YOUR EMAIL LIST
No matter what happens in digital communication, email marketing is one constant. Contrary to annual predictions that email marketing has peaked, the numbers tell a different story. A reasonably recent DMA study found that 76% of marketers use more email than three years ago. Regarding numerically based predictions, Forrester Research forecasts that investment in email marketing will grow.
Knowing that email marketing will not only continue but also increase, how can it be integrated into a successful inbound marketing strategy?
In this series, we will look at the reasons for incorporating email into your inbound marketing strategy and ways to make this integration most effective.
HOW TO GROW YOUR EMAIL LIST
Who you send to is more important than what you send. It doesn’t matter if your list is 1,000 or 100,000; your email marketing is only as good as the quality of your recipient list.
We live in a world where people change jobs, get married and change names, companies go out of business, merge and relocate, and where interests and needs change.
That means that lists have natural decay. On average, marketing lists tend to expire at 25% a year.
So, if you aren’t working at cleaning your list and pursuing new prospects to join your lists, chances are the effectiveness of your email marketing will only decline.
We have found that marketers grow their lists in two ways: the bad way and the good.
Growing Your Email List, The Bad Way
While we can’t say you won’t build your list if you buy third-party email lists, we can say that doing so comes with many risks. Or put another way, we wouldn’t do
Warning – You Can Alienate Recipients
It does not make people happy to get emails with irrelevant ads or marketing messages from companies they have never interacted with. This is the opposite experience they get with inbound marketing, where they seek you out. Being interrupted creates annoyance and few, if any, quality leads.
Warning - You Could Get Blacklisted or Marked for Spam
You don’t ever want to affect your deliverability rate negatively. We’ll cover this more in the next section, but using a third-party list can do more damage in deliverability than good.
Warning - Bought Recipients Aren’t as Engaged as Opt-In Recipients
Not only are click-through rates dramatically worse with third-party lists than opt-in lists, but even when they convert, the quality of the leads is also much worse.
Warning - It Undermines Your Inbound Marketing Strategy
Buying and using a third-party list can undercut your company’s reputation as a helpful inbound marketer.
As an inbound marketer, you want to attract leads through useful, valuable content rather than harassing prospective customers with ads or direct mail they never asked for.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
It’s almost the opposite of outbound marketing, which likes to interrupt consumers hoping they will suddenly see the light and want to buy that product.
Inbound marketing is about getting found by those looking for a solution you offer, converting that person into a lead or sale, and then analysing their behaviour so you can learn how to attract more people who might be looking for your solution.
Growing Your Email List, The Good Way
If you provide value and relevance to your prospects, they will eventually convert into quality leads. The best way we know how to attract them is through inbound marketing.
If you want to start generating leads through inbound marketing, launch a blog and fill it with good, valuable, search-friendly content.
Don’t Hide Your Subscribe Box
A good blog and website should act like a magnet for potential subscribers. When they get to your blog, please don’t assume they can intuitively find their way around. They won't sign up if you make it hard for them to find your subscribe box.
To ensure your subscriber box is optimally placed, try A/B testing its placement on your site. An excellent place to start is putting your email submission field in the top of your blog and remove any other distractions.
Consider Partnerships
Non-competing companies often share the same market audience. So, figure out which non-competing company wants to reach the same audience as you and ask them to join you in co-hosting a webinar or another marketing event.
Both companies will reach out to their lists.
Participants will be encouraged to opt in to hear more from each company during the webinar or event. The result will be that both companies will have new and engaged subscribers.
How to Reduce Unsubscribes
Growing your email list is like taking two steps forward and one step back. You will eventually get unsubscribed.
What’s important is to try to minimise them. Here are a few tips on how to reduce your unsubscribe rate:
Optimise The Unsubscribe Process
The top two reasons email users unsubscribe from a business or non-profit email subscription are:
- Too many emails (69%)
- Content that is no longer relevant (56%)
So take that knowledge and use it to your advantage. During the unsubscribe process, they can receive fewer emails or emails about specific topics.
They still might want to unsubscribe. But how do you know if they have lost interest in you or if they don’t like email marketing? Give them a way to follow you through your social media sites.
