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Posts Tagged ‘Email marketing’
Are Your Business’s Marketing Emails Optimized for Mobile?
June 1st, 2012 :: Rieva LesonskyBy Rieva Lesonsky
If your small business’s marketing emails aren’t optimized for mobile, you’d better get moving. A new study by email certification company Return Path, reported in eMarketer, estimates that mobile will surpass desktop PCs and Webmail to be the dominant platform for email by the end of 2012.
Already, Return Path reports, 30 percent of all email opens occur on a mobile device. That’s up from just 10 percent a few years ago, and the figure is expected to reach 35 percent by next month.
The percentage of opens on Webmail services like Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and Gmail is declining. The problem for small businesses is that if your emails are designed for a traditional Web browser or Webmail, they won’t display properly on a mobile email reader.
The fact that many people still get their email via Outlook on a PC at work is pretty much what’s keeping the PC’s share of email opens relatively steady. But with the rapid growth of mobile opens, it’s uncertain how long that dominance will continue. In the past year alone, mobile email opens increased by 82.4 percent. Apple devices lead the way, accounting for 85 percent of all mobile email opens even though they’re only about 30 percent of mobile devices.
With about 50 percent of Americans owning smartphones and 15 to 20 percent using tablets, these numbers will only increase. Return Path found email opens on the iPad had grown by 53 percent in just a year.
With Web.com data showing that small businesses that market via mobile see business increase, it’s clear there are reasons to get mobile. But while consumers are getting wise to mobile, marketers aren’t. Return Path found that almost half of companies didn’t know how many mobile email subscribers they have.
What should you do?
- Make sure your marketing emails can be read on both Android and iOS platforms (the dominant mobile devices).
- If you market BtoB you may also want to format your messages for BlackBerry, since many enterprise decision makers still use these devices.
- Know what platform your subscribers use and how they want to receive email so you can tailor your message to their needs.
- Keep your messages simple in terms of design, graphics and actions so it’s easy for consumers to act on whatever device they are using.
Image by Flickr user James Cridland (Creative Commons)
Google+Who’s Using Daily Deals—and How Can You Lure Them to Your Business?
May 16th, 2012 :: Rieva Lesonsky
By Rieva Lesonsky
Do you use daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial to lure customers to try your business? A new study from Edison Research, The Daily Deals Consumer 2012, offers some useful insights into who’s using these services, why and the potential impact on your brand and business. Here’s a closer look.
Nearly one in six Americans (15 percent) use daily deal services. Daily deal users are primarily in the 25 to 54 age group; two-thirds are women; and they have a higher than average household income.
Daily deal sites are most popular in the South, where 45 percent of users are located. Next comes the West with 22 percent of users, the Midwest with 20 percent, and the Northeast with just 13 percent.
Groupon is by far the most popular daily deal site, with 83 percent of daily deals users registered there. Forty-four percent use LivingSocial, and 12 percent use “other.”
More than half of users are relatively new to daily deals, having joined in the past year. Since they started using daily deals, most users (48 percent) say their purchasing habits have remained fairly steady, but 32 percent are using deals less often than when they first started, while 14 percent are using them more often.
Deals work–only 6 percent say they have signed up but never purchased a deal. As to how well they work, there’s good news and bad news. While 28 percent of users say they’ve tried a new business because of a deal, then continued to patronize it without a deal, 30 percent say they’ve tried new businesses once, but never gone back, and 28 percent say they use deals from businesses they already patronize. Daily deals can be a good way to get new customers, but you’ve got to work to earn their loyalty beyond the deal.
Daily deal users were substantially more likely than average consumers to own a smartphone or tablet. Because they’re so mobile, there are opportunities to reach out to them with “just-in-time” deals that are local and mobile.
Daily deal users spend more time online than average consumers (3.34 hours per day, as opposed to the average of 2.25), and 85 percent go online at work. They’re also far more likely to choose the Internet over other forms of media, such as radio, TV and newspapers. In fact, they’re also more likely to listen to Internet radio and watch online videos, which could lead to cross-platform promotional opportunities.
Not surprisingly, daily deal users are far more likely to have social media accounts than non-daily deal users, and spend more time there. Some 83 percent are on Facebook, 40 percent are on LinkedIn, 20 percent are on Twitter and 20 percent are on Google+. They are also twice as likely to follow companies or brands on social media. When you get a daily deal user hooked on your business, you have a great opportunity to reach their friends and family circles as well.
How are you using daily deals in your business?
