The rise of predictive analytics has opened doors for marketers to understand consumers better and take the next step in automating how they communicate with their customers/prospects. Predictive tools are no longer just focused on analyzing data but are now able to predict customer behavior. It means that these tools can actually ‘predict’ what actions are likely to happen in the future, based on your current data. With this insight, marketers can now use targeted email marketing to increase response rates and conversions.

How exactly is predictive marketing transforming email marketing? What should we expect in future trends? And what components of predictive marketing are critical to success?

Let’s take a deeper look at how predictive analytics helps you craft the perfect email campaign for each customer.

What is Predictive Marketing and How Does It Affect Email Marketing?

The term ‘predictive marketing’ refers to using customer insights to create personalized content that drives the right customers down the purchase funnel at the right time. The goal of predictive marketers is to maximize the value per customer.

Predictive marketing works by analyzing customer behavior, interests, and preferences to provide them with customized offers throughout their buying journey. It enables marketers to curate the perfect email for every subscriber and send them at the most appropriate time, significantly boosting conversions. This is different from behavioral email marketing that sends emails based on the past behavior of customers. Predictive marketers use rich data sets to understand each customer’s unique needs and preferences to build a personalized experience.

Targeting the right customers at their known stages in the purchase journey produces better results than traditional mass-email marketing campaigns. For instance, using AI to create granular content for specific demographics can help marketers skip broad messaging and, instead, go straight to personalized emails. 

This empowers marketers to anticipate and understand key customer behaviors, such as:

Their evolving purchase intent

• Possible date and time of future purchases
• Most sought after product categories
• Risk of them churning
• Customer lifetime value

What Do the Numbers Say?

As reported by MarTechAdvisor, a survey of 579 marketing decision-makers has revealed key insights about the impact of predictive marketing in emails. 

According to the results:

• 82% of marketers consider email marketing to be a necessity for keeping up with their competitors.
• 78% of the marketers agree that soon, all marketing will become predictive.
• 81% of the marketers are willing to increase their foothold in predictive analytics while driving key marketing decisions.
  
  
  

How Predictive Marketing enhances Emails

Predictive marketing can significantly improve the overall email marketing strategy while cutting costs. Following are some notable ways in which this is done:

1. Recognizing the Interests of Customers

Predictive analytics can simplify the steps of sales nurturing after customers have subscribed to the email list. This makes it easier to execute email marketing:

• Sending welcome emails to new subscribers
• Leveraging A/B testing to understand the best performing emails
• Using the right emails to make customers interested in the brand and its products

Since predictive marketing can help to segment customers into relevant small groups, it becomes easier to pinpoint the real customers.

2. Personalizing Subject Lines Based on Customer Preferences and Behavior

By using deep learning algorithms in predictive marketing, you can segment your subscriber lists into different buyer personas to create tailored engagement strategies for each group. Since every group is now delivered a specific subject line that they are most likely to engage with, it can significantly improve open rates.

The following numbers dictate how important personalization is in email marketing:

3. Using Dynamic Content Based On Customer Behavior and Preferences

Using real-time data and AI allows marketers to understand their subscribers and serve them specific content that speaks to their needs and interests – not just what they’ve done in the past. This results in better open rates, higher click-through rates, and more conversions.

By identifying how customers are most likely to respond to emails,  as well as what type of content they’re most interested in, you can provide highly targeted emails that will produce better engagement.

Using real-time feedback and AI makes email marketing more dynamic and personal – resulting in a positive impact on your business’s bottom line.

4. Using recipient data to ensure higher deliverability rates for their emails

By identifying key factors that impact email deliverability, such as IP address blacklists, marketers can ensure greater success when it comes to email reach.

For instance, marketers can find out which ISPs are more likely to block their emails by using predictive algorithms to sift through the “Spam Complaints” report of any ISP in their list. They can then work towards improving delivery rates for their emails by taking steps to avoid being marked as spam, such as creating a clear unsubscribe option.

5. Personalizing email content to real-time intent

With predictive analytics, emails can be customized for every subscriber’s current stage in the buying process. This helps to provide hyper-relevant email offers instead of sending generic messages that may lack context.
Emails can also be customized for specific customer behaviors or click-through rates. For example, marketers can create two different versions of the same email. One version is sent to customers who have opened an email within the last ten days, and another version is sent to those who haven’t opened in 30 days.

6. Identifying risk indicators against churn

Predictive marketing leverages AI to identify red flags in subscriber behavior that demonstrates the threat of churn. This allows you to act quickly and save your customer relationships before they leave forever!
For example, when an email subscriber hasn’t engaged in a while, marketers can send an email to ask them why they haven’t opened any emails lately. If the subscriber’s response is something like ‘I’m getting too many emails’ or ‘You send me too much promotional stuff’, you know that the account has at least some problems.

However, if the subscriber responds with ‘I’m travelling a lot’ or ‘My work inbox is getting clogged’, then you know that you can take corrective measures to win back their business.

This type of dynamic segmentation allows marketers to be proactive and deliver personalized content – which keeps your customers happy and reduces churn rates.

7. Building better omnichannel experiences

Predictive analytics allows marketers to look at all interactions that a user has with any touchpoint and understand what is relevant when it’s relevant to them. This helps you deliver a personalized experience throughout the entire lifetime of the customer.

In addition, because your customer data is always up-to-date, you can make smarter decisions – such as knowing when it’s the best time to cross-sell or upsell with the right emails.

So, before making any big decisions around marketing campaigns, you can leverage predictions to ensure that you’re making data-driven decisions and setting yourself up for success.

Key Use Cases of Predictive Marketing in Email

Let’s look at some key examples of how predictive marketing fits into the email marketing universe and what do the end results look like:

• Predicting the interest of a prospective customer in a specific email promotional offer.
• Selecting and sharing relevant products to upsell or cross-sell to customers based on their likelihood to buy.
• Detecting the signs of dissatisfaction among customers and preventing the likelihood of churn with relevant engagement emails.
• Recommending the best combination of products and services to customers to increase their cart values.
• Predicting the likelihood of a new customer to convert into a loyal customer and using the right incentives to do so.
• Calculating the potential lifetime value of all customers and identifying the ones with the highest value.

Looking Forward

Thanks to predictive models in email marketing, marketers can now sift through copious amounts of customer data to take key customer engagement decisions. Such data-heavy approaches have given marketers today the opportunity to pinpoint customers’ needs at ‘quantumesque’ levels, making the future of email marketing as bright as today!

The post How Email Is Transforming Into A More Effective Channel With Predictive Marketing appeared first on Email Uplers.

Did you know that nearly 81% of marketers believe that email newsletters are the most powerful form of content marketing? But it is important to create engaging and relevant email content for your subscribers to keep them engaged with your brand.

Over 290 billion emails are sent daily; the competition is vast. It is crucial for you to deliver content that boosts curiosity, interest, and loyalty for your brand. Now, we know all of this sounds a little overwhelming, but with SFMC, you have the power of an amazing content management tool – Content Builder.

Content Builder has changed how marketers used to create and deliver content earlier. It is a user-friendly cross-channel content management tool with the help of which you can consolidate any content such as images, blocks, templates, or emails in a single location to use in the marketing cloud. Thus, it allows you to spend less time on creating the content and more on customer retention, engagement, and experience. 

Top Benefits of Using The SFMC Content Builder

• This smart content management tool has a user-friendly interface that eases the tasks of creating different content and saves time. 

• Have you got Non-IT teams in your business? Don’t worry! Content builder helps you create professional-looking emails without even knowing HTML codes. 

• You can view the changes made to email content in real-time with the help of the always-present preview. 

• You can add code-snippets to your emails to add various kinds of links, such as forward to a friend.

• Other than that, you can drag and drop the image you want from your computer to an email template, and it would be directly uploaded to the Content Builder.

• Besides, you can use this feature to build a new email just by selecting an existing email. 

• Furthermore, it has the option to Scale and Fit the images in an email and resize the image to its maximum width and height. 

If you are willing to know more about how Content Builder helps email marketers create and run engaging marketing campaigns in SFMC, click here. 

SFMC Content Builder Best Practices

Keep in mind these best practices for Content Builder so that you can deliver great emails to your subscribers.

#1 Use Content Blocks To Create Responsive Email Designs

Content Builder in SFMC allows you to create responsive emails with the help of Content Blocks. When you fill in the layout box of your email template, you don’t need to worry about how your email would look on different devices. Content blocks will automatically adjust the content to different devices and email clients.

With the help of content block drag and drop functionality, you can create emails without even having to know a lot of email development skills. 

See how Nike uses Salesforce Marketing Cloud to send 100% responsive emails to their subscribers. 

Source

#2 Send Targeted Messages Using Dynamic Content

You know that your subscribers are busy people, which is why you want to share information that is relevant to them. This practice helps you increase the open rate of your future email campaigns. This would also help you reduce the number of unsubscribes, keeping only those contacts on your list that engage with your content or are interested in your brand. 

You can use Content Builder to create dynamic content to deliver targeted messages to your audience. Dynamic content is based on the rules that you define on the basis of your subscriber’s attributes or data extension column value. Thus, this ensures that you are sending tailored messages to your targeted audience.

Make sure you create rules if you want to create dynamic content based on the attributes of your subscribers. 

You need to define the following four elements in the order shown below:

• Attribute 
• Value 
• Operator
• Content

#3 Increase Engagement and CTR with Interactive Email Content

With Interactive content in your emails, you can deliver an even more engaging experience to your subscribers. This, in turn, helps to increase the click-through rate (CTR) of your email campaigns. Also, you can receive subscriber information such as profile data, product reviews, and sales lead directly through embedded forms in an email – all of this without the subscribers having to leave their inbox. Thus, you can increase customer engagement as well as get crucial data without taking your subscriber to an external webpage. 

The Email Form Block is available in Content Builder for Marketing Cloud Pro or higher editions. 

Please ensure that your users have Data Extension. Go to Create, View, and Update Permissions if they don’t have permissions enabled for Data Extension.

How to configure the block?

1. In the app switcher, hover over your name and click Setup
2. Now, search for Content Builder Settings
3. Finally, Enable Email Form under Block Group Configuration

Source

#4 Build The Power of Einstein In Your Content Blocks 

You can use the power of Einstein in your content blocks in Content Builder. Add an Einstein Content Selection content block in your messages; Einstein will automatically choose the right asset from the asset pool, which is likely to engage each subscriber better and will help you get the desired action completed from your subscribers. 

Note: Before going further, add an asset catalog file so that Einstein can select assets to display. Then, drag the Einstein Content Selection block into your message. 

How did this work?

The Einstein Content Selection content block chooses an asset that is personalized for your subscriber from a pool of assets that you upload. Then, it shows that asset in your message. These assets are selected on the basis of how they perform with your subscribers. 

1. Drag the Einstein Content Selection into your message.
2. Select the asset class from which Einstein Content Selection can choose assets. 
3. If there is no alternate image for assets in this class, then navigate to Einstein Content Selection Settings to add one, if necessary.
4. Now, save the content block.
5. Finally, to see how Einstein Content Selection worked, preview your message.

#5 Use Content Builder Approvals To Review and Approve Content

You can use Content Builder Approvals to automate the process of review and approval of various objects. With this, you can submit your emails into a process where it requires the higher management to approve them before they can be sent to the targeted audience. 

The Approval process can be launched from:

• Email Content Creation
• Content Builder Grid
• Or the new Approvals Dashboard 

Wrap Up

These were some of the best practices that you should keep in mind when using Content Builder in SFMC. By now, you know that content is the key to your successful email campaigns. When done right, it helps you build better relationships with your customers and retain them for a longer period.

Follow our blog for such interesting articles that will help you succeed with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Also, if you want to make the most out of SFMC for your email marketing campaigns, then get in touch with our team of SFMC experts. 

The post SFMC Content Builder – Best Practices appeared first on Email Uplers.

The recruitment, hiring, or staffing industry has undergone many sea changes in the past 5 years alone. One of the biggest evolutions: the use of technology to smooth out and speed up the entire process. From using comprehensive Applicant Tracking Systems and job boards to leveraging social media and online interviewing tools, technology has proved a boon for what can be a very tricky process. 

With three stakeholder groups (recruiting organization, applicants, and your agents), you can use every bit of your tech stack to get the maximum ROI on your efforts. Often, it can be a mandate from your clients to see the best results. According to the 2018 Staffing Buyer Study, 67% of hiring managers felt it was very or highly important for their contracted staffing firms to use the latest technology.

A recruitment agency, thus, needs to consider investing in an excellent Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. Here’s why.

Why CRM For Recruitment Agencies?

Here are two broad areas that you can deploy your CRM software for as a recruitment agency.

Managing Relationships with Clients 

If your mainstay is fulfilling deals with recruiting organizations by handling an end-to-end process for them, then nurturing your associations is paramount. As recruitment agencies are dime-a-dozen and firms gravitate towards those offering the biggest value, it’s entirely on you to build long-term relationships with well-thought-out CRM workflows.

You can use your CRM platform for:

1. Client Pool Expansion: You have to constantly keep an eye out for potential deals and proactively seek pitches and sales. Your CRM software can help you tap into the various pools of industries you are targeting. You can leverage it to actively prospect by scanning companies’ social media activities. Go for a tool that integrates an extension to mine data from multiple publicly available points, such as emails, news reports, social media, and other sites. 

2. Deal Management: Once you have netted a good number of clients, your priority should be taking over the entire recruitment process or figuring out where exactly they need help. An essential element of justifying your retainer or commission is ‘fulfilment’. This would not only apply to closing out the vacancy in question but also to any nitty-gritty they have in mind. 

It’s important you keep track of individual requirements. You can use the ‘deal management’ feature of a well-rounded CRM tool to mark specific client asks against the profile.

3. Growing Reputation: In the currently crowded marketplace, the need to stand out can’t be stressed enough. As a recruitment agency, you have to seed and grow an online reputation at every turn. Bank on your CRM tool to follow up with clients and seek their reviews. Every workflow should be targeted towards closing the loop in a sense and populating sufficient positive feedback. 

Ensure you’re generating a good amount of online visibility. You can also employ your CRM to scan social media to identify, address, and prune any negative reviews and track competitor trends.  

Augmenting Agent Performance 

1. Make Their Work Simpler: With agents typically juggling multiple client requirements and applicant processes, a CRM comes in handy to automate, simplify, and streamline the workflow and task management for them. From the first couple of steps of reaching out and registering applicants, your CRM software can help your agents track and sync every part of the workflow. 

A ‘tags’ feature, for instance, can help them optimize contact management, including for your clients. Try and get a software that allows you to create custom fields and tags for hassle-free process management. Also, while the best CRM platforms offer standardized pipelines, you should be able to set up a few custom pipelines to manage different stakeholder processes for clients and candidates. 

2. Optimize The Pipeline: With multiple clients, it can get challenging to juggle and synchronize various pipelines towards the set deadlines. The tool can help you keep a hawk-eye view of each pipeline and ensure its completion by using the calendar module to schedule events. This will also help amp up your agents’ task-tracking capability.

From a big picture perspective of pipelines, a good CRM platform can also aid a recruitment agency in tracking different stages of every individual pipeline towards optimizing organization-level metrics. You can ensure each conversion stage of the funnel is always streamlined, both for process and numbers. This would refer to ‘pipeline velocity’, a key marker of an agency’s continued success. The larger the number of vacancies in each stage of the conversion funnel, the better your standing. The CRM can be leveraged as a diagnostic tool to review your pipeline, both by agent and channel. This will effectively help zone in on weak phases and course-correct in time. 

A Few Things To Keep In Mind

Make sure your chosen CRM product

• Is the most pocket-friendly option for you and fits your overall tech stack budget. Explore different plans before choosing.
• Seamlessly integrates with your existing systems. It should offer fool-proof compatibility from the get-go and, most importantly, be mobile-friendly. 
• Has an intuitive UI with highly accessible features to ensure little to zero onboarding for your agents. It should integrate a host of crucial marketing and management features, including mass emailing capability and A/B testing for all email marketing drip campaigns.
• Integrate social media scanning and linking. As per the 2021 Future of Recruiting Study findings, social media and social recruiting software rank first on the list of recruiting channels and technologies employed by organizations. This is set to continue as a critical technology investment area for hiring in 2021.

Where Do Emails Come In?

Now that we have touched upon the topic of email marketing in the previous section let’s take a closer look at how emails play into the pipeline management and CRM functions of a typical recruitment agency.

Apart from the email drips that you can deploy at different stages of a typical pipeline (for client or candidate), such as intention, pitch, interview invitation, offer, hiring result, etc., a recruitment agency can also find newer, varied use-cases for emails, such as 

• Educational Drip Campaigns to Inform Candidates
  Seasonal and periodic email updates with the latest trends, industry overviews, best practices, etc., can go a long way in boosting the average candidate experience.
  
  Indeed, for example, here has put together a crisp know-how template as part of its ‘career guide’ series. 

For another standout example, check out this email by Authentic Jobs, which works as an excellent and comprehensive content marketing example, too. (Though Authentic Jobs is a large-scale jobs board, recruitment agencies can definitely adapt this template.)

• Personalized Communication With Clients
  An essential part of the CRM with recruiting companies would be periodic and personalized updates to enhance your loyalty and customer service standing with them. These could pertain to key annual insights, data points of your deals, or recommendations configured as thought leadership pieces. From the transactional point of view, you should also keep them in the loop on any organization or system updates and current offers, as Authentic Jobs has done with the below email template.
  

• Seeking Feedback For Reputation Management: As mentioned before, brand and reputation management is an important CRM focus area for every recruitment agency. Here, emails can help you with a seamless stream of communication soliciting feedback, particularly from high-value clients. You can use your CRM software to set up automated and templatized emails seeking reviews to land up in your client’s inbox at the most appropriate time.
  
