MARKETING
The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing
Email is more than just an informative message; it is a sales tool that helps the brand reach its potential customers. That’s why email marketing continues to find a place in many brands’ marketing strategies. Also considered the most effective medium to reach a potential audience, email marketing is estimated to proliferate to more than 370 billion emails per year by 2025.
Statista’s recent report revealed that there would be a rapid and consistent increase in the use of email marketing as a promotion tool. Another report published on Financesonline.com projects that there will be 4.5 billion email users by 2024 compared to 4 billion in 2020. The rapid increase in the use of email has forced businesses to incorporate them into their marketing strategies.
Therefore, companies that want to attract customers to their brand organically must be aware of the core fundamentals of email marketing. Therefore, in the succeeding part of the article, we will understand in-depth email marketing. Everything will be discussed in the following paragraphs, from its meaning to tools.
The Ultimate Guide To Email Marketing
Experts believe that customers love to hear from the brand they love; that’s why they choose to subscribe to the monthly and weekly newsletters that companies send to make them aware of new products, among other things. So, to understand how to formulate an effective email marketing message, it is important to understand what email marketing is.
What Is Email Marketing?
Often digital marketing definition includes email marketing in it. So, what is email marketing? It is a process that revitalizes email as a promotion and advertising tool. Through email marketing, potential customers learn about new products, services, discounts, and offers, among other things. Therefore, it is an effective marketing medium that bridges the gap between the brand and the customer. It also allows brands to communicate with customers directly.
Due to its umpteen benefits and easy-to-use interface, email marketing has become one of the most popular marketing strategies globally. Large, medium or small businesses can implement email marketing into their brand promotional strategy because of the reasons listed below.
Why Is Email Marketing Important?
- It is a cost-effective marketing strategy compared to outdoor, news, and television advertisements.
- It has a higher return on investment (ROI) and helps brands reach a wider audience.
- It is an effective medium to reach new customers with minimal resources.
- It easily integrates into different marketing channels.
- It offers personalization by assisting in creating targeted messages for specific customers.
Email marketing is a powerful promotional tool that helps brands successfully persuade their customers. Its unique features and characteristics force customers to take action on them by reading, deleting, or archiving them. Therefore, it is too hard to avoid email. To effectively formulate an email marketing strategy, a marketing manager should follow a few steps that we will be discussing in the next part of the article.
How To Formulate An Email Marketing Plan?
Follow these steps to formulate an effective email marketing plan successfully:
- Understand your audience’s needs
- Include a call-to-action
- Decide the content of the email
Formulating an email marketing plan is an elaborative process requiring the marketing manager to perform various steps to understand the target audience. Once you have understood your audience’s needs, it is easy to formulate the content of the email. Unfortunately, brands often concentrate on writing email content that aligns with the needs of their audience. It is effective but compromises the organization’s goal. So, while formulating an email marketing plan, try to integrate business goals and audience needs into the strategy to get more effective results.
Different types of email marketing incite different results. So, depending on the market, audience, and business size, a company can decide the email marketing type. Below are some of the popular types of email marketing prevalent in the current times.
What Are The Types Of Email Marketing?
• Newsletters
Newsletters are a significant way of informing the audience about new products or services launched by a brand. In addition, it is used to help the users understand the brand better. Therefore, they follow a strict delivery schedule, which cannot be shifted or changed frequently.
• Welcome emails
Welcome emails are sent to new customers or potential users whom the brands wish to turn into consumers. This type of email marketing aims to educate audiences about the brand, its products, services, and brand goal, among other things.
• Promotional emails
Promotional emails’ main focus is to persuade customers to buy a product or service. Therefore, they are designed to influence the audience to buy the product.
• Sponsorship emails
Brands can use different types of email marketing to reach the audience. Sponsorship email is summarized as the process of promoting a product and service on another brand’s email ad space. In addition, it is used to attract new customers to the products.
Email marketing is a marketing activity that can be intimidating and strenuous for marketing managers. Therefore, brands use many online tools to automate and classify email marketing processes. In the last part of the article, we will discuss the tools of email marketing that helps brands promote their product or service effectively.
What Are The Tools Used For Email Marketing?
