Three Tips for Email Marketing that Creates Customers Posted on April 24, 2014June 1, 2016 by Jessica Lunk We know that email is a primary channel for revenue. So how can you maximize the effectiveness of your email marketing to produce more customers so your business can grow? Speak to the needs of your prospects: Segmenting prospects by their interests helps to deliver personalized messaging that potential customers can relate to. To engage prospects, uncover their unique challenges and provide them with a solution. Example: You are a real estate agent and your customers’ pain-points include determining how much they can afford. You provide a mortgage calculator on your website, and drive your prospects there through email. By helping your prospects answer a question or overcome a challenge, you add value and increase awareness of your brand. Evaluate your prospects’ place in the sales funnel: A prospect who is just browsing has a different set of priorities than a prospect who is ready to buy. Serve up helpful, value-added content at the awareness level, and save the feature and benefit comparisons for hot leads in the buying stage. Example: A prospect in the awareness stage is just beginning to research buying a new home. They aren’t sure what they can afford. A mortgage calculator is valuable at this stage. Down the line, they determine their price range and are ready to shop. At this stage, sending home listings in their price range keeps them engaged. Finally, they find the right home and are ready to buy. Resources that help them secure financing are going to be of the greatest value at this stage. Focus on a single call-to-action: Each individual email should have a clear call-to-action, such as visiting your blog, downloading a resource, or contacting a sales representative. When your email focuses on one single outcome, conversion rates increase. Example: When faced with too many options, your prospects often end up choosing to do nothing. Dear Jessica, Searching for a new home? Determine how much you can afford with our mortgage calculator: http://www.mynewhome.com/mortgagecalculator Or check out our list of lenders: http://www.mynewhome.com/lenders Or visit our website to see our latest listings: http://www.mynewhome.com/listings A single, clear call to action will increase email conversion because there’s only one choice to make – to click through or not. Dear Jessica, If you are thinking about buying a new home, you may be wondering, “How much can I really afford?” We hear that question a lot, so we’ve provided a handy mortgage calculator to help you determine yoiur price range. Check it out:http://www.mynewhome.com/mortgagecalculator Today’s consumer is desensitized to generalized batch & blast email. A more effective approach to email marketing is to create a pitch with a single call to action that speaks to a potential customer’s interests and their place in the sales funnel. A personalized, targeted approach will increase email engagement and convert more prospects into customers.
Gmail Tabs Just Got More Pinteresting Posted on March 27, 2014June 1, 2016 by Jessica Lunk Remember when marketers everywhere panicked over Gmail’s promotions tab? Well, Google has done it again, and is taking the promotions tab one step further. Gmail is experimenting with a new layout that resembles Pinterest, and is turning emails into an infinite scroll of thumbnail images. Now, instead of just a subject line and from address, marketers will be able to attract attention with a compelling image right in the inbox. Google released this image to show us how: What a Visual Promotions Tab Means for You The latest development from Gmail means that there’s even less room for junky, irrelevant email marketing spam. Your email content will still need to be personalized and targeted to your audience. And if your email lands in the visual promotions tab, your email image will play just as big of a role as your subject line does in getting your message opened and read. Gmail’s visual promotions tab is another development stemming from the trending dominance of visual communication. The popularity of online video, infographics, Pinterest, and Instagram all point to the ability of great design to help us digest information in a noisy and complex world. Tackling images and design may sound overwhelming to small business marketers, but it’s actually a great opportunity for the SMB space. Unlike a large Fortune 500 corporation, small businesses are nimble. As a small business marketer, you can adapt quickly to changes like this one, take risks to find out what works best, and carve out an opportunity to stand out in this visual inbox competition. In addition, I think that this new development transforms the promotions tab from a wasteland where emails go to die into a showcase for engaging eye-candy that will keep consumers scrolling. Consumers have already fallen in love with using infinite scrolling images on Pinterest to curate products and dream purchases. Bringing the same design to the inbox could mean great things for marketers. Imagine your best customers scrolling, mesmerized through their inbox where your email image and logo await. With Images Front & Center, What’s a Non-Designer To Do? As a small business marketer, you are used to being a jack-of-all-trades because there isn’t always extra budget for graphic designers or sophisticated design tools. But don’t worry. Design is really about solving a problem visually – and small business marketers are excellent problem solvers. You’re talented, and creative. You just need the right tools. Here are a few to get you started: Canva is a simple graphic design tool for the masses. Use it to easily create eye-catching email images as well as flyers, banners, presentations, and social media assets. DeviantArt Muro is a free, in-browser design app that is less complex than Photoshop, but more robust than MS Paint. Use it when you want to create something from a blank slate. Colourlovers compiles colors, patterns, palettes and trends you can browse or create. Use it when you need a little color and design inspiration. As you add “design” to your checklist of “Things to be Great at Today!” don’t forget that design and content go hand in hand. A stunning visual in the inbox is totally superficial. It might get them to open , but will your prospects click through and convert? They will if your content is as scrumptious and inviting as your email image. If you want to take part in the Gmail promotions tab experiment, you can sign up here for the field trial. Be a guinea pig now so you can deliver your prospects a great experience when the new layout goes live.
