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If all goes well, you’ll have built a robust list of subscribers and leads that are waiting to hear from you. But you can’t start emailing just yet unless you want to end up in a spam folder, or worse, a blocked list.
Here are a few extremely important things to keep in mind before you start emailing your list that you worked so hard to build.
An email marketing provider (ESP) is a great resource if you’re looking for any level of support while fine-tuning your email marketing efforts.
For example, HubSpot’s Email Marketing tool allows you to efficiently create, personalize, and optimize marketing emails that feel and look professional without designers or IT.
There are a variety of features to help you create the best email marketing campaigns and support all of your email marketing goals.
Additionally, you can analyze the success of your email marketing so you can share the data that matters most to your business with your team. The best part? You can use HubSpot’s Email Marketing service for free.
Here are examples of features services like HubSpot offer to consider when choosing an email service provider:
While you probably don’t think twice about the formatting or subject line of an email you send to a friend, email marketing requires a lot more consideration. Everything from the time you send your email to the devices on which your email could be opened matters.
Your goal with every email is to generate more leads, which makes crafting a marketing email a more involved process than other emails you’ve written.
Let’s touch on the components of a successful marketing email:
Copy: The copy in the body of your email should be consistent with your voice and stick to only one topic.
Images: Choose images that are optimized for all devices, eye-catching, and relevant.
CTA: Your call-to-action should lead to a relevant offer and stand out from the rest of the email.
Timing: Based on a study that observed response rates of 20 million emails, Tuesday at 11 AM ET is the best day and time to send your email.
Responsiveness: 55% of emails are opened on mobile. Your email should, therefore, be optimized for this as well as all other devices.
Personalization: Write every email like you’re sending it to a friend. Be personable and address your reader in a familiar tone.
Subject Line: Use clear, actionable, enticing language that is personalized and aligned with the body of the email.
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Segmentation is breaking up your large email list into sub-categories that pertain to your subscribers’ unique characteristics, interests, and preferences.
Our subscribers are humans, after all, and we should do our best to treat them as such. That means, not sending generic email blasts.
We talked about segmentation briefly above. The reason why this topic is important enough to mention twice is that, without it, you run the risk of sending the wrong content to the wrong people and losing subscribers.
Each person who signs up to receive your emails is at a different level of readiness to convert into a customer (which is the ultimate goal of all this).
If you send a discount coupon for your product to subscribers that don’t even know how to diagnose their problem, you’ll probably lose them. That’s because you’re skipping the part where you build trust and develop the relationship.
Every email you send should treat your subscribers like humans that you want to connect with, as opposed to a herd of leads that you’re trying to corral into one-size-fits-all box.
The more you segment your list, the more trust you build with your leads and the easier it’ll be to convert them later.
The first step in segmentation is creating separate lead magnets and opt-in forms for each part of the buyer’s journey. That way, your contacts are automatically divided into separate lists.
Beyond that, email marketing platforms allow you to segment your email list by contact data and behavior to help you send the right emails to the right people.
Here are some ways you could break up your list:
In reality, you can segment your list any way that you want. Just make sure to be as exclusive as possible when sending emails to each subgroup.
Now that you know who you’re emailing and what’s important to them, it will be much easier to send emails with personalized touches.
Sure, you’re speaking to 100+ people at one time, but your leads don’t need to know it.
A 2021 report by Litmus revealed that 80% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences.
To really drive this point home, consider this: Personalized emails have higher open rates. In addition, 83% of customers are willing to share their data to create a more personalized experience.
You’ve gathered all this unique data. Your email marketing software allows for personalization tokens. You have no excuse for sending generic emails that don’t make your leads feel special.
Here are a few ways to personalize your emails:
Automation is putting your list segmentation to use.
Once you’ve created specific subgroups, you can send automated emails that are highly targeted. There are a couple of ways to do this.
An autoresponder, also known as a drip campaign, is a series of emails that is sent out automatically once triggered by a certain action. For instance, when someone downloads your ebook.
You’ll use the same guidelines for writing your emails that we discussed previously to ensure that your readers find your emails useful and interesting. You should decide how far apart you’d like your emails to be sent, say every few days or weeks or even months.
The great thing about autoresponders is that you can set it and forget it. Every user that is part of your autoresponder will receive each email that you’ve added to the series.
Workflows take autoresponders a step further. Think of Workflows like a flow tree with yes/no branches that will execute actions based on the criteria that you set.
Workflows have two key components:
Workflow tools are smart enough to know if a user opened an email or downloaded an offer, and it will set off a series of actions based on that behavior. That means, it can send an email series, or even change a prospect’s lifecycle stage based on what a user does.
Here’s an example of how a workflow could be set up:
The key difference from an autoresponder is that workflows are smart: They can change the course of your automated series based on what your prospect will find useful.
For instance, if a new subscriber receives a welcome email and the subsequent email is set up to send them an offer that they already found and downloaded on your site, the workflow tool will know and adapt. In an autoresponder, a user receives a specific set of emails at specific time intervals no matter what action they take.