  Make sure to test different email samples to improve open and conversion rates. You should also consider including direct links to the various review platforms and provide a short sample copy that includes keywords to guide your clients. Also, design your drip to include follow-ups with a polite and cleverly worded reminder with an ‘email read’ trigger.

Some Things To Make The Email Experience Better

• Start a dialogue
• Personalize
• Seek opinions
• Be considerate 
• Nurture

Wrapping Up

So, there you have it – the long and short of CRM and email use cases for a recruitment agency. A versatile CRM software with complete email integration is definitely the way to go to get the right talent through the door, net the most optimum ROI, and, above all, ensure client satisfaction repeatedly. Looking for end-to-end email automation management for your hiring functions? Get in touch with our experts.

The post How CRM Can Work For A Recruitment Agency, And The Role Of Emails appeared first on Email Uplers.

As many as 93.5% of users purchase their products online. Think that’s fascinating? Now get this- it is estimated that by the year 2040, almost 95% of all purchases will be through eCommerce. From fast-tracking the buying process to letting people shop virtually any time of the day, eCommerce has well and truly made its way into the hearts of the modern netizens, and there’s no doubt that the adulation it inspires is here to stay for long. With internet access and adoption increasing rapidly with every passing day, the number of digital buyers continues to script an upwards trajectory too. In 2020 alone, more than two billion people purchased goods or services online, and during the same year, e-retail sales surpassed 4.2 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide. Even though it was the year of the pandemic, global retail eCommerce sales grew by more than 25 percent.

However, running an eCommerce store is no mean feat. There are multiple processes associated with an eCommerce business, including product placement, order processing, inventory management, and marketing (among others), which means a substantial influx of data flow at every step of the journey. Unless you have the right strategies and software in place to help you process this data, you’ll never be able to deliver the customer experience that you want to. Thankfully, you don’t have to build these systems and workflows on your own or from scratch if you are a Klaviyo user. 

ECommerce and Email Marketing

When it comes to promoting and marketing their products and services, eCommerce businesses regard emails as their go-to channels. And why shouldn’t it be? Email marketing yields $44 for every $1 spent, accounting for a whopping 4400% ROI. In fact, 61% of consumers prefer their brand communications to take place via email. Therefore, as an eCommerce store owner, it is imperative that you adopt a platform with which you can centralize your customer communications. Klaviyo lets you do just that.

Klaviyo is an insight-driven tool that empowers you to deliver hyper-personalized experiences to your subscribers. Besides setting up highly effective automated email marketing workflows, Klaviyo arms your business with the necessary technology, tools, and guidance that enable you to catalyze your growth and expansion. But, since it is so incredibly feature-intensive, Klaviyo can be a thoroughly overwhelming tool for the uninitiated. 

So, if you want your brand to reap the benefits of this powerful platform, the best course of action is to hand over its reins to a Klaviyo expert. Read on to find out the many ways in which you can leverage Klaviyo for your eCommerce business by onboarding an email expert.

1. Create Brand Awareness With Powerful Automation Workflows

Automated email workflows allow you to send emails that correspond to customers’ interactions and activities on your website. Klaviyo has a library of completely customizable pre-built flows that makes establishing automated email workflows extremely convenient. The best part? You don’t have to stay confined to this library. Klaviyo provides you with three other flow triggers, namely list, metric, and segment, using which you can effortlessly create the email automation of your choice. As you can see, because of their extensive nature, these flows can be difficult to master for the uninitiated. Hence, the best way to get on top of these automation workflows is by hiring an expert who knows the platform inside out. Some of the most commonly sent automated emails are:

• Welcome/Onboarding Emails: These emails are typically sent by brands to customers when they either finish their account creation or signup process. Alternatively, these emails are also dispatched to those who subscribe to the brand newsletter for the very first time. Welcome emails are crucial because they enable you to cast a compelling first impression on your audience and pave the way for long-term brand engagement in the process. Take a look at this example.

• Cart Abandonment Emails: These emails are sent in the form of follow-up messages to those who don’t complete the checkout process after adding items or products to their online shopping cart. Given that the average cart abandonment stands at 69.80 %, you ought to make these emails a mandatory member of your eCommerce email automation armor. Here’s an example.

• Re-engagement Emails: These emails target customers who become dormant after completing an initial purchase or two with your business. Re-engagement emails are important because they hold the power of converting an inactive customer into a recurring one. The most effective re-engagement emails use subscriber data such as segmentation, last purchase date, and user activity to their advantage. As a result, they are able to pique the curiosity of their customers and, above all, provide them with new ways to engage with your platform. Take a look at this example for some inspiration.

• Post-purchase Emails: Cleverly crafted post-purchase email sequences can go a long way towards informing your customers that your care and concern for them extends well beyond their transactions with you. You don’t even need to be particularly inventive with these emails. A simple email soliciting their feedback works just as well. Getting this feedback from your customers gives you the opportunity of improving your process or updating your product in the future. Here’s an example.

2. Increase Your Value Proposition With Segmentation

If you want to build thoroughly engaging and personalized email campaigns, then you can’t afford to ignore email list segmentation. With the help of a Klaviyo expert, you can leverage Klaviyo’s powerful segmentation module to provide more value to your customers through hyper-personalized emails and enhance your sender reputation in the process. Additionally, an expert will also let you tap into its Smart Sending functionality to avoid spamming subscribers who have recently received an email from you. Subsequently, this lets you curb your unsubscribe rates. In a nutshell, Klaviyo’s segmentation feature motivates your customers to interact more and more with your emails by giving your campaigns the necessary direction and ambition. By hiring a Klaviyo expert, you can leverage this functionality to drive greater organic traffic to your platform. Some of the most common parameters on which a Klaviyo expert will segment your email lists are demographic data (such as age, occupation, gender, geographic location, and language), past purchases, email engagement rates, website activity, and their position in the sales funnel.  

3. Harness The Limitless Possibilities of Klaviyo’s A/B Testing

Onboarding a Klaviyo expert will empower you to make the most of Klaviyo’s extremely potent A/B testing abilities, allowing you to optimize your conversions and significantly improve your customers’ shopping experience in the process. From subject lines to call-to-action buttons and everything in between, an expert will enable you to vet all the critical components of your email through Klaviyo’s potent A/B testing module. An expert will help you use the module to first send out the tests to a small segment of your list. Thereupon, having determined the best-performing version, they’ll send the winner to the remaining recipients on your list. Subsequently, this allows you to elevate the performance of your email campaigns significantly. 

4. Get On Top of Your Personalization Game

With data-centric marketing campaigns becoming all the rage these days, personalization has become the top-most priority for today’s marketers. To that extent, personalization is no longer confined to addressing customers by their first or last names and sending them dedicated emails on their birthdays. Modern-day personalized communication involves analyzing customer behavior on your platform and leveraging the insights to send emails that are as unique to them as they are relevant. Klaviyo’s variables and template tags let you achieve all this and subsequently deliver a customized experience to your subscribers. You need a Klaviyo expert to make the most out of them. For starters, they’ll help you decide the lines along which your brand’s personalized communication should be based- it could be anything from providing product recommendations based on their browsing history or past purchases to sending them specific behavior-triggered emails.

5. Boost Email Deliverability

Since Klaviyo lets you capitalize on the tenets of segmentation and personalization,  onboarding an expert can really let you go that extra mile and craft extremely customer-centric campaigns. Ultimately, it’ll help you give a leg up to your email deliverability. As your emails’ value proposition and relevance rise, so will their open rates and click-through rates. If you’re looking to increase the visibility of your eCommerce platform, then ensuring high email deliverability is a surefire way of meeting that objective.

Wrapping It Up

As more and more eCommerce stores continue to announce themselves in the market with every passing day, you need tools like Klaviyo in your marketing kitty to give yourself a competitive edge. Besides letting you engage with your customers in the manner that you want to, Klaviyo enables you to make data-driven decisions by capitalizing on behavioral insights, thereby skyrocketing your revenue as well as your brand image. So, what are you waiting for? Hire a Klaviyo expert and start savoring the gifts of this extremely powerful platform!

The post How A Klaviyo Expert Can Help You Leverage The Platform For Your Ecommerce Business appeared first on Email Uplers.

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

—Maya Angelou

In today’s hyper-connected, hyper-digitized, hyper-competitive world, customers expect truly extraordinary customer experiences. In fact, about 86% of customers are willing to pay more if a brand can deliver great experiences along their journey – whether it’s online or in-store, via email or text messaging. As PwC says, “experience is everything”.

And creating and delivering extraordinary customer experiences starts with creating customer journeys. Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) provides a powerful tool to create effective customer journey maps. This tool is called Journey Builder.

With Journey Builder, you can visually represent each interaction that a customer could (or does) have with your brand along their journey. With this “journey map”, you can understand them better and leverage key insights about them to design personalized, automated email interactions at scale. The result: improved customer engagement at every step of the journey and customer experiences that garner support, loyalty, and even brand advocacy.

But to achieve these goals, it’s crucial to create the best possible journey map in SFMC Journey Builder. And for this, testing each journey is vital. This brief guide shows you how to test journeys in SFMC Journey Builder to design and send memorable email campaigns with ease. 

Why Journey Testing in SFMC Journey Builder

With SFMC Journey Builder, you can map customer journeys and recognize how they engage with your company over time. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes; it will help you develop a keen sense of empathy and design email campaigns that address their needs. This will positively increase engagement that results in deeper relationships and greater brand loyalty.

The above journey maps how the brand will engage with customers after purchase through promo codes and email reminders.

By testing each journey, you can confirm that it is behaving as expected and thus ensure that you’re creating the right email campaign for each journey before investing time and resources into that campaign. To get the best possible results, create separate email journeys and campaigns for customer onboarding/welcome, abandoned cart, engagement/re-engagement, special occasions, etc.

With SFMC Journey Builder, you can test both simple and complex journeys ahead of time. This means you can always create and save a “draft” journey and make changes to it at any time. Do keep in mind that journey testing is not available for Single Send journeys.

Journey Testing with Sample Contacts

Before testing a journey, make sure you validate and save it in Journey Builder. By validating, you ensure that all elements of the journey’s design are complete and ready to test. 

After creating and validating a journey configuration, run the “test mode” in Journey Builder. Here’s how to do it:

i) Create a list of 10 sample contacts from your SFMC instance to understand how they experience the journey.

ii) Choose the Send Type.

iii) Choose whether you will send them test messages during the test run.

iv) Go to the Test Behavior section in Journey Builder to view a summary of activities in test mode (see the section on test mode).

v) Activate the journey test. At this point, Journey Builder will run the test against your sample audience.

Once the test is complete, you will see how each sample contact interacts with the journey. Is this what you expected? If yes, you can activate the actual journey. If not, go back to the previous steps to make changes and rerun the test.

Ideally, start with a simple journey to test your approach and gather baseline metrics. Once done, you can iterate by adding more complexity to the journey as required.

Journey Testing with Data Extensions

In SFMC, data is stored in a table where the columns define the data that’s stored in rows. This table is known as a data extension (DE). In the DE, a column is an attribute, and a row is a record.

Journey Builder allows you to test email marketing journeys with a DE as an entry source. In this case, you can configure a journey test using real SFMC contacts. Choose a sendable DE, and admit contacts into a journey in a batch.

You can use the same DE as the entry source for multiple journeys. However, if the DE contains too many rows, it may impact journey performance, so pre-filter the DE to speed up processing. If a single journey’s data is stored in multiple DE, create a single entry source DE using a query. Finally, create a copy of the DE as sendable and testable, and use this copy as a test group of contacts.

To configure a test that simulates the journey of real contacts in your SFMC DE, follow these steps:

• Click Test
• Click Choose Contacts
• Select up to 10 contacts from your DE
• Click the Send Type tab
• To send a test message, click Send Only Test Messages and enter an email address
• To review the test settings, click Summary
• Click Start Test

Journey Testing with Test Mode and Classic Test Mode

In Journey Builder, the test mode gives you an accurate view of how a journey works without the wait. You can view customers’ simulated journey paths without sending them “live” messages. Once the test is complete, the journey canvas shows each contact’s expected path. Click through each path to confirm that the contact progresses through the journey as you intend them to. If they don’t, you can edit the journey as needed within the journey canvas. If you make any edits (either to the entry source or to any canvas activity), make sure to save and validate the journey and then test it again.

The classic test mode simulates random and decision split activities without sending messages but ignores wait times and contact entry settings.

To use this mode, click Test. Then fire a contact via API, use the Fire Event activity in SFMC Automation Studio, or use another method based on the journey’s entry source. Once the test is complete, the results appear in the workspace. You can either accept the results or edit the journey and test it again until it performs the way you intended.

Optimize Journeys with Journey Builder Path Optimizer

Path Optimizer within SFMC Journey Builder is a great way to identify the most effective journey for each customer and make on-the-fly adjustments to meet your business goals.

Use Path Optimizer to configure branches with up to 10 paths (a sequence of events in a customer journey) with user-defined distributions. The winner is selected automatically (or manually) based on email engagement metrics. All losing paths shut off the flow of contacts.

For example, if you want to create and optimize a Welcome campaign in Journey Builder, you can experiment with multiple paths/emails as below:

Each welcome email is on the same journey but goes through a different path. With Path Optimizer, you can test these multiple paths simultaneously to determine which  one performs better in terms of relevant metrics, such as:

• Contacts
• Open rates
• Click rates
• Unsubscribe rates

Path Optimizer then runs the test, and after a predetermined testing period, automatically selects the winner based on your chosen engagement metric(s). You can also select the winning path manually based on your own criteria. Either way, Path Optimizer makes it easy to select the “winning” path and thus get your welcome email campaign out quickly.

Benefits of Journey Testing in SFMC Journey Builder

Pre-testing journeys in Journey Builder increases the chances of creating the best possible journey for each customer and each email campaign. By using the test mode, you can quickly iterate your journeys and thus feel more confident before activating them.

You can choose (or tweak) the audience you want to test the journey on. Then, by sending test emails from the journey, you can confirm if you’re sending the right kind of message to the right contact at the right time.

Journey tests run very quickly, so you have the freedom and flexibility to edit journeys quickly and test them multiple times until you get them right. Finally, the test mode doesn’t affect tracking or reporting, so you can use it confidently without worrying about any impact on a live email campaign.

Conclusion

Customer journey mapping is a crucial starting point to customer experience management. SFMC Journey Builder is a great way to not only map customer journeys but also to test these journeys. Journey testing lets you confirm that a particular journey is behaving the way you expected before you invest resources in creating campaigns around that journey.

We hope you found this guide to journey testing in Journey Builder useful. If you need further information on journey testing, contact the SFMC email marketing experts at Email Uplers.

The post A Brief Guide to Journey Testing with Salesforce Marketing Cloud appeared first on Email Uplers.

One of the most powerful aspects of email marketing is its ability to be automated. 

By automating your email marketing, you not only save yourself time but you’re also able to target the right subscribers with the right message at the right time. 

This makes your email marketing more effective and increases your conversion rates. 

That’s why the importance of email automation is hardly a secret anymore. 

It’s well and truly become common knowledge that you should send automated emails like welcome emails, abandoned carts, post-purchase campaigns, and the like. 

But there are also lesser-known automations that, while not as essential as say your welcome series is, are incredibly effective.

Setting up these automation campaigns will improve the overall effectiveness of your email marketing strategy. This will give your business an edge over competitors and bring in more sales.

So let’s take a look at what some of these automations are and why they’re effective. 

5 Lesser-Known Email Automations

1) Birthday Emails

Let’s start off with a simple and straightforward email automation: Birthday emails. 

As you can probably tell from the name, these emails are sent to wish subscribers a happy birthday on or close to their birthday. Just like in the example below from FitOn.

As you can see, this is an incredibly simple and easy email automation to set up. Yet it goes a long way at building customer relationships and making your audience feel appreciated. 

And the stats behind these campaigns demonstrate just how engaging they are.

Compared to regular email marketing, birthday emails enjoy a 179% greater click rate, 481% higher transaction rate, and generate over three times as much revenue.

To set them up, all you have to do is just include a ‘happy birthday’ message and, ideally, a special offer as a gift. 

Of course, you will need to know when your subscribers’ birthdays are as well as other birthday email marketing best practices.

The other great thing about these emails is that, unlike other sale campaigns, they generate a constant stream of additional sales.

This is because your subscribers’ birthdays are spread throughout the year. So you won’t experience a big spike in sales or give away too much margin all at once. It’ll be a more consistent source of sales throughout the year. 

2) Follow Us on Social Media Invitations

Your email and social media marketing strategies shouldn’t exist in isolation from each other. By incorporating them together, you’ll boost the effectiveness of each channel.

And one way you can do this is by inviting subscribers to follow you on your socials with an automated email campaign. 

In its most simple form, this can be achieved by simply telling subscribers why they should be following you. 

If you want to take it up a notch though, you can show them what they’re missing out on by not following you. Just as Society 6 has done in their campaign below. 

Essentially, all you really need to do is give subscribers a compelling reason to follow you. If you do that, you’ll start to see your number of social media followers increase. 

This will increase the effectiveness of your social media marketing which will, in turn, improve the success of your business. 

As for when you should automate this campaign to send, making it part of your welcome series is a good starting point. That way you’ll ensure every subscriber receives it. 

Bonus tip: You can also use social media to grow your number of subscribers. You can do this by mentioning your opt-in incentive and directing followers to your sign-up form.

3) Anniversary/Milestone Emails

It’s not just subscribers’ birthdays you can celebrate. Any kind of milestone or anniversary can be worthy of celebration. And therefore an automated email campaign.

While the list of potential occasions you can celebrate are pretty much endless, here are a few ideas:

• Anniversary of a customer signing up for your email list
• A customer having made their 5th, 10th, etc. purchase
• A customer having spent $X at your store
• Someone reaching a milestone like referring X number of new customers

For a visual example, Twitter celebrates the ‘Twitterversaries’ of its users.