Conduct A Frequency Study
You can wait for them to unsubscribe or be proactive and survey your subscribers about how often they’d like to hear from you.
With that information test what the survey results tell you with a higher and lower frequency rate. Then analyse which frequency results in more conversions and fewer unsubscribed. If you are looking for benchmarks, according to Marketing Sherpa, the average unsubscribe rate for more than 80% of the companies they surveyed was less than 3%.
Focus On Targeting
Irrelevance will kill your lists. According to Marketing Sherpa’s Wisdom Report, 40% of subscribers mark emails as spam because the communication is irrelevant.
In the same report, those who send emails targeted through segmentation to specific audiences get 50% more click-through than those who don’t.
So, analyse the data on how your subscribers behave and focus on the relevance of your emails to your segmented lists.
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Digital Marketers
Digital marketers use many different tactics to market their products, including search, social media, mobile, analytics, and advertising.
Email should not be viewed as a separate entity. It is most effective when it’s integrated with the rest of your marketing. In this chapter, we show you a different way to integrate email with your other marketing assets.
Email & Social Media Integration
Numbers rarely lie. In a recent study from Aberdeen Research, 65% of the top 20% of B2B marketers who use social media for lead generation choose to integrate email with social media.
The nice thing is that you can more easily mimic this group's success than you think. Here are some tactics to get you started.
Add Social Media Sharing Buttons to Your Emails
If you want to extend your email's reach and expand the visibility of your content and brand, try adding social media sharing and follow buttons to your emails. It’s simple, effective, and easy to do.
Send Email Based On Social Media Insights
If you use integrated marketing analytics, you can determine which leads or subscribers have mentioned you on X. These are highly engaged leads and deserve targeted sends.
Grow your Email List Through Social Media
We’ve found that social media users who engage with you are excellent leads. So please give them a reason to subscribe to your email list. On your Facebook page, offer them a tantalising call to action and clarify why signing up for an email subscription will benefit them.
Email & Search Integration
Do you know that the link at the top of many emails lets people view them on their web browser? This not only helps people who have trouble viewing the email in their inbox, but it can also help with search optimisation.
When you host an HTML version of your email on the web, you create an archive of that email accessible to search engines. Because of that, make sure your email content follows SEO best practices such as:
- Use your best keywords
- Anchor text when constructing the body of the message
- Ensure all images have alt-tags
- Include social media sharing buttons to stretch the content further.
Integrated Analytics
The online behaviour of your customers and prospects is seamless. They go from social media to a website, opening an email, clicking through to a landing page, downloading it, and then back to Facebook. They don’t cover their tracks because they don’t have to. But in today’s analytics world, you need to see the integrated connection between these activities, and relying on individual analytics for each channel won’t help. You need a multichannel view that helps you find out information such as:
- The number of people who clicked through but did not convert
- The number of people who converted on your website that came from social media, and the number that actually opened your last email campaign.
- Which tactics result in more leads: PPC, organic search, email or social?
One of the real benefits of integrated analytics reports is that they help you get more targeted in your email sends. With integrated marketing analytics, you can segment your mailing list and send communications based on the lead’s history of downloads and pages viewed. With integrated analytic software, you can see how email fits into the inbound marketing puzzle, giving you the context to make intelligent decisions on segmentation and nurturing.
Integration with Mobile
More and more people open their emails through their mobile devices. That number can be as high as 50%, depending on the industry. And once they’ve opened your email on their mobile, chances are they won’t reopen it on their computer.
So, what must you do to make your email strategy mobile?
- Start by testing your email templates to see how they look on different mobile devices.
- Make sure your call-to-action buttons and links can be easily clicked by readers using touch screens.
- Offer both plain text and HTML versions of your email.
- Since your images may not display, pay attention to the descriptions in your alt text under the images.
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Remember, your email is just the beginning of the process. Remember to optimise the landing pages and forms of your email links for mobile.
Look into getting marketing software (that automatically optimises your emails and landing pages for mobile viewing.
