It’s finally happened. I have resigned to the fact that you never stop learning in the digital marketing space. Once you head down the rabbit hole seeking the best ways to communicate with your audience, there’s no turning back!
Recently, I’ve been wondering if it is easier to convert ‘tyre kickers’ AKA prospects into buyers on social media or through email marketing. Like a lot of you reading this, Chrissy is my go-to virtuoso for all things digital media… I’ll explain to you what she explained to me.
“Social media and email marketing should both be used to attract new customers and connect with the wider audience. But what I love about email marketing, is that it is the next level when it comes to communicating and engaging directly with your customers. The social media feed is the hectic man! You are competing for eyeball attention on socials. Whereas the email marketing space is more ‘intimate’ if you like! While your email database may be a cast of thousands, the message itself is essentially being sent directly to the individual, which makes it more personalised. Communicating directly through email marketing can tick all the boxes to win a sale; from the warm and fuzzy feels, building rapport through to proving your status as an expert in your field.”
Chrissy symeonakis
Ah! There is my question answered! Social media is for catching the eyeball attention of your audience and email marketing is for building credibility and nurturing.
In marketing there are three stages in the marketing funnel:
“Businesses who use a mixture of social media and email marketing are giving themselves the best opportunity to communicate to their audience at each stage of their individual buyer journey,” informs Chrissy.
Now that I have clarified that both social media and email marketing have roles in the marketing funnel, I thought I’d delve into some of the ‘must know’ fundamentals for conducting an effective email marketing campaign. There is a big $$ difference between running a ‘meh’ campaign versus an ‘on-point’ one for your audience; let’s face it, that’s the whole aim of the game, right?
Is it best to use email marketing software to manage email marketing campaigns?
In brief, unless you have a software package to assist you in managing your database and email marketing campaigns, don’t even bother starting. A software package that records the ‘open-rate’ and ‘click-through rate’ tells you the cold hard truth. The data doesn’t lie.
There are many email marketing software packages out there. Fun Fact – Chrissy has her very own, Creative Soul-utions.
What do ‘open rate’ and ‘click-through rate’ mean?
As the name suggests, the ‘open rate’ tells you the percentage of people who opened the email sent. Chrissy says, “A good open rate is between 15-25%.” The ‘click-through’ rate tells you the percentage of people who clicked on a link or Call To Action (CTA) button in your campaign.
Should a campaign be re-sent to those who didn’t open it the first time?
Chrissy explains “The answer is both Yes and No! Yes, re-sending a campaign is the fastest and easiest way to ensure the hard work you’ve already done gets more views. My pro-tip is to not re-send every campaign. Be selective about the campaigns you re-send, as you don’t want to be harassing. Overdoing it can lead to being unsubscribed to.”
What is A/B testing?
A/B testing is simply taking a sample of your overall database and testing two variants. It gauges how to effectively communicate to your audience. Sure, you can go searching for the latest data on ‘what time to send a campaign’ or ‘what is the best layout to use.’, but even the experts won’t know how to engage specifically with your audience. A/B testing takes out the guesswork.
Before sending out a campaign to your full database, you select a small sample of the audience to test two variants.
For example, let’s say we are going to test the effectiveness of emojis in the subject line.
We then send emojis in the subject line to group A and leave them out of the subject line to group B.
In this case, we would measure the open rates to assess which group performed the best.
Let’s presume that the subject line with emojis performed the best. We would then send out the campaign to the rest of the database with emojis in the subject line.
A/B testing can be used to trial so many variants of an email campaign which can include:
- Call to Action Buttons
- Tone
- Layout
- Graphics
- Personalised v’s generic
- Send time
Sometimes the smallest changes can make the biggest difference, which is why A/B testing is so important. It is ensuring your campaigns are hitting the mark.
There is just so much to learn in the digital marketing space, and as I said in my introduction, I have accepted that I won’t ever know it all. When it comes to email marketing Chrissy is a mastermind. I couldn’t believe it when she told me that she once sent out a campaign to 1.8MILLION email recipients in one campaign for Zomato Australia! Chrissy has a wealth of knowledge and years of experience with sending out email marketing campaigns. Luckily for the rest of us, she’s willing to share it.
If you’d like to chat about how we can assist you with leveling up or implementing some email marketing in your business, get in touch.