• You seem to be losing your strategic footing
  
• You are failing to generate sufficient leads
  
• Your content is not good enough to engage prospects
  
• You are not leveraging data to translate intent into impact

The underlying cause of all these is stress. First, you are a small business. Second, email marketing is complex. Unless you are a large team of dedicated pros, it can feel overwhelming to manage email campaigns. Besides, it’s not your only channel of marketing, albeit a very profitable one. As a business, you must be flailing your tentacles every which way. 

Maybe it’s time for you to consider outsourcing. But let’s explore it at some length. 

1. Outsourcing Saves You Time

If you want to do email marketing right, it’s going to be time-consuming. According to one Litmus survey, 53% of email marketers say that it takes more than a fortnight to create a marketing email. Design, coding, and review take the most time. 

Now, you are a small team. True, you are creating emails at a quicker rate than larger teams. However, it’s equally true that you are producing fewer emails at a time; maybe no more than four or five, if you are a three-person team. The bigger team is churning out at least 20 higher-quality emails at a given time. 

If you outsource to a larger team than yours, you will be producing more emails and better emails. In the meantime, your team can attend to other pressing marketing needs in a more efficient way. 

2. Outsourcing Costs Less

The typical email marketing team is made up of the copywriter, designer, developer, and marketer. Now, suppose you want to hire a team of email specialists. You will have to reckon with the “true employment cost” of each employee, which can be broken down in the following manner:

• Unemployment insurance
  
• Infrastructure costs
  
• Hardware and software costs
  
• Federal and state income taxes
  
• Medical insurance
  
• Fully paid vacation, sick leaves
  
• Retirement policies 

When you outsource, you don’t need to bother with these additional costs. Now, remember that email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing tools. In fact, a majority of marketers spend no more than 20% of their marketing budget on email marketing. 

With a cumbersome in-house team, you may end up allocating twice the amount of money for email marketing alone. Why would you do that? If you know how powerful email is compared to other costlier marketing channels, you should inevitably want to save. 

3. Outsourcing Involves The Experts

Email marketing demands expertise. Period. 

Don’t expect to luck into a stellar campaign now and then. Knowing just enough about email marketing is equivalent to knowing nothing about email marketing. If you really want to rake it in through email, you must engage full-fledged experts. Since hiring in-house experts is not an affordable solution, as we just saw, outsourcing is your best bet. 

It’s not just about the money, though. If you are thinking long-term, you must bring in the pros. 

Let’s say you want your business to grow into a strong brand over the next ten years. Branding requires, among other things, powerful storytelling. Email is a great way to share your brand’s story, engage your audience, and keep the conversation going. Having the right startup resources can make this process smoother and more effective.

Ah, but you are a small business. You don’t have the manpower to shoot above a couple of emails at a time. Do you expect to fashion a narrative in the space of two emails and also have it work wonders for you? We hope not!

4. Outsourcing for Seizing The Moment

The relationship between marketing and news media is a relatively new one. Earlier, marketing was predominantly inward-facing. In other words, you would build a campaign around your product, launch the campaign, and then wait for the results. 

Today, however, marketing is outward- as well as inward-facing. Apart from premeditated campaigns, you might have to build instant campaigns around attention-grabbing events around the world. Yes, we’re talking about moment marketing. Let’s say that it is seasonal marketing scaled down to per-diem trends. 

Without an email-only team of deep-dyed experts, you could not attend to daily, interesting stories across the globe, let alone turning them to your advantage. You are a small team. You don’t have the time to watch for trends and such on social media 24×7. 

Even if you do come across a particularly juicy, trending newsbyte, converting it into a robust campaign on time without the support of a dedicated team is a Herculean task.

5. Outsourcing for Deliverability Management 

Email deliverability management is complicated, to say the least. Let’s try and understand why. 

To begin with, your email list is not evergreen. It starts decaying owing to a number of reasons. By the end of the year, your list contains a lot of disengaged users. These users will affect your engagement metrics, damaging your sender reputation. 