Image by Flickr user Taro Taylor (Creative Commons)
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13 Helpful Guidelines for A/B Testing
May 4th, 2012 :: Monika Jansen
A/B Tests, or Split Tests, can help you optimize your landing pages, email marketing campaigns and calls-to-action. But isn’t testing something only big marketing research firms do? The answers is a definitive “no.”
In this article, I’ll share some tips for using A/B testing in your own marketing strategies, regardless of the size of your staff or budget.
Are your marketing efforts making the grade?
A/B testing can help you determine which marketing variables are giving you the best response rate. An example of a variable is the call-to-action in an email message or the landing page a Facebook post directs people to.
By conducting A/B tests, you can tweak your marketing performance to drive more traffic to your website and generate more leads for your business. The marketing pros at Hubspot have lots of suggestions for conducting A/B testing, but I’m going to break down the strategies for you in a quick and painless way.
Your A/B Testing Cheat Sheet
- Conduct one test at a time to be sure your results don’t get mixed up. In other words, don’t launch a test for your email and your landing page simultaneously. Along that same line, only test one variable at a time so you can be sure you know exactly what to change or improve.
- Test among two or more audiences and be sure these samples are similar. For example, if you’re testing an email message, pull names that have been on your list for similar amounts of time.
- Just like in science experiments, you’ll need to have both a control group and a treatment group. In your A/B tests, the control group will be your original email or landing page, and the treatment group will be the variations of these tools you want to test. You may want to test whether including an image will enhance a landing page, so your original landing page would be the control element, and the landing page with an image would be the treatment element.
- Conduct your A/B tests during the same timeframe. What this does is remove timing as a variable because conducting marketing tests a month or two apart can yield very different results. If you’re testing several elements for one particular campaign, test them simultaneously. Just be sure to test only one variable on each of your tests, as I mentioned above.
Deciding which variables to test
Now that you have some guidelines to get you started, which variables should you test? When you were creating a call-to-action for the company’s latest product launch, you may have wondered which copy or graphic elements would get the best results. Those elements are perfect for A/B testing. Here are some variables you may want to test:
- Offers that convert the most prospects into leads
- Structure for your copy (bullet lists, paragraphs, etc.)
- Size or placement of the call-to-action
- Color scheme or other design element
- Photo or logo to use on a landing page
- Format of email (newsletter, digest, etc.)
- Time of day to send email
- Subject line of email
A/B testing is an effective way to learn why your marketing campaigns or working – or why they aren’t. By testing elements in their campaigns, marketers can easily tweak their strategies to get the most bang for their buck- something every small business owner can surely appreciate.
Image courtesy of spamula.net
Google+Move Over, Social Media: Consumers Prefer to Get Marketing Messages by Email
May 4th, 2012 :: Rieva LesonskyBy Rieva Lesonsky
When it comes to small business marketing, social media seems to get all the attention these days, but that old workhorse email marketing may actually be better at getting the job done. So says a new survey from ExactTarget reported in Small Business Trends.
The survey of consumers found that a whopping 77 percent prefer to get permission-based marketing messages via email. The next most preferred method, direct mail, didn’t even come close, with a mere 9 percent of the overall respondents ranking it their top method for receiving marketing messages. And text messaging and social media barely made the running, preferred by just 5 percent and 6 percent of users, respectively.
Now, you might think that this percentage is skewed toward older users—but you’d be wrong. Even among the 15-17 age group, 66 percent preferred email marketing messages, while just 10 percent preferred text messages and 8 percent Facebook.
While you may have heard that use of email is dropping, ExactTarget found that the decline in email use refers to personal communications. But consumers’ preference for getting permission-based marketing through email has actually increased 5 percent since 2008.
What’s happening? It seems that while fewer people are using email to communicate with friends and family (texting and social media are becoming more popular for this purpose), email is becoming the primary way that consumers like to manage their interactions with businesses. “Email is the top channel in terms of acceptability across all types of marketing message we asked about….from travel alerts and purchase receipts to promotional messages and polls,” ExactTarget reports. (The one exception was spam emails.)
No matter what age range you’re targeting—from 15 up to 65-plus—email is still the way to go. But generic email blasts are not, ExactTarget reports. For companies finding their email efforts are getting less response than they used to, consider:
- Is it timely?
- Is it targeted?
- Is it relevant to the user?
- Does it have a compelling subject line, headline and benefit?
Today’s subscribers are more sophisticated when it comes to email. Keep these four factors in mind, and your open rates will increase.