Why is this important? Sending the right email at the wrong time is detrimental to your bottom line.
Email marketing templates — like these ones from HubSpot — are another great resource to help you with your email marketing.
Unless you’re a designer and developer on top of being a skilled marketer, templates will save you a ton of time — they take the design, coding, and UX-definition work out of crafting your emails.
Just one caveat: when making your selection, choose email templates that are proven to be effective.
The highest-quality templates come from the most reputable ESPs that have tested them against thousands of alternatives. So, stick with the professionals.
And speaking of things like quality work and great reputation, there are some email regulations to be aware of when crafting emails and developing your marketing strategy.
Email regulations are consistent with consumers’ desires to know how and why their information is being used. If there’s anything we care about, it’s complying with what our customers—or potential customers—want.
Technically, CAN-SPAM is an acronym for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (because sometimes the two go together).
In practice, it’s a way to protect your subscribers’ right to only receive emails that they’ve requested.
The law was passed in 2003 and applies to any commercial emails used for business purposes.
Here are the ways to ensure that your emails are CAN-SPAM compliant:
Please note: This is not to be confused for legal advice. See the FTC’s site for more specific legal information regarding CAN-SPAM laws.
While some may view these newly implemented email regulations as burdensome and unnecessary, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) actually moves us closer to building long-lasting and trusting relationships with our customers.
GDPR is about giving your customers the right to choose. They choose your emails. They choose to hear from you. They choose your products. And that is exactly what inbound marketing is about.
Something important to note about GDPR is that it only applies to businesses that operate in the European Union and businesses that market to EU citizens. Noncompliance will result in significant fees that aren’t worth the risk, so make sure to read the GDPR guidelines entirely.
Here’s an overview of how you can comply with GDPR laws:
These regulations will be taken seriously (as they should), so it’s a good idea to create a GDPR strategy for your business before you start sending out emails.
You spend time creating the perfect email and adhering to regulations, so the last thing you want is to end up in a spam folder.
You’ll want to avoid the spam folder because:
You can avoid being deduced to spam by:
A whitelist is the opposite of a blacklist, meaning it’s a list of approved senders that are allowed to reach the subscriber’s inbox. The easiest way to accomplish this is to have your new subscriber add your email address to their address book. Include directions on how to do this in your welcome email.
Avoid using all caps and multiple exclamation points, as well as spam trigger words, like “opt in”, “click below”, and “order”, that are easily detected and marked down by Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
Your email service provider’s reputation affects your deliverability, so stick to established, well-known companies.
Once someone opts in to your email list, send an email asking them to confirm. This ensures that your new subscriber is genuinely interested in your emails and will likely be more engaged.
(Check out more ways you can avoid the spam filter.)
And last but certainly not least, you need to consistently measure the success of your email marketing efforts. There are a number of options you can choose from when it comes to your business’s email marketing analytics.
By diving into your email marketing analytics, you’ll be able to make better decisions that are sure to positively impact your business’s bottom line, resonate with your subscribers, readers, and customers, and justify your work to the rest of your company.
Here are the best ways to analyze the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
Not all email lists are created equal. Some audiences prefer personalization and others will think it’s spammy. Some audiences will like bright, eye-catching CTA buttons, and others will prefer a more subtle call-to-action.
You’ll never know what type of people make up your email list until you test the variables. That’s where A/B testing comes in handy.
Surprisingly, not many brands leverage it. A 2021 Litmus study found that 44% of marketers rarely A/B or multivariate test their emails. Only 19% do it often or always.
A/B testing, or split testing, is a way to see what type of email performs best with your audience by analyzing the results of email A against email B.
Here’s the step-by-step process for A/B testing your emails:
Most email service providers will have A/B testing built into their software, which will make it easy for you to compare email results without much manual work.
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There are four key metrics to pay attention to when evaluating the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign.
Many factors impact your KPIs, and it’s going to take some experimentation and guesswork to figure out which tweaks to your emails will yield the biggest changes.
If you aren’t getting the numbers you want, try playing with these variables to improve your email results.
Your data does no good if you can’t report it in an organized fashion.
An email marketing report is a spreadsheet where you can record your results in one place to help you make inferences from your KPIs and take action to improve them.
Here’s how you should organize your report:
While there are many rules to sending a marketing email, the most important is this: Treat your subscribers like humans.
You can achieve all of your email marketing goals if you keep this golden rule top-of-mind in every autoresponder, lead magnet, and subject line.
When in doubt or if you’re ever in need of inspiration, turn to some of the greatest email marketing examples. You can also take a look at some quick additional tips in this video by HubSpot Academy:
And remember, your subscribers want to hear from you and they want to relate to you. Be a genuine resource, and they will look forward to opening an email from you just like they would any friend of theirs.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
Originally published Mar 23, 2022 7:00:00 AM, updated March 23 2022
Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.
Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.
Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.
For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.
The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.
Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes
Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643.
Here are the median salaries by role:
Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.
One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%).
Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.
Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams
In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”
This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.
In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.
The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents.
Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.
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