Here are some marketing tools that brands commonly use.
- Mailchimp
- Campaign Monitor
- Sendinblue
- Easysendy
- SendPulse
Besides email marketing, there are different types of digital marketing strategy that helps in reaching the targeted audience effectively. To understand the intricate details of different digital marketing strategies, marketing managers can take digital marketing certification courses offered by Emeritus India in association with renowned Indian and international universities.
MARKETING
YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples [2024 Update]
Introduction
With billions of users each month, YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and top website for video content. This makes it a great place for advertising. To succeed, advertisers need to follow the correct YouTube ad specifications. These rules help your ad reach more viewers, increasing the chance of gaining new customers and boosting brand awareness.
Types of YouTube Ads
Video Ads
- Description: These play before, during, or after a YouTube video on computers or mobile devices.
- Types:
- In-stream ads: Can be skippable or non-skippable.
- Bumper ads: Non-skippable, short ads that play before, during, or after a video.
Display Ads
- Description: These appear in different spots on YouTube and usually use text or static images.
- Note: YouTube does not support display image ads directly on its app, but these can be targeted to YouTube.com through Google Display Network (GDN).
Companion Banners
- Description: Appears to the right of the YouTube player on desktop.
- Requirement: Must be purchased alongside In-stream ads, Bumper ads, or In-feed ads.
In-feed Ads
- Description: Resemble videos with images, headlines, and text. They link to a public or unlisted YouTube video.
Outstream Ads
- Description: Mobile-only video ads that play outside of YouTube, on websites and apps within the Google video partner network.
Masthead Ads
- Description: Premium, high-visibility banner ads displayed at the top of the YouTube homepage for both desktop and mobile users.
YouTube Ad Specs by Type
Skippable In-stream Video Ads
- Placement: Before, during, or after a YouTube video.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Vertical: 9:16
- Square: 1:1
- Length:
- Awareness: 15-20 seconds
- Consideration: 2-3 minutes
- Action: 15-20 seconds
Non-skippable In-stream Video Ads
- Description: Must be watched completely before the main video.
- Length: 15 seconds (or 20 seconds in certain markets).
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Vertical: 9:16
- Square: 1:1
Bumper Ads
- Length: Maximum 6 seconds.
- File Format: MP4, Quicktime, AVI, ASF, Windows Media, or MPEG.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 640 x 360px
- Vertical: 480 x 360px
In-feed Ads
- Description: Show alongside YouTube content, like search results or the Home feed.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Square: 1:1
- Length:
- Awareness: 15-20 seconds
- Consideration: 2-3 minutes
- Headline/Description:
- Headline: Up to 2 lines, 40 characters per line
- Description: Up to 2 lines, 35 characters per line
Display Ads
- Description: Static images or animated media that appear on YouTube next to video suggestions, in search results, or on the homepage.
- Image Size: 300×60 pixels.
- File Type: GIF, JPG, PNG.
- File Size: Max 150KB.
- Max Animation Length: 30 seconds.
Outstream Ads
- Description: Mobile-only video ads that appear on websites and apps within the Google video partner network, not on YouTube itself.
- Logo Specs:
- Square: 1:1 (200 x 200px).
- File Type: JPG, GIF, PNG.
- Max Size: 200KB.
Masthead Ads
- Description: High-visibility ads at the top of the YouTube homepage.
- Resolution: 1920 x 1080 or higher.
- File Type: JPG or PNG (without transparency).
Conclusion
YouTube offers a variety of ad formats to reach audiences effectively in 2024. Whether you want to build brand awareness, drive conversions, or target specific demographics, YouTube provides a dynamic platform for your advertising needs. Always follow Google’s advertising policies and the technical ad specs to ensure your ads perform their best. Ready to start using YouTube ads? Contact us today to get started!
MARKETING
Why We Are Always ‘Clicking to Buy’, According to Psychologists
Amazon pillows.
MARKETING
A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots
Salesforce launched a collection of new, generative AI-related products at Connections in Chicago this week. They included new Einstein Copilots for marketers and merchants and Einstein Personalization.
To better understand, not only the potential impact of the new products, but the evolving Salesforce architecture, we sat down with Bobby Jania, CMO, Marketing Cloud.