Image by Flickr user Sean MacEntee (Creative Commons)
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Small Businesses Have Advantage in Facebook and Email Marketing
April 11th, 2012 :: Rieva LesonskyBy Rieva Lesonsky
Do you think your small business is at a disadvantage compared to big, national companies when it comes to getting “likes” on Facebook? Well, think again. A new study conducted by Constant Contact and Chadwick Martin Bailey found that consumers are more likely to opt in to receive communications from local businesses than national businesses on Facebook, as well as on email.
The study surveyed consumers nationwide about why they liked businesses on Facebook and opted in or out to email newsletters. “Both are forms of permission marketing,” explains Mark Schmulen, general manager of social media at Constant Contact.
The study found consumers like businesses on Facebook or opt into their newsletters for similar reasons: to receive discounts and special offers. “Regardless of whether it comes through email or on Facebook, a great offer can be a front door to new business, and a really good opportunity to begin to build a long-term relationship with new customers,” says Kristen Garvey, vice president of marketing at Chadwick Martin Bailey.
People unsubscribe or stop liking businesses for similar reasons, too. “The main reasons people unlike or unsubscribe have to do with relevancy and frequency,” says Schmulen. “Content isn’t king. Relevant content is king. Effective marketing is about earning your audience’s permission and delivering relevant and actionable content without being overly intrusive. This data shows the importance of not just producing great, engaging content, but following best practices and finding the right balance between overdoing it and not communicating enough.”
Here are some more findings:
- Despite the widespread use of mobile devices, 84 percent of consumers primarily access email from their computers.
- While 30 percent of consumers access Facebook from a mobile device, 82 percent prefer their computers.
- The organization it is from and the subject line are the top reasons consumers open emails from a business.
- Lack of interest and over-sending are the top two reasons consumers do not open emails from a business.
- Over-emailing and irrelevant content are the top reasons consumers unsubscribe from email lists.
When it comes to both Facebook and email, Schmulen says, “Small businesses clearly have the edge over larger organizations. Relationships are the cornerstone of any business, and they are one of the top reasons that emails get opened. A quarter of respondents indicated that they prefer to opt in to local businesses via email and Facebook over national businesses because of the personal relationships that they have with the organization.”
Image by Flickr user owenwbrown (Creative Commons)
Google+Small Biz Resource Tip: Zaarly
April 10th, 2012 :: Maria Valdez HaubrichZaarly
The best kinds of customers are the ones who already know they want your product or service. Zaarly is free to consumers who are looking for specific products and services and know what price they’re willing to pay. When a consumer posts a request on Zaarly, a notice and email gets pushed to businesses like yours who’ve signed up to provide products or services in that category or for that keyword. You can then respond to consumers through the Zaarly messaging system. Signing up to receive alerts is free; you pay only if a customer decides to buy your product or service. You can accept credit card payments through the Zaarly system.
How to Integrate Email, Facebook and Twitter in a Marketing Campaign
April 6th, 2012 :: Monika Jansen
Integrating your email, Facebook and Twitter strategies into one marketing campaign doesn’t have to be hard. And, with all of the following benefits, smart marketers are syncing their efforts to get big results.
- Social drives email opt-in: On Facebook, you can drive visitors to Like you and to opt into your email list with a custom welcome tab. On Twitter, you can send out teasers promoting your next email campaign, with a link to an email sign-up page.
- Email drives social campaigns: Including social share buttons in all your email messages can increase traffic, followers and Likes.
- Increase the reach of your message: Your entire email list may not be on Facebook and Twitter, and not all your fans and followers may have opted into your email list yet. Cover all your bases with an integrated marketing campaign.
- Increase the potential of word of mouth: Using sharing buttons and sending fans and followers to an email list sign-up not only increases your reach, but it also increases the opportunities for word of mouth communications.
- Integration helps nurture a lead further along: Perhaps one of your leads received an email from you and then clicked over to your Facebook page. There, he or she receives more information and enjoys your Facebook content, helping to lead the prospect further along the conversion funnel.
Socialize Your Email Marketing
To get started integrating your email and social media strategies, embed social media links into your emails. You may want to consider one of the email marketing solutions with features that allow you to easily integrate social functionality into your campaigns. Lyris HQ offers tons of social features such as the ability to add social enhancers to email messages and segment recipients by social activity. You can also ask email recipients to share and retweet content with your own buttons embedded in the emails.
Build a Helpful Toolbox
Use tools to help integrate your strategies. Here are several worth checking out:
- Vanity URLs: If you haven’t done so already, create a custom URL for each social media page you set up. Try to use the same name for all your platforms if possible (Facebook = facebook.com/mycompany, Twitter = @mycompany)
- Embedded Like buttons: Add a Facebook Like button to all your channels, from your blog to your email messages.
