Email Uplers

How CRM can Help Boost Your Email Marketing ROI

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 10:29:31 GMT

Even as the discourse around the use of social media platforms and other online tools for targeting and converting leads grows, the quaint channel of email marketing continues to remain the most effective. As per the 2019 DMA report, you can expect an average return of $42 for every $1 spent on email marketing campaigns. That’s an ROI of a whopping 4,200%! With 3.9 billion daily email users across the world and 306.4 billion emails being sent out every day, this digital marketing channel can open up huge opportunities to drive up lead conversions and sales.

While these statistics are aspirational, not all email marketing campaigns deliver such astronomical ROIs. As a business owner, you must take stock of how well your marketing initiatives fare vis-à-vis these yardsticks and what you can do to optimize returns. One effective way of curating campaigns that resonate with a broad cross-section of your target audience and not just one specific demographic is to leverage your customer relationship management (CRM) system.

As you know, CRMs are a gold mine of data that can help you understand who your existing and potential customers really are. Let’s take a look at how these data insights can help you transform your email marketing initiatives.

Role of CRM in Email Marketing

For any email marketing campaign to be effective, it needs to speak to a specific audience in a language and tone that resonates with them. Your CRM that is loaded with customer data can be a potent tool in crafting campaigns that are relevant and targeted. Insights such as purchase history, conversation records between customers and support executives, or personal information such as social media handles, job details, age, or pin code help you understand your target audience inside out.

Based on these insights, you can craft highly personalized emails using a marketing automation platform of your choice. It is important to note that while ‘marketing automation’ and ‘CRM’ are used interchangeably sometimes, these services are not identical.

CRM tools are used for customer, lead and pipeline management, and hence, prove to be a rich source of data insights. Marketing automation, on the other hand, is used to craft, test, and execute customer-centric promotional campaigns. When used in tandem, CRM, and marketing automation tools marry the data insights with campaign execution, resulting in improving the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives.

That’s why a lot of businesses today either use CRM tools with built-in marketing automation features or sync CRM data with marketing automation software.

How to Use CRM to Boost Email Marketing ROI

When it comes to email marketing, your automation software and CRM tool can be considered as two pieces of the same puzzle. By basing your email marketing campaigns on comprehensive customer data provided by your CRM, you can create highly personalized and relevant campaigns capable of yielding optimally high ROI, consistently.

Here are 6 smart ways you can leverage your CRM insights to boost email marketing ROI:

1. Promote Upselling Using Sales History

Source

Your CRM contains details regarding your customers’ purchase history. This data can be used to promote upselling and increase engagement with your existing customers. For instance, ahead of the release of a new product or service, you can analyze past sales data to ascertain which customers would be most interested in these new offerings.

Based on this analysis, you can curate a campaign exclusively targeting those to whom these products or services will be most relevant. In this email, for example, purchase history is being used to promote similar products to a buyer. This helps in keeping your marketing messaging highly personalised and nudging returning customers to engage with your brand. According to a recent survey, 80% of customers are likely to make a purchase from brands that offer a personalised experience, which, ultimately, translate to higher ROI.

On the contrary, if you send out promotional deals, product updates and announcements to your entire subscriber list, you risk antagonising those customers to whom certain messages are not relevant.

2. Target Userbase with Hyper-personalized Campaigns

Source

The historical data stored in your CRM software can also help you target your user base with hyper-personalized campaigns. For instance, a customer’s contact information such as area code for their phone number or the zip code on their residential address can help you zero-in on which segments of your user base to target with a marketing campaign regarding your business operations in a particular area. Like in this case, the target audience can be segmented based on their zip code, so that the email reaches only those living in or around Greenville, South Carolina.

Besides, location information also proves valuable in tailoring the tonality of your content to suit the sensibilities of the recipients. From culturally appropriate references to preferred languages, there are many ways in which you can tweak the content of your emails to hyper-personalize them based on the insights gathered from CRM data. Hyper-personalization, when done right, can increase the chances of a recipient clicking on your CTA by 202%, which means an exponential rise in your ROI.

3. Discover New Leads

Source

With a database comprising details of every user who has ever engaged with your brand, CRMs contain an unmatched wealth of information regarding your target audience. Not only do they tell you who to target with your marketing campaigns but also whether or not a lead has been qualified by the sales team.

With a single click, you can ascertain whether a user matches the demographic profile of your existing user base. If yes, you can use the information stored in your CRM to decide which segment a particular lead fits into best. Using these insights, you can start reaching out to them with targeted, personalized emails – such as the welcome email in the example above – that will push them to act on your CTA.

4. Personalization Through Purchase and Social Media Activity

Source

Of course, your existing customers’ purchase history is a great way to predict their future buying behavior and curate marketing content that is aligned with these predicted patterns. Discounts, promotions, special deals, announcements of new products can be made more effective using this single data insight.

But you can make your email marketing efforts more pointed and astute by also leveraging insights from your users’ social media activity alongside. For instance, a customer has bought a gadget from you. Based on that information in your CRM, you already know that they have a penchant for gadgets. Now, if you also scan your CRM data for social media conversations on your brand’s page or about it, you may find that the same customer has left a comment regarding another gadget being out of stock.

So, as soon as that item is back in stock, you can send them an email update about it. And maybe even throw in a special price. Voila, a sale is almost guaranteed!

5. Build Customer Personas

Source

Segmentation has proven to be a vital approach for enhancing the efficacy of your email marketing campaigns. One excellent approach to segmenting your user base effectively is to create customer personas with the help of your CRM system.

Use the data stored in your CRM to research the habits, demographics, buying patterns, likes and dislikes of your customers. Based on certain common dominating factors, divide them into three, five, or ten different personas. For example, if you’re a men’s accessories brand (such as in the example above), one persona could be male buyers in the age group of 30-35, who are young working professionals, financially independent, and in charge of their own purchasing decisions. Another could be college-going teenagers who shop from you only during the End of Season Sale. And so on.

Once these personas are created, you can just go on adding your customers to categories they fit best in. Then, create email marketing campaigns targeted toward each of these personas.

6. Test Lead Strength

Your CRM system can also determine the strength or quality of a lead. Based on these insights, you can determine where a particular lead falls in your sales funnel and determine how much effort you want to invest in converting a particular lead.

Details such as location, job title, industry, age, among others, can tell you if a particular user does not qualify as a potential lead for your brand. So, you don’t waste your time and effort chasing leads that have no potential for conversion.

This can help weed out redundancies in your email marketing campaigns, and in turn, build upon the ROI.

The Takeaway

With so many brands servicing the same customer base in every industry vertical, your email marketing initiatives have to stand out from the crowd to make a real impact. This can be achieved by combining the power of email marketing with data insights from a well-managed CRM. Thus, giving your email marketing ROI an exponential boost.

At Email Uplers, we provide you with an established ecosystem to help you leverage every critical data point from your CRM. Visit this link if you need help with email campaign management that ensures higher ROI!

The post How CRM can Help Boost Your Email Marketing ROI appeared first on Email Uplers.

5 Best Practices to Boost the Deliverability Of Your Holiday Email Campaigns in SFMC

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 13:49:21 GMT

Your brand is very conscientious about holiday season email marketing. Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) is your ESP of choice.

For the upcoming holidays, you and your Salesforce email specialist work hard to devise the strategy, choose the right Salesforce templates, design the email campaign, and send it to a targeted list of subscribers.

You then sit back and wait for the results: increased conversions, more sales, higher profits, and…

…Merry Christmas!

….Or is it?

When you analyze your campaign, you find that the actual results are nowhere close to expected results. You also realize that the main issue underlying this gap is poor deliverability.

Email deliverability is a key success factor for email marketing. Why? Because you may design the world’s best email campaign but find that very few recipients actually receive or open your emails. This indicates a deliverability problem. It usually happens either because the email landed in the recipient’s spam folder rather than their inbox or because their email address itself is invalid.

In 2019, holiday sales grew 4.1% to $730.2 billion. Plus, as recently as Q2 2020, digital commerce has grown by 71%. And email marketing plays a critical role in both.

So if your email campaigns have a deliverability problem, you need to find a way to fix it or risk losing out on massive customer engagement opportunities, sales, and profits. Here are 5 best practices to help you and your Salesforce email specialist do just that!

#1: Segment subscriber lists with Einstein Engagement Scoring

Subscriber (or audience) segmentation is always important, but even more so for holiday email campaigns.

Suppose you’re a hotel chain implementing a Christmas email campaign with SFMC. You design special offers for loyal customers and tempting discounts for frequent cart abandoners. All your emails contain pictures of sandy beaches, tropical fruits, and sunshine. So far, so good, right? Wrong!

What if you send these same emails to all subscribers – including those who already live in places with sandy beaches, tropical fruits, and sunshine? Are they likely to be impressed with your campaign or turned off?

This is why segmenting your audience is so important.

Einstein Engagement Scoring, an AI-based tool in SFMC Email Studio can help you segment subscriber lists and then deliver to the most engaged users first. Say you send a campaign at 8 AM to your most engaged users. Send it to the rest of your audience at 9 AM. This way, you can ensure that the most engaged people have already opened your email.

Source

Einstein Engagement Scoring uses Machine Learning and customer data to generate predictive models that indicate each subscriber’s likelihood of staying subscribed, opening an email, or clicking on links. It assigns one of four personas to each subscriber:

Loyalists: Subscribers with high open and click engagement
Window Shoppers: Subscribers with high open and low click engagement
Selective Subscribers: Subscribers with low open and high click engagement
Win-back/Dormant: Subscribers with low open and click engagement

Use these personas to refine customer engagement campaigns and journeys in order to maximize both engagement and conversions.

Source

After activation, you can check the Einstein Engagement Scoring dashboard to see the tool’s predictions.

Source

#2: Spread out the email sends with Send Throttling

Customers usually receive more marketing and brand emails during the holiday season. This is not surprising, considering the larger amounts of money that come into play during this time for shopping, gifts, holidays, etc.

But when send volumes are way up, mailbox providers and spam filters usually err on the side of caution to protect their subscribers from spam. That’s why it’s important to be strategic with email sends. One way to do this is to spread out the sends by increasing frequency gradually.

Send Throttle in Email Studio sends emails during the hours you specify every day, starting from the day you send the email until all emails are sent. The send is not spread evenly between the start and end times. The system continues sending during the specified time range until the send is complete or the end time you specified is reached, whichever comes first. The throttle ensures that SFMC does not send a greater number of emails than the throttle limit during the specified period.

To send emails with the Send Throttling feature, define these options:

Delivery window: The range of hours between which you would like to send emails
Hourly threshold: The maximum number of emails to be sent within an hour

Keep in mind that Send Throttling is not activated by default. To activate it, go to:

Setup > Platform Tools > Email Studio > Email Optional Features > “Send Throttling”

#3: Optimize your send times with Einstein Send Time Optimization

Optimizing send times is about sending an email to a subscriber at a time where he is most likely to open it and engage with it. And Einstein Send Time Optimization (STO) is a great way to do this.

Einstein STO in SFMC Journey Builder automatically determines the best time within the next 24 hours to send emails to a subscriber. By evaluating about 20 different factors, including sends, clicks, opens, unsubscribes, spam complaints, etc., Einstein STO recommends the optimal email send times that are most likely to lead to opens. It thus helps marketers and Salesforce email specialists increase email and push notification engagement.

Source

With the Einstein STO dashboard, email marketers can visualize optimal predicted send times by the day or hour for all contacts, helping them choose the best time for batch sends for their holiday emails.

Source

#4: Create engaging emails with dynamic content and Salesforce templates

At any time, the importance of good content, intriguing subject lines, high-quality visuals – all wrapped up in a nice personalized, hyper-targeted package – cannot be overstated. But during the holidays, when most people are drowning under an avalanche of marketing emails, these factors are absolutely critical.

SFMC Email Studio provides several Salesforce templates, dynamic content blocks, and a host of other features to create personalized content quickly.