Dig deeper: Salesforce piles on the Einstein Copilots
Salesforce’s evolving architecture
It’s hard to deny that Salesforce likes coming up with new names for platforms and products (what happened to Customer 360?) and this can sometimes make the observer wonder if something is brand new, or old but with a brand new name. In particular, what exactly is Einstein 1 and how is it related to Salesforce Data Cloud?
“Data Cloud is built on the Einstein 1 platform,” Jania explained. “The Einstein 1 platform is our entire Salesforce platform and that includes products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud — that it includes the original idea of Salesforce not just being in the cloud, but being multi-tenancy.”
Data Cloud — not an acquisition, of course — was built natively on that platform. It was the first product built on Hyperforce, Salesforce’s new cloud infrastructure architecture. “Since Data Cloud was on what we now call the Einstein 1 platform from Day One, it has always natively connected to, and been able to read anything in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud [and so on]. On top of that, we can now bring in, not only structured but unstructured data.”
That’s a significant progression from the position, several years ago, when Salesforce had stitched together a platform around various acquisitions (ExactTarget, for example) that didn’t necessarily talk to each other.
“At times, what we would do is have a kind of behind-the-scenes flow where data from one product could be moved into another product,” said Jania, “but in many of those cases the data would then be in both, whereas now the data is in Data Cloud. Tableau will run natively off Data Cloud; Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud — they’re all going to the same operational customer profile.” They’re not copying the data from Data Cloud, Jania confirmed.
Another thing to know is tit’s possible for Salesforce customers to import their own datasets into Data Cloud. “We wanted to create a federated data model,” said Jania. “If you’re using Snowflake, for example, we more or less virtually sit on your data lake. The value we add is that we will look at all your data and help you form these operational customer profiles.”
Let’s learn more about Einstein Copilot
“Copilot means that I have an assistant with me in the tool where I need to be working that contextually knows what I am trying to do and helps me at every step of the process,” Jania said.
For marketers, this might begin with a campaign brief developed with Copilot’s assistance, the identification of an audience based on the brief, and then the development of email or other content. “What’s really cool is the idea of Einstein Studio where our customers will create actions [for Copilot] that we hadn’t even thought about.”
Here’s a key insight (back to nomenclature). We reported on Copilot for markets, Copilot for merchants, Copilot for shoppers. It turns out, however, that there is just one Copilot, Einstein Copilot, and these are use cases. “There’s just one Copilot, we just add these for a little clarity; we’re going to talk about marketing use cases, about shoppers’ use cases. These are actions for the marketing use cases we built out of the box; you can build your own.”
It’s surely going to take a little time for marketers to learn to work easily with Copilot. “There’s always time for adoption,” Jania agreed. “What is directly connected with this is, this is my ninth Connections and this one has the most hands-on training that I’ve seen since 2014 — and a lot of that is getting people using Data Cloud, using these tools rather than just being given a demo.”
What’s new about Einstein Personalization
Salesforce Einstein has been around since 2016 and many of the use cases seem to have involved personalization in various forms. What’s new?
“Einstein Personalization is a real-time decision engine and it’s going to choose next-best-action, next-best-offer. What is new is that it’s a service now that runs natively on top of Data Cloud.” A lot of real-time decision engines need their own set of data that might actually be a subset of data. “Einstein Personalization is going to look holistically at a customer and recommend a next-best-action that could be natively surfaced in Service Cloud, Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud.”
Finally, trust
One feature of the presentations at Connections was the reassurance that, although public LLMs like ChatGPT could be selected for application to customer data, none of that data would be retained by the LLMs. Is this just a matter of written agreements? No, not just that, said Jania.
“In the Einstein Trust Layer, all of the data, when it connects to an LLM, runs through our gateway. If there was a prompt that had personally identifiable information — a credit card number, an email address — at a mimum, all that is stripped out. The LLMs do not store the output; we store the output for auditing back in Salesforce. Any output that comes back through our gateway is logged in our system; it runs through a toxicity model; and only at the end do we put PII data back into the answer. There are real pieces beyond a handshake that this data is safe.”
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