Suppose you end up on a blocklist. Delisting is equally complicated. If not handled properly, you might throttle your chances at future requests and end up securing a permanent block. 

Another problematic aspect is the seemingly whimsical nature of ESPs. There is no universal standard of legitimacy in email traffic. The standards vary from one service provider to the next. 

To make things worse, ESPs don’t tell you their peculiar requirements. You can’t tell whether or not your email has met their standard until you find out that it has been routed to spam. Gradually, if too many emails land in the spam folder, your reputation will suffer a major blow. Repairing it is not easy, either. 

Adapting to each service provider requires considerable industry knowledge. Take feedback loops, for instance. You need to find out if your ESP signs you for feedback loops automatically or if you must do it yourself. If it’s the latter case, it’s not simple. You need to apply for feedback loops. Now, there are many feedback loops. Which ones should you sign up for? Only an expert can help you answer that question. 

Evidently, it is quite overwhelming to manage deliverability on your own. It’s not something you can avoid, either. Good deliverability is the prerequisite of sustainable email marketing. 

6. Outsourcing Provides You with Insights

Email marketing is not only complex but dynamic. When you are engrossed in managing your campaigns for hours on end, it’s only natural that you lose track of what’s working and what isn’t. It may not always be the case. Yet, it often is. 

One of the benefits of email marketing is that it is measurable. We now come into analytics territory. As a business doing email marketing, you want to know:

• Who your most engaged subscribers are
  
• Where your highest-quality subscribers are coming from
  
• How your subscribers interact with your emails
  
• What your email deliverability trends look like
  
• What your bounce reports look like
  
• How your email journeys can be improved
  

Performance monitoring is key. Yes, there are many advanced software solutions that can generate granular reports for you. However, translating data into impactful action is what makes the difference ultimately. A good third-party team will comprise skilled data interpreters who can suggest micro improvements and enable you to make data-driven decisions. 

Identifying Your Email Marketing Needs

Which areas of email marketing should you consider outsourcing? It varies from business to business. You go where the cracks take you. Still, if you are not sure, here are some areas of email marketing that typically require time and aggressive expertise, encouraging outsourcing:

• Email design
  
• Email coding
  
• Conversion tracking
  
• Subscriber/contact list management
  
• Performance monitoring

Wrapping Up!

Do you have more respect for email marketing now? Evidently, you are dealing with a monster of a tool. Nothing in email comes easy. It demands constant monitoring and improvement. 

Equally, bear in mind that resource optimization and strategizing are the two biggest challenges that marketers face. Outsourcing can take a lot off your shoulders, leaving you to focus on your core competencies. 

The post Have You Considered Outsourcing Your Email Marketing Needs? Maybe You Should! appeared first on Email Uplers.

Now, what’s the first thing that comes to your head when you hear that word? Emails that begin with “Hey XYZ”, right? Before you feel compelled to incorporate the same approach in your campaigns, we’ll strongly advise you to do a double take. See, there’s nothing with that approach, but in 2023, it is extremely passe. We live in a time when data is an extremely potent currency. As a business, if you are not leveraging it to improve your customers’ user experiences, you’re definitely putting yourself behind the eight ball. Personalization, much like other marketing techniques, has become massively sophisticated over the course of the last decade. 60% of successful email marketers regard personalization as a highly reliable tactic to shoot up engagement. If you haven’t yet found yourself exploring its various nuances, now’s as good a time as any. 

Today, we’ll be discussing in-depth 4 advanced personalization techniques that will make increasing your engagement and customer loyalty levels an absolute breeze. Ready to dive in? Let’s go!