Email Arrival
Just because you sent it doesn’t mean it got there. Approximately 17% of all emails don’t arrive. You can blame it on several factors – spam traps, defunct emails, and firewalls, to name a few. If you want to keep your deliverability rates as high as possible, you need to
- Keep your email lists clean
- Ensure you’ve properly warmed up your IP when starting with a new email service provider.
- Follow best-inbound marketing practices for email
Keeping Your Email Lists Clean
Eighty-three per cent of you can blame non-delivery on your sender's reputation, as defined by the Sender Score.
What Is a Sender Score?
A free service of Return Path, the Sender Score algorithm rates the reputation of every outgoing mail server IP address on a scale from 0-100. It gathers data from over 60 million mailboxes at big ISPs like BellSouth and Comcast. It looks at where people unsubscribe or report spam from specific email senders. It then assigns a Sender Score based on that monitoring.
Like your credit report, your sender score changes.
How it changes all depends on how you send your emails and how people respond. If you constantly send them information they don’t want, they will unsubscribe, impacting your score. Keeping track of your Sender Score is essential since that score often dictates how mail servers will deal with your emails. You want your Sender Score to get as close to 100 as possible. The closer it is to zero, the harder it will be for you to get your emails into someone’s inbox.
Scores are calculated on a rolling 30-day average. Your score ranks your IP address against other IP addresses, much like a percentile ranking. If you use an email provider to send emails for you, you need to worry about your provider’s IP address, not your company’s. Ask them their Sender Score and ensure it is in the 90%s.
Many email networks and ISPs don’t query your Sender Score. That should not influence your desire to have a high Sender Score since, as a free email sender reputation tool, it helps you be aware of and have the opportunity to fix any deliverability problems.
So, how do you know if your list is good or not?
Answer these five questions, and you will get a good idea of where you stand.
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Does Everybody On This List Have a Prior Relationship with Your Business?
If the answer is No, either get rid of the list of all the people you don’t have a relationship with. Without a prior relationship, they won’t be expecting your email. For them, it will be spam, and many of them will mark it as such. That, in turn, will damage your Sender Score, making email delivery harder. If the answer is Yes, then good job. Read the next question.
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Do You Have an Unsubscribe List?
If the answer is Yes, then go to question 3. If the answer is No, you might be breaking the law when you send it. Every company has people who have unsubscribed to their emails. These people do not want to see your emails again; you must respect that. If you don’t, you’re breaking the CAN-SPAM law and upping the odds of people reporting your email as spam. Every time you load a list into a system, you need to load both the master list and the unsubscribe (suppression) list. This way, you can avoid emailing those who don’t want them.
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Did You Purchase, Rent, Or Lease the List from A Third Party?
If the answer is yes, then realise that sending emails to this list increases the chances of getting flagged for spam. These lists come from many places. The better ones have people give their addresses to somebody else, but they expect an email from them, not you. The worst ones harvest addresses from directories, and those people on that list do not expect any type of email. If the answer is No, then go to question 4
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Will The People On the List Be Expecting (Not Be Surprised) By Your Email?
Hopefully, the answer is yes. If it’s not, you need to build your list using inbound marketing and names from opt-ins.
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Have You Emailed These Contacts Within the Last 12 Months?
If the answer is no, then odds are recipients will have forgotten about you and will be surprised to get your email, but not in a good way. You are not some long-lost relative or friend. When they get your email, even if they recognise your company name, they might mark it as spam. If the answer is Yes, and you have answered the other four questions correctly, then you are ready to create some awesome emails filled with beneficial content to increase your conversion rates.
What to Know About Server IP Addresses?
A server IP address is a series of numbers that uniquely identify the server that’s sending your emails, e.g. 172.16.254.1. Every email campaign that is sent out is associated with an IP address. Your sender reputation is associated with that given IP address. Knowing this, you can opt for a dedicated IP address or a shared IP address for your email sends. Here is some information that will help you make that decision.
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Dedicated IP
A dedicated IP is just that—an address unique to you. Because it’s only yours, you have the sole power to influence its reputation. That’s a significant advantage, but it comes at a cost. Dedicated IPs tend to be expensive. Furthermore, your IP won’t even register on the Sender Score scale if you don't send enough emails. While having an unknown sender score isn’t necessarily bad, having a high score registered is still better.
