Year: 2016

Do you know Tricks of Best email marketing campaigns, if not learn with us. Decade ago, marketers scratched ideas on a piece of paper, ran email campaigns and crossed fingers that results would follow. The campaigns did and did not generate results. But the marketers kept running them.

It was aimless shooting in a pitch dark room where the campaigns would hit the bull’s eye sometime and missed the target often. But the reason why marketers kept taking these chances was that while they had an idea that their campaigns weren’t working as per the standards, they couldn’t identify the exact loopholes.

There were no proper tools and the campaign results were gained in disconnected pieces.

The tactics have changed but the attitude of marketers is still the same

According to CSO Insights, more than 65% of businesses are not satisfied with their email marketing campaigns. The reason is the absence of a well-defined strategy and the usage of disconnected tools that makes it tough to measure campaign results.

Businesses need a new framework for running email marketing campaigns. A plan of action needs to be framed that has the following crucial components:

• Set of clearly-defined goals
• Finite start and end date
• Tool for tracking the campaign success and failure.

Here’s a step-by-step blueprint for planning and launching an email marketing campaign. Take a look –

1. Notion Building

The idea of launching an email marketing campaign cannot be taken hastily. Successful email marketing campaigns demand to be carefully researched, well thought-out and focused on details, rather than based on a shallow idea, thought of in a shower.

So it is advisable to marketers to brainstorm several sessions, discuss and debate multifarious topics and finally zero in on the best one. It is important to involve the entire marketing team because although brilliant ideas are floating around everywhere, they get lost in the shuffle if not heard.

Tip: Create a folder where all agents dump their campaign ideas. Go through each of them in the team meeting and make the final choice. Before the campaign gets off the ground, discuss the following aspects:

• Duration for framing and running the campaign
• Number of resources required for the campaign
• Expected results from the campaign.

Discussing these will help to keep things streamlined and organized from the initial stage itself.

2. Identify the Audience and what resonates with them

Build the message keeping the audience on top-of-mind. Find answers to questions such as:

• Which part of the marketing funnel will be targeted?
• What sort of content will resonate with these section of prospects?
• Which are the popular topics with this audience?
• Which campaigns have run successfully and which ones have failed miserably?
• What factors have contributed to the success/failure of the earlier campaigns?
• How can maximum value be delivered to the prospects?

3. Define the Goals

Do not set vague and obscure goals such as ‘more sales’. Be as specific as possible when setting goals for the campaigns. So if the prime objective is increasing sales, then break down the goals in the following forms:

• 500 new leads
• 700 new free trials
• 200 new sign ups.

Having specific to-the-point goals will make it easy to assess the results of the campaign later.

4. Build the Campaign Landing Page

Email marketing campaigns can only deliver the desired result if they push the recipients towards a call-to-action (CTA). That is why it is essential that the campaigns are framed as such that they foster and inspire action at the end. So create a dedicated landing page for the marketing campaign that directs prospects toward the goal and simultaneously allows you to easily track the success of your campaign.

Elements required in a high-converting landing page:

• Unique value proposition
• Benefits/Advantages
• Customer reviews
• Call to action.

In addition to these, many businesses include a video in the landing page. You can do it too if you want to show your product in action that helps prospects visualize themselves using it.

It actually increases conversions. However, remember that incorporating video in the landing page is a challenging venture that will require lots of resources. Make sure you do not neglect other important elements on your landing page, in the lieu of the video.

Tip: Do not forget to frame the follow-up message for the email campaign. This will be immediately sent out to the recipients, once they carry out the desired action on the campaign landing page. Follow-up messages will confirm the action of the recipients and not leave them in a state of bewilderment.

5. Performance Tracking

It doesn’t makes sense to invest time and resources into email campaigns if you do not have the means to know how they are performing. New-age CRM software solutions are the best platforms to carry out email marketing campaigns and assess their results as well. There is a set of predefined templates available. You can choose either from them or use the editor to create a customized email template specific to your requirement.

Reports and real-time analytics in the CRM is an added advantage that helps you understand the performance of your email campaign better. Using this feature, you can track:

• Number of recipients
• Number of people who have opened the e-mail
• Number of people who have opted out
• Number of people who have clicked on the link
• Number of invalid e-mail id (if any).

