will make your hunt easier. If you have any queries you feel we can address, please leave them in the comments section. 

The post How To Choose The Right SMTP Service For Email Marketing? appeared first on Email Uplers.

One of the best ways to spur customers into taking action is by instilling a sense of urgency and scarcity in their minds. And few methods are as effective at achieving this as countdown timers. There’s just something about the very image of a ticking clock that never fails to get your veins pumping, right? Brands and marketers understand this well, which is why they routinely leverage this tool in their email campaigns. 

Particularly during the holiday season, their stocks reach spectacular heights, for they prove to be an extremely potent means of rising above the crowd. As a matter of fact, a countdown timer that hits all the right notes can increase your conversion rates by a staggering 400%! If you, too, are planning to incorporate them in your holiday campaigns, you couldn’t be reading this blog at a better time. Here, we discuss all the various factors one needs to take into account while using countdown timers. Curious to find out what they are? Read on!

How Do You Make An Email Countdown Timer?

We understand that countdown timers are pretty useful, but how do you really create one?

Well, there are two ways you can go about it:

1. Make an HTML timer and embed its code in your email:
   These are the timers that countdown live, in real time. In case you are wondering, no, you don’t need to code them from scratch. There are multiple tools available online that you can use.
   
   All you have to do is specify your deadline and the time zone. Additionally, you can also customize the language, text, and background color (as well as the color of the numbers). Now, let me address a question that must be renting your head- “Will my timer start counting down as soon as the reader opens the email?” No, such timers start ticking away from the moment they are created. 

2. Make a looped GIF animation:
   Yes, it’s pretty much what it sounds like. You make an animated GIF that loops within a fixed starting and ending point. Goes without saying, they are far more convenient to execute than HTML timers. You might lose a couple of points for authenticity, sure, but atleast you don’t have to worry about email clients flagging these timers because they are essentially GIFs. There are a few things that you need to be mindful of, however. 
   
   Firstly, know that not all email clients support GIFs. Outlook, for instance, displays only the first frame of an animated GIF. Secondly, you have to create different GIFs for different batches of subscribers depending on the send timing. Let’s say your sale ends at 7 pm, and you are sending a reminder email containing the countdown timer to a few subscribers at 12 pm. Here, you have to take care to include the GIF that shows 7 hours are remaining. You can’t use the timer GIF you would have sent to your 9 am subscribers (and neither can you use the one sent to your 12 pm subscribers for your 3 pm batch).

When Can You Use A Countdown Timer?

One of the foremost reasons why email marketers are fond of countdown timers is because they can be called to action for a wide range of occasions. Below, we have listed out some.

Sales

Email countdown timers are associated with sales more than any other event out there; I think all of us can agree to that. The first step towards nudging your customers to shop your shelves clean involves inserting a good ol’ timer in your email. Take a look at Wix’s email for some inspiration.

New Product Launch

Releasing a new product into the market is always a tricky affair, no matter how renowned and loved your brand is. To ensure that it ends up in your buyer’s shopping cart, not only do you have to win their trust by successfully communicating its USPs but also convince them of its scarcity. Countdown timers will help you with the latter. Some brands even prefer counting down to the release date of their product to generate a buzz around it.

Seasonal Events

Remember how I said earlier that email countdown timers become particularly popular during the holiday season? There are other high-traffic periods besides the holiday season as well, such as Woman’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, and the like, where you can use countdown in email. The bottom line is that they are quite handy when it comes to calling attention to your seasonal offers. 

Take a look at these examples.

Four Sigmatic during Black Friday.

Walmart during Black Friday.

Designmodo during Cyber Monday.

Coupon Redemption

Brands often slip a discount coupon into their re-engagement campaigns to lure back some of their dormant subscribers. This ploy of offering an incentive is a successful one, but what if we told you that you could further enhance it? All you need to do is throw an email countdown timer into the mix. An attractive discount, against a ticking clock? That’s definitely gotta rouse a few from their slumber.

Early Access

Want to pique the curiosity of their subscribers? Give them early or exclusive access to the launch of a product. Tell them that they have a shot at purchasing their product before their fellow shoppers. And what can you do to nudge them? You guessed it, summon the services of a countdown timer. 

Some Best Practices

Listed below are a few best practices that will help you maximize the impact of the countdown timers in your emails.

• Verify the expiration date specified on your timer: Any confusion in that aspect and the whole purpose of using a timer in the first place will be defeated.
• Place your CTA in the vicinity of your timer:  Besides serving its desired purpose of instilling a sense of emergency in your subscribers’ minds, your timers are eye-catching visual elements also; always remember that. Therefore, by placing your CTA (which is arguably your email’s heart) near your timer, you are simply increasing the likelihood of it getting clicked. 
• Don’t overuse timers: With all that I’ve talked about countdown in email up until this point, this really needs to be stated as well. Timers are precious real estate, of course, but if you start using them in every second email you send out, you’ll dilute their gravity. 
• Ensure the copy accompanying the countdown timer is justified: Readers shouldn’t have any ambiguity regarding the deadline or the event to which your timer is counting down.
• Pay attention to the placement of your timer: Ideally, it should be kept above the fold. That way, it’s the first thing your subscribers will notice upon opening the email.
• Add the best version of your countdown time:  How do you determine that, you ask? Two words: A/B/n testing.

Wrapping It Up

If previously you used to look at countdown timers through a foggy lens, I hope this blog was able to rectify that for you. Go ahead, then, weave them deftly into your campaigns and watch your conversions skyrocket!

The post Want To Add Countdown Timers To Your Email? Here’s Everything You Need To Keep In Mind! appeared first on Email Uplers.

In 2017, IDC predicted that the “Salesforce economy” would create 3.3 million new jobs by 2022. More recently, in 2021, IDC scaled up its forecast to 9.3 million jobs by 2026. That’s 9.3 million jobs that Salesforce and its ecosystem of partners will create in the next four years. A majority of these jobs will require specific digital and occupational skills, such as skills related to SFMC.