Another great way to improve the deliverability of holiday campaigns is to implement real-time emails. Real time email marketing is about personalizing every single email message based on each opener’s personal context the moment it is opened. Live Weather Content Block in SFMC Content Builder allows for personalized images based on local weather conditions to appear when a subscriber opens an email.

Remember the hotel example we spoke about earlier? With real-time emails, the hotel brand can ensure that subscribers living in cold areas and looking to vacation in Florida see images of sandy beaches and sunshine, while those living in Florida and thinking about a quick getaway to New York City in December will see images of snow-covered Xmas trees. Win-win for everybody!

Source

You can also use dynamic banners, webcrops, product recommendations, and coupons to increase the likelihood that subscribers will open your emails and engage with them.

#5: Stay Out Of The Spam Folder with Content Detective

No one likes spam. A shady email with shady links deserves to be marked Spam because it is. But a thoughtfully-designed holiday email campaign that ticks all the right boxes for layout, content, links, and CTA deserves better.

Luckily, SFMC provides the means to avoid this fate.

Content Detective in Content Builder mirrors the logic used by spam-filtering software to scan email content to identify words, phrases, and patterns that could trigger spam filters. It also recommends resolutions to each identified problem. After running Content Detective, you can complete a single-click review of your content and edit the specific triggers identified to minimize the chances of your email being marked as Spam in your recipients’ Inboxes.

Some More Best Practices To Improve Deliverability for Holiday Email Campaigns

Here are some more steps you can take to ensure that your carefully-crafted holiday emails get in front of the right subscribers:

Practice good data hygiene by regularly pruning your subscriber list.
Warm up your IPs before launching your campaign. Don’t give ISP servers a reason to block you.
Ensure that the new email addresses you’re collecting are real, valid, and interested in hearing from you.
If bounce rates exceed 5%, pull back on mailing these unengaged subscribers for the holiday season.
Review your Preference Center to find information on subscribers’ type and timing preferences, and send targeted emails accordingly.
Run A/B testing on subject lines to see if certain subject lines garner higher open rates.

Wrap up

The holiday season can be a “noisy season” as far as email marketing is concerned. But brands who focus on deliverability can cut through the noise and ensure that they reach the people they’re trying to reach. Take the time to improve your email deliverability, and you will definitely see great results that will lead to your best holiday season yet.

The post 5 Best Practices to Boost the Deliverability Of Your Holiday Email Campaigns in SFMC appeared first on Email Uplers.

The Definitive Guide To Holiday Email Campaign Management

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 06:37:59 GMT

The Holiday season begins from Halloween in October and lasts all the way to the New Year and a few weeks beyond. This is a very important period for marketers across industries whether B2C or B2B. US and Canadian consumers typically spend between 1000-1100 USD during this season. Over half of this spend is on gifts, one fourth on decorative items and the remaining on food and other goodies. The key trends of consumer buying behavior during holidays are:

E-commerce and online purchases from aggregators and company websites will continue to dominate, while there will be reluctance and slowness in physically visiting stores. 2020 is expected to see a never-before cluttering and blitz of consumer omni-channel marketing
Loyalty rules: For many categories of products, almost 2/3^rd of their consumers will continue buying from them out of loyalty. This translates into huge up-sell and cross sell opportunities. Also, the importance of referrals and word of mouth cannot be stressed enough.
Consumers will continue to download, browse choices, make purchasing decisions, and conclude their transactions through Apps

Considering the above trends, there will be an unprecedented digital clutter and a boom of malware, phishing, and other cyber-attacks through email. Over 90% of attacks originate through email; while most are targeted at the marketers themselves, customers are wary of and reluctant to open emails which can expose their personal or credit card/ bank account information

It is hence obvious that Holiday Email Campaign Management is of paramount importance during this crucial period and smart campaigns would make the marketers:

Stand out from the digital clutter and entice customers to open, absorb and click on the CTA; responsive campaigns will leverage the customer’s mobile and app preferences as well
Plan and do the pilot testing early, fine tune the campaigns, and move ahead full blast
Continuously monitor, and modify to make these resounding successes

KEY CONSIDERATIONS FOR A SUCCESSFUL HOLIDAY EMAIL MARKETING CAMPAIGNS

All these strategic and tactical parameters play a vital role in email campaign management and are important at different stages of campaign management, which we will explore in the following sections.

PRE-PLANNING PHASE

It’s all in the planning. Successful campaigns are 80 % planning and 20% execution and fine-tuning. Let’s begin with pre-planning which includes:

1. Setting campaign objectives

These must be clearly spelled out and metrics identified. All marketers would typically define the following objectives for different customer segments during the holidays:

Getting more sales through holiday offers and discounts
Acquiring new customers and commencing relationship building
Cross-selling, upselling to existing customers
Increasing engagement with existing customers
Reviving former customers

2. Mapping out a plan – holiday by holiday

The holiday season continues for around 2 months. It is important for email campaign managers to carefully plan an email strategy basis the specific holidays during this period. You primarily need to consider:

Halloween
Thanksgiving
Black Friday and Cyber Monday
Christmas
New Year

You must plan tactical strategies based on the customer segment, and corresponding message, frequency, and timing mix on the basis of the Holiday Calendar. This will, of course, depend on the industry segments, products, state-wise presence, positioning, and other variables.

3. Getting together the right mix of talent

In the pre-planning phase itself, it is important to define the responsibilities and get the right resources onboard as you might need extra help for Holiday Email Campaigns. Here are some positions you must fill:

Depending on your email marketing strategy, you should debate and answer the following considerations:

Do we need specialists for all the above roles, or can your current resources handle multiple responsibilities?
Roles in house vs outsourced. For Outsourced partner considerations: Experience, adept in similar industries and so on and so forth

PLANNING PHASE

Now that the pre-planning phase is done, and we have defined the objectives, calendar, and the team needed, we shall now begin the campaign planning:

1. Prioritizing List cleaning

It is super critical to carry out list cleaning before the holidays. There are many smart steps to have a good, clean list and the most important one is capturing relevant website visitors through mailing list opt-ins, subscriptions, and using exit-intent popups. However, it is highly recommended to carry out email scrubbing every few months to ensure accurate customer email lists and improve the open and click-through rates and reduce bounce rate. Some smart ways for this are:

Analyze bounced rates and fix errors
Re-engage with inactive customers
Dedupe/ duplicity email check
Remove inactive customers

2. Segmenting the cleaned up list

Mailchimp’s finding shows that segmented campaigns get close to 49% more clicks and 23% more open rates than non-segmented campaigns. Once the customer email list is cleaned up and updated, segmentation can be easily done by slicing and dicing on the basis of factors like:

Demographics
Email engagement
Website behavior
Position in the sales funnel
Past purchases
Amount spent on your website round the year or during the holidays

You can leverage the data from the CRM to segment subscribers and create targeted, personalized emails for them. Moreover, you need to pay special attention to and have an extra level of personalization with customers who are in the highest stratum, have exhibited High Value and/ or volume of past transactions, and who are strong on referrals. These are the high-value customers who contributed the maximum to the seller’s revenues

3. Following deliverability best practices

You may create the best of holiday campaigns but what if they don’t reach your target audience? Deliverability can prove to be the key to successful holiday email marketing. So, before we look at email creation, it is worthwhile to reiterate the fundamental aspect of email marketing- No matter what, the message must reach my customer mailbox.

While reviewing your email lists and segmenting your subscribers will boost deliverability, there are other practices too which will prove useful. Some of them are:

Do NOT make sudden changes to email sending pattern
Personalize your emails
Create mobile-friendly emails

So the email must circumvent the barriers of automated spam filters and low customer attention span and get opened, read through, catch attention, and propel the customer towards the Call to Action. So now, let’s get to creating the email.

EXECUTION PHASE

1. Creating a beautiful, pixel-perfect Email – Copy, Design, and Coding

To begin with, let us examine the type of emails which need to be created in a very eye-catching manner especially in the holiday season:

Promotional Emails: Limited period, last minute and early bird offers. Creating time bound urgency
Transactional Emails: Welcome email formats, product ordering forms, subscriptions, cart abandonment, rewards and returns
Relational Emails: Newsletters, catalogues, gifts, product teasers & comparatives, membership, freebies, service camps, quizzes, and games
Recommendation emails – Upsell and cross-sell
Strong Referral programmes and incentives
Re-engagement Emails for former customers

Let’s now start with the email copy…

EMAIL COPY

The content of your email is of paramount importance. Once your subscriber receives the email in their mailbox, the email should immediately galvanize the customer to open, read through, assimilate the takeaways, and propel them towards the Call to Action. Here are some dos and don’ts for effective and efficient Email copy :

EMAIL DESIGN AND CODING

While the email content is very important, it is all in vain if your email design is not attractive enough or the subscriber sees it garbled on their handheld device. As a result, they either forget about it or worse, mark your email as spam or add it to their junk. Here are some key aspects to be considered for efficient email design and coding that will grab the interest of your subscribers, make them read, assimilate, get wowed and further propel them towards the Call to Action:

2. The actual Email Campaign Execution

Now that we have an accurate, cleaned up and well segmented customer list, personalized powerful marketing messages with holiday themes, and clear CTA, the next step is to set up the email and click send. Here are some important considerations before you hit send:

Leverage key learnings from past campaigns
Choosing between manual and automated campaign
For the automated campaign, set up the complex workflows accurately – triggers, follow-ups, reminders with day/ week, and time wise frequency. Cart abandonment triggers matter even more during the holidays
Test the triggers
Test for deliverability

CAMPAIGN ANALYSIS AND OPTIMIZATION PHASE

It is very important to continuously monitor the Performance Metrics (PM) of your holiday email marketing campaigns.

This includes open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, conversion rate, forwarding rate, spam complaints, sharing rate, and similar metrics for mobile devices and tablets reporting.

Leadership teams are most interested in:

Overall KPIs of revenues, customer satisfaction Indexes, cost, response time, customer adoption, churn
Slicing, dicing, and drilling down the KPIs by products, campaigns, geographies, customer demographics
Comparing trends of these KPIs with historical data
‘What if’ analysis

Considering the limited and lucrative holiday period, these dashboards and measures need to be monitored and analyzed at a very high frequency. The campaign dynamics should be quickly fine-tuned depending on the customer segment, and the campaign needs to be spruced-up. Ultimately, we all need to be:

Continuously moving the customers and prospects to the next favorable stages of buying
Keeping customers and prospects always engaged
Delivering a special level of personalization to VIP and top customers
Improving CTA outcomes and lead times
Minimizing churn and helping retention
Incentivizing referrals
Proactively testing new campaigns
Providing insights into what works and what doesn’t, including the send time
Balancing consistency with smart customization across channels

WHAT AFTER THE HOLIDAYS?

It is also worthwhile to mention that there is a significant market for products and services helping in lifestyle/ fitness/ detoxification/ getting back to work, which will immediately take off after the holiday season is concluded in early January. We can apply the same guide with some tweaks to the after-holiday Email Campaign Management and have a great start to the New Year!

TAKEAWAYS

This holiday season, fix your Measures, Map the season, segment the Market, customize and beef up the Message, closely Monitor and timely Modify the Campaign. That’s the trick to successful holiday email marketing.

The post The Definitive Guide To Holiday Email Campaign Management appeared first on Email Uplers.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Oct 2020 Release: Your guide to all the important features – Part 1

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 12:15:15 GMT

We are in the last quarter of the year 2020, and this time coincides with the final release of Salesforce Marketing Cloud for the year – the Oct 2020 release. Everyone in the Salesforce ecosystem, be it customers, Salesforce partners, or marketing agencies, is eagerly waiting for the release, as it is all set to bring them a host of anticipated features as well as few surprises.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud release of October 2020 will be rolled out from October 17, 2020, and will continue till October 24, 2020. The rollout as per the release calendar happens during the course of a week. There are multiple new features or enhancements in the Oct 2020 release, and hence, they can’t be covered in a single article. Therefore we shall be dividing this blog into a two-part series.