Exactly what events you’ll want to automate an email campaign for will depend on your business and what you think your customers value.

Picking the right events is critical to ensuring the campaign makes customers feel special. So make sure you put aside a bit of time to think about this. 

You can then choose how you want to celebrate the occasion. Such as by offering a discount coupon or another special offer.

4) Customer Review Requests

Positive reviews are the ultimate form of social proof. 

In fact, a massive 9 in every 10 customers will read online reviews before making a purchase. 

This means you need to have a targeted strategy for generating these reviews. And one of the best ways of doing this is with email automation. 

In particular, automating a customer review request email after someone’s purchase like in the example below from Wildist. 

You have several options for how you go about automating this campaign. 

For example, you could ask for a review of the specific products or services the customer purchased, or of your brand as a whole. 

You can also ask for a private review that you use internally to gauge customer experience, or ask for a public review for social proof.

If you ask for a public review on social media, it’s best to wait until after someone’s second purchase. That’s because not everyone will have a great first experience but if they’re coming back for a second time, it must’ve been good.

Regularly asking for a private review after their first purchase is also a good way of quickly identifying any customer experience issues. This lets you fix the issues before they affect too many other customers.

5) Replenishment Emails

The last email automation on this list is a commerce-specific one: Replenishment emails. 

Also known as reorder emails, these campaigns are sent after a customer has purchased a particular product that needs regular replenishment. Right when they’re about to run out. 

Examples of products that lead themselves well to this type of automation include:

• Personal hygiene products like razors, deodorant, soap, toothpaste, etc.
• Food items like coffee beans and other staples
• Pet food
• Toilet paper

While the goal may be to generate more sales, you can easily frame it as a helpful reminder. Just like Purina has done in their campaign below.

Customers also appreciate these types of reminders. Replenishment emails have the greatest click-to-open rate of any email automation. 

You also don’t have to limit yourself strictly to products people purchase on a regular basis. 

If you sell books, you could easily set up a similar ‘what to read next’ style automation. You could have this sent a month after someone’s last purchase and include recommendations based on their last purchase.

Conclusion 

Email automation is an incredibly powerful tool for both saving you time and generating sales. 

That’s why you shouldn’t stop at just setting up the most common automations but also consider these less common ones.

Not only will these automations resonate with and engage your audience, but they’ll also lead directly to more sales. So even if you only set a couple of them up, you’ll notice a big improvement in your email marketing performance. 

The only thing left to do is start setting them up! 

The post 5 Lesser-Known but Highly Effective Email Automations appeared first on Email Uplers.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software works as a scaffold to store information about the prospective clients and customers. 

True CRM software came into existence in the beginning of the 1990s. At the outset, they helped to track the customer interaction and automate different tasks depending on the business type and industry. However, nowadays, CRM tools come with a plethora of features that help shorten the sales cycles and drive faster business growth. 

Since the inception, CRMs have evolved and totally revolutionized the way businesses work. 

The most important transformation has been the emergence of industry-specific CRM tools. 

The concept of industry-specific CRM tools sounds pretty interesting as they are exclusively put together for your business. 

Before we delve deeper into the industry-specific CRM solutions, let me give you an overview about the role of CRM in marketing.

Importance of CRM in Marketing

CRM, when used correctly, can be used to empower your business and strengthen the relationship with your customers. 

Here’s how:

1. With a robust CRM tool in place, you will be able to track the customer’s behavior and past interactions. 
2. As CRM tools give you access to enormous data about your customers, your marketing professionals can create customer-centric communications.
3. You can send out regular marketing messages and stay at the top of the subscriber’s mind. As a result, it will boost subscriber engagement, brand loyalty, and retention. 

Investing in a CRM tool will let you track the performance of your marketing strategy. Based on these insights, you can then optimize your campaigns for better results. 

Now, we shall move on to understand different types of CRM systems according to their features and industry-specificity. 

Classification of CRM Systems

1. Horizontal CRM

Horizontal CRM systems provide a huge range of CRM capabilities throughout the diverse industries. 

Advantages

• You will get native support of different features according to your industry type. 
• It is possible to customize the CRM tool and integrate it with other applications to cater to specific business needs. 

Disadvantages

• It can get somewhat expensive to keep up with the customizations and their maintenance. 
• You cannot always guarantee a smooth user experience. 
  
  
  

2. Lightweight Vertical CRM

Lightweight vertical CRM solutions come with UI templates, data model extensions, UI labels, and common process flows without any scripting of the end-to-end process. 

Advantages

• You will get access to standardized process flows pertaining to your industry. 
• As these CRM platforms are compatible with different solutions, they will not get obsolete even in the long run. 

Disadvantages

• Lightweight vertical CRM might not be powerful enough to suit your industry. 
• You would need to invest in advanced technology management to match the exact business model. 

3. Deeply Vertical CRM

When you are looking for end-to-end scripted industry processes, deeply vertical CRM solutions are the best bet. 

Advantages

• These CRM solutions have better adoption rates as they support the industry processes. 
• They are entirely compliant with the industry best practices and regulations. 

Disadvantages

• As the processes are fully scripted, it can get difficult to adapt according to the business specifications. 
• In comparison to traditionally used CRM solutions, it can get pretty daunting to support the maintenance of these deeply vertical systems. 

Despite all these challenges posed by deeply vertical industry-specific CRM, many businesses prefer industry-specific CRM tools as it helps to achieve a multitude of objectives as discussed here:

Advantages of Industry-specific CRM

1. You can easily integrate an industry-based CRM into your business.

Whether you are in the eCommerce sector, real estate, banking and finance, or any other field, an industry-specific CRM can be conveniently integrated into any business. Of course, there is no doubt that advanced CRM tools can be customized according to your business needs. However, investing in an industry-specific CRM is a wiser option to choose. 

Let me share two examples with you to help you understand better:

If you are an insurance company, you must go for a CRM tool that allows you to process e-applications and e-policy tools. It should contribute to better productivity and lead tracking. 

On the other hand, construction companies must opt for a CRM that facilitates work order management, task management, and preparing different proposals. 

Most of the industry-specific CRM systems can be used without any installation hassles. As a result, business owners can significantly cut down on the time and resources. They can focus on building their business, instead. 

2. Industry-specific CRM is easy to use.

Verticalization has helped to create bespoke CRM solutions that are perfectly suitable for any business. As the professionals are well acquainted with the system and processes, you will be able to employ the software without any learning curve. 

3. Industry-specific CRM tools have a host of useful features according to your industry.

Rather than settling for a “one-size-fits-all” CRM tool, wouldn’t it be better to go for an industry-specific software system?

Such CRM solutions will help you to accomplish your objectives without any unnecessary expenses. 

With that said, let me walk you through some features that make these CRM tools stand out from the traditional ones. 

1. Electronic Health Record (EHR) System

For healthcare business owners, patient confidentiality is of utmost importance. Your medical professional has access to quite a lot of private information. EHR solutions are developed, considering patient privacy and all the healthcare regulations.
You can integrate the EHR into the healthcare and insurance CRMs directly and retrieve all the private patient details without any privacy infringement. 
For example: Salesforce Health Cloud is the perfect option for healthcare and life sciences organizations looking for advanced features built into the CRM software. It is HIPAA-compliant (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) and offers effective ways to manage patient records, marketing, and patient service support. 

2. Listing Management Tools

Real estate marketing professionals have to deal with property listings, agent management, and prospect and customer management. With the help of the CRM tool, you can maintain all this information at a centralized location and also automate all the real estate management processes. Listing management tools and real estate CRMs go together like Mac ‘n’ cheese. Pipedrive and HubSpot CRM are two of the best tools for real estate businesses. 

3. Dealer Management System

Automotive companies can use auto dealership management systems to enable automobile equipment manufacturers to manage their listings and customer information. Automotive CRM solutions must have a Dealer Management System at the center of its features. 

4. Proposal Management Features

If you are a business consultant or agency owner, you will have to rely heavily on proposal management features. Choosing a construction or consulting CRM will help you streamline the processes and send impressive proposals to your clients. Tools like HubSpot CRM and Cosential work the best if you have high-volume proposal submissions. 

I am sure you must be contemplating investing in an industry-specific CRM after reading all the way till here. 

I personally love the idea of having an exclusive CRM for a business, but it has its own share of demerits. 

Take a look…

Cons of Industry-specific CRM Systems

1. Vertical CRMs are too heavy on the pocket when compared to basic CRMs. 

You have to pay an additional licensing fee for vertical CRMs. They are developed by industry experts and that pretty much justifies the pricing on the higher side. 

2. Industry-specific CRM comes with limited user roles.

No two companies have the same organizational hierarchy even if they are a part of the same industry and follow similar business models. Unfortunately, industry-specific CRM tools have generalized user roles. They are created considering that every company has the same job titles and levels of access. As a result, it becomes difficult to provide access to the right professionals. 

3. Vertical CRM has generic workflows.

It might sound contradictory but vertical CRMs follow a generic approach according to the industry. Consequently, business owners get limited automation workflows, custom fields, and reporting. Industry-specific CRM solutions have limited customization options because of the same reason. 

How to Choose the Right CRM?

Whether you go for horizontal or vertical CRM, you must bear in mind that it must be flexible enough to suit your business requirements. Invest in the tool that makes things easier for you and does not add up to the execution woes. 

Besides, the CRM tool must be customizable and enable you to switch to another one without any migration issues. Furthermore, go for the tool that is compatible with all the third-party tools that you are using at present. It would be a bonus if it keeps upgrading the support for newer systems and tools. 

Wrapping Up

We get so many clients who insist on using an industry-specific CRM or migrating to one. I strongly advise them to weigh the pros and cons and then take the decision. Just because everyone else in your industry is ready to spend on an industry-specific CRM does not mean that you should, too. Consider the limited customer base using industry-specific CRM and only then make up your mind to choose the CRM. 

At the end, it all boils down to usability and cost-effectiveness rather than verticalization. 

The post CRM Solutions: The Big Debate on Horizontal Versus Industry-specific Tools appeared first on Email Uplers.

The digital landscape continues to evolve and it was only a matter of time when banner advertising caught up. Enter HTML Banner Advertising – one of the latest trends to strike marketers.

But are they really that effective? How do we know which ad to go for? This blog takes a quick look at both sides of the coin to settle the debate.

What Are Static Banner Ads?

Static banners are images with advertorial content that can be used on websites, social media platforms, and emails. They have many benefits, such as being able to target specific demographics and easy content updates among others. Usually, these are the ads that you see on sidebars while visiting web pages and consist of the following elements:

• An image
• Copy
• A CTA

‘Static’ signifies that the ads consist of no movement, frames, or transitions. All elements are frozen and simply for the purpose of displaying information.

What are HTML Banner Ads?

HTML or HTML5 Banner Ads are similar to Static Banner Ads in function. But they go a step further to add interactivity to the advert, making it more attention-grabbing. Such ads can consist of:

• Image files
• Video files
• HTML file

In the HTML file, it is possible to include source links for videos, graphics, and images. It might even consist of HTML code that drives animation or makes the advert responsive.

For example, consider the homepage of ReallyGoodEmails that sports this banner advertisement powered by a GIF. With changing text, the ad is able to target users that use various marketing channels, such as – direct mail, social media, emails, etc.

Anatomy of a Great Banner Ad

To understand which type of banner ad would be best for your campaign, we need to first look at the constituents of a great banner advert. A well-strategized banner advert consists of:

• Layout: They can have many different sizes. The goal here is to figure out the banner advert size that would perform the best for your campaign.
• Graphics: Appropriate and relevant graphics are the next step. What visuals should the graphics include?
• Color: The right colors can invoke emotions, keeping your ads message and brand perception in sync.
• Simplicity: Static ads are usually simple while HTML ads are comparatively extravagant. Figuring out your marketing sauce is the next step.

Do Banner Ads Still Work?

Contrary to popular belief, Banner Ads are still far too effective to be shunned altogether. Even if it means facing an army of ad-blocking software in the process. Why? Great Banner Ads can help you to:

• Boost the CTR of your marketing campaigns and rake in revenues.
• Provide an alternative marketing strategy/channel to hedge your marketing bets.
• Provide a super quick go-to-market strategy for any new campaign.

But with their apparent benefits out of the way, which type of banner ad should you go ahead with? Let’s find out.

Static Vs HTML Banner Ads: Which one to choose?

If you are looking for an absolute answer, we would hate to disappoint you. The truth is, both static and HTML Ads can be your go-to banner mantra depending on your use case.

But we would surely help you arrive at the most appropriate decision. To begin, consider the following factors before making your banner ad choice:

• Objectives of your marketing campaign.
• The budget you have set aside for banner ads, including production time and costs.
• The message and branding that you want to portray.
• Devices that your target audience is most likely to use.
• Advertising placements on the media channels in your distribution strategy.
• Past engagement behaviors of prospective customers.
• Ad re-messaging and retargeting strategies.
• Ad testing, evaluation, and measurement statistics.

Each of these factors can ultimately affect your decision.

When To Go With Static Banner Ads?

Due to their apparent simplicity, Static Banner Ads may not always seem like the obvious choice. But it is the lucidity that plays in their favour.

Let’s say that you have an urgent message to convey to your audience (such as a limited flash sale) and want them to take quick action. Depending on the context, well-placed Static Banner Ads might play in your favor here since they reach the CTA sooner (read immediately) when compared to HTML banner adverts. This is especially true if you find the behavior of your prospects to be impatient or impulsive.

Similarly, if you have a simple marketing message to deliver to your audience along with a relevant eye-catching image, Static Banner Ads can again be the way to go. Benefits of Static Banner Ads include:

• Time Commitment: Static banner ads are a time-efficient way to promote your campaign without the hassle of managing or creating content multiple times. Once you create the ad, it can be published on multiple channels for easy promotion and instant results!
• Regulation: There are few highly regulated industries where each website or marketing content must be strictly reviewed. Static banner ads keep things simple in such situations, helping the marketing and legal teams to work in cohesion.
• Quicker Deals: Static banner ads may sometimes work well for first-time visitors since they are better for one-time and quick deals that are more CTA reliant.
• Cost-effective: Since they take considerably less time and effort to create compared to HTML banner ads, the cost of marketing is much lower.
• Easier Editing: Static banner ads might be a better option for marketing campaigns where the offering is dynamic and ever-changing. They are easier and cost-effective to edit than HTML ads.
  

When To Go With HTML Banner Ads?

For relevant campaigns, there is no denying the fact that HTML ads can stand out. Since they include rich media elements such as video, audio, and animation, users are more likely to engage with them. And contrary to their predecessor (archaic flash animation), they do not require the integration of any third-party plugins to function.

HTML Ads also give banners a lot more flexibility in terms of placement and distribution. Benefits of HTML banner ads include:

• Countless Options: Multiple ad types and ad scales can be used across devices. This gives marketers the ability and incentive to A/B test exhaustively and arrive at the best performing ad.
• High Responsiveness: HTML Banner Ads are driven by HTML codes at their base. This means that they can be made to be highly responsive according to the platform or screen size of viewers.
• Better Engagement: Marketers can experience better CTRs for interactive or animated HTML Banner Ads since they have the potential to better grip viewer attention.
• Ad Optimization: Marketers have the ability to use data functions such as heatmaps and real-time analytics to constantly revise banner designs.
• Higher Reach: Depending on your audience segments and buyer personas, different segments can engage with varying media elements. For videos within HTML ads, marketers have the opportunity to boost their audience reach considerably.
• Dynamic Engagement: Since HTML Banner Ads make use of multiple media elements, they can be used to target different segments of the audience and at the most appropriate engagement time. This can significantly boost engagement due to hyper-personalization.

Final Takeaway

Rich media HTML Banner Ads are surely the way to go forward, provided that you have the resources and the time to make them work. With a reduced attention span of readers and the availability of a plethora of digital choices, creative banner ads can better grip audiences and make your messaging stand out.

In case you are just getting started with banner advertising and are looking for a quick fix to get your campaigns off the ground with minimal resources, Static Ads are the way for you.

No matter what choice you make, always follow the golden rule of marketing – the ROI of your campaigns must outweigh your investment!Need any help with creating static or HTML banners that work? Our expert team can help.

The post Static or HTML Banner Ads? Settling the great debate! appeared first on Email Uplers.

Ready to Start Planning Your Holiday Email Campaigns?
For many, the holiday season is synonymous with loved ones, food, celebration….and shopping! The merry and bright season opens up a plethora of revenue opportunities for all kinds of brands – including yours! So how can you leverage these opportunities to attract more buyers, push more sales, and convert more customers into super-fans?

With holiday email marketing!

A well-planned, well-designed holiday email campaign can help you make the most of the holiday period to connect with customers, grow your brand, and stand out from the crowd.

This detailed guide covers everything about holiday email marketing, including:

• Why holiday email marketing should be part of your overall marketing toolkit
• How you can leverage marketing automation to achieve success with holiday emails
• Why it’s important to build a holiday schedule before you start planning your campaigns
• How to create amazing holiday emails that delight and impress your audience
• Best practices to bring in more dollars with every Thanksgiving email, Christmas email, Halloween email, and New Year email 

Why Holiday Email Marketing

According to the National Retail Federation, retail sales during the 2020 holiday season (November-December) grew at 8.3% to $789.4 billion, compared to $729.1 billion in 2019. This surge can be partly attributed to online store sales, which were up 23.9% at $209 billion. Clearly, holiday sales are nothing to be sneezed at – and brands must make every effort to boost their results in this area. And email marketing provides the perfect means to do so. 

It’s already well-known that email has the highest ROI ($42 for every $1 spent) of all other types of marketing mediums, including social media and paid search. Moreover:

• About 80% of professionals believe that email marketing improves customer acquisition and retention
• 60% of consumers say they have made a purchase after receiving a marketing email, compared to just 12.5% who will consider using the “buy” button on social media

Email is a low-friction, low-cost means of engaging with your audience with unique, branded, personalized content that promotes, impresses, and delights your subscribers. It’s great for content distribution, promotions, customer acquisition and retention, and brand-building.