You need talented SFMC specialists to make the most of the vast – and growing – SFMC platform. Without them, you might struggle to use SFMC properly and end up with an expensive and low-ROI white elephant on your hands.

So, how can you capture the maximum ROI from your SFMC investment?

How can you hire the right SFMC Architects/Administrators/Developers/Marketers/Designers experts to work with and in your email marketing team?

The 5 tips below will help. Read on!

1. Ask them about their Trailhead activities

There are many reasons SFMC is one of the world’s most popular email marketing platforms. One is that in addition to its vast range of features, functionalities, and integrations, its ecosystem includes Trailhead, a free online learning platform. Trailhead provides interactive and gamified lessons plus numerous learning paths for anyone looking to develop their SFMC and email marketing expertise.

Look for candidates who spend time on Trailhead. These candidates are most likely to take ownership of their own learning and development, are interested in reskilling and upskilling, and have the motivation to succeed in their roles – all qualities that will help the organization succeed with SFMC.

Also look for SFMC specialists who:

• Have earned Trailhead Superbadges: Superbadges demonstrate their hands-on SFMC skills through real-world business scenarios
• Participate in the Trailblazer Community
• Are involved with programs like Trailblazer Connect for additional training and to build connections in the Trailblazer Community
• Have independently built apps to solve real-world problems in the Trailhead Playground
• Can talk about their preferred Trailhead modules and projects in detail to demonstrate their SFMC expertise

2. Look for transferable skills and experience

Too many companies restrict their search for SFMC specialists with narrow job descriptions (JDs). While it’s not wrong to assess and compare candidates on the basis of SFMC experience and certifications, it’s not a good idea to assess and compare them solely on the basis of these parameters.

Many people can make excellent SFMC specialists, even if they don’t have SFMC-specific experience. For this reason, you should look for candidates who bring transferable experiences and skills that could be valuable for your SFMC team.

• Can they prove their ability to be customer-centric and to anticipate client needs?
• Do they have a history of making proactive suggestions in their previous roles?
• Are they good at time management and request prioritization?
• Do they pay attention to small details while also keeping an eye on the big picture?
• Do they focus on work/output quality and make an effort to consistently improve?
• Are they passionate about enhancing customer experiences?
• Do they work well with others? At the same time, do they take accountability for their own work?

Candidates who can tick all (or most) of these boxes usually do well in SFMC roles, so do ask pointed questions to assess these qualities. Focus on behavioral questions as well as “what did you do”-type questions to understand if they have the experience, attitudes, and transferable skills that will apply well to the role you are interviewing them for.

3. Look for perseverance and tenacity in aiming for SFMC certifications

The best and most passionate SFMC specialists work hard to obtain and maintain their SFMC certifications. That said, not everyone holds SFMC certifications but may still have the experience and skills you need for your SFMC team. For this reason, it’s important not to look only for certified SFMC candidates and not to be put off by candidates who have not passed one or more SFMC certification exams.

A candidate’s platform knowledge, level of commitment, and willingness to learn are more important qualities than certificates, so assess them on the basis of these qualities instead of rejecting them for not holding a certificate. If they have not had the opportunity to pursue a certification, ask why. If possible, tell them that you will give them this opportunity if they join your team. Also look at their Trailhead profile to see if they are committed to ongoing learning about SFMC. And perhaps most importantly, show these candidates that you appreciate their perseverance, tenacity, resilience, and growth mindset, and want to work with them and support them as they pursue a certificate, regardless of how many attempts it takes.

4. Strengthen your employer brand

A strong employer brand is how your company is perceived in the employment market. Do your current employees say good things about the firm? Is the company considered a great place to work? Can you attract the right type of candidates to apply for open roles? If you said “no” to any of these questions, you need to work on strengthening the employer brand.

First ask yourself these questions:

• You have unrealistic expectations of the team and its members
• You lack clarity on what each SFMC resource will be responsible for
• You assume that the different Salesforce specialties are interchangeable and consequently pressure people to do things they are not qualified for or interested in
• You don’t give team members the required resources to do their jobs well
• You don’t give them decision-making power and constantly micromanage them

The answers will reveal why you are unable to attract (and retain) the best SFMC talent to your organization. They will also act as useful guidelines to help you avoid these mistakes in future, which will then help strengthen your employer brand and make the company more desirable to the best SFMC talent.

Other ways to strengthen the employer brand:

• Build and promote a company culture that encourages learning and thrives on growth
• Maintain a positive working environment where everyone is treated fairly and with respect
• Clearly communicate the expectations (roles and responsibilities, technical skills, soft skills) for each SFMC role
• Promote the employer brand on social media with employee stories, case studies, blog posts, and other authentic and unique content
• Add a careers page to your website detailing why your company is a great place to work for top SFMC talent

5. Provide learning and development opportunities

One effective way to attract top SFMC talent is to showcase the learning and development (L&D) opportunities the company provides to all SFMC specialists. Show them which Trailhead courses and certifications they can pursue to advance their careers with the company. Install Trail Tracker to assign learning topics and badges to each team member and track their progress vis-à-vis their colleagues. Connect their achievements to KPIs and/or compensation so they have an additional incentive to keep learning and to benefit the organization with their SFMC knowledge and skills.

Encourage them to participate in the Trailblazer Community and to attend local Salesforce meetups to collaborate with or learn from other SFMC professionals. Invite external SFMC experts to offer private workshops and organize sessions where team members can share their learnings and insights with each other in a collaborative, safe space.