- Facebook Connect: Allow your website visitors to log into Facebook as they browse your website content.
- Twitter Search Widget: Use this widget to display real-time tweets for a specific term within your Web content.
- TweetDeck/HootSuite: Easily manage multiple feeds for consistency with these third-party dashboards.
- Radian 6, SM2 and Sysomos: Track social media using these tools.
- Buddy Media: Create landing pages for your marketing campaigns across different platforms.
3 Steps to Integrating Your Message
A total digital marketing campaign should focus on a unified message, stretching across different platforms and complementing and leveraging each one’s strengths. Though it may sound complicated, this process can be really simple.
Step 1: Use your email subject line to define your message. Keep your writing clear and tight, using no more than 50 characters. State what your readers can expect from your email, including what’s in it for them, and what action you want them to take as a result from your email.
Step. 2: Tweak your message for Twitter. Translate that 50-character email subject line to a 140-character tweet. Use the additional space to add more interest and to clarify your call-to-action.
Step 3: Modify your message for Facebook. Now you have plenty of space to flesh out your message further. Still keeping brevity and clarity in mind, develop your message into a full Facebook post. Add a compelling image, and you’re all set.
How about you? How do you integrate your marketing efforts on Facebook, Twitter and email into one cohesive campaign?
Image courtesy of creative design agency Arrae
Google+7 Email Marketing Metrics You Should Be Tracking
April 5th, 2012 :: Monika Jansen
Email marketing is still an effective way to reach customers, clients and prospects, but if you aren’t measuring your campaigns’ performances, you may as well be sending emails out into the dark. Tracking key email marketing metrics will allow you to compare current campaigns with past ones to know whether your message is being received. Here are some email metrics, from the marketing pros at Hubspot, that will help you tweak your campaigns.
1. Bounce Rate: the percentage of emails that could not be delivered to a recipient’s inbox
The bounce rate can help you discover problems with your email list by tracking “hard” and “soft” bounces. Hard bounces indicate email addresses that are no longer functional, so they should be deleted from your list. Soft bounces are a result of a temporary problem with a valid email address – perhaps the recipient’s inbox is full, or there is an issue with their server. You should try to send these emails again later.
2. Delivery Rate: the percentage of emails that were actually delivered
To calculate the delivery rate, subtract the hard and soft bounces from the gross number of emails sent, and then divide that number by the gross number of emails sent.
You should aim for a delivery rate of 95% or higher. A delivery rate that falls over time may indicate problems with your list (see hard bounce above). One campaign with an especially low delivery rate means you should examine that message again for elements that may have been flagged as spam. The delivery rate sets the stage for your email campaign success because it shows you whether people are receiving your message at all.
3. List Growth Rate: how fast your email list is growing
To calculate list growth rate, subtract opt-outs and hard bounces from the number of new subscribers gained in a month, then divide that number by the original list size
You will naturally lose some of your subscribers due to people changing jobs, forgetting passwords and creating new accounts, etc. To keep your list refreshed, you need to continuously reach out to potential subscribers and keep that list growing.
4. Click-Through Rate (CTR): the proportion of an audience that clicked on one or more links in your email
To calculate CTR, divide unique clicks by the number of emails delivered.
This one is huge because the CTR indicates whether your message was relevant and the call-to-action effective. Because CTRs can vary according to the type of message sent (newsletter, promotion, etc.), it’s a good idea to track CTRs based on each type.
5. Email Sharing: the percentage of recipients who forwarded the email to a friend or used share buttons to post it to a social network
When your email messages are shared, you increase your reach by tapping into your subscribers’ own networks. Shared content means your message was relevant and interesting enough to be passed on, so pay attention to the types of content being shared when planning for future campaigns.
6. Conversion Rate: the percentage of recipients who clicked a link and performed a desired action
Of all the email marketing metrics to track, this one may be the most important. An effective email message compels the recipient to take action, whether it’s clicking on a link or making a purchase. To accurately track this metric, you’ll need to create unique tracking URLs for your email links to identify where campaign clicks are coming from.
7. Revenue Per Email Sent: the ROI of your email campaign
To calculate your ROI, divide the total revenue generated from the campaign by the number of emails sent.
If you use email marketing to sell products, then this metric is for you. Simply put, it tells you how many sales resulted from your campaign. Be sure to integrate your email metrics with your ecommerce platform to get the full picture.
As with any marketing initiative, it’s important to measure performance to be sure you are reaching your goals. Try tracking these seven metrics for a clearer understanding of how well your email marketing campaigns are performing.
Image courtesy of creative design agency Arrae
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