So if email marketing can garner all these benefits, can you imagine what holiday email marketing can do for you? For one, it provides numerous opportunities to reach out to your subscribers with warm, personalized messaging that sparks greater joy and excitement for the upcoming holidays. It can also help you generate and nurture more leads by gently encouraging them to think of your brand for their holiday shopping needs. In addition, if done well, holiday emails can:

• Increase average order value
• Heighten awareness of products that you really want to promote
• Maximize conversions over the holiday season
• Generate more sales and bigger profits

All in all, the holiday period can be hugely profitable, and holiday email marketing can help you end the year on a high note.

This guide unravels the mysteries of effective holiday email marketing with plenty of actionable suggestions, and holiday email marketing examples to inspire you.

Mobile-friendly Holiday Email Marketing

Mobile devices like Smartphones and tablets are immensely popular for a range of digital offerings, including for reading email.

Mobile opens account for 46% of all email opens.

Studies have found that 69% of mobile users delete emails that aren’t optimized for their device.

So, if your holiday emails are amazing and unique, but not mobile-optimized, a huge number of your subscribers probably won’t even open them. As a result, you will miss out on the opportunity to boost customer engagement, conversions, sales, and ultimately, profits.

Other research has found that more consumers are also doing their holiday shopping on mobile devices. In an October 2020 survey, 62% of U.S. consumers aged 21-45 said they used their mobile phones for their entire shopper’s journey. Earlier, in September, experts predicted that mobile sales would reach $314 billion in 2020, representing over 44% of all e-commerce sales. Moreover, in the days following Cyber Monday, mobile accounted for 39% of consumers’ online spends, 47% year-over-year.

Create mobile-ready holiday emails by following these strategies:

• Use responsive email templates and pre-built content blocks
• Select a clean layout with well-organized and clearly visible content
• Include links and buttons; check that they all work on all mobile devices
• Include images with ALT text; make sure they all load properly
• Use white space and contrasting colors for better readability
• Use short subject lines, effective pre-header text, and a punchy top headline

With mobile emails, less is usually more, so use limited content. Also use mobile-friendly fonts, not fancy fonts that don’t render well on mobile devices. Select a single column layout with easy scrolling and navigation. Also show the CTA text/button clearly and above the fold. You want the subscriber to take fast action, instead of trying to figure out the point of your holiday email.

Brit’s 4th of July email is mobile-friendly with a clean layout and simple structure. However, its CTA links are sub-par. The use of links instead of buttons, plus text color that doesn’t stand out makes it difficult for the user to understand what they’re supposed to do with this email.

(Gmail on Android 8)
(Image Source)

The email from GoPro does not have the same issues as the Brit email. Plus, it has a simple, mobile-friendly layout, limited text, and a clear value proposition.

(Image Source)

The Power of Email Automation for Holiday Email Marketing

Holidays are a time when people are in the mood to unwind, have fun, and shop. As a result, they’re likely to be more receptive to holiday emails. So should you take advantage of the opportunity by sending your Halloween email campaigns or a Merry Christmas email to everyone on your mailing list?

You can – but you shouldn’t.

The best way to increase holiday email open rates, click-through rates, engagement, and conversions is by ensuring that every email reaches the right people, with the right message, and at the right time.

List segmentation is a big part of achieving this goal. We’ll talk about this a little later. The other key aspect is email marketing automation.

Email automation is about using automated workflows, processes, and tools to reach your target subscribers with the most relevant message at just the right time.

With email automation, you can get rid of the busywork, and focus on:

• Cutting through the noise
• Having one-to-one conversations with subscribers
• Giving your brand a unique voice that resonates with them
• Nurturing meaningful relationships that go beyond the temporary holiday period

Further, automation enables you to share interesting and unique content that improves subscriber engagement and retention, increases traffic to your website or store, and enhances your brand’s value. For all these reasons, email automation can be an incredibly powerful choice for your holiday email campaigns.

So what kind of automated holiday emails can you send with your brand’s unique flavor?

• Welcome emails
• Onboarding/account creation
• Abandoned cart
• Product (inventory) updates
• Holiday special event announcements
• Customer surveys or feedback
• Lead nurturing
• Engagement/re-engagement/win-back
• Holiday special/limited time offers
• Unsubscribes
• Account renewals
• Account reactivation
• Upsells or cross-sells

With email automation, you set up a holiday email campaign just once. Your automation platform or Email Service Provider will then ensure that the campaign continues to run by itself with very little effort from your side. 

In addition to sending unique holiday content, marketing automation can be used to clean up your email list and keep it up-to-date for every holiday email campaign.

Do You Know Your Holidays?

If a majority of your target audience is in the United States, you should know that the most important holiday season runs from late October or early November to the first half of January. These few months open up a wide window of opportunity for your brand’s promotional and marketing activities, since the emails you send during  this period can garner amazing benefits in terms of customer engagement, sales, and profits.

These important holidays are among the biggest “shopping days” of the year in the country:

• Halloween
• Thanksgiving
  

This email highlights the spirit of Thanksgiving and asks viewers to pay it forward. It doesn’t sell anything and has no strings attached.
(Image Source)

• Cyber Monday
• Hanukkah
• Christmas Eve
• Christmas Day

(Image source)

This adorable Christmas email from Email Uplers prominently features a video recorded by “Santa”. The message is simple and lighthearted, yet genuine, and its goal was to spread cheer during the difficult 2020 holiday season. Email recipients can pass on the love (and hope) by simply sharing the message as a tweet.

• New Year’s Eve
• New Year’s Day
• Black Friday

This email starts with a punny top statement that immediately makes the recipient smile. It also shows the offers front and center, and includes a clear CTA to encourage action.
(Image source)

While you should definitely promote your brand during these holidays, you should also plan holiday email marketing for other special days (not all of which are part of the winter “holiday season”), such as:

• International Women’s Day: March 8th
• Mother’s Day: May 8th
• Father’s Day: June 19th
  
  

The picture of a father and his young daughter sets the stage beautifully for the rest of the email which encourages the subscriber to “Shop Now”, but is not too aggressive or pushy.
(Image Source)

• Independence Day: July 4th
• Labor Day: September 6th
• Sweetest Day: October 16th
• Veterans Day: November 11th
• Small Business Saturday: November 27th
• Giving Tuesday: November 30th

Of course, you don’t have to create a campaign for each of these holidays. But if a particular holiday is significant for your brand, you should definitely invest time and effort into designing a special campaign for that day.

Don’t be afraid to include unusual days in your holiday email marketing strategy. In fact, the more unusual the day, the more your emails will be remembered! Just make sure the day is relevant to your brand and to your audience. So if yours is a fried chicken brand, why not send out humorous emails to celebrate National Fried Chicken Day on July 6th? But if you are a wine brand, it’s probably not a good idea to send emails out for Chocolate Milkshake Day on September 12th! 

Once you know which holidays are relevant to your brand, build a smart holiday email schedule.

This will help you start planning in advance, giving you enough time to:

• Plan the strategy
• Build and segment your email subscriber list
• Create the design
• Choose the right templates
• Create copy
• Set up approval workflows
• Set up campaign execution in your email tool
• Set up A/B testing
• Identify relevant metrics to measure email performance

In addition, creating a schedule will allow you to think of ways to prevent email fatigue among your audience:

Should you send emails early? Will this give you a leg up on the competition, or lead to your messages being ignored?

Or should you wait to send emails until 1-2 days before the start of the holidays? Is this more likely to get subscribers’ attention, or will you be competing for their inbox with dozens of other companies who had the same idea as you?!

There’s no right or wrong answer to these questions. However, getting your timing right is essential for engaging subscribers – especially during the holidays. By creating an early schedule, you give yourself the best chance of doing so. In addition, you should leverage your email platform to experiment with:

• Send times: Optimal times within the next 24-hour period
• Batch sends: Send holiday emails to a batch of subscribers at the same time
• Send throttling: Send emails during a specific time range

Other best practices to consider when building your holiday email schedule:

• Don’t send a big wave of emails too close together
• Ramp up your campaigns to “warm” up your IP as you get closer to the holiday
• Always check that your emails don’t include “spammy” words that can affect email deliverability and affect your sender reputation, such as:

1. $$$
2. Earn $
3. Best price
4. 100% free
5. Big bucks

• Don’t purchase an email list because this will affect email deliverability. Build a list organically instead

The Importance of Audience Segmentation for Holiday Email Campaigns

In the section on email automation, we briefly alluded to sending holiday emails to the right audience at the right time. In the previous section, we discussed the “right time” part. Here, we explore the “right audience” aspect by talking about segmentation.

AirBnB does a great job of segmenting its subscribers based on their interaction history, and expressed preferences. It also includes an enticing discount and adds urgency to encourage action.

(Image Source)

As with every other kind of email campaign, you want high audience engagement with your holiday emails. And this is not possible with a generic mass email sent out to every single person on your mailing list. Rather, what you need is targeted holiday emails that resonate with the people who receive them. This is why it’s vital to create messages tailored to a recipient’s demographics, interests or purchase history. And for this, segmentation is essential.

In general, segmented campaigns get 14.37% more opens and 64.78% more clicks than campaigns that are not appropriately segmented.

If your email tool includes a segmentation feature (ideally, powered by Artificial Intelligence), use it to create relevant customer segments for each holiday email. Some tools even let you generate predictive models that indicate each subscriber’s likelihood to open your holiday emails, or click on internal links. You can even create subscriber personas (e.g. loyalist, window shopper, dormant, etc.) and design different holiday campaigns for each in order to maximize engagement and conversions during the holidays.

Other best practices to segment your audience for holiday campaigns:

• Think about what kind of information your subscribers would find most useful based on different factors, such as their age, gender, location, personal interests, and behavioral data
• You can also segment your audience for holiday campaigns based on:
   #Shopping history: Are they seasonal or year-round shoppers?
  #Coupons: Are they price-sensitive?
  #Other offers: Do they tend to ignore or take up holiday offers?
• Set up data filters or SQL queries in your email tool to create segments based on specific customer data 
• Add a link to your Preferences Management Center in welcome emails
• Start segmenting subscribers as soon as they subscribe to your brand’s emails
• Leverage progressive profiling to tweak your segmentation strategy over time
• Maintain email list hygiene so you send emails to the subscribers who are most likely to engage with your messages

Create Unique, Personalized Content

There are many other ways to include personalization in your holiday campaigns. And this is easier to do if you have already segmented your audience. Segmentation will help you add the right type and level of personalization to each email for each subscriber to increase the chances that your holiday campaign will achieve its goals.

But why does personalization matter?

To improve audience engagement with your Thanksgiving emails or New Year emails (or any holiday emails for that matter), you must connect with them at a more personal level. Moreover, personalized emails garner 6X higher conversion compared to generic messages, and emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.

You can use dynamic content to send different emails to different subscribers, depending on their actions, location, etc. This is a great way to drive traffic to your store or website through your holiday email messages.

Here are some ways to include personalization in your holiday campaigns:

• Leverage subscriber demographics, history or stated interests/preferences to include special holiday offers 
• Address each subscriber by their first name, either in the subject line or in the first line of the message body
• Create tailored copy with a unique value proposition for every subscriber
• Include real-time content with tailored product recommendations or promotions
• Use warm, human-sounding copy that incorporates the spirit of the holiday season
• Personalize the “From” field with your company name for credibility, and a sender’s name for the “human factor”

Personalization is especially important if you plan to send any of the following emails before or during the holiday period:

• Welcome or onboarding
• Cart abandonment
• Product recommendations
• Engagement or re-engagement

  

This simple email is very effective at touching base with a subscriber without being aggressive or pushy. The message is simple: “We want to stay in touch with you.”
(Image Source)

• Thank you
• Limited-time offers

So what kind of content should you create for holiday emails to clients?

1. Holiday Gift Guide

A holiday gift guide is a great way to showcase the products you want to promote for the holiday season. Ideally, create a guide that matches the subscriber’s interests. This is another way to include personalization in your holiday emails.

Useful tips to create holiday gift guides:

• Create a clean layout with different sections, so subscribers can easily select what interests them the most
• Divide featured products by price, category, subscriber interests, etc.
• Curate products around a particular theme, e.g. all red sweaters, all Christmas-themed journals, etc.
• Make the guide mobile-friendly and accessible
• Link to the guide in every holiday email message, so you can keep promoting your products throughout the holiday season

This gift guide from Tattly shows gifts by different categories, making it easier to navigate and shop. The design is minimalist, but very effective.

(Image source

2. Holiday Offers

Send exclusive offers to existing subscribers to wow them and boost your sales. Also inject early holiday messaging for early-bird shoppers. Don’t be afraid to run early specials, or use messaging that reference the coming holidays. Make the emails fun, interactive, and light-hearted.

Include discounts wherever possible, and include urgency by:

• Promoting early bird pricing for some products
• Including last order/last shipping dates
• Specifying when a particular promotion ends 
• Displaying holiday discount codes with a countdown timer
• Including solid numbers, e.g. “Get 50% off on Product X if you order by December 21st”
• Sending friendly reminders and follow-ups about deadlines or deliveries

Make sure you don’t confuse urgency with aggression. Rather, position the copy so that the subscriber can clearly see the value of taking action by a certain date (“what’s in it for me?”). You can also create holiday emails with last-minute offers or deals for shoppers who couldn’t complete their holiday shopping on time, but are still looking for good deals – especially for gifts.

3. Contests and Advent Calendars

A holiday-themed contest is a great way to promote your products, grow your email list, boost  website traffic, and increase sales. Make it fun and time-bound. Display the terms and conditions clearly, either within the email itself or on the contest landing page.

Starbucks jazzes up its regular brand colors (white/green) with a touch of Christmas red, and entices subscribers to engage with the email with a contest featuring the adorable reindeer Juniper.
(Image source)

You can also create an online advent calendar to ramp up your holiday email marketing campaign, and increase subscriber engagement throughout the holiday season. For instance, you can create daily emails reminding subscribers to click on today’s date and uncover a “freebie” inside. This freebie could be a downloadable resource (e.g. an ebook), a limited-time promotion, a discount code, a free gift on purchase, etc. You can use the calendar either to promote your products (“Best Christmas Gifts on a Budget”), or to showcase holiday-themed:

• Videos or images
• Website content (e.g. blogs)
• Quizzes
• Polls
  

Some more tips to create memorable holiday email content:

• Use fun, festive email designs or games that immediately remind people of the upcoming holiday
• Add holiday imagery and emojis to copy and subject lines
• Use power words in subject lines and copy to grab subscribers’ attention:
  
  • Free shipping
  • Order now
  • Limited-time Discount
  • Exclusive Offer
  • Open Now
  • Early Bird Discount
• Pique subscribers’ interest with holiday-themed email preview text
• Feature your offer prominently; don’t make the reader hunt for it
• Ask questions that remind people of why they’re interested in your email: “Looking for gift ideas?”, “Worried about last-minute gift shopping?”, etc.
• Use attention-grabbing subject lines
• Update the footer with holiday content, such as:
  • Links to a gift card or gift guide (if you have created one)
  • Links to your online store
  • Information about discount period
  • Other services or offerings, e.g. in-store pickup, curbside pickup, free gift wrapping, etc.

Finally, you can spread holiday cheer with unique content and information about:

• Local or online events
• Party ideas
• Donations to a particular charity
• Special announcements

4. Referrals

The holidays offer the perfect opportunity to grow your customer base.

How?

By encouraging referrals!

Entice existing subscribers with a special deal, promotion, discount or gift, if they refer a friend or purchase a gift subscription. The right incentive can be a big driver of increased sales and repeat business.

Crystal-clear referral incentives plus a play on “Thanksgiving” makes this a very effective email

(Image source)

Remember: All holiday content should be warm, genuine, and unique. Use emotional triggers where relevant, but avoid using a mopey tone. It is the holidays, after all, so you want to retain a cheerful tone without going overboard. Don’t overdo the sales pitch, avoid too many promotional emails, use catchy headlines, communicate clear value, and always honor any offers you make.

A word about A/B testing

It’s important to A/B test your holiday email campaigns before you send them out. Set up A/B testing in your email tool to test two versions of every email. Each version will have one element that’s different from the other, e.g.:

• Subject line
• CTA text
• Visuals
• Copy

Send each version to a different subset of your audience, and measure its performance. Select the “winner”, and send that as the final email. You can also test multiple elements in each email with multivariate testing to further increase the chances of meeting your email goals. A/B and multivariate testing require some time and patience, but you will find that the effort is definitely worth it.

Some More Best Practices to Create Memorable, On-brand Holiday Email Campaigns

There are plenty of other things you can do to set up amazing holiday emails that your subscribers will look forward to year after year.

1. Look Back On The Past

If you have sent holiday emails before, ask yourself: What worked well? What didn’t? Which emails performed the best, say, in terms of opens, clicks, or sales? Review the data in your email tool, and check if you can reuse the same strategy or success factor, such as:

• Subject lines
• Design or layout
• Subscriber segments
• Send times
• Colors or esthetics

Which brings us to…

2. Track Performance in the Present

If you didn’t track the performance of your holiday emails in the past, you won’t be able to reuse any successful strategies for your current campaign. Similarly, it’s important to monitor current performance based on a measurable goal, so you can gauge the ROI of your efforts on an ongoing basis. For instance, are this year’s holiday sales on target? Are they higher or lower than last year’s holiday sales?