In addition to L&D opportunities, here are some other ways to attract and retain the best SFMC talent in your organization:

• Offer competitive compensation
• Offer additional perks, such as flex hours, reimbursement for exam fees, etc.
• Encourage them to take charge of their learning and career growth, and support them with both
• Show them how they and their work matter to the company
• Encourage them to ask questions about the company and their role, not only during the interview but also after they are hired

Wrap Up

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is one of the best investments you can make for your email marketing program. But to make the most of this investment, you need talented and passionate SFMC specialists in your team. Considering the demand for these specialists, it’s not easy to find them, much less to retain them. Fortunately, if you follow the 5 tips we have discussed here, you will improve your chances of attracting and retaining the best SFMC talent in your organization.

We hope you found this brief guide useful. If you need further support with your SFMC email marketing program, contact Email Uplers.

The post 5 Tips to Hire and Retain the Top Salesforce Marketing Cloud Talent appeared first on Email Uplers.

Ever been on a dating app?

The first thing you do is check out the profile of the person you are interested in, right? That’s how it works in marketing too. You will need to check the profile of the prospect or customer you want to reach out to. However, a big difference is that you will not get access to readymade customer profiles in a marketing setup. You will have to gather data and create them on your own. This entire process of creating a comprehensive portrait of your customers is known as profiling. When you add the prefix progressive to profiling, it means that you ask additional questions in the subsequent forms to get more information about the lead. Asking too many questions at a go can be exhausting for the respondents. So, progressive profiling furnishes a better user experience with shorter and intentional lead forms. 

What’s the Issue With Long Forms?

A long signup form will frustrate the subscribers and force them to leave the page. Consequently, you will have fewer subscriptions with a low conversion rate. 

3 Reasons why people avoid filling out long forms.

1. Security issues

When you collect too much information, it will raise doubts related to data security. With an increase in the cases of data breaches, your customers think twice before providing any information. That’s why long forms don’t work too well. 

2. Irrelevant fields

Having too many fields on the sign up form will repel youryour customers. They will end up assuming that the company does not need this information. Moreover, if a prospect is simply exploring different platforms, they would not be willing to share much information. After all, who would like to fill out a long questionnaire for a 7-day free trial? That leads us to the next point… ↓ 

3. Incorrect data

Long forms will compel the users to fill out the forms with random information just to finish the registration process. This wrong information will be useless for your sales or marketing team. Therefore, it will make no sense even if you have a detailed form to collect user information. 

How Does Progressive Profiling Work?

Progressive profiling helps in collecting relevant information about a prospect in a subtle way without being too intrusive. As you ask the questions in a step-by-step manner, it does not lead to much friction. The marketing team can use this information to segment the database and then approach them with relevant messages. It will enable the sales team to carry out prospecting and reach out to the hot leads first. 

Consider the stage of the buyer’s journey while creating the form to build the profile. Use ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu strategy to build the subsequent forms. 

This strategy helps determine where should the forms be placed and the questions to be asked on each form. The marketing automation platform takes the help of the CRM system and contact record to choose the questions that should be shown to the users. Set up the system to ask the right questions. Choose the fields thoughtfully so that they match your business type and industry. You can take the help of an email campaign manager to ascertain the right fields. 

With that said, let’s move on to the implementation part — how to execute progressive profiling. 

6 Clever Ideas for Progressive Profiling (With Practical Examples)

1. Ask the customer to set up their account

Suppose you need the below mentioned information for your SaaS product:

• First name
• Last name
• Email address
• Company
• Designation
• Company size

You can either have one registration form with all the six fields or go for progressive profiling and break down the fields into two or three subsequent forms. 

When the customer signs up, you can ask for the first name, last name, and email address along with the password. This does not look too intrusive as it is basic information required for the registration. They are used to filling out this information and in most cases, it gets fetched automatically. Therefore, it leads to no objection from the prospects. 

Once you have captured the email address, you can send them onboarding emails. You can use these emails to provide more information about your products and ask additional questions for customer profiling. 

Let me tell you how Mailchimp does it. 

You only need to provide your username, email address, and password to create an account on Mailchimp. Once you have completed this process, you will get a confirmation email to activate your account. 

After activation, you will be able to set up your account with all the relevant details like:

First name and last name

Business name

Phone number (optional)

Business address

Top goal with Mailchimp

Number of email subscribers

How do you sell to your customers

Whether you want to import your brand

How do you want to stay in touch 

You can skip some steps if you want to and complete the account set up process. 

2. Use a popup form after the user logs in

Popup forms are the most convenient form of progressive profiling. Display a popup form asking for relevant information when the user signs in to their account. As a best practice, avoid swamping the readers with too many questions at the outset itself. Let some days elapse before you start displaying these forms to the users.

The best thing about these forms is that they have high visibility. As a result, more people are expected to fill up the form. However, these popups might interfere with the user’s navigation process. If you want your popup forms to work, make sure that it stands out and does not come off as spam. Keep it different from other popup messages like cookies, privacy, and other website notifications. Also, keep the popup form short and sweet to make it more effective for progressive profiling.

3.  Send an email to encourage the users to provide their information

Rather than using popup forms that can lead to more friction, send an email requesting the subscribers to complete their profile. Incentivize them to provide their information. You can also gamify the entire experience by letting the users know that their profile is 75% complete and they only have a few more fields to reach 100%. 

If you are in the eCommerce industry, you can use the welcome email series to carry out progressive profiling. 

Take a look at this email by Office in which they have asked for the user’s birthday to send out a personalized email on their special day. It is a great example of progressive profiling. 

Another example of progressive profiling is this email by Reebok. See how they have asked for the user’s preferences so that they can promote relevant products. 

When compared to popup forms, emails are a much better way to profile the customers. The reason being that they stay in the inbox (as long as the user doesn’t hit the delete or archive button). It is quite likely that the prospect will come back to fill in the form when they have some free time. Just make sure that your email subject line and copy are compelling enough to drive action. 

If you need help with setting up these automation workflows, you can count on agencies providing email marketing management services. 

4.   Make the process fun with quizzes

See those random quizzes (like “Which flower are you” or “What does your birthday month say about you”) filled by your friends on Facebook news feed? Use the same tactic to collect data from your target audience.