In this first blog from the series, we will cover the essential features in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, for example, Einstein, Alert Manager, Sync Data extensions field limit, mixed content block by Google, the User experience of campaign management, etc.

Marketing Cloud Einstein updates

Einstein within Salesforce Marketing Cloud has multiple new and exciting updates in the Oct 2020 release. Let’s cover some of the critical updates here.

1. Maximize Engagement with Optimal Send Frequency

Features in Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Einstein help marketers with AI-based predictions or recommendations, which further helps garner better email engagement. Einstein Engagement Frequency helps identify the best email frequency for your email sends, i.e., the optimal number of emails to be sent to subscribers to keep them engaged.

As part of this release, the new Einstein model recommends personalized frequency thresholds and suggests the optimal no. of emails you need to send to all Business Units contacts. Also, the Einstein engagement split activity within Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Journey Builder uses the optimal send frequency [based on the real-time send metrics] of each contact entering the journey to be able to send the communication as per their desire.

2. Einstein Engagement Split to support MobilePush

Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Journey Builder module has Einstein engagement split activity. As a part of the Oct 2020 release, this has been supported for the MobilePush module as well. So now, the email & mobile activity can be used to build the paths for Einstein engagement spilt activity within Journey Builder.

3. Availability of Send time optimization in Single Send Journey

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder’s Send time optimization activity helps send email to each contact at the optimal time. It is recommended to add this activity before every email in the Journey Builder canvas. As a part of the Oct 2020 release, Send time optimization activity will be available for single send journeys as well. This was already available for multi send journeys within Journey Builder.

Mixed content blocking by Google

Mixed content refers to the loading of both secure [over HTTPS] and non-secure [over HTTP] content on the same page. The initial request for loading the webpage was over HTTPS. As HTTPS is becoming a dominant form of web requests, Google has decided to start showing a warning for the mixed content rendering on the web page beginning Sept 2020.

From Jan 2021, Google will completely block the mixed content download to make the web a more secure place and safeguard the subscribers’ interest.

To understand the various scenarios in detail and the mitigation plan for the scenarios, please visit the knowledge article posted by Salesforce here.

Synchronized Data extension field limit

Synchronized data extensions are used to store the cross-cloud object data within Marketing Cloud. These data extensions store Sales or Service cloud data inside Marketing Cloud, and it can be further used for targeting and personalization for subscribers.

With the advent of Oct 2020 release, there has been an upper limit set for the fields within the synchronized data extensions. This limit is set for 250 fields, and any synchronized data extension that is existing and has more than 250 fields will continue to work without any issue.

Removing Campaigns from Email studio

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is unifying the user experience of accessing campaigns and is in the process of retiring Email Studio Classic Content experience. So, keeping in mind the above two guiding principles, Marketing Cloud will recommend creating and managing campaigns from the Campaign application. This will help to unify the Marketing Cloud user experience. Marketing Cloud has removed access to create, update, view the campaigns from the Classic emails, Triggered sends, Subscriber list, and Subscriber groups in Email studio. However, this change has no bearing on the SOAP API integrations.

More Details via Alert Manager Email job error summary

The alert manager provides the user, whose name is added in the Marketing Cloud, an update about any critical alert for any email batch send and email trigger send. This alert service would show the recipient an error notification and its details – if there were any system errors due to various factors in Email Studio, Journey Builder, or Automation studio.

As a part of this release, the Alert manager will provide the subscriber with errors and the number of errors in Email studio, Automation studio data extension, and List sends. The alert will have a new subscriber summary to display the errors of the email sent. This feature will send a summary of the failure status if the list or data extension shows a failure of more than 100 subscribers after the send is complete.

Wrap up

The above blog covers some of the important features of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Oct 2020 release, and we hope it will help marketers, partners, and customers to prepare better with their digital marketing strategy. We have covered some of the important features of the Oct 2020 release, and as mentioned in the beginning, we shall cover all the remaining features in the Marketing cloud Oct 2020 release in the next blog in the series.

For a complete list of Salesforce Marketing Cloud features of Oct 2020 release and their details, you can refer to the link below: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=mc_rn_october_2020_release.htm&type=5

The post Salesforce Marketing Cloud Oct 2020 Release: Your guide to all the important features – Part 1 appeared first on Email Uplers.

4 Email Marketing Tips for Volunteer Recruitment

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 11:46:28 GMT

One of the important tasks of a volunteer management leader is communicating with volunteers. Not only is it necessary to ensure that all volunteers are on the same page and aware of what the different opportunities require, but how you communicate will affect how you recruit prospective volunteers.

That is why creating a dedicated and comprehensive email marketing strategy is so crucial. Even with the prevalence of text messaging and social media, email is still one of the best ways to reach your volunteers and prospects. In fact, according to Statista, email usage is actually predicted to increase by 2-3% each year from 2018 to 2023.

In the past decade, email marketing has evolved beyond a mass text communication to your entire audience. With novel marketing tools and software solutions, you can create emails with high-quality graphics and interactive content, as well as develop a strategy for more targeted and personalized communications.

That being said, meeting prospective and high-qualified volunteers isn’t always easy, but your email tool can help your volunteer management efforts. Let’s explore the following email marketing tips to help set your volunteer program up for success and reach top prospects:

Craft the right message
Segment your email recipients
Automate personal details
Be creative with email design

Email marketing strategies thrive when the content is personalized and provides the recipient with genuinely valuable information. Keep this in mind as you rethink your own email marketing outreach efforts. Ready to begin? Let’s jump in.

1. Craft The Right Message

In any volunteer recruitment effort, you’ll need to think carefully in order to craft the right message. Whether you’re putting out social media blasts or distributing actual recruitment posters, the right message will capture your audience’s attention and engage them. The same goes for your email marketing efforts.

To create the perfect email that aligns with and supports your volunteer recruitment efforts, consider taking some insights from this article on recruitment best practices from Galaxy Digital, a volunteer management software provider. In short, you should follow these steps:

Evaluate your organization’s image. Take a moment to reflect on your organization’s current standing and how potential volunteers will view your successes, goals, and mission. Once you have a better understanding of your organization, it can be easier to target the right volunteers and craft the right message.
Draft your message. Your email should aim to recruit volunteers in a positive way. Make sure to focus on why volunteers are needed and the exact roles you’re looking for. This is also a great place to describe how the opportunity can benefit the volunteer.
Create a call to action. Once you draft the email describing your need and the volunteer positions you’re seeking, you need to also include a clear call to action that leads readers to your volunteer website. This can be a simple link to your volunteer registration page with the text: “Help us do more for our community and volunteer today!”

You need to compose an email that effectively represents your organization’s brand, describes the volunteer opportunity and why it’s important, and pushes prospects to visit your volunteer site. Consider creating a template for easy email completion in the future!

2. Segment Your Email Recipients

Often, your volunteer opportunities might require specific skill sets or other traits. Or, you might know that some of your existing volunteers only sign up for certain experiences and tend to avoid others. This is why email segmentation is so important.

Email segmentation is a marketing strategy that can help create more targeted content for your supporters. This is a common tactic for nonprofit organizations when talking to donors. In fact, according to this article, “To strengthen communication and development strategies, nonprofits of all sizes organize their overall donor populations into smaller groups, or segments, that have common characteristics.”

In order to segment your email audience, you’ll need a volunteer management tool that can serve the purpose. This way, your organization can:

Send targeted volunteer opportunities to those with the needed skills. Segment your volunteers and volunteer prospects by particular skills like construction or medical experience. Then, when you send out volunteer recruitment emails you know that the people who are receiving them are qualified for the job.
Only offer the volunteer opportunities that actually interest the recipient. Segment your volunteers by their interests and goals, so you have a sense of which prospects will likely sign up for which opportunity. When volunteers only receive recruitment emails for experiences that they’ll enjoy, it also increases the chance that they’ll keep supporting your cause.
Create a specific email chain for those who have never volunteered before. If you know that a supporter hasn’t actually volunteered before, your emails to them might require additional information beyond what the opportunity consists of. Compose an email that also talks about previous volunteer impacts and your mission statement that is only sent to new volunteers. After all, your regular volunteers don’t need an update on what your organization does— they already know!

With email segmentation, you can rest assured knowing that your recipients are receiving targeted and valuable content. This can increase conversion rates and the number of volunteers joining your organization!

3. Automate the personal details

Along with more targeted email content, your email marketing strategy should also consider the best ways to personalize its messages. With American workers receiving an average of 126 emails a day, it’s worth it to optimize your content in order to make your email stand out.

Simply adding the recipient’s name and other volunteer history details can show prospects that they’re more than just one of many in a database. In fact, emails with personalized subject lines to the reader are 26% more likely to be opened. However, it’s not very cost and time effective to manually personalize each of your email marketing content to volunteers.

Instead, look to your volunteer management solution and fundraising software and see if you can automate personal data within your emails.

Currently, your organization should be recording key details anyway. According to this DNL OmniMedia article on data management strategies, you should be collecting data like:

Demographic and contact information
Donation records
Engagement histories like volunteer records and program attendance
Employer and other professional affiliations
Interests, skills, or philanthropic affinities

The data points above can be a great way to upgrade your email marketing content. For instance, let’s say you’re sending out volunteer recruitment emails to a group of prospects that have participated in a similar experience before. Besides their name, make sure to automate details such as the exact opportunity they’ve volunteered in before and its impact. This way they’re reminded of their past support and know that it made a genuine difference, motivating them to sign up again!

4. Be Creative With Email Design

The last tip we’ll be talking about is how to be creative with your email content design. Defaulting to a purely text email is an easy way to send recruitment appeals to prospects, but might not be the most engaging way to reach out.

Consider instead incorporating fun graphics or even photos from past volunteer events. This is a great way to capture readers’ attention and offer a representation of what the prospect will do for the volunteer experience. Graphics are also a convenient and intuitive way to display information on your volunteer opportunity. Hiring a skilled HTML email developer would be a great bet here.

On this same train of thought, interactive emails have risen in popularity due to how engaging they are. In fact, 81% of marketers have noticed that interactive content performs more effectively than static content.

Interactivity in your recruitment emails encourages active engagement instead of passive reading. For instance, consider including quizzes, polls, or surveys in your emails. These could be about the volunteer opportunity at hand or even on the volunteer’s current relationship with your organization. This is also a great way to gain some genuine feedback from volunteers.

For more help on how you can bring your email marketing content to the next level, consider working with a specialist. An email marketing expert can help you develop content that accurately represents your organization and volunteer experience, effectively engages recipients, and ultimately leads them to your volunteer site.

Wrapping Up

Email is a great tool to connect with and recruit volunteers for your organization. However, developing a qualified and successful email marketing strategy requires more than just writing an appeal and sending it off. Hopefully, the above tips can set you on the right path to creating personalized and targeted content that effectively engages your audience. Good luck!

The post 4 Email Marketing Tips for Volunteer Recruitment appeared first on Email Uplers.

7 Tips to Create Surefire Holiday Cart Abandonment Emails

Wed, 14 Oct 2020 00:43:39 GMT

The holiday season is right around the corner!

Considering that holiday spending is expected to clock a new high of $6.16 billion this year, we hope that your email marketing campaign to capture buyers’ attention is already underway. After all, this low-cost, high-ROI digital marketing channel is your best bet to drive up conversions.

Even so, getting your target audience to your online store doesn’t guarantee sales. According to a study by Statista, 88.05% of all orders are abandoned mid-way.

Source

Even though the rate of cart abandonment varies from study to study, swinging in the range of 55 to 89%, the average rate for 2019 was 77.13%. That’s more than two-thirds of your cart value not converting into sales!

But as it turns out, there is a silver lining after all. This tendency of a majority of buyers to abandon a purchase right before hitting the payment button can be brought down considerably via targeted emails. If used the right way, it can be a game-changer for your business’ cart abandonment woes.

Source

According to a Barilliance study, the average cart abandonment email conversion rate is 8.24% in 2020.