Monitor real-time performance (your email tool should support it) to understand exactly what’s working, and what isn’t. Also important – if you find that something is not working, make sure you have a Plan B in place. But for this, you should plan your campaign early

3. Send Post-holiday Emails

For most people, the end of the holiday season rarely means the end of the holiday mood. Tap into this sentiment to grab the attention of two kinds of subscribers:

1. Those who didn’t shop during the holidays, but would like to do so now, when the madness is all but over
2. Those who did shop during the holidays, and would like to shop some more to take advantage of ongoing holiday sales or promotions

4. Pay Attention to Your Calls to Action (CTA)

A strong CTA is always important in every email, but especially so in holiday emails. It can persuade a subscriber to take a particular action, such as:

• Click Here
• Explore Now
• Shop Sale
• Grab Offer
• Refer a friend
• Sign Up
• Checkout

…all of which can move the subscriber down the sales funnel towards conversion.

However, your holiday campaigns will not perform well if the CTA:

• Does not attract subscribers’ attention
• Is not clearly visible
• Does not tell the reader exactly what to do
• Does not link to a landing page (e.g. a store page)

Get your CTA right with these tips:

• Use a button instead of hyperlinked text
• Use contrasting colors
• Place the CTA above the fold
• Use white space around it
• Keep the text short (“Buy Now”, instead of “Click Here to Buy This Product”)
• Use multiple CTAs throughout the message (either the same text or different text)
• Make sure it leads to a relevant landing page
• Fix any broken links before sending emails out 

Swiss Chalet sends an attractive email with high-quality photos of its culinary offerings, plus a visible CTA button under each offering that just says “Order Now”. The red color is also evocative of Christmas. Simple, uncomplicated, and very tempting. 

(Image source)

5. Include Deals They Can’t Say No To

If you have planned your holiday campaigns in advance, you should have enough time to design amazing deals that subscribers won’t be able to resist. Three particularly popular holiday deals are:

• Product discounts
  

(Image source)

For holiday shoppers, there’s no better combination that Santa and the words “X% off” – which this email from Rifle Paper achieves beautifully!

• Cashbacks
• Free shipping

Include a compelling offer, back it up with attractive copy and visuals, and clearly mention the key points of the offer (“20% OFF until December 31st”). Also include a CTA button leading to your online store.

Ready to Start Planning Your Holiday Email Campaigns?

Your business can always benefit from a sales lift. And the holiday season provides the perfect opportunity to do so. Follow the strategies outlined above, and you can surely create unique holiday emails to engage with customers, garner their interest and loyalty, and entice them to stick with your brand well after the holidays are over.

All set for your cash registers to go ka-ching?! Get a head-start on your 2021 holiday email campaigns  with Email Uplers. Our team can help you with your holiday campaigns, segment your audience, create on-brand copy and visuals that attract, entice and delight subscribers, and analyze each campaign and optimize the next for even better results. Capitalize on the many brand-building opportunities the holiday season has to offer – with Email Marketing and Email Uplers. 

The post Comprehensive Guide to Holiday Email Marketing: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know appeared first on Email Uplers.

Some 79% of small business owners say that email marketing is “very important” to their business strategy. At least 66% use it to promote their business and communicate with customers. And it’s well-known that email marketing yields the highest ROI of all marketing channels – $42 for every $1 spent.

These facts show that email marketing is an incredibly powerful strategy for all kinds of businesses – even small firms and startups. If implemented well, it can help your startup:

• Connect with your audience
• Acquire and retain more customers
• Boost conversions and sales
• Establish a positive reputation
• Grow your brand

But to achieve these objectives, you need the right CRM – like Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC).

If you are a startup considering email marketing, this article is for you. Read on to learn some strategies to make the most of your SFMC investment, and achieve email marketing success. 

#1: Map Out Customer Journeys

Did you know you can send many kinds of emails via SFMC Email Studio?

• Lead nurturing
• Transactional

A simple email from Zappos to help customers easily change their password

• Notifications
• Promotional
• Newsletters
• Special occasions

A well-designed email to make a subscriber feel special on their special day

• Engagement and re-engagement,

and many more.

But which email should you send to which subscriber, when and why? This greatly depends on where that person is in their journey with your startup. And you can understand this by mapping this journey along various touchpoints and channels. Here’s where SFMC Journey Builder is very useful.

Journey mapping is not only for larger companies. Even startups should map their customers’ journeys to tell a visual story of the customers’ experiences as they engage with the company along many touchpoints over time. Journey mapping is also useful for deriving actionable customer insights that can then inform your sales, marketing, or customer support initiatives.

With Journey Builder, you can:

• Craft customer personas to understand who they are
• Create maps with timelines, stories, and relevant touchpoints
• Identify where customers interact with your company as they move through the sales funnel
• Understand the quality of their experience at each touchpoint

Ultimately, Journey Builder is a great tool to create personalized, targeted emails relevant to customers at any particular stage of their journey. So if they have just signed up on your website, you can send them a Welcome email. But if they are a loyal customer, deepen the connection through personalized content, offers, or greetings for special occasions. You can even test various  journey paths to identify the best way to reach customers using SFMC Journey Builder Path Optimizer.

Automated welcome email sent out to new Oberlo subscribers

A simple “steal this deal” email – ideal for loyal, long-term customers 

Everyone loves 4th of July sales – especially Joe Fresh customers when they receive such emails!

#2: Target the Right People Through Segmentation

Most startups typically have a small audience for their emails. So should you even bother to segment them? The answer is Yes.

By segmenting your subscriber base, you can:

• Understand what your customers are looking for in your emails
• Personalize emails to impress and delight them
• Deliver better customer experiences
• Create loyal fans and brand advocates

SFMC provides numerous tools to help you segment your audience and meet the above goals:

• Data filters in Email Studio to create new segments
• SQL filters in Automation Studio>Journey Builder to target very specific segments
• Audience Builder to filter across data extensions, append data to segments, and build a single view of the customer
• Einstein AI to target subscribers based on what they will probably do next

With SFMC, you can easily create multiple segments, and send hyper-personalized emails to each subscriber in that segment:

• New users/Welcome emails
• Converted users/Upsell emails

A well-designed upsell email for existing Grammarly users

• Loyal Customers/Referral emails

A great way to garner loyalty from existing customers and get more new customers

You can even automate customer segmentation in SFMC using data extensions.

#3: Implement Email Marketing Automation

With automation, you can set up an effective email marketing program for your startup quickly,  cost-effectively, and at scale. The CRM allows you to set up specific triggers or schedules in order to:

• Automatically send emails
• Create highly-segmented mailing lists
• Maintain healthy subscriber engagement

SFMC is so flexible that you can automate many kinds of emails, such as:

• Welcome
• Abandoned cart

Simple email with high-quality photos to encourage a cart abandoner to come back

• Special occasions
• Event promotions

This email from EIQ is a great way to promote an upcoming event and boost attendance

• Product recommendations
• User-triggered emails

Automated email sent when the ordered product is dispatched. It features Nike’s easily-recognizable logo at the very top.

• Newsletters
• Unsubscribes

A simple notification from Hulu to inform the customer about subscription cancellation. Simple, personalized and timely.

SFMC email automation best practices to follow:

• Leverage built-in templates for each email type
• Customize templates with your startup’s colors, logo, custom fonts, and content blocks
• Create mobile-friendly, responsive email templates

Great layout and content blocks ensure that the message will render correctly on mobile devices

• Use compelling subject lines and CTAs
• A/B test emails before sends
• Regularly measure results to improve email performance and results (e.g. opens, click-throughs, etc.)
• Gather customer feedback through survey emails

Casper’s uncomplicated message encourages user feedback in a simple format.

#4: Enhance Customer Experiences Through Personalization and Dynamic Content

With SFMC Email Studio, you can effortlessly send hyper-personalized emails to an “audience of one” to enhance their experiences with your startup right from the get-go. Moreover, you can do this at scale, and for virtually any kind of email.

Personalization is a great way to grab subscribers’ attention. Moreover, brands using email personalization generate 17% more revenue compared to other brands. Startups also benefit from email personalization, so do incorporate this strategy into your email marketing program.

Leverage SFMC to create customer personas, understand individual preferences, and review previous purchases. You can easily do this by asking for their name, gender and interests in your website’s signup forms. Use this information to:

• Create personalized content that delights them
• Include personalization in multiple elements, such as pre-header, header, subject line, greeting, and offers
• Send out custom re-engagement emails to subscribers who haven’t opened your emails in a while
• Send engagement-boosting polls, surveys, competition invites, promo codes, etc.

Leverage SFMC Content Builder to engage with subscribers through personalization. With this tool, you can:

• Segment your email list by various parameters, e.g. gender, age, location, transactional data, etc.
• Personalize the “from” name
• Personalize different types of emails
• Keep spammy words out to improve email deliverability with Email Studio Content Detective
• Create impressive interactive emails with quizzes, maps, product carousels, etc.

Amazing interactive elements in this BBC email are sure to boost viewership numbers!

• Create dynamic content that changes in real-time based on the subscriber’s demographic or other factors

In this email, numbers and data will change and display depending on the user

https://reallygoodemails.com/emails/highlights-of-your-year-100-off-for-2017

Also take advantage of SFMC Einstein AI to further optimize your startup’s personalization strategy:

• Einstein Copy Insights to craft personalized subject lines that resonate with your audience
• Einstein Content Selection to create personalized content for each subscriber
• Einstein Send Time Optimization to optimize send times and volumes

#5: Leverage Analytics to Improve Email Marketing Performance

Ideally, you should test all campaigns before sends. For this, you can perform A/B testing to compare different versions of an email and leverage Einstein Engagement Scoring to assess how each subscriber reacts to your emails.

SFMC also provides many metrics, dashboards, and reports, so your startup can gauge email performance and take the right steps if there are gaps. You can test multiple metrics, including: 

• Open rates
• Click-through rates
• Conversions
• Bounces
• Spam complaints

With real-time tracking and graphical reporting, you can also perform detailed campaign analyses to understand whether your subscribers are clicking on your emails more (or less) than the industry average, which content or design pieces they engage with the most, and which links or buttons do better than others.

Wrap Up

For startups looking to build a captive audience and grow their nascent brand, email marketing can be hugely valuable. It’s easy to implement, scalable, and does not cost a bomb. Further, with a full-featured CRM like SFMC, you can send the right email to the right person at the right time to grab their attention and garner their loyalty.

The Email Uplers team has worked with startups worldwide to set up successful email marketing programs. Tell us how we can help your startup by clicking here.

The post 5 Powerful SFMC Email Marketing Strategies for Startups appeared first on Email Uplers.

If you’re a B2B business, the process of marketing, while highly lucrative, can also be fraught with complexities. For one, you have to identify your audience very precisely. Also, this target market may often be a narrow slice compared to the potential audience of a B2C firm. A further challenge is that business readers are often juggling too many things; the result: B2B emails have traditionally suffered from a lower open rate. 

Among the many distribution channels you can use profitably for your B2B marketing, email still holds good as a lead generation tool. According to the 11th Annual Content Marketing Survey, 87% of B2B marketers prefer email for organic content marketing, only behind social media platforms. 

Image Source

And why not? Your emails, as a B2B business, are a crucial element and the easiest way to reach your target audience. 

But with the plethora of emails that an average office worker sees in a day, your emails have to do more than just mark your existence. They actually need to start and build a conversation with your leads and convert them. So, what can you do to make sure your B2B emails deliver bang for the buck and amp up your ROI?

4 Ways You Can Leverage Your CRM For Your B2B Emails

There are certain elements that make B2B email marketing distinctly different from the B2C strategy. And there are a few commonalities, too. Regardless, you will stand in good stead only with a clear delineation of your B2B marketing strategy. Considering it a unique game, we list below certain key features you have to keep an eye out for to ensure you aren’t shooting in the dark. We are also providing you with a few tips alongside on how you can bank on your CRM to ensure these B2B email marketing goals are met.

#1. Identifying Stage In Sales Funnel

Consider the typical audience you’d be marketing to as a B2B business. The average subscriber or lead in a business context will need a lot of convincing to buy into your brand and stick with it long term. Therefore, the persuasion tactics you need to integrate with your email marketing will be markedly different from anything you can use for B2C or other scenarios. 

Essentially, your brand pitch and other content distribution would have to be spread over an extended duration with a longer series of emails to accommodate these long buying cycles. Among other things, you’d need precise event triggers identified and geared towards successful lead nurturing. At every step, your email marketing campaign would have to tap into your CRM and sync up with the sales stage your subscriber is at. 

Your CRM platform can help you precisely track the record of their engagement with your firm and the triggers that will apply to each contact based on their unique needs, purchasing history, etc. So, ensure you’re keeping a data (demographic and activity) model for every customer and tracking their buyer journey.

#2. Mapping Buyer Personas

A buyer persona, as you’d know, is a representation of a potential buyer or a segment of your target market, comprising a summary of their unique characteristics, criteria, and felt concerns and needs that will effectively direct them towards your business or brand.  Now, more than ever, in a crowded market of suppliers, B2B buyer personas are an integral part of the marketer’s toolkit. Apart from the usual data points such as age, needs, and goals, a B2B email marketer also needs to track leads’ existing, preferred suppliers and any pain points that would initiate a switch to your brand.

Most importantly, as a B2B marketer, you have to assess your subscriber’s decision-making capacity. These insights are critical to prevent you from wasting resources trying to advertise and sell to the wrong persons. The buyer personas are best compiled when built up based on customer data recorded in real-time. As underlined in the previous point, your CRM is an invaluable bank of these data points and should help you effortlessly sculpt buyer personas.

Apart from tracking behavioral trends in your CRM, you need to consistently update your web sign-up forms and exit surveys to record customer data accurately. These data sets can then guide your email marketing campaigns, including onboarding and overall automation efforts to make sure you’re targeting your highest-quality leads. Make sure your CRM has neatly segmented subscriber lists, based on buyer personas, with appropriate tags. One other thing to keep an eye out for: ‘negative personas’, to ensure those leads with too little potential are kept out of further processing in the funnel.

#3. Deciding The Kind Of Content And Personalizing Emails

To begin with, your B2B email marketing needs to resonate with an appropriate tone of being a solution-provider. Your first and every email has to make the right impression and deliver on expectations to foster lasting relationships. You can set precisely defined B2B email marketing benchmarks to guide you in this process. Some of these benchmarks, such as conversion rates, can be drawn from your CRM based on an individual customer or segment’s behavioral patterns, i.e., the buyer persona.

This leads us to the actual content of an email. Your content, more specifically in B2B marketing, needs to be entirely targeted. Each email’s content needs to be drawn up in relation to the buyer personas you have created beforehand. The content also needs to be differentiated based on your leads’ interest levels. By personalizing the timing and other communication preferences, you stand a greater chance of your business reader actually taking an interest in what your brand has to say and taking the desired action. You can record these opt-ins through your CRM with a streamlined and short sign-up form.

These sign-up forms will also help you target your content towards different persons/levels of the Decision Making Unit (DMU), which forms a part of every B2B target audience. Based on their unique position in the DMU, each reader will take a unique perspective to your content. Therefore, one of the easiest ways to convert your subscribers and boost your email ROI is to ensure your best email messages speak to each reader and address unique pain points. For this, you have to track your lead’s job title through your CRM platform and then group similar titles in a custom field to target your email campaigns.

You also have to note that research shows B2B subscribers have a greater interest in receiving content-centric emails with relevant and engaging information than those that are simply promotional. You should also consider the different kinds of content your email readers would be interested in based on their buying cycle. To name a few through the different stages, you need to integrate the following content through CRM automation:
a. Trends and 101-guides
b. Solutions coverage and comparisons supplemented with suitable assessments
c. How-to-buy guides and benchmark demonstrations with case studies

#4. Deciding The Kind Of Content And Personalizing Emails

Tracking the buying cycle and the stage of buyer journey through your CRM offers an additional advantage: follow-up. Based on their CTR and the actions they have taken thus far, your B2B lead can be targeted with additional follow-up emails. For example, if they have subscribed to a video channel or downloaded an industry whitepaper or ebook, they are clearly evincing interest in a particular topic. You can then follow up and persuade them to convert on a higher-value transaction up the funnel.

These follow-ups can also be actualized through other mediums. According to Jill LeMaire Redo, VP of Digital Strategy and Insights at Epsilon: “It is the coordination and integration of all marketing communication tools, avenues, and functions into a seamless program that maximizes the impact on consumers while minimizing costs.” In other words, you have to implement marketing automation through multiple channels on your CRM or omnichannel marketing. You can better target your customers through the possible varied mediums by recording their preferences on your CRM.

Lastly, there are two important things to do while implementing follow-ups for your B2B email marketing. 

1. Firstly, validate your emails. According to an Email Tool Tester’s study, 16% of all B2B emails never land up in the recipient’s inbox, one of the reasons being bounced emails. An effective way to tackle this is to integrate a good email cleaning tool with your CRM-email marketing software. This will help enhance your campaigns’ effectiveness and boost your sender reputation. 
2. Second, limit your email campaign drip to only what’s necessary to avoid ‘inbox fatigue’. Keep your messaging to point, and know when to pivot on your strategy.

Wrapping Up

So, there you have it: four solid tips to smartly amplify your CRM integration and automation for your B2B email marketing strategy. The results will not only make a case for continued resource investment but, more importantly, boost the ROI at the end of the day. By implementing these action points consistently across your campaigns, you should see an uptick in every one of your relevant metrics. What’s more, you can effectively actualize your end goal: connecting with your target business audience and converting them for lasting relationships and larger returns.

Want additional help to leverage CRM and optimize your B2B email marketing? Reach out to us.

The post How to Use Your CRM to Boost the ROI for Your B2B Email Marketing appeared first on Email Uplers.

We all know the importance of creating a strong digital presence. A large part of this is working to create engaging emails and offers that have the potential to go viral. The success of your marketing initiatives depends greatly on how well you are able to connect with your email recipients. Interactive emails help to achieve engagement, connect with prospects, and thus boost your email campaign performance. This is why it is so important to have expert email developers for interactive emails on your team.