GoDaddy sends out an interactive email to help the subscribers find the ideal website builder. It will also provide details about the user’s challenges and what they are looking for.   

Quizzes are similar to gamification and you can use a reward mechanism to encourage more responses. According to your industry, you can use different ideas to implement this tactic for progressive profiling. 

Remember that your subscribers are busy people. So, keep your questionnaire simple to understand and short. Keep the quiz results as accurate as possible so that it does not come off as a clickbait and meaningless exercise. If quizzes don’t look like your cup of tea, give a shot to surveys and ask the users for their preferences. 

5. Carry out one-on-one interviews with the prospects

While this seems to be a time-consuming and challenging idea, it gives the most reliable information about the users. Your sales team can get in touch with the most qualified leads and ask them suitable questions that will support progressive profiling. The ultimate objective of this strategy is to lead them to buy and facilitate the decision. 

Wrapping Up

It has become inevitable to impart a personalized experience to the users. And progressive profiling goes a long way in getting first-party data and recognizing the prospect’s requirements and needs. You only have to ensure that you ask the right questions and design the profiling strategy in such a way that the users share data without any apprehension. 

The post 6 Brilliant Ideas to Collect Customer Data With Progressive Profiling appeared first on Email Uplers.

If you are a business owner, you have often experienced the need to let your prospects and customers know about the product updates or the launch of new features. Although you can use social media to let your followers know about it, you cannot still be sure whether your existing customers or prospects read it. That’s why email marketing is a fail-safe method to inform all the concerned people that you have something new in store for them.  

To make sure that your customers find the product update emails appealing enough, you must conform to certain best practices.

So, let’s get started. 

1. Figure out who should you send the product email to 

Firstly, you must determine who will benefit the most from the update. If it is a generic product update that will enable the hot leads or most qualified prospects to make a faster decision, send it to them in addition to the existing customers. On the other hand, if you have updated a particular product, it will not be relevant for everyone. So, you must send it to people who are using the respective product. 

2. Send relevant emails to the concerned audience

Segment your database according to the products they are already using or the ones they have expressed interest in. It will help you send tailormade content to them. For instance: If you have enhanced the features of your personalized video functionality, send product update emails to people who are already using it or have inquired about it. 

3. Let the users know about the benefits of the new features

Rather than letting the users know the technical aspects of the product updates or features, talk about how it will benefit them. Often, marketers complicate the email communication with technical jargon. It leaves the users overwhelmed and they end up ignoring the email. You need to pique the reader’s curiosity through the email. 

Based on your product type and industry, answer questions like:

1. How will the new feature save the user’s time?
2. How will it drive faster business growth?
3. How will the product update enhance the user’s lifestyle, overall well-being,  and standard of living?

For example: If you are related to the OTT industry and are launching a new feature like profile transfer, you will have to explain to the users how it will work and improve the user experience. See how Netflix has incorporated the details in their email. 

Now apply this principle to B2B and SaaS products like Dropbox has done. 

They have informed the readers how the new product update will prevent issues like choppy playback and audio lag.

4. Use the power of storytelling

Create a background about why you introduced the new feature. You can use stories like a before and after, showing the transformation. Alternatively, you can paint your image as a philanthropic thought leader and make the email an emotional read rather than a sales pitch. You can also share the Eureka moment that gave you the idea of launching the new product or feature. For example: The lack of a similar product in the market and the grave challenge faced by people. 

You can also highlight the contribution of your team and how they executed the new product update. If you have previously launched a beta version of the new update, you can let the readers know how the customers are successfully using it. Some brands even request the users to try out the beta release and be the early adopters. Then, you can ask for their feedback and incorporate those changes to come up with a more powerful final version of the update.  

This example by AllTrails is one of the finest business email templates. They have used a conversational tone emulating a bit of storytelling in their product update email. 

5. Determine whether or not you need to send the email

Some updates might not be so important that you need to send an exclusive email. Decide which updates will have a considerable impact on the user’s overall experience. Make sure that the email adds value to the customer’s life and enhances your credibility. 

If it is a basic update with minor changes, you can do away with the email rather than spamming the readers with trivial information. Not everyone in your database will be receptive to product updates. So, you can share certain updates on other channels like your website, blog posts, social media updates, and other release notes. Generally, release notes have a lot of information to be broadcasted. In such scenarios, you can have a blog article or have an exclusive resource center to archive all the new product updates and features. 

Take a look at this email by Pitch in which they have shared the links to their resources to notify the users about the product updates. 

Interested users can click through and read about it in further detail. 

6. Add relevant visuals 

It is a good idea to include explanatory images or GIFs to demonstrate the product update. After all, visuals go a long way in conveying the message faster and more effectively. Without images, your subscribers might not be able to understand the exact usage of the update. Moreover, the right imagery will bring better subscriber engagement and prompt the users to check the update. 

Codepen has done a great job by adding the screenshot of their Asset Manager in their product update email. It will give a clear idea about the update.

In another email, they have shared an image of their Asset Manager along with the blog link for users who want more information.

7. Use product update emails to re-engage the dormant users

Your users might get inactive if a specific feature that they need is unavailable. So, you should send product update emails as a part of the re-engagement marketing strategy. Let the customers know about the new features you have added and how it will improve their experience. Make it effortless for the users to take action by writing a short and clear email. 

Clear has sent out a brilliant email to re-engage their customers by letting them know about their easier and faster check in.

[Although it is not exactly a product update email, it can still work as an inspiration for you.]

Need more ideas?

Here’s an email by Avocode that shares the public launch of Jira integration through their product update email. It not only works wonders for product marketing strategy but also helps revive the inactive leads. 

8. Add an element of fun to the product update emails

Generally, product update emails are a bit boring. Try to maintain a light and conversational tone so that it does not look too technical to the readers. Use vibrant colors that make the email look fun. If the email looks grim and bland, it will put off the subscribers. 