1. Collect Data Mindfully

Personalization begins with data collection; that’s no secret. You’ll be told this by all agencies providing email marketing management services. Keep in mind that consumers these days are highly aware of how their information is used by brands, so you need to be quite mindful of how you go about collecting it. Once you’ve cracked that code, shift your focus toward collecting the right data using secure residential proxies. Don’t collect data simply because it is up for grabs; try and assess whether the information is relevant to your campaigns or not as well. Some common data points which businesses look to gather from their customers are: age, gender, preferences and interests, location, occupation, and the like. Rather than mining third-party data, which happens without the consumer’s consent, strive to collect zero and first-party data, which centres around much more honest and transparent means. 

Not sure what means you should employ to collect information from your audience? Check these out.

• Signup Forms: An impactful signup form is worth its weight in gold. Why? It helps you gather zero and first-party data with ease, thereby empowering you to build a stellar email list. Additionally, contacts that have been added through signups, engage better with your campaigns, bolstering your email deliverability in the process. Including incentives (could be anything- coupon, ebook, planner) in your signup form is a good way to amplify their appeal. The thought takes more ground when one takes into account the fact that as many as 60% of people fill out signup forms with the hope of receiving something.

• Recommendation Quizzes: Apart from being fun tools that engage your audience, recommendation quizzes also help you provide fascinating insights into your visitor’s psyche. Ubiquitous across eCommerce websites, it allows them to tailor incredibly personalized experiences for their buyers.
  
• Surveys: No matter what kind of business you are, having a thorough understanding of your customer’s pulse is always a priority. In this regard, surveys serve as your go-to ally. Information you collect via a survey enables you to identify existing loopholes in your products or services and resolve them at the earliest. In the process, surveys enable you to improve your customer experience by leaps and bounds. For best results, we recommend sending a survey to your buyers in the post-purchase period. Only after they have used their product, would they be equipped enough to provide feedback regarding its attributes and overall quality.

This survey email from HotelTonight ticks all the right boxes.

Image source

• Website and In-app Activity: Tracking visitors’ movements and interactions across your website and mobile application will help you glean volumes of invaluable first-party data. Having knowledge of things such as which pages on your website are most frequented, which products are most viewed, which price range is most sought-after, and the like will allow you to curate unique experiences for your visitors.

2. Segment, Segment, Segment

No two customers on your list will be the same. To be able to successfully appeal to their distinct sensibilities, you need to first understand all the various factors that set them apart from each other. This is where segmenting your email list comes in handy. Only when you divide your subscribers into different segments based on various parameters such as age, gender, occupation, location, browsing history, past purchases, and position in the sales funnel will you be able to get a grip on their unique traits and ideologies. Subsequently, you can get to work crafting personalized campaigns for each of these segments.

Listed below are a few things you can consider taking into account while practising segmentation:

• Define your segmentation goals at the outset: Every business has different objectives associated with its segmentation strategy. Some wish to amplify their content engagement, some look to enhance their deliverability, and some hope to dial up their sales. Hence, even before you draw up your segmentation blueprint, it is crucial to visualize the outcome you wish to see post implementing it. Ascertaining the “why” is also important, for it gives you a better understanding of the segments you need to prioritize in order to actualize it.
• Do not make things overly complicated: A convoluted segmentation strategy allows you to dig up insights that lay beyond a granular level, of course, but to set it up, you first need to build a solid foundation. So, start simple. First, define the most obvious and relevant segments and then keep on adding more sophisticated ones down the road as and when necessary.
• Remain flexible: Customer sentiment is an unpredictable entity, largely seasonal in nature. Your segmentation strategy needs to be flexible enough to accommodate this. Buying behavior during, say, Valentine’s Day, is going to be very different from that during Thanksgiving. The wise course of action, therefore, is to treat each occasion on its merit.

3. Use Dynamic Content

Adding dynamic content is one of the best ways of making your subscribers feel that you wrote an email just for them. For the uninitiated, dynamic content refers to a particular section in the email that can be customized to contain different content for different subscribers. In a world where customers give the experience they receive from the brand the same pedigree as their products and services, using dynamic content will allow you to perch your brand heads and shoulders above your competitors.

