While we could talk about email marketing strategy and best practices for days, we’ve reigned it in and condensed this particular blog series into two parts.
In part one, our resident email health experts, Jo Tovee and Jasmin Sheilds, shared their expertise on optimising your Mailbox Provider relationship. Starting off on the right foot with your Inbox Service Provider will ensure you reap the full value of the best-in-class tips we’ll share here in part two: managing the customer relationship.
Platform Specialist Jasmin says, “You can have a beautiful email, but if you have a poor sender reputation or you're not properly authenticated, then there's no point in having a great email that your customers would love because they're not going to see it. And by reverse, if you have all the right technical things in place but your email won't convert, then you're not serving that customer relationship anymore.”
Your Mailbox Provider and customer relationships are equally important, each encompassing multiple elements. But not to worry; Aamplify’s dynamic email duo, Jo and Jasmin, are here to walk you through the most crucial bits in creating and maintaining an enviable customer relationship.
We can all probably recall a lousy email marketing experience — personal or professional — which was annoying. Poorly executed email communication from a business or brand can leave a poor impression on an otherwise perfectly adequate customer experience. (Just look in your Gmail Promotions tab for these examples.)
Internally, your organisation may think everyone is interested in every single email you send, but put your customers first and consider their perspective. Jo says, “The goal of your consumer relationships is for them to recognise who you are and know why they signed up for your emails. Communicate with them in a good cadence or consistency about relevant things, and don’t spam them with loads of emails that will give them e-mail fatigue.”
Focus on giving customers what they want, when they want it, in an accessible manner with a touch of personalised delight. Here’s how.
It can be a point of pride to tout a robust email database, but if these contacts aren’t actively engaged, then this vanity metric could be costing you — literally.
Establishing good data hygiene practices is like the gift that keeps on giving back to your organisation. Jasmin elaborates: “Data is in every facet of the business, but having good data is what actually gives you an accurate picture of what your strengths and weaknesses are in what you're attempting to do; it's the same thing for e-mail marketing.
“You can have a database of 50,000, and that's fine as a vanity metric, but how is that 50,000 highlighting what you're doing well and not? How is it supporting you in making more informed decisions and targeting?
“From an e-mail performance perspective, if I have that database of 50,000, I'm sending out my monthly newsletter and maybe another piece of content throughout the month, and there's only 20,000 that are opening it, or clicking, then my open rates are going to be consistently below par. But suppose I look at that database and identify that there are only 20,000 that are engaging with me. In that case, I will just start sending to those people because the other 30,000 are no longer needed in the system.
“Plus, if your database is smaller but higher quality, that database is likely cheaper to run. What's the point in sending to 50,000 when only 20,000 of those people matter? You're spending more than half that budget on sending to people who aren't there for your brand in the hope they might see it.”
Pro tip: HubSpot’s active list feature allows you to set criteria and automatically updates your email database based on those parameters.
Sending irrelevant emails is a great way to blow your inbox placement and ensure that contact never engages with you again. Let’s all agree not to do this and listen to Jo’s sage advice about what to do instead.
“You may think everybody wants to hear about whatever you're releasing, but unfortunately, that’s not always true. You need to consider who is engaged with your brand and who is relevant to the message you’re sending. So targeting as a whole comes into effect; not everyone wants to hear everything about you.”
Jasmin adds, “If you want to reach more people than just those who are engaged, consider those campaign strategies. This segues into the A/B testing and how you will segment your audience. Let's go to the people that we know are going to be really interested, hit them first, learn from that, and tweak it for the next segment of people. Then, start A/B testing what might work to get that engagement.
"It's really just moving away from batch-and-blast because that approach is what kills deliverability.”
Pro tip: Automate your email A/B testing with HubSpot’s workflow feature.
Capturing new leads is great, but what are you doing to keep these people engaged and active once they’re in your email marketing bucket? Email contacts are valuable, so make the most of each one.
From Jo: “There’s always room for people coming in from the top, whether that’s through capturing leads on your website or wherever else they're coming from; you always want to grow your database bucket. The people who are unsubscribing and no longer engaging with you are leaking out of your bucket. You can minimise this by re-engagement, nurturing emails, targeted content, and knowing who your audience is.
“It’s normal to have a percentage of churn, but you want to implement best practices to minimise that churn where possible.”
“Churn isn’t necessarily bad,” Jasmin adds, “Identifying churn can also be beneficial.
“For example, if you suddenly go from sending once a month to once every week and your churn goes up, then that's a clear sign that you're creating noise in their inbox, and they don't want to hear from you as much. So, go back to things like marketing preferences, which allows them to decrease what they hear about or how often they hear from you.”
Pro tip: Create an air-tight email marketing bucket with HubSpot Academy’s free Email Marketing Certification Course.
Email marketing continues to prove its value in the B2B marketing landscape, and we’re 100% here for it. If you want to hear more from our Aamplify email marketing experts, sign up for our very own e-newsletter and join our LinkedIn community. You’ll be in good company.
Before the first day, you might also consider leaving a note on your new hire.