Check out this product update email by Tome that has used vibrant neon shades to create an exuberant vibe. Such responsive email HTML templates will garner a higher click-through rate and more sales.  

9. Write a catchy subject line 

Your subject line should be convincing enough to drive open rates. If you have all the points discussed above in place but a boring subject line, your efforts will be in vain. Rather than treating it as an afterthought, give enough time to think of a persuasive and creative subject line that attracts the readers to open the email. 

Take a look at some examples here:

1. HubSpot Integration

By ClickUp

2. We’ve added new features to make trail time even better!

By AllTrails

3. Smiles Davis, let’s get you started with Replay

By Dropbox

4. New: Introducing Profile Transfer

By Netflix

5. New in Pitch Creator profiles, speaker view, and a look back at Q2

By Pitch

Wrapping Up

Product update emails should be an indispensable part of your marketing strategy, especially if you are in the B2B and SaaS industry. If you want to convert your leads into customers and retain the existing ones, product email marketing is the perfect idea. Keep improving your product consistently and communicating it to your subscriber base. Make the most of this opportunity to inform the customers that you are paying attention to their feedback and striving to meet their expectations. 

The post Product Update Emails: 9 Best Practices to Hit The Right Chord appeared first on Email Uplers.

Such is the relentless march of time, that the boundaries between two successive years now seem increasingly blurrier than ever before. As I write this, we are some 20-odd days from 2023. For someone, who’s mentally grazing the comfortable pastures of 2019, this is a ridiculous amount of information to process. But, I digress. This blog isn’t about my unenviable coping mechanism with the flipping of the years; it’s about the finest email marketers and brands among us who grace this occasion with their jaw-dropping campaigns. 

Starting the year on a high is essential, for it can set the tone for the days to follow. This is why businesses treat their new year email campaigns with incredible gravity. But, creativity is a funny thing. It eludes us when we need it the most. Thankfully, there’s no dearth of stunning inspirations around us, just the tonic we need to get our thinking gears into full swing. Today, we have presented a selection of the finest new year email examples to give you just the headstart you need with your own campaigns. Ready to dive deep into them? Let’s go!

1. Lucky Brand

Subject line: Cheers To The End Of The Year!

Lucky Brand’s new year emailer is neat and visually striking and gets its message across in a few words, an approach I am completely in favor of. You see, customer inboxes during this time of the year are obscenely crowded. So, it’s fair to assume that they are highly likely to skim past emails where the content is presented in the form of long and winding paragraphs. Aiming for brevity, thus, will most definitely elevate your success rates. 

Another thing worth appreciating in this email is its single column layout- this promotes accessibility (making your email more palatable for screen reader users) as well as keeps you free from overlapping columns, misplaced images, overflowing text, and a whole lot of other rendering issues that frequently occur while using multi-column layouts. Lucky Brand’s commitment to email accessibility can also be seen in the mindfulness they have observed with the foreground-background contrast. Although the email uses two starkly different background colors, it takes care to curate the foreground accordingly, making sure the contrast is never short of ideal. 

2. Avon

Subject line: Happy New Year

Many brands launch a new slate of products during New Year’s. If you’re planning to do the same, let Avon’s email over here be your guide. Their product display section, in particular. Besides using high-quality images of items, they have cleverly punctuated the background with a creative visualization of the specific product’s contents. This not only takes the visual appeal of the email to the next level but also helps the viewer understand exactly what they’re looking at, even without reading the title. 

3. Mya Bay

Subject line: Happy New Year !

Year-in-reviews make for highly engaging content, but at the same time, they can be information-intensive as well. Hence, if you are taking this route, you need to ensure that your design game is top-notch, just like Mya Bay have done over here. 

Their design language here ticks all the right boxes- it is perfectly in line with the brand’s persona, it helps the viewers distinguish between different sections without relying on the content, it is uncluttered, and of course, it looks drop-dead gorgeous. In fact, if I’m being completely honest, I was a tad bit disappointed that the timeline HAD to be brought to a close post November-December; I wouldn’t tire of spending a dozen more scrolls on this kind of visual presentation. 

4. Tiny Tags

Subject line: A recap of our fave pieces, tags and words.

During the holiday season, your email list is very likely to undergo a seasonal growth courtesy of customers who subscribe simply to avail of your holiday offerings. Given New Year’s signals the fag end of this period, it’s your last chance to convince and convert this crop of contacts from seasonal to full-time buyers. And what’s a better way of going about it than by making social proof the core of your new year emailer? That’s precisely what Tiny Tags have done over here. 

In an adorable photo grid, they have added pictures of some of their happy customers and also tagged their Instagram handles. Below this grid is a testimonial section, which flashes one glowing review after another. Hoping that both these sections would have worked their magic on you, they cap off the email with a product recommendation to nudge you into making a purchase. 

5. Emma Sleep

Subject line: Happy New Year!

Illustrations are an excellent means of grabbing attention. Be it their endearing imperfection or their inimitable appeal, they know just the spell to cast on eyeballs. Now, throw animation into the mix, and you have at your disposal an extremely potent visual concoction. Emma Sleep, in this email, have taken this very concoction and used it in their hero section, thereby making sure that the reader would feel compelled to scroll down the email after opening it. Since the above-the-fold section here is so visually busy, Emma Sleep have made the conscious choice of keeping the bottom half rather simplistic. The margin of discount on each product has been distinctly labelled across them to offer more clarity to the buyers. 

6. Email Uplers

Subject line: Wishing you all an awesome 2022!

At Email Uplers, we decided to welcome the new year by sharing with our subscribers some of our highest points of 2021 (21 of them, for obvious reasons). With the design, our aim was to evoke sentiments of happiness and celebration in the reader’s mind. As per the content, each feat has been presented with a crisp copy and a complementary icon. The titles of our best-performing content pieces, along with their links, have also been included over here. 