What is an Interactive Email?

An interactive email is an email that utilizes a variety of different features to draw interest and encourage your recipients to install your app, purchase your product, sign up for your service, or just engage with your email. 

The interactive elements may include GIF animation, Flip and Scratch effects, Countdown timers, Games, Sliders, among others. These elements make the emails more fun and interesting.

For example, consider the following interactive email from EmailMonks that delivers a mini-game to its readers. Not only does gamification increase engagement multiple-fold, but it also keeps the festive spirit alive, ensuring that readers are more likely to remember the brand.

An interactive email will typically include a call-to-action button or link that allows the user to engage with the content in the email in more detail. For instance, they can learn more about a new product or sign up for a trial membership, or just enter the next level of the game! This is why it’s important that you have expert developers on your side who understand how to create a flawless and compelling design.

If you don’t have a good grasp of what goes into creating interactive emails, here are some reasons why you may want to bring in the experts:

#1 – Developing a Professional and Attractive Interactive Email Design

If your email recipients feel that your email doesn’t offer them anything new, or if it’s simply too dense, then you’ll lose their attention and interest. That is why having a great interactive email design to catch the eye of these customers is so important.

When you work with an expert, you are able to get a more professional looking and perfect interactive email design that your potential customers will want to engage with. A good design coded to perfection can make all the difference in whether or not someone is going to engage with your interactive email.

Few best practices of great interactive email design that an expert can help you with include:

• Being concise with every visual element.
• Having the best possible layout of all elements in the interactive email.
• Including elements of personalization.
• Including unique visual elements.
• Experimenting with and optimizing the CTAs.
• A/B testing all design elements and interactivity.
• Including an email signature design.

#2 – Executing Impeccable Email Coding and Testing

Coding interactive emails is no easy feat.

So much so that it can even be a month long tirade at times!

Interactive emails often have a tendency to misalign in stacking from desktop to mobile versions. This often results in broken emails, such that they can directly affect the ROI of your interactive email campaigns.

On the other hand, not testing your interactive emails can negatively affect your key metrics such as click rates, among other factors. Ultimately, your overall branding suffers. Here are some reasons why you need to hire an expert email developer when it comes to your interactive email campaigns:

• It is much easier to get broken email designs than you may realize.
• Sending out an interactive email with broken links or incorrect information is completely avoidable if you design your emails correctly.
• Embarrassing typos and poor grammatical errors can cost you more in interactive emails since the entire user experience is riding on the copy.
• Interactive emails commonly have multiple important images to include when compared to everyday emails, which makes robust testing and expert opinion even more crucial.

#3 – Imparting Mobile Responsiveness To Interactive Emails

With mobile usage on the rise, you need to ensure you’re able to send emails that will work on a variety of screen sizes. If your interactive email isn’t responsive, recipients will get an error when trying to engage with it. And you definitely want your emails to be delivered in the way that you intend them to. If they resize at will, the interactivity may not appear as expected, making your user experience go down the drain.

It is crucial to optimize your interactive emails for mobile because:

• Mobile users drive at least half the traffic of all opened emails.
• They produce much higher conversion rates than desktop users.
• Emails that render incorrectly on mobile devices may be deleted within 3 seconds.

Hence, hiring an experienced email developer becomes paramount since he/she can take care of the nuances of the trade such as:

• Paying attention to pretext headers.
• Always developing and using a responsive design for interactive emails.
• Keeping the text and design elements minimalistic for mobile accessibility.
• Being extra cautious and selective with images and videos.
• Using clear CTAs that render correctly on varying screen sizes.
• Optimizing the landing pages for maximum conversions.
• Rigorously testing the interactive elements in the email on different browsers and devices.

#4 – Integrating and Optimizing Your Emails

In the digital age, email marketing is no longer enough. With so many tools available for marketers to utilize and promote brands online, why not integrate your interactive emails with these? By optimizing this strategy for every subscriber you have on your list, you can ensure that each one of them receives a highly tailored message from what they want or need at any given time.

The expert will ensure everything is working in a way that is going to make your messages more effective. This can have profound benefits for your interactive email campaigns:

• You can deliver hyper-relevant content to every subscriber such that they actually start looking forward to your emails.
• There are more opportunities for analytics across multiple platforms due to better integration potential.
• Over time, you build better relationships with your audience since your interactive emails are more personalized.
• It is easier to realize much better ROI than other social media channels.

#5 – Managing Interactivity Support of Various Email Clients

Since interactive emails are accompanied by complex designs and coding paradigms, they are not supported by all email clients. This presents certain unique challenges for marketers, ones that they might not have experienced before. For example, your interactive email designers/developers might need to code fallbacks for those recipients who are using unsupported email clients.

You may have realized by now that if done wrong, interactive emails are not as easily measured as other generic email campaigns. You might need to use holistic email client usage data and manage every possible ‘failure’ scenario to arrive at the true metrics.

Thus, there is a definite need to hire an expert interactive email developer, one that has the experience and skill to add additional open tracking pixels that can track all required micro-interactions.

When Do You Need To Hire An Email Expert?

There are various components to consider when deciding whether or not it’s time to bring in the experts for creating interactive emails. Here are some questions to help you decide:

• How many users do you send to?
• Do these users act on your emails as anticipated?
• What is the revenue per user that your current or previous email efforts have been yielding?
• Are there any reporting tools in place to help you analyze and improve upon potential problems, such as spam complaints?
• What are some of your biggest concerns with respect to creating interactive emails?
• In general, how effective are your current email efforts?
• What steps have been taken to improve email effectiveness in the past?
• How is your current marketing budget allocated and how does it compare to budget allocations of other companies in similar niches or industries? Are you satisfied with the results?
• How much have you spent on creating interactive emails in the past?
• Are you looking at using your current budget more effectively or are you looking to expand?  Is there a specific goal that is driving your efforts?
• If we’re talking about six months or even a year from now, how do you envision your email marketing efforts and return on investment will be?

If you have been unable to answer a majority of these questions, now might be the time to look into ways to improve your interactions with customers. You can start by talking to email experts and learning more about interactive emails.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is clear that you need to have an expert email developer to create interactive emails. Not only can they help with the content, but also with finding the best images and videos, a professional and attractive design, sending mail faster and more effectively, making sure customers view your interactive emails just the way you want them to and keep engaging with your emails.

The post 5 Reasons Why You Need to Hire Expert Email Developers for Interactive Emails appeared first on Email Uplers.

It’s no secret that the world has gone digital. We shop, order food, and even work online. And now, the future is here, and we can host remote events. If you run a business, virtual events can be invaluable. 

But what kind of companies would benefit from running a virtual event?

It could be a brand looking to showcase products to secure new trade customers. Or it could be a large organization that wants to connect a team at an international conference. It could even be an agency running a job fair or a public relations firm promoting new releases from clients.

No matter what type of event you’re hosting, the secret to success is making new connections. 

The question is, how do you follow up with leads from a virtual event? Read on to find out.

1. Turn attendees into leads by making the virtual event worthwhile

These days, business is fast-paced, and your attendees will only have a limited attention span. If your event is dull or uninformative, any potential leads may quickly disappear.

On the other hand, your leads may even track you down for more information if your event is engaging. This makes the task of following up much easier.

StuDocu recommends keeping sessions short and sweet to create engaging virtual events, limiting each session to 15 or 20-minute blocks. “Use short, five-minute interviews to break up the monotony of droning hour-long keynotes. Add interactive questions and answers from the audience to improve engagement and deliver on authenticity.” 

Consider securing special guest speakers, such as a local personality or a leader in your company. You want guests to talk about your event and share their experiences with others. This could provide you with leads that weren’t even there on the day.

Make sure you take the time to plan the event properly. Disorganized events can cost time and money, and you could lose your one chance to wow attendees and turn them into leads.

Following up on your leads from the event would be part of the final closing process.

2. Give your attendees a value-add

To encourage participation and attendance, you may want to give your invited guests an incentive. For example, if you run a stationery brand, you could offer attendees a free sample pack as a thank you.

The catch is that you only send them the stationery once the event has finished. Not only does it tempt them to attend, but it also opens the door for you to chat about business afterward. 

Creating buzz before your virtual event and building relationships early can help your post-event networking efforts.

Find ways for your attendees to connect with you and other attendees afterward. For example, you can send feedback emails or have a dedicated event Facebook page where your guests can share feedback and view replays of their favorite sessions. Or to create even more engagement with attendees, you obtain their feedback using Instagram poll questions.

3. Use the right software and tick all the boxes

Choosing the right platforms will help you communicate with leads both during and after the event. 

Webinar software can be used to hold virtual question-and-answer sessions. When you connect individuals in the moment, following up with leads afterward will feel natural. 

The webinar tools you choose will depend on the type of event you are running and the features you need. This guide to the best webinar software compares some of those different solutions side-by-side.

Once the webinar is finished, you can follow up with your guests by sending them additional resources or a copy of the video. 

(Image Source)

4. Connect your attendees to the right people

If you’re hosting a large event, you’ll want to connect your leads to the right people. You can do this by hosting different sessions with the opportunity for questions and comments. 

If it’s a job fair, the goal is to connect employers and candidates. You could follow up by asking job seekers to upload a resume that you can send to a specific employer. 

As the go-between, you can then check in with both parties to determine whether they found what they were looking for. 

For those running B2B events, think about services the attending businesses may need. For example, they may want to outsource time-consuming roles such as HR and accounting. 

You can also invite industry experts to offer advice, tips, and resources for success. 

When you follow up with leads, you can remind them of what they learned and who they spoke to. For smaller events, you can send a pack in the mail with business cards from participating PEOs.

(Image Source)

5. Send personalized emails

So, you’ve planned your event and made sure you’re giving your attendees a well-planned value-added experience. If you have access to tracking and statistics, you can view logins, attendance, and potentially chat transcripts and downloads.

This information will be useful to understand what worked and what didn’t. It’ll also help you create personalized follow-ups.  

We know that generic emails don’t work. At best, a prospect will read it and delete it. At worst, your email will end up spending eternity trapped in a spam filter.

Reply suggests you identify and meet the needs of your leads as part of the sales development process. It said, “rather than trying to use email blasts with zero targeting, help your SDRs (sales development representatives) use what they’ve learned about your ideal customers to send relevant messages that are personalized to them and their needs.” 

If you can, try to personally address all communication and make mention of a session they attended or a conversation you may have had.

(Image Source)

6. Approach them at the right time

Don’t let too much time pass before contacting your leads. Even highly targeted emails and phone calls will be a waste if the event isn’t fresh in their minds. They will have moved onto other things.

The perfect time to follow up with your leads is within the first 24 hours. You can have your responses ready to go and take advantage of the buzz your event created.

Depending on how many visitors attended, you may be able to sort your leads into different categories. For example, a hot lead may get an immediate follow-up phone call, while a warm lead may get a personalized email the next day.

When sending emails, be sure to include a call to action (CTA). What can they do next, or where can they find more information? 

You may want to use integrations such as a “buy now” button or a survey for your CTA. Be prepared to give a quote or estimate if your lead circles back with interest.

Following up with your leads after a virtual event

Virtual events and physical events are similar, but the advantage of going digital is that you get access to stats, instant sign-ups, and data tracking. 

You can use this information to target leads and give them a personalized follow-up message. 

Of course, your leads will want to know you have something to offer. You should plan your events carefully, use the right software, and give them a value-add. Don’t forget to include interactive webinars and help them connect to the right industry professionals.

When you have a smooth, informative event, following up with leads will be a breeze. They may even approach you themselves.

The post 6 ways to follow up with your leads from a virtual event appeared first on Email Uplers.

Our favorite CRM leader Salesforce has recently released its much-anticipated August ‘21 release for its marketing cloud. SFMC has got some interesting and exciting features added to it that will help marketers more than ever before. Also, marketers can use these features to deliver robust, engaging, and personalized email campaigns to their customers.

This blog will walk you through these features and how they will help you. 

The next SFMC release, the final one of the year 2021 is scheduled for October – anywhere between October 16-23. For now, let’s dive in to find out what’s new in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud August ‘21 release. 

#1 Datorama Insights for Slack

In the August 2021 release, Salesforce has made it easier to use Slack to collaborate and act on your marketing analytics. Now, you can increase transparency across your business on marketing analytics insights through Slack. 

Also, this integration of Datorama and Slack allows you to send insights to Slack from your dashboards directly. Furthermore, you can share visualizations with your stakeholders via automated Slack actions. 

Benefits –

1. This feature will allow you to align your efforts with data-driven decision-making. You can connect all your data in Datorama and visualize insights. Also, directly share these insights with your teammates from Datorama dashboards to Slack. 
2. You now have the ability to optimize your campaigns faster. This enhancement in SFMC will allow you to set up automated alerts in Datorama to send notification updates about campaign KPIs and insights. Thus, you can increase engagement in real-time. 
3. This feature also allows you to seamlessly share marketing analytics with your teams as well as stakeholders. Thus, you can use cross-team collaboration to improve the performance needed to meet the business goals.

This feature is available for all existing and new Datorama customers.

#2 Datorama Reports for Marketing Cloud Enhancements

With this feature, Corporate, Enterprise, and Pro customers can now analyze their campaign performance with Datorama Reports for Marketing Cloud. You can view and share visual dashboards or create customized reports as per your needs. Also, with low/no-code Queries, you can easily explore your data in Datorama Reports- Advanced. 

Benefits –

1. With this feature, you have all-new Analytics for Marketing Cloud. Also, you get visual, shareable, and customizable campaign reporting.
2. Data exploration has now become easy with SQL-free data exploration. 
3. You can use your data the way you like. Use the data of your next email marketing campaign in SFMC to seek insights, troubleshoot, or export to external systems. 

Datorama Reports for Marketing Cloud comes with Corporate, Enterprise, and Pro Marketing Cloud editions. 

#3 Interaction Studio: Experience Cloud Integration

This enhancement in SFMC will help you deliver even better personalized digital experiences! You can combine Interaction studio’s powerful personalization and interaction management tools with that of sites and experiences of Salesforce Experience Cloud. 

Benefits –

1. Deliver the best customer experiences with data-driven sites, portals, and mobile applications that are personalized for every individual’s intent.
2. Also, you can break down silos and content to personalize a consistent journey for your customers. 
3. Furthermore, you can build the best digital experiences by personalizing across your website and apps. You can then connect them with offline moments to continue delivering a consistent customer experience. 

This feature is available for all Interaction Studio customers in Growth and Premium editions.

#4 Wait Until Push Engagement- Journey Builder Activity

This is a new feature for mobile push notifications. It is the wait until activity for Journey Builder but for push notifications. Earlier, marketers had to create queries and decision splits to determine whether a user opened a push notification or not. But, with this latest enhancement in SFMC, marketers can drag the activity onto the journey builder canvas and listen for open events in real-time.

Furthermore, these events can orchestrate customized experiences for customers who don’t take a specific action within a defined period. 

Benefits –

1. React in real-time based on whether the contact opens your push notification within a defined time frame or not.
2. It allows marketers to set a defined period for the action to take place. If the engagement doesn’t occur in that time frame, send the contact down an alert path. 
3. Personalize customer experience. Wish them on their birthday, congratulate them on new loyalty levels, remind them about abandoned cart items.

If you are willing to know more about how to work with SFMC Journey Builder, then click here.

This feature is free for Corporate and Enterprise editions. Also, likely to be Generally Available by mid-September. 

#5 Distributed Marketing: CPI for Bulk Sends

It is the new enhanced distributed marketing bulk sends with Custom Personalization. This enables you to create custom plugin interactions. For instance, You can create a custom subject line that includes a contact’s title, first and last name by creating and registering Custom Plugin Interaction (CPI).

Benefits –

1. It allows you to add custom personalization interaction tabs for more complex use cases such as carbon copying or using an alternate email address. Also, for better performance, use not more than 10 custom interaction tabs with no more than 10 fields each. 

This feature is available to all customers who have distributed marketing version 233 or later installed.

#6 Datorama: Scenario Planning for Media Planning Center

You can now optimize budget allocations with scenario planning and increase your ROI from your media plans by comparing budget scenarios and forecasting performance. 

Benefits –

1. This feature in SFMC allows you to use advanced statistical methods to forecast performance, compare scenarios, and make decisions based on data. 
2. Forecast by using different methods driven by AI. Also, you can easily switch between different forecasting calculations, including ones built using Einstein Marketing Insights.
3. Furthermore, you can now make informed decisions with the help of this enhancement. It allows you to understand the expected accuracy of forecasts with accuracy calculations powered by Einstein. 

It is available for any Datorama edition with the MPC or MIO add-on. 

Wrap Up

This was the most interesting and much-awaited Marketing Cloud release of the year so far. These features are going to help marketing cloud specialists in delivering cross-channel marketing campaigns to their customers. Also, it will be interesting to see what’s lined up for the last SFMC release of the year in October. Stay tuned with us to know about the latest developments in and around Salesforce Marketing Cloud. 

If you need help implementing these features or want to know how to make the most out of them, you can get in touch with our team of SFMC specialists. 

The post Salesforce Marketing Cloud August ’21 Release – Key Highlights appeared first on Email Uplers.

Of course, acquiring new customers is central to growing your business. But you know what’s equally important? Nurturing your existing customers. Marketers these days enjoy the luxury of having abundant customer data at their fingertips. As a result, they are constantly scratching their heads to figure out the best possible way to put it to use. Here’s where milestone emails come into the picture.

What Are Milestone Emails?

Milestone emails are behavior-based emails that are sent automatically to existing users on specific occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries, or just about any other significant milestone. Primarily, milestone email campaigns are designed to remind your customers of the value they’re deriving from your business and how your company makes a difference in their lives. Now, this serves two vital purposes- firstly, it incentivizes your consumers to continue using and endorsing your product or service, and secondly (and more importantly), it makes your brand appear more friendly and personable, paving the way for more word-of-mouth marketing (read referrals) in the process.