CRM makes it easier for any business to access precise campaign data and accurately track the behavior of the prospects all the way down the funnel You can set up reports to see the point at which people are dropping off and optimize those spots in the conversion funnel.

6. Lead Nurturing

Email marketing campaigns are not one-time games. It is important to continue the communication to convert leads into customers and existing customers into repeat customers. And this is precisely where lead nurturing comes into the picture. CRM plays an instrumental role in lead nurturing. It empowers businesses to keep offering value to the prospects through different forms of contents. Targeted contents over a period make prospects happy and they are more likely to do business with you.

7. Evaluate the Campaigns

Once the campaign has come to an end, look back and evaluate the results. Hold a meeting and discuss the following points:

• Were the goals met in the campaign?
• What could have been done differently?
• What aspects of the campaign didn’t work out?
• How can the campaign be run better next time?
• What new customer insights have been gained?

These discussions help the marketing team to understand the campaign results and make constructive changes in the upcoming ones.

Final Thoughts

There is no one sure formula to create a successful email marketing campaign. However, following a series of documented steps promise to maximize viewership and put the business in a better position to gain the desired ROI out of the campaign. So it makes complete sense to be organized and systematized rather than blind and intuitive. Isn’t it??

How Social and Email Marketing Integration Impact Your Business, let’s learn the secrets of it and try to understand how they are changing the marketing dynamics. Marketers are in constant search to find the most foolproof marketing method that will always score a home run with customers. Email marketing and social media marketing both have emerged as essential weapons in one’s marketing portfolio. But often they are treated as standalone systems without really realizing their common objective. There are also some ideas that email marketing is dead and can’t fetch as much results as it used to do before the social era. But the reality can’t be further from the truth. When email marketing and social media marketing just work fine as standalone systems together they create a synergy that can be unbeatable in the hands of marketing managers.

CMOs and marketing managers looking to optimize the reach of their marketing campaign therefore mustn’t ignore either. In this article we have discussed how social and email marketing can collaborate to create a perfect marketing mix. However, interestingly both social media and email marketing now can be conducted from one’s CRM solution.

Email marketing

Email marketing is a part of direct marketing campaign when commercial, solicitous messages are sent to potential customers to promote product and services. It is of broadcasting nature and expected to bring more direct results.

Email marketing normally happens over a period of time. You may receive periodical mails from the merchant with whom you have listed your mail id. The history of email marketing is as old as the history of emails. Its quick and immediate nature made it a favorite choice for marketing campaigns almost instantly. Today, around the globe there are over 3.375 billion active email accounts. If we consider every individual to have two email accounts the number comes to 1.68 billion people, which is greater than the population of the largest country in the world.

Email marketing can contain plain text emails, advertorials, direct promotional content, videos, newsletter and as well simple solicitous mails wishing birthdays and anniversaries. In a word, any email from a prospective seller is a part of email marketing.

Unlike before most part of email marketing now can be automated through custom CRM software tools that offer marketing automation solution.

Social media marketing

Social media marketing involves customer engagement on social sites. Rather than direct selling social media is mostly targeted to gain visibility and audience on the web world. It is relatively a new concept and is still at the budding stage. It is mostly targeted at engaging customers on social sites and encourages them to like, share, twit and discuss on various social platforms. A social media share is likely to fetch in more value since the action takes place in a trusted third-party site. Social media marketing can be called new form of word of mouth marketing.

While email marketing targets individuals; social media marketing targets larger audience at a time. Combining the two can help creating a marketing strategy that can have the best of both.

Social media marketing too can be managed through social CRM solutions that allow one integrating social feeds to one’s CRM interface.

In the modern scenario the customers are constantly searching to find what’s in the deal for them. Targeting only one method of marketing may fail to create a full-fledged impact. An email can be trashed or deleted and social announcement may be overlooked as they have shorter shelf life. But when the marketing content reaches both the inbox and the social profile of the customer it is likely to create better impact.