We at Email Uplers create beautiful, pixel-perfect, responsive email templates. Should you wish to get an email template coded, we can do it in just 8 hours! 

7. Mexicali

Subject line: New Year, New Moon

Gradients have been among the most popular email design trends over the last few years. If you are wondering why that’s the case, just take one look at Mexicali’s new year emailer. Visually, gradients serve various purposes, but in this hero section, they’re accentuating the enigma and surrealness that is intrinsic to astrology. Gradients can be of various types- single color, multiple colors, bold, subtle, and even animated. Subtle gradient is what’s at play over here. It can be noticed in the email’s CTA buttons as well, which is what makes them so prominent, to begin with. In their gift guide section, Mexicali have employed a GIF to display their various offerings. 

8. Coola

Subject line: Start with you

When it comes to deciding the color palette of your new year emailer, you have, more or less, two options to choose from- creating a new one for the occasion, and sticking to your brand book. Just for the record, neither approach is wrong. Eventually, it all boils down to execution. In this case, Coola have chosen the latter. Ocean blue and dark blue are Coola’s primary shades, and to make them prominent, they have chosen for their background a shade that is significantly lighter than these two. 

I really like the product descriptions over here too. They’re crisp, to the point and perfectly convey the USPs. Having a unique CTA phrase for each section is another feature worth noting in this email. Personally, my favorite CTA is one accompanying the blog promotion section. Telling the subscribers upfront about the blog’s read time is a great way of establishing transparency with them. 

9. buybuybaby

Subject line: Kickstart the year with a fresh routine >>

Keeping the design language consistent while also making sure that no two sections in the email look similar- this is an area that poses a headache to many brands out there. buybuybaby’s new year emailer presents a solid solution. This email has 4 sections in all, and all of them use the same template. Yet, as a reader, you’ll have no trouble distinguishing between any. Why? Because a unique color has been assigned to each. A simple yet highly effective fix. Another thing which makes this email engaging is its cuteness quotient, which, we can all agree, is right through the roof.

10. Pretty Litter

Subject line: January is looking bright

Pretty Litter’s new year email contains a little bit of everything- a plugin of their latest product, an introduction (via video) of the founder, a blog promotion section, and mention of their social media handle too. What this does is give every subscriber, no matter where they fall on the spectrum, something to engage with. Overall, the image is heavy on visuals with the intention of maximizing engagement and interaction.

Wrapping It Up

How do you feel about crafting your new year campaign now? A lot more confident, we hope? If you want to go beyond this list and dig up the internet for some more inspirations, feel free, by all means! If you come across anything you want to share with us, you know where to find us. And if you want to get a really cool new year email template designed, just get in touch with us; we’ll respond in a jiffy.

The post 10 New Year Email Inspirations To Get Your 2023 Off To A Rollicking Start! appeared first on Email Uplers.

Growing up, our science classes taught us that friction is a “necessary evil”; that, although the phenomenon’s inherent nature of presenting resistance might come across as a nuisance, it is the very thing responsible for facilitating a wide variety of our actions such as walking, writing, gripping objects, and generating heat among many others. Now, those of us who graduated out of those science classes and embraced marketing might have an incredibly tough time wrapping our heads around the “necessary” part of it. As far as we are concerned, friction is the devil himself. 

It is the singular greatest obstacle between our customers and them receiving the experience we desperately want them to. Naturally, a great chunk of our professional careers is focused on eliminating friction. And that brings us to this blog, which is, well, yet another step in that direction. What are we talking about in this blog? A variety of methods that will help you optimize your landing page checkout experiences and skyrocket your conversions (by as much as 35%). Excited already? Well, what’s stopping you? Read away!

Don’t Make It Mandatory For Visitors To Create An Account

Personally, I’ve found myself bouncing from a fair number of pages solely because of this reason. And I’m quite sure that I’m not the only one. For a minute, put yourself in a new visitor’s shoes- you come across a particular brand, say, via a targeted social media ad. You check out their handle and find it rather interesting. You decide to check out their website. Your decision is handsomely rewarded, for this page contains a whole lot of products that you’ve always wanted. You merrily surf through the page, filling your cart, one item at a time. Satisfied with your picks, you proceed to checkout. However, instead of the payment portal, a pop-up window appears on your screen. It asks for you to log in or signup to complete your purchase. A buzzer goes off in your head, you roll your eyes, heave a sigh of utter disappointment, and abandon, both the cart as well as the brand for all of time to come. 

Don’t want this narrative to play out for your visitors too? Well, you already know what to do. Of course, brands that make account creation a compulsory part of the checkout process don’t do it with the intention of turning away visitors. They do so with the aim of generating leads. But, you see, there are plenty of other avenues to achieve that. For starters, you can always implement a time-delayed or scroll-delayed pop-up form. Feel they are too intrusive? Try out inline forms. 

Look, I completely understand if none of these alternatives work for you, and you want to stick to your original idea of including account creation in your checkout experience. But, we already discussed the demerit of that approach. So, to avoid that, the least you can do is give your visitors a guest checkout option. This will allow them to complete their purchase first and create an account later.
This is exactly what Warby Parker does.

A lot of brands these days are also providing their visitors with the option of signing in with an existing Google or Facebook account (essentially, a social log-in option). This helps them obtain all the customer details they need and minimizes the number of clicks for the user, an absolute win-win scenario. 

Pay Attention To The UX Design Of Your Checkout Page

Trust me, this plays a significant role in enhancing your checkout experience. After all, how will you convert visitors into customers if you can’t engage them effectively, to begin with? Nothing makes visitors abandon the checkout process faster than a flow which is incoherent. 

Take a look at some factors that one ought to keep in mind while designing the checkout page.