Since these emails are extremely personalized, they help in boosting click-through and conversion rates. Although milestone emails were traditionally the prerogative of subscription-based companies, nowadays, they have come to be associated with any brand that is offering a recurrent product or service to its consumers. However, setting up a milestone campaign just for the sake of having one is not going to do your business any good. You must have clear, predefined business goals in mind before you sit down to craft one. Ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve through these emails.

Are you looking to:

• Enhance customer engagement? 
• Increase online traffic? 
• Drive more conversions? 

Answers to these questions will enable you to gain clarity regarding your overall goals and empower you to curate incredibly well-thought-out milestone campaigns. 

Milestone emails come in many shapes and forms. In this article, we’re going to explore these different categories by looking at how the best in the business do it. Hope you have your snorkels on, cause we’re going to dive deep!

Birthday Emails

If you’re new to the world of milestone emails, then birthday emails are an excellent starting point. The only data you need to dispatch these emails are your customers’ dates of births, information that is not at all difficult to obtain. It is something that you can collect either at the time of account creation or while they subscribe to your newsletter. But, don’t just send a run-of-the-mill birthday email. Personalize it, add a thoughtful and well-written message, and make it festive! Let your reader know that you’re equally stoked about their special day as they are. Oh, and do not forget to include a special offer or discount. After all, what’s better than a birthday treat, right? 

Pro tip: If you do not have any decent offer up your sleeve, you can just as well provide them with free shipping for the day. The idea is to do away with any hindrances that might possibly discourage them from placing an order with you on or around their birthday. At the end of the day, no gesture is too big or small; it’s the thought that counts.

Here are a few examples of birthday emails from brands that absolutely hit it out of the park.

# St. Ives:

Source

Let’s start proceedings on a simple note. The bold colors and large imagery of this birthday email from St. Ives make it fun, festive, and playful. But what really works in its favor is its disarming simplicity- A short and sweet message coupled with a clever CTA. Remember, when in doubt, always keep it simple. 

#Intuit:

Source

Moving on to some slightly more elaborate things, we have this neatly crafted email from Intuit Mint. The strength of this email lies in its cleverly written body. While the language used is no doubt thoughtful and warm, at the same time, it subtly calls the attention of the recipient to the many ways in which the company has added value to their lives.

#Puma:

Source

This milestone email from Puma checks all the boxes of a good birthday email- crisp copy, special offer, and no clutter. If there’s one trick that they missed here, it’s probably not personalizing their subject line (which reads: “Happy birthday to you!) and their content. But, from their perspective, they probably counted on the discount code to compensate for that. Not a bad call considering that the majority of people would instead prefer a birthday treat over a personalized birthday wish (right?).

#Pizza Hut:

Source

Pizza Hut makes use of the classic “birthday wish” trope to come up with this delightful birthday email. What really stands out in this email is its content hierarchy. The elements have been arranged so that one can’t resist but scroll down to the CTA once they open the email. Free cinnamon sticks are, of course, the icing on the cake.

While birthday emails are typically customer-oriented, in some cases, the brands send out emails on their own birthdays as well. Guess what? They are equally excellent. Take a look.

#Care/of:

Source

Care/of has used their birthday email to encapsulate their one-year-old journey and the milestones they have bagged in the process. It is informative, reflective, and has a touch of humor as well. Pretty neat, if you ask us.

#Casper:

Source

Casper celebrates its 5th birthday with this effective birthday email that offers its new and old users alike a discount of 10%. What better way to celebrate a birthday than to share joy with your customers.

Anniversaries

No matter the nature of the relationship, inter-personal or brand-customer, anniversaries are always special. For brands, an anniversary is representative of the fact that a certain individual liked their products or services enough to remain associated with them for a period of one whole year (at the very list) since their subscription. Frankly, there’s no greater form of validation for them than that. Therefore, you should use every inch of your anniversary emails to let your customers know how grateful you are for their loyalty.

Looking for some inspiration? We got you.

#Wemo:

Source

Short, crisp, and to-the-point, Wemo’s anniversary email wishes its users while offering them with a unique personal code to ensure that their loyalty remains unwavering in the times to follow as well.

#Grammarly:

Source

#A Book Apart:

Source

Sometimes, brands use their anniversary emails to highlight customer data in the form of milestones. This clever tactic helps them paint an accurate picture of their involvement in their users’ lives. For example, take a look at this milestone email from Uber.   

Source

Year-In-Review Emails

Thanks to Spotify, customer’s year in review has really started to catch people’s imagination these days. A year-in-review email is a simple yet effective method for brands to show users how they have made use of their product or service over the course of a single year. Data doesn’t have any bias, so the insights might not always be relevant or exciting. Here’s where the onus shifts on brands to glean only those nuggets of granular data which they’re sure will grab the attention of their customers. 

Let’s take a look at some examples.

#Spotify:

Source

#Resy:

Source

#MileIQ:

Source 

#Lyft:

Source

#Eventbrite:

Source

Wrapping It Up

In the course of delivering personalized experiences, brands occasionally happen to get too close for comfort. This is where milestone emails become all the more crucial. Sure, they’re crafted out of customer and usage data, but how they’re composed makes them insightful to readers rather than intrusive. Therefore, milestone emails are not just a great way of interacting with your customers but also a compelling way of informing them that you care deeply about their patronage and endorsement. 

The post Taking Personalized Experiences To The Next Level with Milestone Emails appeared first on Email Uplers.

So, you have decided to hire a Mailchimp expert to ramp up your email marketing strategy? With over 12 million customers turning to the popular marketing automation platform for their email needs alone, we’d say this is a great bandwagon to jump onto in 2021.

You may be doing this for a variety of reasons. It could be, for instance, for more seamless integrations and campaign management. Or, you might be seeking smooth automation so you can focus on other aspects of your email marketing game. You might also be a longtime adopter of this all-in-one marketing platform who’s looking solely for the development of high-quality, compatible email templates. 

So, to begin with, identify your objectives and goals for taking to this much-coveted marketing platform.

Marking And Mapping Mailchimp Expertise

Mailchimp migration can be best achieved by hiring a professional or an entire team of specialists. To optimize the expertise, there are certain qualifications and know-how you must keep an eye out for. By checking the following lists off (based on the kind of Mailchimp expert you are looking for) against the experts’ profiles, you’ll definitely stand a better chance of success with this uber-efficient integrated marketing tool.

We are also listing a few points that you, as the hiring brand or agency, must bear in mind and take the lead in actualizing.

Mailchimp Template Developer

# Things They Must Be Good At

• Well-versed with design elements to create effective templates. Hierarchy/prominence of different content elements, contextual use of CTAs, and color theory are some of the things they must be good at juggling.
• Willing to take inspiration from different sources. Whether it is from specific designers’ output or curated collections, an awareness of trends is important to constantly improve and, more importantly, eliminate any accidental plagiarism.
• Ability to customize copy to particular needs. The campaign goals and the audience should always dictate the content’s form and tone.
• Detailing and optimizing layout hierarchy. They must be able to take a call on the what and how of CTAs, the text formatting, image placement, and organization of the email header, body, CTA, and email footer.
• Optimizing layouts for varied email clients and proficiency in HTML as well as Mailchimp’s email template languages.
• Conversant with professional tools, apart from the built-in editor, to augment template quality at every turn. These would include Adobe Photoshop, Sketch, etc.
  

  # The Checklist For You

• Figure out the end goals for each campaign and individual email. Know what your audience is interested in receiving in their inbox and map your overarching template strategy accordingly.
• Segment your subscriber lists for more precise targeting.
• Identify the kind of campaign (welcoming, automation, seasonal, etc.) you need to execute. Also, take a call between regular and trigger-based campaigns.
  

  Mailchimp Campaign Manager

  # Things They Must Be Good At

• Defining and augmenting the audience. A knowledge to leverage Mailchimp’s sign-up forms and unique fields will stand them in good stead.
• Charting and optimizing the campaign strategy to be audience-targeted by curating the latest trends and best practices. It is important to honor and reward subscribers frequently, apart from actively injecting the brand personality.
• Deciding the most optimal frequency and timing of campaigns. They will have to make a schedule and stick to it with a content calendar and organized folders that can easily be imported into Mailchimp.
• Be proficient in executing A/B testing across email clients and ISPs. According to research by Mailchimp’s data science team, the use of A/B or multivariate testing for campaigns, with revenue as the test metric, augments revenue by 20% for ecommerce businesses in comparison to a standard campaign.
  

  # The Checklist For You

• Ensure compliance with Mailchimp’s terms of use to avoid spam filters and firewalls.
• Chart the roadmap for measurement of campaign performance.
• Design the testing strategy.
• Ensure your campaigns connect with the intended audience. Mailchimp’s automation features are key in this regard to execute precisely targeted campaigns.
  

  Mailchimp Automation Expert

  # Things They Must Be Good At

  • Setting up complex workflows. They have to be familiar with the different automation series offered by Mailchimp and be capable of customizing them from scratch to align with unique business needs.
  • Complete knowledge of the many classic automation types that Mailchimp offers with built-in triggers for common activities. This would include the know-how to halt or edit the settings of an active automation.
  • Adept at setting up triggers based on the audience, the individual campaign objectives, and overall marketing goals.
  • Ability to review workflow progress and pivot, including setting up the appropriate delays and queues.
  • Measuring the automation strategy’s performance by tracking the Campaigns page in your Mailchimp account. This will provide an overview of each classic automation executed, including the sending status and performance trends.
    

    # The Checklist For You

  • Set your goals for automation. If you’re building a drip campaign, be specific about what actions you want people to take in order to design triggers perfectly.
  • Define and communicate the roles of team members that are involved or that may change when initiating the automation.
  • Visualize the workflow you want to achieve in a cogent and clear format. Putting it down as a visual representation is sure to help.
    

    Mailchimp Data Integration And Migration Specialist

    # Things They Must Be Good At

    • Know-how to access Mailchimp’s suite of ecommerce features, such as abandoned cart and product retargeting emails, promo codes, etc.
    • Expertise to use synced data in varied ways. For example, integrating data-driven, personalized recommendations in email marketing campaigns, using pre-built ecommerce segments to target different customer bases, and turning on tracking for campaigns and automations to record customer actions and measure ROI.
    • Ability to connect custom coded websites with the marketing platform. In cases where your platform isn’t listed among the 250-plus available integrations, the expert would need to add Mailchimp’s site code to your website’s HTML. You can then use pop-up forms and Google remarketing ads, albeit this method doesn’t provide support for Mailchimp’s native ecommerce tools. 

    # The Checklist For You

    • Devise an overall strategy to leverage the most relevant Mailchimp integrations for your campaign tracking and metric measurement.
    • Map and identify scenarios to leverage the Mailchimp marketing API and drive effective campaign management and analytics.

    Some Tips to Hire The Best Mailchimp Experts 

    1. Pinpoint the why and how of your felt need for a Mailchimp expert. In other words, what are the marketing goals you hope to actualize by leveraging the platform’s features and roping in the specialist(s)?
    2. Identify the possible sources for hiring the expert. Do you want to onboard an in-house team member, or would an offshore expert be best for your specific needs? Each option has its unique pros and cons, including flexibility, accessibility, and costs involved. So, choose wisely.
    3. Fix your budget. Depending on whether you choose an offshore expert or a fulltime specialist, the cost for each position would vary.
    4. Shortlist the best profiles by checking off the above-listed qualifications and competencies. Both outsourcing platforms and job portals will offer you a  plethora of candidates. A well-designed recruitment process, including professional tests and multiple interview rounds, will help you narrow down the pool.
    5. Identify the soft skills that your Mailchimp expert should bring to the table and evaluate their profiles against these. Some essential non-technical competencies would be effective communication, organized and methodical project management, time management, and ability to multitask.

    Wrapping Up

    So, there you have it! We hope the above pro tips will enable your leap of faith in making Mailchimp your partner of choice to consolidate your email marketing strategy. Remember, you only stand to gain by leaning on specialists to smoothen out this process of migration. Save time, boost your bottomline, and, most importantly, connect better with your customers!

    
    Want help to automate, migrate, and integrate with Mailchimp? Hire our experts.  

     

     

The post Looking To Hire A Mailchimp Expert? Here’s What You Need To Know appeared first on Email Uplers.

Creating an email is one thing, but having people read one top to bottom is different. Read on to catch some email designing hacks that will make your audience engage and fall in love with your brand! Smart subject lines, witty colors, and email videos are just some of the hacks that will up your emailing game for sure. 

1. Include emojis in your subject line

There are a lot of people out there focusing on choosing the right pictures for their emails and creating content that sells. And that is great. But there is one thing that most of them forget to do – and that is save some time for subject writing. 

I know you might think it is just a plain line, but in fact, it is not. Your subject line is the God that decides whether or not your email is worth reading. If you do not engage your reader from the subject, you’ve spent 2 hours crafting a prize-worthy email for nothing. No one will read it. 

So, to make sure that you do not waste precious time and selling opportunities, make sure that you devote yourself to subject writing. This article will teach you everything you need to know about making the subject line appealing. 

It does not stop here. Writing a magnificent subject line will not do. To make sure that you catch your reader’s attention, you must also include emojis. They are easy ways to make sure that people will find a reason to open your email. 

Important as they are, there is one thing that you should keep in mind when adding emojis. Please do not overdo it. 3 emojis are more than enough, although I would stick to 1-2. Using just a few emojis will be enough to catch people’s attention but not too much to defocus from the subject of the email. 

2. Incorporate catchy email videos

If you were smart enough about your subject line, your users have now opened the email. And what do you think will catch their attention now? Do you think it’s the first paragraph? Nope. It’s the visuals that you use! 

Of course, choosing appealing images is important, they are the ones that will keep your audience engaged and ready to read the headlines and then text. But what if you could do more than just include a nice image? 

Listen closely, email videos are the next big thing. With Reels and TikTok on the rise, smart brands have users hungry for video content. This is a plus you must include. Here are the email clients that support playing video:

• Apple Mail
• Outlook on Mac
• iOS Mail
• Samsung Mail

But what about other clients? How will you incorporate a video in that case? What you can do is use a static image with a play button. All you have to do is link the image to where the video is hosted (let’s say your website or YouTube) and there you go!

3. Use colors wisely 

Let’s now dive deeper into color usage and picking the perfect images! Do not just add pictures that seem interesting. Always think about what you are trying to convey, about what you want your readers to feel. Do you want them to be excited about a sale? Use bright red! Do you want them to feel the calmness of the seaside? Use light blue! 

Color is so much more than a plain splash. Colors evoke feelings and people act or not based on their feelings. This means that choosing the right color palette for your email might be that deciding factor that makes your readers access your sales link or not, make a purchase or not. 

Now let’s try and dive deeper into color psychology. We’ve already stated that red pairs with bold, passionate, energetic, and powerful. Yellow, on the other hand, makes people think about the warmth of the sun, summer holidays, which are connected with happiness, friendship, and imagination. Light blue makes us think about the infinite sky, and this is why it’s thought to be the most calming of the spectrum. It comes to represent security, stability, and harmony, with its darker shades representing confidence and stability. Green symbolizes nature, strength and is all about spring and revival. 

Metal textures are powerful, evoke youth and strength, and are best used with fashion brands or design companies that are into the industrial style. 

4. Use a responsive design 

This is one of those email designing hacks that you must take into consideration: do not forget about mobile! You might think that this is just another piece of advice, but in fact, not using a responsive design will cost you a lot. 

This is because more and more people are checking their email via mobile. If your design is not responsive, they will see an unattractive, unappealing, and incoherent email. This will not only fail to deliver a message, but also make your audience think you are unprofessional and you do not want to associate that with your brand. 

5. Design an email signature

When it comes to email marketing, you must make everything as personal as possible. Make sure that you have the name of the user in the subject line as much as possible and use a friendly tone in your copy. 

Readers must feel as if you are having a conversation, so they then go buy that tanning product, concert ticket, or school bag. 

One of the greatest email designing hacks for personal emails is including a signature at the end of the copy. This will give readers the impression that they know you and will build confidence around the brand. A good email signature is comprised of more than just a name, you should include: 

• First and last name
• Contact information
• Job Title 
• Company Name
• Social media links (e.g. LinkedIn profile)
• Photo

Conclusion

Now that you know all these email designing hacks, it’s high time that you started creating an email that sells and engages the audience. Remember to keep the subject witty, include videos, and resort to color psychology to help your readers fall in love with your brand! 

The post 5 Email Designing Hacks That Will Help You Build a Brand appeared first on Email Uplers.

Automation is a great way to streamline your email campaigns, but it is imperative to watch for common pitfalls before you set this path. 

Automated email responses are one of the best examples of this because they give off a sense that your company has no human employees and is solely focused on making money – not giving good customer service. When it is evident in your message that you have automated your emails, people may see your business as impersonal or inattentive. This could lead to poor engagement rates in the future.

The following are some ways in which email automation can go wrong:

1) Boring and spammy subject lines

Readers do not open email messages with subject lines that they deem boring or spammy. They can make you lose the reader’s interest. It is important to capture your readers’ attention in just a couple of seconds as they might be receiving hundreds of emails every day.

It is better to have an original and attention-grabbing subject line instead of using “Re:”, “Reply” or the old-fashioned “Hi”. The subject line should be short and sweet.

Once you know what kind of subject lines are working the best for you, begin implementing the right ones in your emails. Ensure that each email campaign has a different and unique subject so that readers do not lose interest, keeping drop-offs from soaring.

Expert tip: There are software that can help you create interesting subject lines. They will help you test what kind of subject line is your target audience most receptive to in order to maximize the effectiveness of your email campaign.