Let’s take a close look at why customers abandon purchases mid-way and the role of targeted email messaging in reversing that trend, especially during the high-rush holiday season!

Why Do Customers Abandon Carts?

Consumers can bounce from the checkout process for a host of reasons. These can range anywhere from poor connectivity to high shipping fees or a complex checkout process. These abandoned purchases can result in losses to the tunes of billions during the holiday sales season.

According to a Retail Dive report, 63% of consumers who abandon their purchases claim that they’re less likely to purchase from a retailer or e-commerce platform after a poor shopping experience. This means you not only risk losing out on one sale but a customer’s loyalty. Half of the customers who abandoned purchase attributed it to a time-consuming checkout process, 41% said it was because the shopping experience wasn’t optimized for mobile devices and 23% blamed it on the checkout process not going through.

Once a buyer abandons a purchase, they’re not likely to follow it through on another device at a later time either. While some of the factors for cart abandonment relate to the sub-par end-user experience, others may be beyond your control. Apart from working to optimize the user experience across devices, the next best thing you can do to turn around sales volumes during the holidays is to give them a nudge by engaging with them in their inboxes.

How to Create Emails that Reverse Cart Abandonment?

Almost every business today leverages cart abandonment emails to some extent. However, not every email leads to conversions. That’s because not all cart abandonment email messages are created equal. To ensure that yours is compelling enough to make the recipient want to act on the CTA, it must contain three key elements:

Personalized Messaging: You have to make the consumer feel like the email is talking to them and addressing their specific needs. Personalized tone and messaging are a sure-shot way of achieving that. An email with the customer’s name in the subject line alone can yield a 46.21% open rate. You can make it more impactful by adding the name of the abandoned product into the mix.
Timing it Right: One would think that sending an email as soon as a customer abandons cart would be ideal. However, data suggests that sending emails within one hour of an abandoned purchase achieves a conversion rate of 3.14% whereas those sent exactly one hour later can drive 6.33% conversions. Beyond an hour, the efficacy of a cart abandonment email to drive conversion continues to dip consistently. So, this holiday season, plan your abandonment emails accordingly.
Right Messaging: Apart from personalization and a clearly defined CTA, your email must also offer something additional of value such as product recommendations, coupons, discount offers that are specific to the holiday spirit or season. Besides, using a responsive design, clean design, highlighting your USPs, and customer reviews can make the messaging more impactful.

7 Tips to Create the Perfect Holiday Cart Abandonment Emails

Sales are the ultimate source of holiday cheer for any business. To make sure your spirits are not dampened by items left sitting in the cart, here are 7 impactful tips to create cart abandonment emails for the holiday season that will give your buyers just the right nudge needed to complete their orders:

1. Discount, but Strategically

Source

Your customers may well be leaving items in their shopping carts as a way to prompt you into offering them a sweeter deal. It is one of the reasons why cart abandonment emails have high open rates – and even more so during the holiday season – when they expect deals and discounts to be raining everywhere!

You can use this to your advantage by offering your buyers small, strategic discounts before announcing a sitewide sale. Just like GoPro has done in this email offering buyers a special bonus that lasts until Christmas and is lucrative enough for anyone who has been holding off a purchase for a better offer.

2. Personalize Messaging based on Data Insights

Source

One of the best practices to make your cart abandonment emails more effective is to include product pictures. This is especially crucial during the holiday season when your buyers may be browsing and building shopping carts on multiple sites.

A picture can help jog their memory and stir their desire to own that particular item. To make it even more effective, you must use data insights to personalize the message and capitalize on a buyer’s taste. For instance, if a customer leaves a dress, a pair of earrings, and shoes in the cart, you can turn to customer data insights to choose which product to display. If your customer has bought dresses from you in the past, prioritizing that item from their cart can get you top billing.

3. Create urgency

Source

You can create a sense of urgency in your buyers by adding a countdown timer to your holiday cart abandonment emails. These can trigger the FOMO instinct in your buyers, pushing them to complete a purchase. These are particularly effective in making your customers process their orders during highly anticipated sales such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday or make them want to take advantage of an ongoing offer.

This email, for instance, reminds the customers of the urgency of buying gifts before Christmas and availing an ongoing offer at the same time.

4. Grab Attention with Interactive Elements

Source

Interactive emails have emerged as a top marketing trend, owing to their ability to capture the recipients’ attention and engage them. Using GIFs, videos, sliders or gamification can be a great way to make your customers engage with your cart abandonment message.

You can use it to weave in a special discount or sales announcement to incentivize a purchase. Or purely to engage your readers for better brand recall or traffic diversion to landing pages. The above email, for instance, uses an interactive game. When a customer engages with it by playing, they become invested in the process and are more likely to spread the word, boosting brand awareness.

5. Add an Incentivized Survey

Source

There are myriad reasons behind cart abandonment. Using incentivized surveys serves a dual purpose. It allows you to gain insights into the reasons behind incomplete orders as well as gives your customers the enticement needed to make a purchase.

In this email, for instance, customers are being offered a gift card that has been carefully targeted toward the Black Friday sale. A classic case of two birds with one stone move!

6. Optimize the Check Out Process

Source

One of the key reasons why customers abandon shopping carts is a time-consuming checkout process. So, use your cart abandonment emails to address that. Make sure that clicking on the CTA takes them straight to the payment option so that the process of completing the order is quick, seamless, and straightforward.

By giving your customers a direct checkout option – as this email does – you can cut back the risk of a customer abandoning the cart all over again despite clicking on your email.

7. Target Conversions with an Email Series

When it comes to post-cart abandonment communication with your customers, once is necessary but not quite enough. A great way to mitigate the risk of a potential sale lost to cart abandonment is to craft an email series rather than bundling reminders, recommendations and offers in a single email.

The idea is that if one email doesn’t do the trick of nudging a customer, three might. Besides, you can hold off offering discounts until the final email in the series. That way, you don’t compromise your profit margins unless you absolutely have to.

Check out this cart abandonment email series sent by Uncommon Goods.

The Bottom Line

Between the influx of customers during the holiday season, last-minute and early-bird discounts, the holiday season can get hectic quickly. While dealing with all that rush, you cannot overlook the possibility of sizable cart abandonments. Plan your email marketing strategy ahead of time to effectively counter this tendency among your buyers!

At Email Uplers, we provide you with an established ecosystem to help you automate every html email campaign – especially during the busy holiday season. Visit this link to learn more about what’s in store for you!

The post 7 Tips to Create Surefire Holiday Cart Abandonment Emails appeared first on Email Uplers.

4 Signs That You Need to Change Your Email Marketing Strategy In SFMC (Powerful Hacks Included!)

Tue, 13 Oct 2020 13:18:07 GMT

A lot of time, energy and resources go into planning, executing, testing and analyzing an email campaign. Even so, sometimes things do fall through the cracks and lead to below-par results. Even with Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), one of the top providers of digital marketing automation and analytics software and services, email marketers and their Salesforce specialists sometimes have to deal with underwhelming email campaign results.

But what is the root cause of these poor results? Are there any ‘signs’ that tell email marketers they need to change their email marketing strategy? And most importantly, what can they do with these signs to get better results from their email campaigns?

This article discusses these signs and also provides some possible solutions. If you are an email marketer, pay attention to these signs so you can increase your chances of success!

Sign #1: Poor Open and Click-through Rates

The two basic metrics that email marketers cannot afford to ignore are “email open rate” and “email click-through rate”.

Email open rate is the percentage of subscribers who open an email out of all the subscribers.

Email click-through rate is the percentage of subscribers who click a link within an email.

Poor open and click-through rates can be traced to a number of reasons:

i. Ineffective subject lines

An interesting, intriguing and unique subject line can dramatically increase the likelihood that emails will be opened. And subject lines that are personalized, say, with recipients’ names, increase open rates by 26%. A boring or vague subject line can do the exact opposite, since it implies that the email is not worth opening.

Best practices to create great subject lines and improve open rates:

Keep them brief: 25-30 characters usually work best
Don’t be afraid of adding emojis
Use Einstein Copy Insights to create engaging subject lines
Never use words like “test”, “Re:” or “fwd”
Authenticate emails so the sending address contains the company name, not something like noreply@company.com

ii. Irrelevant content

If an email is not relevant to a subscriber, they won’t open it. Why would a Caucasian man in his 60s open an email about hair straighteners designed for African American hair? It’s important to send targeted emails to specific subscribers based on their location, preferences, buying history, recent activities, demographics, etc. Einstein Email Recommendations in SFMC is a good way to observe customer behaviors and build preference profiles in order to create content that’s relevant for them.

Other best practices to create relevant content and improve open rates:

Segment your audience using data filters or SQL queries in SFMC Email Studio. You can also use Audience Builder
Create different journeys for different segments with Journey Builder in SFMC
Create real-time emails with hyper-targeted content to keep messages up-to-date
Include relevant product recommendations, coupons or special offers
Create copy with readable font size and optimal use of white space
Keep the message short and sweet

Source

iii. No personalization

Personalized emails are 22.2% more likely to be opened. The reverse is also true – emails with generic info, and little or no personalization are often ignored and summarily deleted without opening.

Best practices to create personalized content and improve open rates:

Address the subscriber by name in the greeting
Use merge tags to insert data from your mailing list directly into your email campaigns
Include dynamic content blocks, Salesforce email templates and real-time content
Use Einstein Content Selection tool in SFMC to create personalized content even with pre-written copy, images and links

Source

iv. Missing incentive or lack of urgency

An incentive is better known as “What’s in it for me?” (WIIFM). Every day, the average office worker receives about 120 emails. Emails that are too sales-y and fail to communicate value to the subscriber are rarely opened. Ditto, emails that lack a sense of urgency.

Best practices to improve open rates with incentives:

Include a clear, unambiguous CTA and show it above the fold
Use words like “limited offer” and “offer valid till…” to create urgency to (gently) guide the user towards a particular action without seeming pushy
Include a ‘countdown timer’

Source

v. Not sent at the right time

Since every subscriber engages with emails at different times or on different days, there is no one best time or day to send emails to everyone. However, open rates can be increased by finding the best (or most optimal) time for each subscriber. Einstein Send Time Optimization (STO) in SFMC Journey Builder uses 90 days of email engagement data to automatically determine the best time within the next 24 hours to email each contact.

Sign#2: High bounce rates

A bounced email indicates an email deliverability problem. Deliverability is when an email successfully arrives in the recipient’s inbox. It is not the same as email delivery. Deliverability can be impacted by different factors, including Internet Service Providers (ISP), Mail Transfer Agents (MTA), and bounces. An email sent from SFMC is marked as ‘bounced’ when the subscriber’s receiving email server rejects it. Bounce rate is the percentage of total emails sent that could not be delivered to the intended recipients’ inboxes.

Best practices to keep bounce rates down and deliverability rates up:

i. Configure your Sender Authentication Package (SAP)

SAP configuration in SFMC and your DNS ensures that email providers see you and your domain as legit so emails don’t bounce.

ii. Be aware of and manage ‘reputation factors’

Keep in mind these critical factors that can impact your reputation and deliverability:

Sending frequency
Blacklists
Legitimacy
Subscriber reactions
Compliance with CAN-SPAM and other regulations
SPAM trapped

iii. Manage subscriber data

Only email people who have specifically opted-in. Once in a while, create journeys or run campaigns on ‘Inactive’ subscribers to weed out the ones who should not be in your subscriber group. If engagements are low, delete them from the list.

iv. Use Content Detective in SFMC Email Studio

Content Detective in Email Studio simulates content filters in real sends, and flags content issues so action can be taken before sends. This can help keep bounce rates low and deliverability rates up.