Beyond Email Clicks: Why Small Biz Marketers Want to Measure More Posted on March 13, 2014June 1, 2016 by Jessica Lunk Marketers love delivering email open rates and click-through rates that go through the roof and beat industry standards. The smallest percentage increase in click-through can be exciting, especially as your list size grows. We like to obsess over opens and click-throughs because they’re simple to measure. Even the most basic batch & blast email marketing tools track clicks and opens, and even show you who has clicked. But do you ever feel like something else should be there? Small business marketers are itching to reach more meaningful metrics, metrics that go beyond click-through rates to measure how email campaigns are driving sales and generating revenue. Sure, you know that they’re clicking. But are they converting? Email opens and clicks are the first steps to conversion. With these metrics in hand, there are still questions left unanswered: Are you sending the right mix of content? The modern marketing approach is to provide value-added content that informs, educates or entertains your audience. However, we can’t forget to ask for the sale as well. As you build a track record of delivering awesome content to your list, your email opens and clicks will rise. At the same time, only sending value-added content may not lead to conversions. Email clicks can tell you that your list loves your content, but they can’t tell you if you are sending the right balance of value-added content and call-to-actions that ask leads to learn more about your product and services, shop or buy. What happens when leads reach your landing page? You may have become a master at crafting calculated email content that gets opened and clicked. But do leads hit your landing page and drop off? Or do they follow through with the next call to action, such as signing up for a service, tweeting out a blog post, or making a purchase? If you can’t tie clicks back to a completed action on your landing page, you can’t know if your emails are really driving increased awareness, new opportunities and sales. Clicks can’t tell you that you might need to adjust your email content to match what’s delivered on the landing page, or that a little landing page optimization might help convert more visitors. Email clicks alone do not indicate that leads actually convert on your landing page. Are your email campaigns generating opportunities and customers? Clicks and opens are not currency – customers are. Clicks and opens can indicate the health of your emails and campaigns, but they don’t tell you if engaged contacts are converting to customers. Beyond Clicks: How To Measure the Success of Your Email Marketing Using an email marketing tool integrated with a CRM for your small business closes the gap between email clicks and customers. CRM tracking gives you the full scoop on how your customers, well, became your customers. With CRM, you have insights into: Where your customers originated from What emails they have opened The links they have clicked The pages they have visited The forms they have filled out The sales people they have engaged with Measuring opens and clicks is the foundation of revenue-generating email marketing. But small business marketers feel like they need something more to correlate email activity to revenue. CRM brings these metrics full circle, helping marketers reach the analytics they need to demonstrate the ROI of email marketing campaigns.
