Sometime email marketing feels like the gamble Journey sings about:
Workin’ hard to get my fill
Every [brand] wants [to] thrill
Payin’ anything to roll the dice
Just one more time
Some will win
Some will lose
Some were born to sing the blues
Oh, the [email] never ends
It goes on and on and on and on
But done right, email marketing is music to the ears of customers and brands alike. Here, we round up advice from several recent DMN articles on email marketing. Play on.
“The people getting A’s in email are moving to marketing to people more on a one-to-one basis. Instead of basing everything on a calendar and sending everybody the same message at a given time, the top quartile is saying, ‘Lets create 10, 30, 40 messages and tie them to cart abandonment, post-purchase, and browse abandonment.” –Loren McDonald, VP of Industry Relations for Silverpop, in “Are the Days of Batch and Blast Behind Us?”
“The biggest mistake marketers make is focusing on those basic performance metrics, such as opens, clicks, unsubscribe rates,” Bunner says. “But setting clear measurement objectives upfront let’s you know what’s working and what’s not.” –Jeni Bunner, insight director at Outsell, in “3 Essential Email Metrics”
“Today’s list hygiene is really focused on activity or engagement by consumers, so when we talk about cleaning lists, we’re talking about removing people who haven’t opened or clicked on your offers in X months.” –Quinn Jalli, SVP of digital marketing services at Epsilon, in “Busting Myths on Email List Hygiene”
To create more relevant messages, “we focused a number of things, such as the seasons of the year. For example, the summer tends to be our peak time, so we sent seasonal messages that were more relevant. But we took it further and included locations and how long the customer had been on our email list.” –Amar Jodhan, digital marketing specialist at 1-800-GOT-JUNK? In “1-800-GOT-JUNK? Cleans Up Its Email Marketing”
“Marketers should always use the data they’ve collected to draw behavior and preferences, then optimize campaigns.” –Dominique Levin, VP of marketing at AgilOne, in “Pulling the Trigger on Email Marketing”
“We basically split our messaging into two sides. We still send batch-and-blast emails on a discovery basis, but when you do certain actions on the site or look at certain things we start to market to you on a one-to-one basis. That’s the Behavioral Approach.” –Ben Roberts VP of marketing operations at Acumen Brands, the parent company of country fashion brand Country Outfitter, in “It’s High Time for Personalized, Dynamic Emails”
“Marketers…focus more on growing their lists than targeting [their lists]. When you’re not focused on targeting your lists your [metrics] will remain static at best.” –Josh Rosenwald, CEO of Unroll.Me, in “Email Opens Have Increased While Clicks Remain Static”
After measuring response levels to determine whether it needed to adjust its email frequency, JustAnswer cut its email database by half, boosting year-over-year revenues from existing customers by 110% in the process, according to Kara Douglas, senior manager of email marketing at JustAnswer, in “Email Is JustAnswer’s Answer to Customer Engagement”
Instead of triggering emails solely on specific customer actions, marketers also should identify what they want customers to do next. –Shelly Alvarez, director of client services at PostUp, in “6 Do’s and Don’ts for Trigger Emails”
“Marketing executives are now demanding that their teams take care of deliverability issues. That’s part of the reason list churn declined so much this year.” –Loren McDonald, VP of Industry Relations for Silverpop, in “Has Email Marketing Finally Evolved?”