Sign#3: High “Marked as Spam” Rates

When subscribers mark emails as spam, they’re still going to receive them, but they’re never going to open them. Some emails also get marked as spam automatically, without the subscriber taking any action. Either way, emails marked as spam affect open rates and also impact the brand’s perception among its target audience. It might be difficult to get subscribers back on board after they label emails as spam. But there are some things email marketers can do to avoid this happening in future.

i. Avoid using ‘spammy’ words

Avoid using certain words in content that may trigger spam filters. These include:

big bucks
!!!
$$$
Casino
Earn $
Save $
Enlarge
Hardcore
Money at home
Naughty

Use Content Detective in SFMC Email Studio to identify and remove these words before sending the email. Make corrections in both HTML and text versions.

ii. Get the timing right

Send emails only when you know your customers are going to see them, but not interfere with their work schedule. Einstein STO is very useful in this regard.

iii. Add a human touch

Emails go out to human beings, not robots. Unfortunately, not all emails consider this reality. Add a human touch to every email, even if the process is automated.

Source

iv. Warm up your IP address

If you send an email to every prospect right away, it will raise a red flag for spam filters. Build a reputation by starting with your best lists. Keep sending volumes low during the first week or two, and then increase gradually until you reach your goal.

v. Set up email authentication

Email authentication protects your brand’s reputation from spammers. Set up rules to determine how your emails will be sent, so fraudulent senders can’t imitate you. Use systems like Sender Policy Framework, DomainKeys, or DomainKeys Identified Mail to do this.

vi. Don’t include attachments

Avoid attaching files or images in emails. Also make sure that you only include links from credible websites, including your own.

vii. Make unsubscribing easy

No email marketer or Salesforce specialist wants to lose subscribers. But emails that make it difficult to unsubscribe are often marked as spam. Provide an easily accessible unsubscribe button. This can help avoid spam filters, lend credibility to emails and also satisfy CAN-SPAM laws.

Some more best practices to lower spam rates:

Use merge tags to communicate that you know the person receiving the email
Ask recipients to add your email address to their address book
Use Salesforce email templates in SFMC. They contain the correct in-built coding so you won’t have to do your own coding or risk making mistakes that may trigger spam filters

Sign#4: High Unsubscribe Rates

This is another major red flag that something is not right with the email marketing strategy. Here are the top reasons people opt out of a brand’s email marketing campaigns:

i. They never signed up, or didn’t realize that they signed up

People hate unsolicited email, so adding them to the list without their explicit consent or confirmation is a sure-fire path to unsubscribes.

Solution: Clearly communicate to recipients that they’re subscribing to an email list. Provide opt-in checkboxes. You should also include a “double opt-in” so a person has to confirm their subscription in an email to receive more.

ii. Too many emails

Email marketers often under- or overestimate the frequency at which subscribers wish to hear from them. Bombarding people with emails is not the way to ensure Salesforce customer retention!

Solution: Ask subscribers to submit their email frequency preferences, either when they subscribe, or later, via an email preference center. Periodic surveys are also a good way to understand subscribers’ send frequency preferences. Use Einstein STO to determine the optimal send time and Einstein Engagement Frequency to identify the optimum number of email messages to send.

iii. They can’t view the email properly

Emails that don’t load quickly, or images that don’t render properly are two common reasons for unsubscribes. Also, a majority of email recipients view emails on mobile devices, so emails that are not mobile-optimized are also a turn-off.

Solution: Make sure that emails render correctly across all devices. Do A/B testing to confirm that copy, images, CTA text, links, etc. load properly and quickly. For subscribers in areas with low or poor Internet connectivity, send text versions of emails.

iv. Emails look cluttered or unprofessional, and have no clear take-away

No one likes to be overwhelmed with information, and this is exactly what a messy email does – it overwhelms. Moreover, if there’s no clear take-away or purpose to the email (“What am I supposed to do with this information?”), people will leave.

Solution: Send the email to a test email address. How does it look? Is the formatting off? Are there any typos? Proofread the email and fix these errors. Does the email look aesthetic or dated? Use customizable Salesforce email templates and ensure that the email conforms to your brand’s design and copy guidelines. Also maintain a text to image ratio of 60-40, and avoid using too many links in the body copy.

Source

v. The email is too aggressive or sales-y

Many people unsubscribe because every email from a brand is a hard-sell advertisement with too many pushy words, capital letters, exclamation marks, etc. Such emails come off as aggressive and unsubscribe-worthy.

Solution: Provide helpful information and original, relevant content. Follow the 80/20 rule: 80% emails with helpful tips, strategies or resources such as free ebooks, links to interesting blog articles, or registrations for free webinars. The other 20% can be sales-related.

vi. They did not receive auto-triggered emails when they expected to

Automatically triggered emails are sent after a subscriber takes some action. For example, once they make a purchase on an eCommerce store, they should immediately receive a thank you email with the receipt and information about expected time of delivery. If you don’t set up auto-triggers in SFMC, they might receive this email late, or not at all. This is not a good sign for Salesforce customer retention.

Source

Solution: Create behavioral triggers in SFMC Journey Builder to ensure that emails are sent immediately in response to some action.

General Best Practices

In addition to the tips discussed above, you should also track emails to see who opens your email, how they engage with it, which links or content they click on, etc. This information can provide useful inputs for future strategies. In SFMC, Email Studio has a tracking feature so you can:

View critical metrics like email opens, clicks and undeliverable messages
Capture forwarded emails and how many new subscribers each forward generated
Track subscriber and list performance over time

Other useful analytics tools in SFMC:

Analytics Builder: Provides insights into subscriber behaviors and interests
Standard Reports (Email Studio): Tracks campaign effectiveness
Einstein Engagement Scoring: Target the right customers to maximize engagement and conversion

Wrap up

In the real world of email marketing, there is no one thing that can make or break a campaign, but a mix of different factors. If any of these factors are not performing, they raise red flags and signs. Luckily, a powerful “Salesforce customer success platform” like SFMC provides the tools that enable email marketers to read these signs and take the necessary actions. This article discussed these signs and actions. We hope you find it useful.

The post 4 Signs That You Need to Change Your Email Marketing Strategy In SFMC (Powerful Hacks Included!) appeared first on Email Uplers.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday Email Examples: A Brand New Curation

Sun, 11 Oct 2020 13:45:45 GMT

Your subscribers are likely to get inundated with numerous Black Friday and Cyber Monday emails right from the onset of Fall. So, how will you create an opportunity out of this competitive bottleneck?

The answer is – think out-of-the-box while adhering to the email design best practices.

Let’s understand how exactly you can create high-converting Black Friday and Cyber Monday emails (with some stunning examples).

1. SHOW, don’t tell

Rather than just talking about the discount in your Black Friday and Cyber Monday emails, display the products that are on sale. Visuals speak louder than words and attract the customers to make the purchase. If you are just highlighting the discount in your emails, your subscribers might skip taking action. On the other hand, showcasing the products with relevant images or GIFs will pique their interest and increase the likelihood for conversion.

Here’s a Black Friday email template by Vlado Footwear.

In the first fold itself, they have highlighted the kind of products on sale and the 50% discount on all products. The next fold gives the recipients early access to four of their amazing footwear.

Take a look at this Cyber Monday email by Simplilearn.

At the outset, they have intrigued the subscriber with a discount offer and a GIF. When the subscriber scrolls through, they will be able to check the different courses on sale. Isn’t it a great idea?

2. Try to build visibility on social media through emails

Use emails to build brand visibility on other social media channels. This becomes all the more important during the Holiday Season when people are willing to spend more than the “usual” days.

It will also facilitate word-of-mouth publicity and help you bring more business.

Here’s how Insight Vacations does it in their Black Friday email. They have promoted the hashtag #INSIGHTMOMENTS along with real photographs of their guests from Facebook and Instagram. (Of course, you must have the consent of the users to share their pictures in your emails.)

This also brings us to the third point – create urgency!

3. Create a sense of urgency to drive instant purchases

Did you notice the countdown timer in the previous email example? That’s how you must instil “FOMO” in your subscribers and get them to take action. The email copy creates a sense of urgency by letting the subscriber know that the deal will end soon. It will compel the users to book their tickets instantly (with the fear that the offer will be gone and they will miss out on it).

4. Think out of the box

Take a look at this graph depicting Black Friday online sales over the last seven years.

Shoppers for the Black Friday have only grown during this period. The same applies to Cyber Monday sales. Customers spent $9.4 billion on Cyber Monday in the year 2019 which surpassed the Black Friday sales of $7.4 billion.

To make sure that your business can use this opportunity to its maximum potential, your email campaigns must reflect originality and entice the user to click-through the CTA.

Get your creative juices flowing and design an email that would make your subscriber go “WOW”.

Korres has sent out an interesting email with the perfect use of animations in their Black Friday email. They have ditched the traditional column layout and designed their email in such a way that all the necessary information and images can be accommodated in the first fold itself. It is an impactful minimalistic email.

Here’s another unique approach to promote your Cyber Monday sale. My Name Necklace has displayed a chat message interface to endorse their Cyber Monday VIP Presale. Did you notice the CTA zooming in to draw the subscriber’s attention?

In the second fold, they have handpicked the best necklaces for Christmas to tempt the customer to make the purchase. It is a good idea to promote Christmas sale from November itself as it would contribute to a higher ROI.

These emails also advocate the thought of using the right rich media element matching the purpose as well as the vibe of the email.

That tempts me to share yet another email that I received in my inbox.

WoolOvers Ireland has promoted its NEW knitwear with some of the most appealing images supported with a succinct copy. To ensure an optimum deliverability rate and bypass the spam filters, they have maintained the text to image ratio at 80:20.

Thankfully, unlike some other brands, they have not forgotten to write an engaging preheader text too. (Grab Yourself a Bargain!!!!!)

5. Do not forget the copy

I think I have emphasized quite a lot on the use of ‘correct’ visuals. However, I do not mean to say that you can forget your copy and the power of words. Besides deliverability, it would help you to make your emails more accessible and inclusive.

Let me share an example with you.

While the header image of the email from KSCY stands out from the rest of the emails, it still does not leave a mark because of the lack of ‘other details’. Of course, your subscribers are busy people and they might not have the time to read a long paragraph in their email. Nonetheless, you must showcase the products and have a relevant copy to get people to purchase from you.

Wrapping Up

Just like writers struggle with writer’s block, I am sure email marketing professionals also deal with a similar thing where they are unable to find new ideas. To eliminate the need of staring at the ceiling fan for inspiration, we have curated the top email examples for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

So, why don’t you just try out these simple ideas?

If you still find yourself in a fix, let us know. Email Uplers would love to help you out, and Holidays is our favorite season!

The post Black Friday and Cyber Monday Email Examples: A Brand New Curation appeared first on Email Uplers.

A Quick Guide to ‘Business Unit’ in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Fri, 09 Oct 2020 12:53:23 GMT

Marketers work within Salesforce Marketing Cloud as a part of teams and sub-teams. These teams can be divided into various categories depending on the enterprise or the specific use cases. The marketing teams can be categorized based on factors like region, markets, organizational hierarchy, or any particular setup. This categorization helps the organization and its marketing teams recreate an ideal working environment within the Salesforce marketing cloud.

This functionality is facilitated within Marketing Cloud through a feature known as Business Units. Business Units within Salesforce Marketing Cloud help organize and control access to the information with various marketing and IT teams. Information content can be in the form of multiple artifacts, templates, and subscriber data and settings. Business Units can control all of these.

For example, a global company with regional offices can be adapted within Business Units. You can do this by creating Business Units representing each regional office. It means there can be multiple Business Units with a single Salesforce marketing org. This is beneficial as the marketing and IT team users working within the regional office only get to access the information and artifacts relevant to their specific region. It is also helpful in simplifying things for the users and stopping access to information between cross-regional teams. Marketing and IT teams working under the same Business Unit will have full/partial access to the information depending upon the configurations done based on the business rules.

Key aspects of the Business Unit that you must know before we move forward:

Tenants: Tenant is a top-level enterprise account purchased by the company or organization along with multiple Business Units.

There are four types of Tenants:

Enterprise 2.0
Enterprise 1.0
Core
Agency

Currently, all the new Marketing Cloud orgs are provisioned with Enterprise 2.0 Tenants, and hence, can host multiple Business Units within the Tenant.