The Ultimate Key to Email Marketing Effectiveness Posted on March 5, 2014July 31, 2024 by Jessica Lunk As a small business marketer, you already know that email marketing drives revenue. That’s why you spend lots of time crafting enticing email messages that speak to your prospects. However, while we often dedicate a hefty helping of TLC to email copy and design, it’s easy to overlook the ultimate deciding factor in getting your emails read: A squeaky clean email list. A catchy subject line that gets clicked, a sleek HTML email template that’s easy on the eyes, and an irresistible call-to-action can’t do their job if your email never gets delivered in the first place. The Low Down on Dirty Email Addresses Data decay and human error both contribute to inaccurate, undeliverable email addresses that clutter up your email list or small business CRM. So how bad is it? According to Experian, US companies believe that 25% of their data is inaccurate. Yikes. That’s a quarter of sent emails that never even see an inbox. Okay, so maybe some addresses slip through the cracks. That’s alright. Those were probably bad eggs anyway, right? Actually, those dirty addresses not only affect the contacts with bad email addresses, but they affect the deliverability of your entire list. A Good Business Reputation Relies on a Clean Email List Let’s break it down. ISP: Internet Service Providers Domain name: The address of your site (meant for humans) that points to your IP address Internet Protocol (IP) Address: An address (meant for computers) that corresponds to your domain name Sender Reputation: The score ISPs use to rate the sending behavior of IP addresses. The ISPs then filter emails from the IP address accordingly. In the world of email deliverability, the lower your sender reputation score, the more likely it is that the ISPs will filter your emails right into a spam folder, or even block them from delivery entirely. Bad email addresses = suspect sending behavior = lower sender reputation = low delivery for your entire list. In short, bad email addresses are an equation for disaster. The repercussions can be significant. Bad deliverability means that you’re missing out on opportunities to connect with marketing leads and generate revenue for your business. It also interferes with your ability to communicate with current customers, resulting in poor customer service. It doesn’t take long for a bad email reputation in the virtual world to tumble into a bad reputation in the real world. 3 Factors that Affect Email Deliverability There are three buckets to keep an eye on when optimizing email delivery: Inaccurate email addresses that contain typos cannot be delivered to. Inactive subscribers who don’t open or engage with your emails. Opt-out requests that do not wish to receive your messages any more. How to Keep Your Email List Squeaky Clean Get smarter about capturing contact data. Providing a double opt-in ensures that those on your list truly want to receive your emails, and offers a check-point for deliverability. By using opt-in best practices, you build a highly targeted email list, increasing engagement and deliverability. Verify email addresses before sending emails to avoid hard bounces. Continue to monitor bounces and unsubscribes as you send to your active email list. Make sure to remove hard bounces and unsubscribes from future mailings to keep engagement rates high. Respect opt-outs and inactive contacts. Do not continue to send email to your opt-outs, and cleanse inactive contacts (those who have not engaged with your emails for a time) from your list to increase engagement and decrease spam complaints. For many marketers, email copy and design that converts is the fun part of email marketing. But don’t forget about the foundation of great email marketing campaigns – they all rely on a clean, deliverable email list. Sending to an accurate, active and engaged audience is the best way to keep the ISPs happy and avoid the spam folder.
Put the Heart Back into Marketing, Integrate Email with CRM [Infographic] Posted on February 13, 2014June 20, 2018 by Jessica Lunk No one wants to be just another face in the crowd, they want to be known. So put the heart back into your messaging. Track your contacts’ information, preferences, and pipeline status with CRM. Then, use that data to nurture them through email marketing tactics. By marrying your CRM with email marketing, you can ditch the one-to-many blast and give your customers and prospects the warm fuzzies with one-to-one communication that they can actually relate to. In turn, they’ll show their love with higher engagement and increased sales. Stats & Sources: Email marketers estimate 30% of email revenue derives from targeting to specific segments. – DMA “National Client Email Report” (2013) 61% of US and UK internet users want marketers to demonstrate knowledge of the types of offers they like in email marketing messages. -e-Dialog “Manifesto for E-mail Marketers: Consumer Demand Relevance” (2010) Relevant emails drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails. – Jupiter Research Triggered messages average 152% higher click-through rates than “business as usual” marketing messages. – EmailInstitute “3 Key Trends in Email Marketing & What to Do Now” (2013) Despite relatively low volumes, trigger email campaigns accounted for 21% of email revenue. Over 75% of email revenue is now generated by alternatives to generic one-size-fits-all campaigns. – DMA “National Client Email Report” (2013) Marketers who take advantage of automation—which includes everything from cart abandonment programs to birthday emails—have seen conversion rates as high as 50%. – eMarketer “Email Marketing Benchmarks: Key Data, Trends and Metrics” (2013) Organizations that nurture their leads experience a 45% increase in lead generation ROI over those organizations that do not. -MarketingSherpa “2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report” (2012) 50% of leads are qualified but not yet ready to buy. – Gleanster Research Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. – The Annuitas Group