Individual vs global outreach

Email marketing fails miserably when it comes to outreach. You can’t send mass emails as they are likely to end up in the spam box of the recipient. On the other hand, social media can widen your scopes to reach out to more number of audiences at the same time. But social sites aren’t good for individual follow ups. It is also less targeted than emails. Hence, the social media platform must be used for broadcasting and emails as a reminder mechanism.

One can now pre-schedule an email marketing campaign to send mails at equal intervals. This is known as DRIP marketing.

Encourage sharing

When you create an interesting content you want to share it with your audience. More number of sharing will ensure more audience and hence, popularity. So, when you create content allow provisions for your readers to share it in their favorite form, i.e., on social web or emails. Offering buttons for social as well as emailing will encourage more visitors to share their favorite reads. This will help creating more value since the content is shared on third-party sites.

Encourage navigation

Integrating buttons to your email templates offering links to your social media profiles will help you get more visitors. While emails are expected to bring immediate results, social profiles are used to forge long term relationships. Allow your customer to join your fan page on social sites if they like your email content.

The effectiveness even of an excellently written email is immediate but through social pages the customer will link to you for longer period.

Similarly, if a visitor likes your content on social media allow him to subscribe to your email newsletter. This way you can always keep your visitors engaged.

Befors starting I once wanted to know How modern CRMs are helping marketers, Now as many want to it, lets have a good article on it.

New York Times: A person living in a city 30 years ago saw up to 2,000 ad messages a day, not even half of what he sees today.

What has changed?

Today, a consumer life is rife with marketing messages across the Internet, TV, newspapers or magazines. And this is where things have become enormously difficult for the marketers. Imagine the competition they’ve to face.

Cutting through the noise and making a memorable connection with the target audience is a hell lot of task. But not impossible

Just as they say – for every demand there’s a supply – for marketing too, we’ve a myriad of tools doing the rounds. For instance –

• Social Marketing Tool
• Marketing Automation Tool
• Multi-channel Marketing Tool
• Email Marketing Tool

And just when you thought that marketers are spoilt for choice (with so many marketing applications) – here enters the latest and definitely the grandest of all –

Modern CRM as Integrated Business Solutions

How are these solutions different?

Jodie Ellis – ‘’Proper planning of a business landscape often takes a backseat while meeting the short-term revenue goals. Example – Marketing is lagging down, let’s go for a marketing app, customers attrition is high; let’s implement a customer support software. Believe it or not: this is exactly what happens in an office boardroom when different departments meet up to discuss their challenges

As a consequence, various dissimilar and disparate applications get installed at different points resulting in business process inefficiencies and slowdown.’’

Business entrepreneurs have realized this predicament and hence have made a clear shift to the modern cloud CRMs functioning as Integrated Business Solutions.

As the name suggests, these CRMs function as the perfect substitute for different standalone enterprise applications. Right from marketing to sales, customer service and collaboration – they are integrated with all necessary modules.

So from one source point, marketers get the convenience and benefit to carry out –

• Social Marketing
• Marketing Automation
• Multi-channel Marketing
• Email Marketing etc

Using the Integrated Business Software Systems, marketers get the added advantage of analyzing how their efforts are impacting the goals. Unlike 10-15 years back, when collaboration and knowledge-sharing has been separate and difficult – modern CRMs have fostered an exciting range of collaboration tools to foster teamwork and communication across the business.

Not just this, now small and medium-sized companies have started using more digital tactics in their marketing efforts. A lot of them are adopting marketing automation that has previously been used only by the larger enterprises.

Peter Roesler states…

‘’Credit to the new age CRMs (Integrated Business Management Suites) that today SMBs have the capacity for marketing experiments. Small businesses that have always have faced financial constraints due to putting in a lot of the capital in purchasing, integrating and maintaining different siloed applications have FINALLY come off from such tight spots.

With one business platform handling all the critical business functions – SMBs are in a better position to expand their brands into bold new territories with newer marketing strategy.

So it won’t come off as a surprise if within 5 years we see 90% SMBs is opting for multi-channel marketing, like – email marketing and social media marketing simultaneously.

And not to forget, since the company is starting these experiments from not a standalone marketing app but a common business management platform, they have more flexibility to keep trying if the new marketing tactics have a slow start. Headache of maintaining a separate marketing app is no longer looming on the SMBs.’’