Here are some ways in which you can write catchy email subject lines:

• It should answer the questions, “What is in it for me?” and “How can my life get better?”.
• The subject line would draw your subscribers’ attention. Remember that this is usually the first thing they see when checking their inboxes, so you need to make sure that it catches their eyes right away.
• The subject line should make your subscribers curious. You should ask questions like “What…?” or “How…?”. For example:- “What you can learn from your mistakes” – “Increase your sales by 30%” – “How vacuum cleaners keep indoor air clean”.
• Meet reader expectations by ensuring that your subject lines match the email content. This would boost retention and engagement in the long run.

2) No top-of-funnel growth

Marketing automation should not be a channel by itself. It should always be integrated with your top-of-funnel strategy and work in sync with other marketing channels to drive lead generation for growth.

The ultimate purpose of marketing automation is lead generation. If you are not generating enough leads, then why would you use it at all? 

This is another avenue where email automation can fail miserably. If your email marketing automation tool does not have an integration with the most crucial channels such as SEO, PPC advertising or social media, then you are missing out on a large chunk of traffic that can convert into leads.

Encourage your team to include traffic generation from all top-of-funnel sources in the automation process instead of converting them into a one-way route where you are just giving information or pitching products. That will ensure that every lead generated is qualified and ready to receive your offer.

However, you should not stop at just top-of-funnel traffic generation. Think about how every blog post or article you share on social media drives people down to the landing page. That is where your marketing automation process becomes critical to build those leads into a customer who ultimately pays for your products and services.

3) Using the same email automation message

a) For Every Customer:

This can make a professional business look unprofessional. Unsolicited emails are hard to accept, and people find it easy to ignore them. So if you use the same automation message for multiple customers or prospects, they may not respond positively to your email.

b) For Different Products:

Although this may seem like a logical idea, it is quite unwise to use the same email automation message for multiple offers. The reason for using this strategy can be convenience: one template saves time and effort. However, customers may find such messages annoying and unnecessary. Also, your business will appear less professional.

4) Poor email segmentation

Automated email marketing campaigns can also fail if the email senders do not make sufficient efforts to segment their list. It is very important to disseminate emails. Hubspot reports that Marketers who do so can clock as much as a 760% increase in revenue! 

But this is not the only reason to implement email segmentation.

If you don’t use segmentation, it will be considered spamming and may result in your automated emails being blocked or unsubscribed by the recipients.

Why does it happen? Spam filters look for keywords used in spam messages to rate your emails as junk emails. Mostly, these words are related to products and services that you sell directly via this channel (low-quality content). If there is no relationship between the sender’s brand and the recipient’s consumption needs at a given time, the emails will be marked as non-relevant. 

Some quick steps to segment email lists can be:

• Think from the recipient’s perspective: what are their interests? If they don’t match with your content or offer, then it may not be a good data set to utilize in the first place.
• Use the segments to call a relevant and custom message with the right offer
• Insert appropriate keywords into the email’s content
• Test and monitor frequently

Repeat the steps above with smart data analysis. The goal is to segment your data before you create the email campaign.

5) Multiple bad email addresses in your email list

It is important to set up a reliable list for your automated email campaign. 

For email lists, the acceptable unsubscribe rate lies between 0.2 to 0.5%. So if you are above this range, it is a cause for concern. If you send emails with an incorrect address, or if the person on the list has not engaged in conversation before, then it puts the open rates at risk. It can also sometimes lead to ISPs skipping these recipients when they are checking bounces/no response lists because of this inconsistency.

If you’re trying to achieve higher email deliverability, follow these best practices:

1. Ensure that the information you have on your contact list is valid and up-to-date
2. Check email addresses against a verified database such as your own CRM list
3. Make sure that you have enough information to be able to ensure deliverability. It’s important to get permission from all the people you’re about to send emails to
4. Find out how other businesses are doing it wrong
5. Have a professional email address that avoids numbers, symbols or special characters
6. Include a subject line with the person’s name in it
7. Keep individual emails at no more than 6 lines long
8. Keep subject lines to about 25 words
9. Limit the number of links in one email to 3 links

6) Poor click-through rates of emails

Your email-automation campaign is designed to nudge subscribers to take action, whether it’s to deepen engagement by checking out a new video on your site, using a discount coupon, or making a purchase. While it’s not an exact representation of the lead completing the action, the click-through rate reflects how successful you’ve been in getting them at least some of the way there.

Now you may not be familiar with the term click-through rate, but you’ve definitely seen it. It’s that little number on your email marketing reports next to a headline or subject line and it tells you what percentage of recipients clicked on a particular call-to-action in an email. Click-through rates are generally super low, so it’s easy to get discouraged and wonder if email-automation campaigns even work at all. According to Campaign Monitor, the average CTR of your email campaigns are only about 2.5%.

Since you want a high click-through rate (CTR), you should be asking yourself questions like:

• Is the headline appealing?
• Is it clear what my email is about?
• Does this subject line invite action?

And in an effort to get better CTRs, you should optimize your email marketing headlines, subject lines, and calls-to-action. But here’s the thing – not all email automation campaigns rely on click-through rates for success. Some are designed to nurture relationships with subscribers using engagement metrics that don’t always require clicks.

No matter the case, you need to figure out which strategy works the best for you with sufficient trial and error (read A/B testing)!

Conclusion

Email automation is a powerful marketing tool that can help you grow your email list and market to customers with personalized messages. However, it’s important for marketers to keep in mind some of the common reasons that an email campaign may fail and have a fallback strategy for each of these!

The post 6 Reasons That Can Lead to Email Automation Failure appeared first on Email Uplers.

Did you know for every dollar you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42? This is why nearly 87 percent of marketers use email marketing to disseminate information to their target audiences. 

A good email design with Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps a business grab attention and engage with the right people. Whenever you send an email, you want your reader to click on it as soon as it pops in their inbox to increase the open rate and fulfill the purpose of your campaign. And, good email design helps you achieve that. Also, it helps in getting better ROI and fewer unsubscribes.

However, many businesses still do not know about the capabilities of good email design and the experiences it delivers. Today, this blog will tell you about everything in email designing with SFMC and how you can make the most out of it.

So, let’s dive deep into good email design!

How To Make Your Email Design Stand Out

So how can you make your email stand out? Check out these email design best practices and fundamentals before getting started with your next email marketing campaign.

#1 Use Colors Wisely

You want your reader to read your copy with ease and not strain their eyes. So, you need to think of colors that do not hurt your readers’ eyes. Also, make sure to do a test run before shooting that email to your subscribers’ inboxes.

For example, you may use a dark color for the text on white color background for your email. Also, to ensure that your reader sees your CTA button, you can use light color text over a solid color button. 

#2 Choose The Right Visual Elements

Adding visual elements helps you create engaging and interesting emails for your subscribers. However, including too many visual elements like graphics, photos, or GIFs can affect the email load time and may deviate your readers’ attention from the message. Here, you need to wisely choose what kind of visual element you need in your email and how it would benefit you. Do not go overboard with such elements. Use fewer elements to make your email visually appealing and create interest in the minds of your readers. 

#3 Take A Mobile-Friendly Approach

If your email appears top-notch on smaller devices, then you are doing it right. Your text, images, graphics should be properly visible on a small device as well, or else you would lose that subscriber base. You can choose to make your email designs mobile-focused by making them either Responsive aware, Mobile aware, or Responsive or hybrid. 

#4 Define The Purpose of Your CTA Button

A call to action button in an email or elsewhere should clearly define its purpose. What do you want your reader to do? For instance, your CTA button for the reader could be for any of the following purposes:

• Buy their favorite products
• Recommend your services to their friends
• Avail an offer
• Send a gift card
• Sign up for a service 

Make sure that your CTA clearly stands out from the other text of your email. Also, a CTA button should ideally be 44 pixels wide and 44 pixels tall.

Email Designing With SFMC

Once you know your audience, have set your goals clear, and developed the content strategy, the next in line is the email designing part. Now, let’s see how you can create the best email designs with SFMC to engage with your audience in a better way. Let’s begin! 

#1 The Effective Envelope and Body Content 

The first impression is everything in the world of marketing. And you need to take care of this in your emails as well. You can create a good impression in the minds of your readers with great envelope content. 

The envelope of an email consists of three elements:

• Sender Name: This tells the reader about you, the brand that has sent them the mail. 
• Subject line: An effective subject line tells the reader what the email is all about. This accurately reflects the content in the email body and intends to increase engagement. 
• Preheader text: This text appears just below the subject line. Also, one can customize the content in the preheader text. It can be anywhere between 35-140 characters. 

#2 Optimized Emails For Different Screen Resolutions 

SFMC helps to send optimized emails for different screen resolutions by using a responsive design. So, how does it help in creating engaging emails and getting better open rates from the subscribers? 

Send your emails without worrying about the screen resolution: SFMC automatically tailors messages, CTAs, and interactive content for any type of device with different screen sizes. 

Get better engagement than ever before with the best email designs: You can create scalable, fluid, and responsive designs powered by live content in SFMC. This way, you can generate better engagement than before. 

#3 The Perfect Mobile-Optimized Email 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps you send a single email that works across a range of screen sizes with mobile-optimized designs. 

Keep these tips in mind when creating the mobile-optimized emails in SFMC: 

• Use a single-column format for the images and copy of your email.
• Try to use bigger text and optimized images while leaving plenty of white space for the reader as you don’t want to strain their eyes. 
• Make your navigation easy to use for mobile users, as hovers, mouseovers could be a little difficult on touchscreens. 

See how Grammarly uses Salesforce Marketing Cloud as their ESP to send 100% mobile-optimized emails. 

#4 Designing for Different Email Clients 

Before launching your email campaign, you must know the different clients your subscribers use. Your subscriber may use Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook as their service provider. 

Things to keep in mind before getting started with creating email designs for different email clients in SFMC: 

Know the challenges: These clients accept HTML code in their own ways. Hence, it would be difficult to know how your emails would look in the inbox of your subscribers. 

Test Email Rendering: As a marketer, you need to keep your eyes open to figure out the possible errors that can harm your email campaign in SFMC. For this, you can always rely on SFMC email marketing specialists to help you pave the way through it. 

Customizing the code: You can use CSS code specific to each client and use a rendering tool to run test accounts and view emails on common devices. 

Wrap Up

Effective email designs help you overcome the challenges of getting better open and click-through rates for your emails. They also manage to get away from getting marked as spam, ignored, or deleted. Also, with email designing in SFMC, you get better engagement on your emails and ultimately a greater ROI. 

We hope you found this blog helpful and got to know about how SFMC helps in creating the perfect email designs. If you need help or assistance in getting started with email designing in SFMC, get in touch with dedicated SFMC email specialists – Click here. 

The post A brief guide to Email Designing with Salesforce Marketing Cloud appeared first on Email Uplers.

As an email marketer, do you spend several weeks on email campaign design and content?

If yes, email templates can be the answer to your prayers.

Templates enable brands to quickly design and deploy customized email campaigns, saving time and effort. You can even reuse the same templates for different campaigns, saving even more time, while connecting with your audience in personalized ways, and delivering amazing brand experiences.

Are your current email templates not delivering the results you expected?

Conduct an email template audit to find the gaps that prevent you from meeting your email marketing goals, and guide your decision-making.

Read on to understand why template audits are important for your brand, and how you can get the most from the exercise.

What is An Email Template Audit?

Email templates can become outdated, or fall short of supporting the brand’s goals. But if you don’t know where the gaps are, you can’t address them, much less improve the performance of your email marketing program. Here’s where a template audit can be a game-changer.

With a template audit, you or an external auditor can gauge template performance, identify any gaps, and take steps to close those gaps. Thus, you can establish improvement baselines and identify opportunities for campaign optimization.

With an email template audit, you can find answers like:

• Should we add additional templates to our email marketing program?
• Should we add modules to our existing templates? Or remove irrelevant/outdated modules? 
• Have we received feedback from previous A/B tests that we have not yet incorporated into our templates?
• Do we have a new logo, imagery or standard text (e.g. footer) that should be added to existing templates?
• Are our templates accessible, mobile-ready, and dark mode-friendly?
• Are all links still relevant, up-to-date, and legally compliant?
• Do we need to update the unsubscribe process?
  
  
  
  
  

Benefits of Email Template Audits

A/B testing is an invaluable part of every email marketing program. By setting up different versions of the same campaign and sending each version to a different subset of your broader audience, you can determine which version is most likely to resonate with subscribers. Also known as split testing, A/B testing offers a great way to increase the probability of email opens, clicks, and conversions.

But the fact that A/B testing is “split” testing is also its drawback. Essentially, this means that at any given time, you can only test different variants of a single element. If you want to test multiple elements of two email variants with different subject lines, you can’t do so with a single A/B test. For this, you need to run multiple A/B tests, which takes time and effort. Plus, you need to find the right sub-audience for every test, which requires multiple segmentation efforts.

If this sounds like a familiar issue, you probably test only one or two elements before deploying a campaign. Since you don’t have advance visibility into whether your audience will like the other elements, you don’t know whether your opens and click-throughs may be affected by those elements. And since you don’t know what will work – and more importantly, what won’t – you can’t take the necessary action to retain the good and cut out the bad before it affects your campaign results. By the time you do figure out where the gaps are, the deployment is already done. At this point, you can only measure campaign results, and invest additional time and money in redesign if results are below-par.

Further, by operating in such a black hole, you probably reuse existing templates, even though you aren’t getting the results you expected. Conducting an email template audit is an effective way to break this vicious cycle and avoid all these issues.

Benefits of Expert Email Template Auditors

Thus, an email template audit can help you proactively understand whether all email elements are functioning optimally before a campaign send. If something is working well, you don’t have to expend additional development cost or time on a redesign. But if something isn’t, the audit results will tell you exactly where the issues are, so you can focus your efforts in that direction. This is one reason why an audit performed by a team of experts like Email Uplers is really valuable.

External auditors have advanced expertise in various aspects of template audit. Plus, they come with an outside perspective and knowledge of email marketing best practices – both of which can generate highly relevant audit results, and also show a clear pathway towards improvement. 

In addition, expert auditors can deliver all these benefits:

• Audit each element of every in-use template (baseline analysis) to confirm if it’s still on-brand and relevant to both customers and your email marketing strategy
• Find flaws to be eliminated
• Check the effectiveness of design, element placement, functionality, and content
• Check links and standard text
• Suggest if a template refresh is required to avoid monotony
• Confirm if the template is fully accessible, responsive, and mobile-ready
• Check if both HTML and text versions are available to meet the needs of all subscribers, including those in low-bandwidth areas
• Identify what resources are required to correct any issues
• Check if there are any problems with ESP integration
• Verify email client compatibility and suggest solutions for non-supportive clients
• Suggest ways to improve design and ramp up open rates and click rates

Which Template Components Should You Audit?

Ideally, you should audit all the below elements:

• Preheader and header
  • Does it motivate the reader to open the email?
  • Does it provide the right context?
  • Is it on-brand?
• Subject line
  • Is the length optimized and visible in every browser or device?
  • Are we using emojis strategically?
  • Are there “spammy” words that may land our emails in the Spam folder?
• Content
  • Is the text relevant, personalized, and up-to-date?
  • Are we using crisp and bold headlines?
  • Do font type and size match our brand’s esthetics?
  • Is content placed in easy-to-read blocks?
  • Is the copy well-formatted?
  • Is there a clear take-away?
  • Are special offers, discounts, etc. relevant to the recipient? Are they outdated?
  • Do dynamic content blocks display the correct information to the correct recipient?
• Design and layout elements
  • Is the layout easy on the eye?
  • Are we using the optimal mix of text and graphics?
  • Is the width optimized for every device?
  • Are we creating a text version of every HTML email?
• Graphical elements
  • Are images on-brand?
  • Are all links working?
  • Does every image have alt text?
  • Are the CTA links and text relevant?
  • Are we effectively using white space?
• ESP integration
  • Does the template work with our ESP?
  • If we use more than one ESP, does it work with all?
• Browser and device compatibility
  • Do templates render properly on every browser and device?
  • Are they responsive and mobile-friendly?
• Interactivity
  • Are we using interactive elements effectively?
  • How do they affect user experience and campaign ROI?
• Social sharing links
  • Are we including the right links?
  • Do they take the user to the right page? 
• Footer text
  • Is it updated and clearly visible?
  • Are any changes required?
  • Is a physical address included/required?
• Unsubscribe link and text
  • Is the link clearly visible?
  • Is the process complicated or easy?
• Compliance with CAN-SPAM and other applicable laws
  • Are we non-compliant in any way?

Email Template Audit Best Practices

When conducting an audit, it’s best to divide the template into individual sections, and tackle each separately. This ensures that every section is given the attention it deserves without overwhelming the auditor.

Keep in mind that a template audit should be holistic. Don’t limit your audit to just the visual esthetics or content. Also check placement, functionality, responsiveness, and of course brand-relevance.

If you can’t test for all the elements explained in the previous section, start with those elements that you would normally A/B test, such as:

• Subject line
• Content
• Visuals
• Personalization
• CTA
• Links
• Offers

Also, since each email has a different purpose, the audit should start with this purpose (the all-important “why”) in mind:

• Inform and educate
• Persuade
• Onboard, register, or welcome
• Engage or re-engage
• Cross-sell or upsell
• Follow up
• Ask for feedback
• Make an announcement or send an invite
• Send a special offer, discount, or promotion
• Special occasion wishes, e.g. Mothers’ Day or birthday

Conclusion

Email templates are a valuable element of your email marketing program. However, to ensure that you continue to use the best and most effective templates, you must avoid falling into the “fit in and forget it” trap. Conduct regular audits to tweak your strategy and ensure that you get the best possible results from every campaign.

The audit experts at Email Uplers can audit your email templates and provide a simple, easy-to-follow implementation plan. Click here to know more.

The post Why You Should Conduct Email Template Audits For Your Brand appeared first on Email Uplers.