3 Gmail Tab Realities and How They Affect Your Small Business Email Marketing Posted on February 7, 2014June 1, 2016 by Lindsey Stroud It’s been quite some time since Gmail introduced tabs to its inbox. While all of your emails use to land in one inbox, now they are automatically separated into multiple categories (Primary, Social, and Promotions tabs) via a Google algorithm. As a Gmail user, I – like many marketers – was taken aback by the changes that took place to my inbox overnight, and fearful of the dive my open and response rates would take. But here we are in 2014, and email marketing hasn’t taken the catastrophic hit that we may have anticipated. Here’s why: 3 Gmail Tab Realities and How They Affect Your Small Business Email Marketing 1) Gmail Tabs Don’t Actually Affect Too Many Gmail Users – While Gmail is the most popular email provider with 425 million users, the new inbox change hasn’t even affected a fourth of the overall user base. Why such a low number of email users affected by the change? It’s due to the rise in popularity of mobile devices. As of now, the tab feature is only supported in official Gmail apps for Android and IOS. This means that those who read email through the mail device on their iPhone or Android device are not affected by the email layout change. Litmus recently conducted a study on 5 million Gmail users and found that only 19% of Gmail users actually open their emails using Gmail. The take away? The new tabs feature might not affect as many Gmail users as we originally thought. 2) Relevancy is now more important than ever If you consider your email strategy blasting out a one-size-fits-all newsletter to all of your contacts, think again! Not only will this land you in the Promotions tab, but will most likely result in you getting disregarded all together. The key to Email Marketing is to provide relevant content over time that provides value to your contacts. The way to do this is by segmenting your contacts into identifiable groups and providing content that meets their interests or solves a problem they are facing. In small business CRMs, like Hatchbuck, you can segment leads in the sales pipeline or tag them by their interest category. 3) Ask and You Shall Receive If you have a large following of dedicated readers, supply them with the information they need to receive your content into the Primary tab with no problem! All a Gmail user needs to do is to take your email and drag it into the tab they would like to receive your emails in. Gmail will then pop up an alert and ask the user if they would like to this for all future emails from you. It’s easy for your contacts to do, and will guarantee you always land in the Primary inbox! This paid off tremendously for Gap when they sent an email asking their customers to move them back into their inbox. Sometimes all you need to do is ask and you shall receive! Make sure you continue to provide relevant and engaging content for your followers after asking them for a favor! As you see, the Gmail tab feature doesn’t have to be a detriment to your email marketing! As of a rule of thumb, make sure you are always sending to a list that has opted-in to receiving your content. Once you have a confirmed group of contacts, make sure to segment them according to their needs or interest and provide them content that is relevant to them. This is the easiest way to ensure you land in Primary tab, and continue to see high percentage of open rates and click throughs!
The How and Why of Lead Nurturing for Insurance Agents Posted on February 27, 2013June 1, 2016 by Nicci Troiani What is lead nurturing? Lead nurturing is a marketing process designed to educate and build relationships with your leads and prospects who are not quite ready to buy yet. Why do agents need lead nurturing? 1. Only 25% of new leads are ready to buy and another 25% are not going to buy. You need to properly maintain communication with the other 50% without being the pushy, sales type that they are now conditioned to ignore. By sending them informative, educational information about insurance and financial products, you are building a relationship. The prospect needs to be able to trust your advice, so that when they are ready to purchase, they know where to go. 2. Automate your follow up Following up with new leads and maintaining communication with current customers is a problem that all insurance agents face. It is easy to only focus on “hot” leads and let all others fall by the way side. By using a system that will allow you to send automated email marketing campaigns and trigger tasks and reminders to you, you minimize the time and effort on your part to follow up with all of your contacts, which gives you more time to focus on those ‘hot’ leads and make more sales. 3. Score your leads Whether you purchase leads or simply collect business cards, all leads you get are at a different part of the buying cycle. Tracking behaviors such as email opens, link clicks, white paper downloads and webpage visits will give you an idea of who is most interested. You should be focusing on contacting people who have indicated that they are interested with behaviors like these. Ideally, using a sales and marketing software than can track and score this information for you will save you time and the headache of trying to keep track yourself. How do I start nurturing my leads? Use current marketing materials You don’t want to use material that sounds salesy and chances are, most of your current marketing material does. Your current marketing materials can make a good outline or starting point though. Use what you have and do some additional research if necessary to write a few short and educational articles about your industry. Give the prospect tips on buying but don’t mention your product or service. Leverage other people’s content Start following blogs and publications that write about insurance. They need to provide good, educational information (but isn’t written by a competing agent). Keep and archive good ones that your find (I like Diigo.com for keeping track of articles that I like). Start a blog A blog is a great way to not only attract people to your website, but to keep ideas in writing. Old blogs can be revamped into a new e-mail marketing campaign so its great to have content like this on hand. Send your content out to current prospects via e-mail You should develop an e-mail marketing campaign with your new content. Don’t put long articles into your e-mail, no one will read them. Stick to a short introduction and then a link to the article or blog. Again, this can be a link to someone else’s article as long as it isn’t a competitor. Give new leads your content via social LinkedIn groups are a great place to post your content. Find groups that make sense to post your content (writing about group insurance? post in small business groups) and write a short description with the link. Also, post your links on Facebook and Twitter. You never know who may click to read and become a prospect in the process.