Viewing posts categorised under: Audience & List Growth
There is a reason over 85% of all marketers worldwide are using content marketing to generate more sales. On average, consumers engage with 11.4 pieces of content before making a purchase. Moreover, up to 80% of all users only focus on organic results and ignore all paid ads. Digital advertising has only 11% of the average business marketing budget today, while content marketing has 13% and is expected to only increase in the coming years.
Furthermore, email marketing is an ideal channel for promoting, distributing, and multi-purposing your content. Email and content marketing are natural complements - they go together as deliciously as
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With endless approaches christened “best practices” and infinite blog posts on the latest email optimization tactics, it can be difficult to determine where it’s worth investing your email marketing money and manpower.
Questions like these abound:
- Does my company need abandoned cart/browse campaigns if we’re not an ecommerce or retail marketer?
- Are reactivation campaigns worth it, or should I just cull unresponsive subscribers from our list?
- How much marketing automation do I need? Do I need an ESP or MA platform?
- Do multi-touch campaigns (like a welcome series) outperform single message-campaigns? Is the extra effort to create a series worth it?
- Would my company benefit from reputation management and delivery services? What’s it worth?
- Does dynamic content really pay off?
. . . and the list goes on. It’s often said
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Inspiration from the 2015 Email "To-Do" Lists of Leading Brands
I'm just back from the MediaPost
Email Insider’s Summit at Deer Valley in Utah ski country. Boasting record attendance and the active participation of big brands, the event is always a nexus for email marketing growth, expansion and innovation ideas. With attendees from
Wendy’s, Office Depot, Amazon, Bank of the West, Angie’s List, American Airlines and countless other marquee brands, this time didn't disappoint. In short: everyone’s excited (and in some cases a little daunted by) the email marketing goals they aim to accomplish in the coming year.
Here’s what’s on the 2015 “to-do” list of top marketers and should be on yours as well: See more
If you take them aside in confidence and buy them a drink or two, most people working in email marketing will eventually admit there’s a hungry beast they have to deal with that is never full and always has an appetite for more. No matter how much or how often they feed it, it’s a bottomless pit.
What is this monster? It’s none other than your email list! Actually, if you’re treating it right, it’s more like an elite athlete than a monster. Chances are, no matter how many subscribers you already have, you hunger for more. The simple truth: the care and feeding of your email list is a job that’s never done (and shouldn’t be).
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Last month we explored the first of two important digital marketing list subscriber metrics: CPA, the cost to acquire a new list member (see Part 1 here). I also presented a process for determining your maximum allowable CPA – that is, how much it’s worth paying or investing to acquire new subscribers on a name-by-name basis.
This month we’ll explore various approaches to assigning economic value to every subscriber already on your list. Let’s start with the clearest way first: the Revenue-Per-Subscriber method also known as RPS.
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I was just paid $16.56 for my email address. You read that right: CVS, the drug and pharmacy chain, paid upwards of $15 to acquire my email address. There I was in my local store buying about $40 worth of health and personal care items when they offered me an instant 20% savings on my purchase in exchange for my email address. So I gave it to the clerk, resulting in a discount of $8.28, which somehow (likely by mistake) was applied twice for a total savings to me (and cost to CVS) of $16.56.
At two recent business events (which did not provide exhibitors and sponsors with attendee lists) I noticed exhibitors actually paying attendees cold hard cash in exchange for their email addresses. Yes, they were handing out the green stuff in a blatant, unmasked trade for data. One business coach offered passers-by $1 for a name and email address and $5 for a completed lead qualification questionnaire. At another event, an exhibiting sponsor held a stack of crisp, fresh dollar bills and asked each visitor if she would like $1 in exchange for her email address. Most attendees cruising the exhibits at these events happily gave up their email addresses and took the money!
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In Part 1 of this series you learned about transparency and authenticity. Part 2 explained why creating resonance and cultivating magnetism are essential to generating emotional connections that are real and enduring.
Now in the last of this three-part series, let’s look at the final two ingredients that strengthen the emotional bond your market has with you AND each other: community and consistency.
In online marketing, making emotional connections is especially important because the digital world is immediate, urgent and can seem impersonal. It doesn’t give us the time or intimacy to know and trust people like face-to-face interactions do.
But there’s good news – the online world also offers an expanded ability to connect with others and develop communities beyond the boundaries of our physical worlds. That’s why community is one of the final essential ingredients to creating emotional connections in your online marketing.
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Creative Commons License photo credit: mscaprikell
In
Part 1 of this series, I explained that marketing is not simply about hawking your wares. Certainly it’s about communicating what you have to offer, but
how you do that is what makes the difference between feast and famine.
Whether we know it and like it or not, most decisions in life are fueled at least in part by emotion, and that goes for buying decisions large and small. Our brains are equipped with both reasoning and emotional centers, and each factors into decision making. More often than not, people buy from emotion and justify with reason, so it’s important to know how to emotionally connect with them.
In online marketing, making emotional connections is especially important because the digital world is immediate, urgent and can seem highly impersonal. It doesn’t give us the time or intimacy to know and trust people like face-to-face interactions do. That contributes to a lack of trust (and unfortunately, fraud) online, so allowing people to get to know you digitally goes a long way toward creating the confidence consumers and business people alike need to buy from you in any channel.
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Creative Commons License photo credit: Torley
You might read that title and wonder what in the world emotional connections have to do with online marketing or
any marketing for that matter.
Isn’t marketing simply about telling people what you have to offer and letting them know how to buy or work with you? Certainly it’s that, but much more. Whether you realize it or not, most decisions in life are fueled at least in part by emotion, and that goes for buying decisions large and small.
Our brains are equipped with both reasoning and emotional centers, and both factor into decision making. More often than not, people buy from emotion and justify with reason, so it’s important to know how to emotionally connect with them.
In online marketing, making emotional connections is especially important because the digital world can be fast, furious, and impersonal. There is a built-in immediacy in digital communication channels that often undermines or bypasses the opportunity to slow down the sale and deepen the consideration process that older, offline channels delivered. Plus, there’s a huge lack of trust (and fraud) in the digital world so allowing people to get to know you online goes a long way toward creating the confidence consumers and business people alike need before they're willing to buy.
So, is it easy to create emotional connections online? The good news is “YES!” thanks largely to social media and content publishing platforms that are faster, simpler and more accessible than ever before.
So, how do you do it? See more
photo credit: webtreats
I’m often asked what I believe to be
the number one way to connect email and social media marketing. Last month I tackled that question from the starting point of email. This month I'm addressing it from the perspective of social media.
Both connecting email to social and using social to strengthen and grow email matter
because linking email and social media both ways is important. So if you have a strong or growing presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or more, what’s the best way to leverage it for expanding your email program?
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