• Loading time: Checkout pages that take forever to load are something that all of us are a little too familiar with, completely against our will, of course. Hence, one of your top priorities must be to optimize the loading time of your checkout page. 
• Type of checkout page: Here, you have two options to contend with- one-page checkout pages, and multi-page checkout pages. Both, as you’d have already assumed, have their own share of pros and cons. One-page checkouts emphasize simplicity and convenience and are well rewarded for the same, registering a 21.8% higher conversion rate than multi-page checkouts. However, because they keep all the information on a single page, they tend to overwhelm visitors on occasion. For the same reason, their loading times tend to lean towards the higher side.

Under Armor delivers an ideal illustration of a one-page checkout page.

Multi-page checkouts, on the other hand, phase out the checking out process across multiple pages, making the data collection process smoother for you. Their greatest foe is, unfortunately, their very design. The more the number of steps in the checkout process, the lesser the chances of conversions.

A good example of a multi-page checkout page is that of Great Jones. Take a look.

• Number of information fields: Only focus on keeping fields that ask for essential information from the user. In most cases, this is covered by name, contact number, and address.
  
  
• Variety of payment options: One of the best ways to increase the convenience of your checkout process is by offering several payment methods to your visitors- debit card, credit card, PayPal, Apple Pay, interest-free credit lending, everything.

Make Sure There Are No Hidden Fees

How many times have you abandoned a cart simply because the price of your item jumped from $200, suppose, to $240 as you moved from the product page to the checkout page? As a matter of fact, hidden fees are responsible for a good 49% of shoppers ditching their carts. The ideal course of action, thus, is to be absolutely upfront regarding shipping costs, convenience fees, taxes, and any other additional sum that might come into the picture. If possible, try to give this clarity to your customer even before they start populating your cart. For instance, most brands these days allow buyers to hover over the displayed products; this lets them view the products from multiple angles. In one of these frames, you can consider disclosing the product’s shipping and packaging fees. This way, the buyer knows exactly the amount they have to pay at the final step. 

That said, it is only sometimes possible to state the shipping fees at the outset. This is because a lot of the time, it depends on the customer’s location, a detail you won’t be able to gather before the checkout process. So, do we wait till the checkout window to spring this cost at the buyer? No, there’s a simple workaround. Just inform them that the shipping cost will be calculated at checkout.
Native Poppy have taken this route with their checkout page.

Want to make things more transparent? To this statement, hyperlink a shipping rate table which contains prices corresponding to each region you deliver. Now, coming to taxes. It is best to work them into your product pricing than adding them as an auxiliary fee later on. 

Prioritize Responsivity And Accessibility

92.1%– that’s the percentage of users who make use of a mobile phone to access the internet. That’s a sweeping majority, you’d agree, no matter how your scale is calibrated. This makes it imperative for you to make your checkout page mobile-friendly (and while we are on the topic, a gentle reminder to make your landing pages responsive as well). Once your design is sealed, check that it renders well across both desktop and mobile devices. Overlooking this will have you dealing with an unhealthy number of abandoned carts. 

Some fundamental things to take into account to ensure your checkout page is responsive:

• Use a single-column layout. This not only makes for convenient scrolling but also allows you to steer clear of issues that a multi-column layout invites, such as overlapping columns, overflowing text, and misplaced images.
• Make sure the buttons are not too small. Your website is likely to have several buttons corresponding to different actions so size them as per their priority (the greater the priority, the bigger the button size). All in all, it’s a good practice to keep your buttons in the range of 42-72 pixels. On top of that, look to it that there’s ample spacing between two successive buttons. 
• Optimize images, if any, on your checkout page. Otherwise, it will end up affecting the loading time of your page’s mobile version. 
• Try to enable predictive text for the forms on your checkout page.

Other than making your page mobile-friendly, you must make it accessible as well. At present, nearly 1 million people in the world have some form of disability. The importance of adhering to accessibility best practices, therefore, can’t be overstated. Listed below are a few for your consideration. 

• Add HTML labels to form fields. This will help screen reader users understand which label corresponds to which form field.
• If your page has a set of related form fields, group them together.
• Maintain ample contrast between your background and foreground elements. 
• Check if your page can be navigated, and all its features, accessed, without a mouse.

Wrapping It Up

A sub-par checkout experience can ruin the hard work put into your landing page and get in the way of you driving higher conversions. We hope the insights above will help you take the necessary measures to deliver an unparalleled checkout experience to your buyers.

The post How to Provide a Seamless Checkout Experience for Your Landing Pages appeared first on Email Uplers.

I’m sure at some point or the other in your life, you’ve had to move houses. Sorting your items into different categories, putting them into boxes of varying sizes, using separate packing material for delicate and non-delicate items- I’m sure you don’t need any introduction to the packing and moving routine. Now, why am I talking about this? To call your attention to the fact that this process is pretty analogous to migrating from your current ESP (Email Service Provider) to a new one.

ESPs offer a bevvy of functionalities- website tracking, automation, list segmentation, lead capture forms, and A/B testing- which is why they are absolutely adored by businesses. However, with time, as a business (and its needs and requirements) evolves, they find themselves having to bid farewell to their existing ESP and embrace another solution that is better cut out for their demands. But, this can be an incredibly complex process (again, much like moving houses). If you’re currently in the middle of migrating ESPs or are considering doing so in the near future, this blog can prove to be a timely read. Here, we discuss some of the common pitfalls that crop up during the ESP migration process and how one can effectively deal with them. Ready to find out? Dive in!

The Pitfalls

From gaining familiarity with the features of your new ESP to assessing whether it’s holding up as desired to your expectations, one has to contend with plenty of challenges while migrating. Let’s take an in-depth look at the mistakes businesses are most likely to commit in the process.

1. Rushing The Process

ESPs are complex entities. Therefore, should you fail to carefully plot out your migration from one system to another, you’ll find yourself neck-deep in undesirable outcomes. Once you’re definite about making a switchover, ask yourself this: “What should I be looking for in my new ESP?” Getting a lucid answer to this alone will solve more than half of your problems.