Account name: This is the initial name set at the time of account provisioning and is usually the company name.

MID: This is a unique identification number assigned to each Business Unit and child Business unit. So your account might have multiple MIDs representing each Business Unit.

Business Units are created in Marketing Cloud in the form of a hierarchy. The top Business Unit is called the Parent Business Unit, and Sub Business Units are called child Business Units. The Parent Business Unit and Child Business Unit hierarchy is illustrated in the below image:

There are no definitive sets of business rules guiding the creation of the hierarchy of Business Units within the Marketing cloud. Still, there are a few guidance points based on organization structure and data requirements to decide Business Unit models within an Account. These guidelines are as follows:

Are there separate brands or divisions or regions that require their marketing teams to work in separate Business Units as per specific data needs?
Is there a requirement to model the marketing cloud’s exact organizational structure in the form of Business Units?
Is there a requirement for a separate branding for each division of marketing teams?
Is there a set of common assets that require sharing between various marketing teams?
Is there a requirement for a separate space for testing and UAT activities?

The use case for Business Units

A global retail company named X is implementing Marketing Cloud within their marketing departments across the globe. Their Marketing teams are based in different regions worldwide – North America, Europe, EMEA, and APAC.

Based on the requirements, below are a few considerations for implementing the Business Unit’s hierarchy within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud of the company X:

Parent and child Business Units can model the regional divisions of the Marketing teams, i.e., Child Business Units can be North America, EMEA, APAC, Europe.

The Parent Business Unit can serve as the headquarter for company X and can be reserved for the administrative purposes handled at the headquarters’ level. These admin activities include providing access to the users to their specific regional Child Business Units, storing the company branded templates in the Parent Business Units’ shared folders and the common subscriber data in shared Data extensions.

Set up approval processes for requirements such as making any changes in the email templates. Since the emails need to follow strict branding guidelines, any changes made to the templates should require approvals from the relevant authorities.

Each Child Business Unit should be a self-sufficient unit with its subscriber data and email template, although based on the Parent Business Unit’s branding guidelines. For example, the North American Business unit will have its separate campaign and subscriber data for the North American marketing teams.

Below is the pictorial representation of the Parent Business Units, which represent the headquarters and admin capabilities. Each child Business unit is represented by a regional team, namely North America, APAC, Europe, and EMEA. All the Child Business Units are fully self-sufficient companies within themselves but use the Parent Business team guidelines.

Best practices of Marketing Cloud Business Unit

Some of the best practices that should be followed as a part of creating/using Business Units are as follows:

Parent Business Units should be considered for admin purposes and not used for any specific purposes apart from admin activities. The Parent Business Unit can also be used to model the organization’s headquarters.

Admin activities include all the shared data that needs to be accessed by child BU across the organization.

Data includes branded email templates, shared subscribe data, etc.

One of the Child Business Units should be created as a testing Business Unit so that any new email template, automation activity, or Journey can be tested in the Test Business Unit before being released to the real child Business Units.

User permission should be enabled in a way to provide or restrict access as per the Business Unit concept, i.e., Admin users should have access to all the Business Units starting from the Parent Business Units. Users specific to each Business Unit should have access to their own Business Unit’s information, artifacts, features, and not other Business Unit’s information.

The subscriber data that needs to be shared by the Parent Business Unit with its child Business Units should be placed inside the Shared Data Extension folders inside Email Studio. This will be helpful to reuse the information across the Business units without copying it manually.

The Email templates that need to be shared by the Parent Business Unit with their Child Business Units should be placed inside the Shared folder inside Email Studio. This will be helpful to reuse the information across the Business Units.

The journey should be tested in the testing Business Unit for its correctness and validation. Finally, after it is ready to be used by Marketing teams, it should be transferred to the relevant Child Business unit via the Deployment Manager feature.

Approvals should be used by the Child Business Unit to obtain any required change from the guidelines set by the Parent Business Unit. Suppose the Child Business Unit wants to make some email templates changes or create some new email templates. The approval mechanism should be configured to take approvals from the relevant authority.

The calendar on the Marketing Cloud homepage should be used to view and publish the campaign schedule for all the Business Unit users. This helps to view the similar campaigns run by various teams and users on other Child Business Units.

Separate Business Units also efficiently manage the unsubscribe process, as the subscriber unsubscribes from specific Business Units and not all the Business Units.

Wrap up

Business Units are an integral part of the Marketing Cloud org as they form a key pillar of the structure. The above use case guidelines should help you when designing the Business Unit structure in the beginning. You need to be super careful while doing so, as any failure might create issues later in the life cycle. Also, you must follow the best practices while designing the Business Units, as they help maximize the usage of the Marketing Cloud Business Unit.

For a more detailed understanding of Business Units, you can refer to the Salesforce help documentation.

The post A Quick Guide to ‘Business Unit’ in Salesforce Marketing Cloud appeared first on Email Uplers.

5 Powerful Customer Retention Strategies with Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Thu, 08 Oct 2020 13:30:25 GMT

Attracting a new customer can cost you 5-7 times as much as retaining an existing customer. (Source: invespcro.com & salesforce.com)

Also, the probability of successfully selling to an existing customer is 60-70% while the probability of successfully selling to a new customer is just 5-20%. (Source: Altfeld & smallbizgenius.net)

And yet, 44% of companies focus more on customer acquisition, versus just 18% that focus on customer retention. (Source: invespcro.com)

Retaining customers can yield a number of benefits in terms of sales, revenues and ultimately profits. Then why wouldn’t you focus on customer retention or make an effort to devise customer retention strategies?

Now, if your organization is pivoting towards customer retention, you should consider email marketing as one of your retention strategies. With a 56% success rate (Source: invespcro.com), email marketing is more effective than social media marketing, content marketing, SEO and virtually all other kinds of digital customer retention strategies. With Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), you already have a powerful email marketing platform. And now, you can combine the power of SFMC and email marketing to create memorable customer retention campaigns and improve your customer retention outcomes. Here are 5 ways to show you how!

Strategy#1: Map Customer Journeys with SFMC Journey Builder

Smart brands make existing customers their #1 priority. And Customer Journey Mapping with SFMC Journey Builder provides a great way to start. With SFMC Journey Builder, email marketers can create a customer journey, and tell the story of the customer’s personalized experience as they progress through this journey along many touchpoints – all the way from initial contact to purchasing, and even beyond.

Use Journey Builder to:

Know your customers better
Get a unified view of them across every function, touchpoint and lifecycle stage
Create relevant, personalized experiences with Artificial Intelligence

Versatile yet easy to use, Journey Builder provides a number of SFMC templates to help you create different journeys for different customer retention campaigns – get them to sign up for an informative newsletter, re-engage them with abandoned cart emails, nurture relationships with birthday or anniversary emails, send event follow-up emails, and lots more.

Source

Customer retention best practices when using Journey Builder:

Plan your data and content needs, and create an outline before you create the journey
Create the messages you want to send before creating a journey
Use Goals and Exit criteria in Journey Builder to measure success and to remove contacts from a journey
Stagger scheduled journey start times to reduce the demand and increase the processing speed of individual journeys

Strategy#2: Use Customer Data to Improve Your Email Segmentation

You might have gathered a lot of data about your customers. But are you doing anything useful with this data? If not, you’re wasting a goldmine!

Use your customer data to improve your segmentation and create personalized emails (covered in Strategy #3) that makes customers feel special. And the more special they feel, the more likely they are to stay on with you. Audience segmentation using SFMC Email Studio can help you deliver better customer experiences, generate more sales, and create brand advocates, all of which can increase customer retention.

Audience Builder is another segmentation tool in SFMC. Unlike data filters in Email Studio, it can filter across data extensions and append data to segments. It comes with an easy visual interface that’s ideal when creating simple or semi-complex segments. You can use data from any source within the Salesforce ecosystem and even offline data to build a single view of the customer in Audience Builder. Then using SFMC Einstein AI’s predictive scoring capability, you can target smart audiences based on what they will do next, not just on what they’ve done in the past.

To create memorable customer retention campaigns with SFMC, here are some recommended segments:

i. Converted users-Upsell

Create a segment of subscribers who bought something recently and send them customer retention campaigns with special or limited-time offer emails, reward point emails and loyalty program emails.

Source

ii. Converted users-Re-engage

Create a segment of users who bought something a while ago and target them with re-engagement emails.

Source

iii. Loyal Customers-Convert into fans

Create a segment of power users who engage more frequently with your emails. Let them know they’re appreciated with special offers, freebies, free trials and surveys.

Source

iv. Active Customers-Monetize

For active users who engage with your emails, but also frequently abandon their purchases, send cart abandonment emails with personalized recommendations or discounts based on their activity history.

Source

Strategy#3: Create hyper-personalized emails that make customers feel (really) special

In 2020, the average number of emails in a person’s inbox is 200. When customers are so overwhelmed by emails, can you retain them with generic, non-personalized emails? Unlikely!

Email content personalization is one of the most powerful customer retention strategies and SFMC Email Studio makes it easy to create personalized content that provides real value to subscribers. Make use of SFMC templates with Content Builder in Email Studio or create your own.

Some useful content personalization tips for SFMC:

Create dynamic content in Email Studio to ensure that the relevant messages are reaching the targeted audience
Use Content Detective in SFMC Email Studio to identify and remove ‘spammy’ words before sending the customer retention campaign
Implement action-oriented Calls to Action buttons or links
Create mobile-optimized and browser-agnostic emails
Create short, scannable and easily consumable copy

Source

Use these Einstein AI tools to optimize your customer retention campaigns:

Einstein Content Selection to choose the right asset that’s likely to engage customers better
Einstein Send Time Optimization (STO) to determine the best timeframe to send a customer retention campaign
Einstein Copy Insights to create engaging subject lines
Einstein Content Selection to send personalized content for each customer when they open your messages

Strategy#4: Create interactive or real-time emails to increase engagement and click-throughs

With interactive content like image carousels and forms, your subscribers can enjoy a more engaging experience, which is more likely to encourage them to take action. Result – you retain them and keep them onboard for longer.

Two popular use cases for interactive emails:

Welcome emails: Gather the subscriber’s preferences and personalize subsequent content and interactions
Product interest emails: When a customer browses a specific product category on your website, send them an email with an image carousel to highlight the different features. Add an “add to basket” button to encourage immediate purchase.

Source

Real time emails can also be part of your customer retention campaign. With these hyper-targeted and relevant emails, content is instantaneously adjusted to dynamically personalize every email for every recipient, ensuring that they get only what they actually want or need. This increases the likelihood of customer retention.

Some ways to implement real time email marketing to boost your customer retention:

Create dynamic content with banners, product recommendations, coupons, live prices, etc. that instantaneously adjust for every recipient
Use behavioral triggers with contextual images, countdown timers, ratings/reviews and popularity messages
Use a Live Weather content block for personalized images based on local weather conditions to appear when a subscriber opens an email
Include live social media feeds

Strategy#5: Track Customer Interactions to Understand Them Better

Data tells the story of your customer’s interaction with your brand. When were they last on your website or store? Did they purchase anything, did they simply browse or did they abandon a cart? Did they engage with your last email campaign? With SFMC, you can use all of this information to better understand your customers, respond to their needs and retain them for longer.

For example, you can see when a customer abandons their shopping cart, and make necessary adjustments to your website or email campaigns.

Source

Likewise, if you notice that a subscriber has not purchased anything in a while, you can reignite their interest by sending them a special offer or discount.

Source

After implementing a customer retention campaign, use these powerful SFMC features to analyze and improve performance over time:

Analytics Builder to gain insights into the behaviors and interests of subscribers
Standard Reports in Email Studio to track campaign effectiveness
Einstein Engagement Scoring to target customers to maximize engagement and conversion
Einstein Engagement Frequency to identify the optimum number of email messages to send
Einstein Email Recommendations to observe customer behavior and build preference profiles

Wrap up

Customer retention cannot be a one-time activity. Customers leave for all sorts of reasons, but the only reason they stay can be encapsulated in one word – trust. To keep customers loyal for longer, first, make sure you don’t give them reasons to distrust you and second, use the customer retention strategies and customer retention best practices in this article. Customers are precious. Don’t let them go!