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Shared IP
When you send your emails through a provider, you are sending through a Shared IP. It’s called shared because it uses one IP address to email multiple companies. More affordable than dedicated ones, they also have the scale of sends to register a sender score. The downside is that, because you are sharing, ask your email service provider about their highest and lowest sender scores on record.
Warming Up Your IP Address
It’s an odd thought, warming up a set of numbers. But there is a reason you want to build up your total slowly over time, and it has to do with spammers. Spammers move around and quickly. They use one IP address, send out millions of emails, and shut it down before it gets blacklisted, then onto the next cold IP address. Because of this, companies set up automatic blocks to limit or reject large-scale email sends coming from brand-new IP addresses. So when you start with a new IP address, “warm up” your IP by slowly building up your total sends over time. Luckily, you only need to warm up once. After you have been sending emails from your IP address for a while, you are ready to go.
Marketing Success
Relevance is essential for marketing success. Many companies take relevancy for granted, resulting in poor marketing efforts.
The reason why 40% of email subscribers mark the email as spam is not because they do not know who sent it but because what was sent is irrelevant to their needs.
Targeting through segmentation is one way to make your emails more relevant. Here are five great ways to create more tailored and effective emails.
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Geographic Segmentation
If you are going to segment geographically, consider how the buyer’s location influences his or her purchasing decision. Here are a few examples of segmenting by geography:
- When sending invitations to special events.
- What you offer has geographic limitations, such as a regional sales event.
- When you are limited to an area, as is the case for local landscaping companies, cleaning services, or restaurants.
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Industry/Role Segmentation
This applies more to B2B companies. Your customer’s company is made up of different divisions. How you relate to a salesperson is different from how you would talk to an IT person or marketer, for that matter. They have different goals and interests in your company. Targeting these specific interests can increase your click-through rates.
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Content Interests
Determining who your customers are is often influenced by their past. So, use your analytics to determine what interests your leads. Look at their viewed or downloaded content and segment your lists accordingly. A simple way to start is to pull a list of people who have downloaded a particular whitepaper or another marketing offer. Then, using that content to indicate what interests them, create a targeted email or lead a nurturing campaign that addresses that interest. Marketing software lets you do this segmentation by quickly creating a list based on recent conversion events.
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Behaviour-Based Segmentation
Some leads are further along the sales cycles than others, and you can often determine their interest level in your products based on their activity on your website. For example, how you would communicate with someone who has only seen a few pages on your site differs from someone who has downloaded five whitepapers and visited 50 pages. Your analytics should help you distinguish the browsing behaviour of different website visitors. Use this information to make your communications more relevant to how far along the recipient is in his or her purchasing decision.
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Segmentation by Brand Advocates
Those who advocate for your brand want to feel the love. They want to believe you understand them. So, who are they?
- Frequent buyers
- Social media fans
- Customers who have recommended you to others
- Non-customers who have advocated for you online
These brand advocates need to be carefully nurtured. Your emails need to acknowledge them, which you can do by sending thank-you, advanced notice on new services or products, requests for feedback, and rewards. If you recognise them and show how you appreciate them, they will continue to spread the word. Regarding segmentation and personalisation, consider what differentiates your subscribers and leads and how you can address those needs or interests.
You can start small - even the slightest segmentation can increase your email success rates. The five suggestions above are just a starting point. As you become more involved with segmentation, you will discover more ways to target your audience's and industry's individual characteristics.
CONCLUSION
Email marketing should work to support your lead generation and conversion efforts. It should increase your sales cost-effectively. In this series, we elaborated on crucial ways that you can accomplish this:
- Grow your email list and reduce unsubscribes.
- By integrating your email with the rest of your marketing efforts.
- By improving your deliverability and ensuring that your subscribers receive your communication.
- By segmentation and personalisation.
These are foundational principles that will have a positive effect on your email marketing. Apply this information to your email marketing and watch those leads convert into sales.