Below, we’ve highlighted a few factors one must prioritize while hunting for an ESP.

• Utility of features: Selecting an ESP equipped with diverse functionalities is the way to go, right? Well, not always. You see, it all eventually boils down to your scale of operations. If you are a small or mid-sized enterprise, chances are that you won’t really get many opportunities to fully use a highly sophisticated ESP. While you might be tempted to invest in such an ESP, exercising prudence is key. You can consider asking yourself the following two questions to fine-tune your decision-making:

1. Are the features of this ESP aligning with my business objectives?

2. Will this feature-suite continue to accommodate my business as it scales up?

If and only if you get an affirmative answer for both these questions, go ahead with the purchase.

• Budget: This is pretty much a logical continuation of the point stated above. Most ESPs offer tiered packages where the primary difference between the upper and lower echelons is the number of subscribers they can service. So, if you don’t really have a huge email list, buy a lower-tier plan; you’ll be able to maximize your ROI that way. 
• User-friendliness: Never lose sight of the fact that ESPs are long-term assets for a company. Hence, while choosing an ESP, make sure to check that it has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. The best way to inspect this is by availing of a free trial of the ESP in question- all the top ESPs in the market offer one to new users, anyway. Make the most of it.
• Customer support: We’re sure you’re well aware of the sheer number of nuts and bolts that go into executing an email campaign. At the core of it, lies your ESP. Ensuring, thus, that an ESP has round-the-clock customer support is downright imperative.
• Performance measurement: You might have heard this before, but we are going to state it again nonetheless: Launching an email campaign is just half the job done; the other half lies in tracking its performance. An ESP that has a robust analytics apparatus will give you an in-depth understanding of how subscribers are responding to your campaigns, making it easy for you to optimize them. 
• Security: Your ESP will be privy to a lot of sensitive information pertaining to your subscribers. Therefore, after you have shortlisted an ESP, thoroughly scrutinize its data security policies.

2. Not Warming Your New IP Adequately

This is particularly important if deliverability was the driving reason behind you switching ESPs. Remember, simply migrating to a new ESP which promises superior deliverability won’t solve all your issues. It will improve things to an extent, sure, but you’ll still have to take certain measures from your end to make sure you’re completely in the clear. By “certain measures”, we are mostly alluding to chalking out a dedicated IP warming plan. Moving from one ESP to another also involves moving from your existing IP addresses and domains to new ones. So, unless you establish a good reputation for these new assets by duly warming them up, the migration will prove to be counterproductive. 

3. Being Lousy With Old Data

Your old ESP is a repository of priceless customer data, beyond the obvious email address and contact information, such as subscription dates, opt-outs and unsubscribes, interests and preferences, spam complaint addresses, past purchase behavior, suppression lists, and the like. Now, what happens if you omit this data while shifting ESPs? You’ll have to make your customer profiles from scratch, end up sending emails to subscribers who no longer want to hear from you, and soil your existing personalization strategies, among many, many other things. 

In a nutshell, you risk setting your business back by an unthinkable number of paces. Despite the catastrophic consequences, the number of businesses who fall prey to this is larger than what one would assume.

4. Not Imparting The Requisite Training To Your Staff

One of the major challenges of migrating ESPs is having to wrap your head around the features of a new system, all over again. Without the right direction and guidance, this can appear fairly overwhelming and cumbersome. Whatever level of proficiency you had with respect to your previous ESP won’t reflect in your new one, always keep that in mind. The ideal course of action is to team up with the support team of your new provider and set up dedicated workshops for all your various departments to make the migration process as smooth as possible for them. 

The Solutions

Now that we have learnt about the various potholes, let us understand how we can steer clear of them. 

1. Strike Up A Sync Between Your Marketing And IT Departments

Let us address the question that might have popped in your head after reading that heading: “How does my ESP concern my IT department?” 

Allow us to elaborate. Your marketing department and sales, by extension, are the only two departments to whom your ESP is going to be directly relevant at all times. However, during migration, your IT department will have an equally important role to play. Tasks such as importing contact lists, historical data, and testing for custom integrations will be carried out with them. Hence, getting your marketing and IT departments to coordinate with each right at the onset of the migration process will make life a lot easier for you. Alternatively, you can also seek out the help of dedicated ESP migration experts from an agency.

2. Test At Every Step

Be it creating a segment, designing a template, or setting up an automation workflow, it is always best to stop and test after performing an action for the first time in your new ESP. Yes, even if there happen to be certain similarities between your previous and current providers. Doesn’t matter if you have performed a certain action over a hundred times in your last ESP; you’ll never know how it is going to manifest in the new system unless you take a moment to test it. 

3. Create A Foolproof IP Warming Strategy

Earlier, we talked about the importance of IP warming while shifting to a new ESP. Here, we are going to list out a few best practices. Take a look.

• Know who your most engaged subscribers are. Target them first while sending out emails using your new ESP. This will help improve your standing with ISPs (Internet Service Providers), who use audience engagement as a primary metric to rule whether an email is spam or not.
• Don’t send emails to all your subscribers at once. Instead, increase your send volume gradually. Depending on the number of contacts on your list, phase out the warming process over a few days or weeks as necessary. 
• Which of your email segments has enjoyed the most success historically? Newsletters? Recommendation emails? Customer appreciation emails? Testimonial emails? Whatever might be the case, make sure to keep them at the centre of your IP warming process. 

As you might have already guessed, much hard work and research go into curating a solid IP warming strategy. If your plate is already full of responsibilities, you can always consider working with a reliable agency to carry out this critical task for you.

Wrapping It Up

Migrating from one ESP to another is, no doubt, a challenging affair. We hope the insights shared above help you make an informed decision and select an ESP that will elevate your business to new heights. 

The post Migrating To A New ESP? Common Pitfalls And How To Overcome Them! appeared first on Email Uplers.