The post 5 Powerful Customer Retention Strategies with Salesforce Marketing Cloud appeared first on Email Uplers.

Hyperlocal Email Marketing + CRM: The Perfect Match?

Thu, 08 Oct 2020 07:05:17 GMT

Email continues to surpass other digital marketing channels not only in terms of its high ROI but also as the customers’ preferred mode of communication. As much as 73% of the millennials prefer emails when it comes to communicating with a business. When it comes to receiving communications from retailers, the table below says it all:

Source

Given that email marketing is a relatively low-cost and low-maintenance channel, it accords businesses – irrespective of their size of operations and financial means – an opportunity to reach out to a vast pool of target audience. However, thanks to the possibility of leveraging pointed data insights to craft email messages, personalization has become a base expectation among the consumers.

That’s exactly what hyperlocal email marketing delivers on. Using CRM (customer relationship marketing) tools to drive your marketing messaging and strategy helps to dodge the bullet of non-contextual emails, the tolerance for which is fast declining.

Why Hyperlocal Email Marketing Is Important

How many times in a day do you check your email? Out of these, how many times do you use a desktop or laptop to open and read emails? According to a report, 75% of consumers open their emails on mobile devices.

As smartphones evolve into state-of-being extensions rather than mere devices, it allows marketers to build upon email marketing ROI by not just creating responsive emails but ones that can be tweaked as per a user’s location.

Hyperlocal marketing that facilitates location-based targeting of the audience for your email outreach helps you do just that. This means instead of creating a single message to reach out to everyone in the area your business operates, you target only those to whom your services will be most relevant.

While this approach narrows the scope of your email marketing outreach, it is known to drive better conversions by helping you reach out to people to whom your products or services are most relevant. As per research by Google, there has been a 500% increase in location-specific searches between 2016 and 2018. It thus makes sense to align your email marketing initiative with this trend.

Your CRM system can bring you greater success with this strategy. The data insights from your CRM – that include details such as age, gender, purchase and browsing history, and location – can be an asset for creating tailored emails that resonate with prospective buyers’ inclination to buy access products/services in their vicinity.

7 Ways CRM Can Help You Make the Most of Hyperlocal Email Marketing

Your CRM platform can help you target leads more efficiently by aiding audience segmentation, offering greater personalization, and nurturing long-term customer relations. Here are 7 ways in which CRM can prove effective in aiding your hyperlocal email marketing initiatives:

1. Segmenting Your Target Audience

Segmenting your audience is an integral part of any email marketing campaign. After all, the entire personalization approach rests on handpicking the recipients to whom your products would be most relevant and structuring your message in a way that resonates best with them. Your CRM system not just makes the audience segmentation easier but also more targeted.

By using the right filters, you can divide your potential user base into different categories based on their locations. This includes their place of residence, place of work, the neighborhoods they frequent the most as well as the most traveled routes used for daily commutes.

For example, emails with targeted local updates can be shared with customers based on their vicinity.

Source

In another example, let’s say you run a coffee chain and have opened an outlet at a new location. Using geo-targeting, you can reach out to your subscribers saying, ‘Now, your morning cuppa comes without a detour. We’re open at ‘address’.’

2. Real-time Updates for High Click-through Rates

An email marketing campaign can yield better results when you make it easier for your customers to find you. If you are a retail business announcing an end-of-season sale, including a dynamic map in the email that tells your recipients the nearest store location will give them that extra nudge to explore your offering when they’re in the vicinity of your business outlet. For instance, the example below depicts how regular updates can be shared in real-time to increase the foot traffic in a new store.

Source

With CRM, you can automate this process without losing on the element of personalization. For instance, the dynamic map can reflect different store locations to a subscriber depending on whether they’re accessing it from their home, office, or some other place.

Such real-time updates in the email content can drive up the click-through rates, engagements, and in effect, your hyperlocal sales.

3. Feedback-based Messaging

Source

Your CRM system is a key link that connects you to your customers and develops a deeper understanding of their needs and preferences. This database of customer communications can be a goldmine for insights on which to base your email marketing messaging.

For instance, in this email, a quiz is being used to gauge subscribers’ mood and suggest them a suitable class option. Not only is a quiz a fun way to engage your subscribers but also helps you make pointedly accurate suggestions, based on their inputs. You can, then, create a targeted email campaign around their preferred choices, building their anticipation by telling and stoking their intent to enroll. By announcing a special discount or a promo discount, you can give them a final nudge to go through with their decision.

You can curate unique messages for different areas to cater to consumers’ expectations, needs, and wants. And, in the process, driving up sales across the board.

4. Curating Targeted Offers

Source

Hyper-localization isn’t just about knowing where your subscribers live but also understanding their lifestyle and cultural references. This helps you curate targeted content and offers that they can relate to.

If you are a business with a multinational presence, you must make sure that you use the right references when speaking to your subscribers. For instance, in the email above, CRM data pertaining to past activity and current location is being leveraged to make relevant and personalized pitch. Your CRM can help you identify where a subscriber is based and use an email template that facilitates automatic currency conversions on the basis of their location.

5. Building Localized Outreach

A hyperlocal approach, be it in marketing or business operations, is all about thinking global but acting local. That’s why most websites today have a multilingual presence. But does your email marketing complement this ethos? If not, are you sure that your messages are having the intended impact of consumers in overseas markets?

Imagine if H&M, a Sweden-based clothing brand, crafted its email content only in the native language. Or all of Volkswagen’s email marketing was done in German. Knowing your audience’s preferred language is essential for building localized outreach.

Using your CRM insights such as zip codes, IP geolocation, mobile country codes, you can recreate the same email template design in different languages for different audience segments.

6. Better Lead Nurturing

Source

Once you have captured leads through your submission form, it is important to nurture them the right way through targeted email campaigns. Where your CTA leads a prospective buyer plays a decisive role in building trust and confidence. The way to make this count is hyper-localizing your landing pages as well.

A new visitor or potential customer landing on your website through your email is far more likely to trust you when they see that you understand their neighborhood, their cultural references, their lifestyle. This can be achieved by simply analyzing your CRM data to see where a majority of your existing or prospective customers live and sending them a personalized welcome email (as depicted in the example above).

7. Effective Email Automation

Automation is a key element of effective email marketing. With HTML email templates, you can pre-write email content and send them out at the most opportune moments or on certain triggers. Your CRM can play an important role in making sure that not just the timing but also the content and messaging of your automated emails is perfect.

For instance, welcome emails, cart abandonment emails, re-engagement campaigns and so on can be automated for different location-based segments of buyers based on their past purchases history and feedback.

Consider the case of the email below that, once set up, can be automated based on the location of the readers.

Source

The Takeaway

Creating hyperlocal content that does the job of striking a chord with the audience is not the easiest marketing technique. It requires interaction from your consumer base along with the effective use of technology and data insights. Whether you’re a global brand or an upcoming startup, internalizing such targeted messaging your email campaigns won’t happen overnight.

It’s a work in progress that yields the best results with consistent efforts. The best approach to optimize this initiative is to hire a dedicated email campaign manager and let them build up your marketing strategy with sensitivity, patience, and understanding of local lifestyle, culture, and customs.

At Email Uplers, we bring exactly this to the table. With expert email marketing support, we help you curate engaging email campaigns that can convert leads for you at scale in even the trickiest marketing scenarios. Learn more here.

The post Hyperlocal Email Marketing + CRM: The Perfect Match? appeared first on Email Uplers.

What You Wanted to Know About Real Time Email Marketing with Salesforce Marketing Cloud (But ...

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 12:43:57 GMT

Almost every year there seem to be hot new trends in email marketing. Whether it’s automation or send time optimization, dynamic content or predictive intelligence, these key trends can be easily leveraged with Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC). But one trend that a lot of email marketing specialists are not taking advantage of is real time marketing. And this is a pity, because real time marketing can be a very powerful means of delivering impressive, highly personalized, 1-to-1 email messages at scale to drive better engagement and boost conversions.

If you’re not familiar with real time marketing, take a look at our short introduction section first. But if you’re looking for practical ideas to implement real time marketing with SFMC email marketing, feel free to dive straight into the next section.

What is real time marketing with email

Real time marketing with email takes email customization and dynamic content to a new level. It involves deploying automated email campaigns that change in real time, in response to the consumer’s immediate environment. In simple terms, real time email marketing is about personalizing every single email message based on each opener’s personal context the moment it is opened.

By factoring in user-specific triggers like demographics, purchase history, prior email or web behaviors, external factors influencing their environment such as geography-specific events or the weather, real time email marketing empowers marketers to deploy hyper-targeted and relevant emails. This keeps messages up-to-date no matter when, where or how they’re opened. Content is instantaneously adjusted to dynamically personalize every email for every recipient, ensuring that they get only what they actually want or need.

Some of the most common use cases and advantages of real time email marketing include:

Build a sense of urgency and encourage recipients to take a specific action

Source

Drive more conversions, upsells and cross-sells
Create loyal email followers with loyalty programs and special discounts

Source

Keep recipients informed with tracking notifications

Source

5 Effective Ways to Drive Real Time Email Marketing with Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Real time email marketing is a great way to delight customers and increase open and click-through rates. However, implementing it can be a bit of a challenge with other ESPs. SFMC however makes it easy for email marketers to interact with their subscribers with real time emails, and thus provide the nuanced and sophisticated experiences they’re looking for.

With SFMC email marketing, marketers have access to a range of content tools (not to mention user-friendly HTML email templates!) to personalize emails based on different metrics. These include real-time countdown timers to drive actions, personalized images to improve engagement, and dynamic web crops to seamlessly integrate latest offers or blog posts into emails.

Here are 5 effective ways to make the most of SFMC for your brand’s real time marketing goals.

I. Create dynamic content (Tip: Start with Salesforce email templates!)

A key ingredient of real time email marketing involves the creation of dynamic content, i.e. content that’s instantaneously adjusted to dynamically personalize every email for every recipient. With dozens of Salesforce email templates in SFMC Email Studio Content Builder, you can respond quickly to the needs of your subscribers with personalized emails that promote meaningful engagements.

To know more about HTML email templates in SFMC, read our article An Easy Guide to Building Reusable Email Templates in Salesforce Marketing Cloud here

Some other powerful ways to create dynamic content in SFMC:

i. Dynamic banners and webcrops

Real-time banners keep subscribers engaged for longer by showing them the offers most likely to spark their interest. In fact, one of the best ways to move them towards a sale is to tailor banners to their preferred categories or brands. A good way to ensure that you include only current banners as open time email content is to use ‘webcrop’ technology. The webcrop can be personalized to pull content that an individual has already been exposed to, e.g. their wish list.

If you don’t want to create banners from scratch, take a look at the Salesforce email templates in SFMC first.

ii. Product recommendations and coupons

Showing the same product recommendations to everyone is risky because when suggestions don’t meet their needs, shoppers will get frustrated and leave. With SFMC, you can display products that precisely match each subscriber’s preferences and behaviors. Basing them on open-time inventory and pricing data will ensure that they see only current offers and coupons, not expired or unavailable offers.

By tailoring product recommendations to each stage of the customer journey, brands can:

Boost product discovery and average order value (AOV)
Recommend products to up-sell, cross-sell and deep-sell
Promote excess stock to those subscribers who are most likely to convert
Promote high-margin items to improve profits

A good way to provide product recommendations is to include one of these phrases in the email:

People like you buy
Frequently browsed
Related products
Best-sellers
New arrivals
Try for free

Source

iii. Provide live prices and availability information

By updating pricing and availability information automatically at the time of every open or view, you can ensure that you never promote out-of-date content or unavailable products. This works for new emails as well as for abandoned cart emails.

Source

II. Use behavioral triggers

In SFMC, a behavioral trigger refers to a particular action taken by an individual subscriber. Using trigger data to implement real time marketing and send customized ‘triggered emails’ is both easy and effective. With SFMC, you can create granular segments based on customer behavior and lifecycle stage in order to deliver a ‘person-to-person’ experience at scale.

All triggered emails in SFMC are trackable (opens, clicks, etc), targeted and sent in real time. They provide these benefits:

Provide a great customer experience with price drop and back in stock alerts
Use auto-forward and auto-reply with messages processed by Reply Mail Management
Achieve high deliverability and scalability
Maximize marketing impact with personalized messages based on the type of shopper, carted value
Use AI to build rich customer profiles and do granular segmentation for advanced customer tagging
Drive higher average order value (AOV) and customer lifetime value (CLV) with post-purchase emails
Reduce shopping cart abandonment
Foster greater loyalty with predictive emails that remind them to restock or refill

For best results, make sure that your triggered emails include at least some of the following elements:

Contextual dynamic images
Product recommendations for cross-sells and upsells
Countdown timer
Popularity message
Ratings or reviews

III. Use Live Weather Content Block

Live Weather Content Block in SFMC Content Builder allows for personalized images based on local weather conditions to appear when a subscriber opens an email. By leveraging local weather conditions, you can curate content that’s relevant for your subscribers while driving traffic to your store or website.

E.g. Using Live Weather Content Block, a hotel brand can create emails with tempting images of sandy beaches and sunshine. For subscribers living in colder areas, these messages can be really enticing.

Source

IV. Use Countdown Timers

A countdown timer is an animated clock that can be inserted inside an email message. The clock counts down to an important deadline, such as the end of a promotion, time left to renew a subscription, etc., in order to build excitement and create a sense of urgency. The goal is to encourage the subscriber towards taking an action, without seeming too pushy or ‘sales-y’. The messaging within the email can be personalized based on the event, or for the individual subscriber.

Source

V. Include live social media feeds and relevant messaging

Well over 50% of the global population now uses social media. If your brand already has a social media presence and you’re looking to encourage omni-channel engagement, then combining your SFMC email marketing with social media can be a very effective strategy.

Keep customers updated and engaged by displaying the latest content from your social pages in your emails and ecommerce store. Include live streams of high-quality user-generated content (UGC) such as product ratings and reviews from different platforms to make your shoppers feel part of a tribe. Include popularity messages or scarcity messages to encourage purchase and discourage cart abandonment.

Source

This focus on ‘wisdom of the crowd’ and ‘social proof’ can yield a number of benefits for your real time marketing efforts:

Inspire subscribers with trending items
Harness FOMO (fear of missing out) and encourage them to buy before they bounce or abandon their cart
Improve conversions
Build consumer trust in a purchase decision

Wrap Up

Real-time email marketing provides brands with many opportunities to deliver timely, personalized content recipients will love. And since Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides robust functionalities for email marketing automation, triggered campaigns, dynamic content, hyper-personalization and more, email marketers have everything they need to implement real time email marketing quickly. By utilizing these features, they can focus on more personal, relevant, and timely messages to improve email performance and motivate subscribers to take action.

The post What You Wanted to Know About Real Time Email Marketing with Salesforce Marketing Cloud (But Didn’t Know Whom to Ask!) appeared first on Email Uplers.

3 Ways to Build an Online-to-offline Experience in Marketo

Mon, 05 Oct 2020 12:13:28 GMT

A year back, I had taken an online course on copywriting from one of the digital platforms. It did not seem that exciting until, one day, I received a personalized letter from them thanking me for taking the course, along with a cute (branded) pocket diary and a classy fountain pen.

This offline gesture made me more interested in completing the online course by giving my best shot. It not only helps to build a personal connection with the customer but also increases brand visibility with branded merchandise.

That’s the power of building an online-to-offline experience.

Here are some of the techniques by which you can create an offline experience and confine the discrepancy between online and offline experience.

a. Combine Email with Direct Mail.

Rather than only sending out an email, you can consider sending a direct mail or some gift to your prospects or customers. It would lead to meaningful conversations and help to convince the client to convert. Instead of taking the traditional route and sending spray and pray emails, try going out of your way and sending out direct mail to the subscribers, especially to those who have not opened your email.

b. Promote relevant offers based on the geographical location of the subscriber.

What’s the use of sending a shopping voucher if a geographical location does not have that store? Therefore, it is important to segment your subscribers and send out relevant offers that would be useful for them (and possible to avail). For instance: If you are an online booking portal, you must send out emails that promote events located in that particular location. It would hardly make sense to send an invitation to a music concert in Australia to someone based in Canada.

c. Always TRACK your traffic.

Omnichannel and cohesive customer experience is what you must strive for. With the help of API and other integrations, you can track offline store visits generated from an online advertisement.

Pro-tip: Shortened URLs prove to be of great help when it comes to analyzing the performance of your campaigns and determining how your customers are perceiving your online and offline experiences. You can add the URL parameters in the ‘hidden’ URL so that you can monitor conversions from offline channels in a better way. (This works just like UTM parameters and codes added in emails.

If you are wondering how to execute the same in your campaigns, look no further than Marketo.

Marketo gives you the facility to integrate with Sending Platforms and formulate online-to-offline campaigns, which will give you an opportunity to build long-lasting relationships with your clients. You can program direct mail in addition to your social media channels and emails. It can then be triggered according to the behavior of the subscriber and the stage of the buyer’s journey.

Let’s understand some easy ways in which you can create online-to-offline experiences in Marketo.

1. Bring more attendees to your event and drive meaningful conversations thereafter.

Recently during Covid-19, I attended so many webinars and virtual Digital Marketing Conferences. I don’t remember much about any of these events, but one. What was so special about that “one” event, you ask? Well, a few days later after it ended, I received a Starbucks coffee voucher from the event organizer as a token of gratitude for attending the event. Honestly, I am not a big fan of coffee, but their gesture impressed me.

If you are organizing an event, it is likely to burn a hole in your pocket because of the huge investment it might need. Therefore, you must try to make the most of this platform and drive maximum conversions. Your invitations are a gateway to ROI generated through the event. A great idea would be to send a direct mail in addition to a virtual invite. Many brands send out a physical invitation as it can increase response rates by up to 55%.

Another thing you must bear in mind is that even after your event ends, your “event ROI” does not. You must not forget about the people who took the time to attend your event and contributed to its success. Conventional nurturing process after an event would be sending out regular educational or follow up emails, hoping for a conversion. With Marketo, you can make things easier for your sales representative by assigning a score to every lead that attended the event. The higher the score, the hotter (BTW, I mean “more interested” here) the lead.

In addition, you can tie an automated direct mail send to all the attendees. Just make sure that the direct mail consists of something that would reflect your brand personality and take your business forward. For instance: If you own a company helping people with foreign immigration, you can send out informative material with all the eligibility details and a list of documents they would need for the same. Moreover, you can send out a customized one-to-one direct mail, signed by a sales representative. You can label the direct mail sends in your CRM and then measure the ROI generated through it. Doing so will also help you decide whether you must hold events in the future or not.

This tactic can even be applied in organizations for internal communications. Now that most of the companies have started working remotely, it would be a great idea to send a letter to your employees on their birthdays or special occasions like Christmas or New Year. It would make them stick to your company and rethink if they are planning to leave for greener pastures.

2. Engage “hot leads” that are most interested in hearing from you.

Marketo allows you to integrate your campaigns with Sendoso and deploy an automated email once a prospect downloads a content resource from your website. Along with the downloadable file, this email can include an eGift card from Amazon or any other ecommerce platform. You can even partner with them and generate commissions. While traditional nurture campaigns are simply a series of persuasive emails, Marketo lets you go a step ahead and create an offline experience too.

Recently, a digital marketer, who turned 45, held a virtual birthday party and gave away free Domino’s pizza to 45 lucky attendees who were a part of the celebration webinar. Isn’t that a cool way to build brand visibility and create a memorable offline experience?

It is advisable to practice such gifting tactics for prospects who are placed at the bottom of the sales funnel and closer to conversions.

3. Take a consistent approach with account-based marketing

With the help of account-based marketing offered by Marketo, you can have consistent messaging throughout your social media, targeted ads, and email. Once you recognize prospects that are keen to buy from you with the help of Marketo’s lead scoring tool, you can set a trigger that sends direct mail to them. Send out something that can go well with a compelling message. After the prospect receives the order, the sales representatives will get a notification about it. Based on it, they can get in touch with the customer.

In case you are an ecommerce marketer, Marketo allows you to capture the information regarding past purchases and then target those customers accordingly.

Wrapping Up

Wouldn’t you be delighted if you are using the “Enterprise” version of a software tool and you receive a birthday gift or Christmas present right at your doorstep from them? A basket of goodies on your dining table or desk means so much more than all those downloaded files lying in your “My Documents” or “Downloads” folder. It takes the relationship to the next level and helps in client retention as much as word-of-mouth publicity. That’s exactly what you can do by building online-to-offline experiences for your customers.

In case you need help, just get in touch with Email Uplers and our Marketo certified professionals will show you how.

The post 3 Ways to Build an Online-to-offline Experience in Marketo appeared first on Email Uplers.

Building IP Reputation through IP Warming (in Salesforce Marketing Cloud)

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 13:13:18 GMT

Email deliverability is one aspect that gives sleepless nights to marketers worldwide as it can derail all the effort they put into designing and executing the best campaigns. There are multiple factors affecting email deliverability – domain, difficulty to unsubscribe, lack of engagement, no or wrong IP warming, URL shorteners – to name a few.

What’s the point if your emails do not reach the consumer’s inbox or are put in the trash or spam folder? Email clients like Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo provide the error code to identify the deliverability issues arising from the above reasons.

One of the critical issues that affects email deliverability is the reputation of the IP address from which the emails are originating. Email deliverability is a direct function of the reputation of the IP address. IP addresses can have no reputation or a bad reputation.

1. Zero or no reputation happens in the case of implementation of Salesforce Marketing Cloud with a brand new IP address.

2. A bad reputation is due to various reasons like:

No initial IP warming done.
There are inactive or dormant subscribers.
There are too many hard and soft bounces due to multiple reasons.

Now that you know the importance of an IP reputation in email deliverability let’s talk about one of the essential factors required to build IP reputation, i.e., IP Warming.

Before introducing IP Warming, we will understand the concept of Dedicated IP and Shared IP, and the scenarios under which you should use them.

Dedicated IP is a single IP assigned to your organization, and your organization is required to maintain the IP address’s IP reputation. You are responsible for conducting the IP warming exercise initially to build your dedicated IP address’s reputation.
As the name suggests, Shared IP is an IP being shared by many customers simultaneously, and the IP reputation might be lowered because of someone else’s deliverability issues. There is no feature or strategy for you to enhance the IP reputation in case of any deliverability issues. If the deliverability issue persists, then you might have to shift to a new IP address.

The message volume is an essential factor to consider while choosing between the two options. Dedicated IP should be selected in the scenario when your organization’s message volume is more than 100k messages per month. However, if the message volume is more than 2 million messages, it is recommended to consider multiple dedicated IP addresses. This scenario is not covered as a part of this article.

The Power of IP Warming

IP warming is an exercise done to increase the reputation of your dedicated IP address. It includes strategizing about the type of subscriber, email campaigns, and email volume. IP warming ensures your emails are sent in a pattern of increasing volume over a period of time to your trusted set of customers or prospects.

When a new IP address is purchased for sending emails, it is not warm enough to have a reputation; it has a zero reputation. Email clients like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail check the email sent history for the last 30 days of the IP address to deliver the emails to the relevant inbox. Since spammers frequently use new IP addresses to send spam emails, email clients are skeptical of IP addresses with no history.

The period of IP warming exercise can be between 4-6 weeks, and it depends on multiple factors like subscriber list size, quality of subscriber, send frequency, subscriber engagement, etc.

The below IP warming plan is for North American ISPs and should be adjusted for other regions. This plan shows the volume of email sends for 30 days for each ISP and domain in North America.