Utilizing merge tags is one of the simplest ways to place dynamic content in your emails. With their help, you get to import data from your mailing list directly into your campaigns. Based on the ESP you use, the appearance of merge tags might vary slightly. For instance, while in Mailchimp personalization strings are enveloped within “| |”, in SFMC, they’re kept within “%% %%”. Depending on the information in your database, you can get really creative with your usage of merge tags. What’s more, it is not necessary that you strictly confine them to your body copy alone; you can insert them in your subject lines and preview texts as well. 

To shape your dynamic content blocks, you can make use of several kinds of data, including:

• Geolocation
• Past email interactions
• Past website interactions
• Past purchases
• Gender, race, and ethnicity
• Expressed preferences

4. Send Triggered Emails

Triggered emails refer to those that are sent automatically to subscribers corresponding to their activities and interactions. In essence, setting up triggered workflows allows you to send your customers the right message at the right time. It is no surprise, thus, that these emails experience tremendous engagement levels. 

Some triggered emails which MUST be a part of your workflows are: 

• Welcome emails: Besides letting you cast a formidable first impression, welcome emails are great for navigating new users through your brand, telling them about your USPS, and showcasing them your best-sellers.
• Order confirmation emails: Probably the most widely-recognized variant of triggered emails, order confirmation emails are critical for establishing your credibility and professionalism.
• Reminder emails: Got an upcoming sale or event coming up? Nothing better than setting up a reminder email workflow to ensure everyone on your list is made wise to it.
• Abandoned cart emails: Recovering lost sales is an art, with the proponent-in-chief being an exceptionally curated cart abandonment email.
• Retention emails: Few customers gone dormant? Lure them back in with an impactful re-engagement email that reminds them why they fell in love with you in the first place

Order confirmation email example from Haoma.

Image source

Cart abandonment email example from Something Navy.

Image source

Wrapping It Up

It takes a lot of discipline, rigor, and tenacity to firm your grip on email personalization. But once you get the hang of it, there’s no looking back. We hope the techniques used above have unlocked new personalization possibilities for you!

The post Email Personalization Strategies To Help You Cut Through The Noise appeared first on Email Uplers.

So, what is EDM marketing all about?

EDM marketing consists of strategizing and creating a list of prospective clients to whom you can send out relevant email communications after proper segmentation.

Besides, EDM marketing strategy also utilizes other channels like social media, printed material, SMS, push notifications, etc. to build your email list and drive conversions through the leads. This tactic works for all kinds of businesses, be it eCommerce, SaaS, or non-profit organization. As it takes 6 to 8 touchpoints before converting subscribers to actual paying customers, EDM marketing becomes all the more important. 

How is EDM marketing different from email marketing?

While EDM and email marketing both utilize emails to drive business growth, EDM marketing is much more comprehensive. EDM marketing, in its true sense, starts with generic email blasts, followed by retargeting ads. Such an omnichannel approach will help reinforce the first communication sent through email. It adheres to the rule of seven according to which a prospect must see or hear your marketing message at least seven times before they purchase from you. 

 Advantages of EDM marketing

• EDM marketing helps make the communications more impactful and reach a wider audience.
• It is a versatile and flexible mode of marketing that also facilitates the list building efforts. 
• EDM and email marketing are quite cost-effective when compared to other channels. You only need an email list to get the ball rolling. Invest in a powerful ESP or CRM tool so that you get access to plenty of email templates and a DIY email editor. It will help you save resources and focus on growing your business. 
• Like email marketing, EDM marketing is permission-based marketing. It means you are reaching out to people who have opted in to hear from you. Therefore, they are more inclined to engage with your communications.
• EDM marketing helps build trust with the users by sending timely and engaging messages. 
• You can personalize your email communications based on the customer personas and list segments. Consequently, you can build a stronger rapport with the subscribers and deliver more value to them. 

Now, we will switch to the “how” of EDM marketing campaigns. 

How to Formulate an Impressive EDM Marketing Campaign?

As shown in the chart above, an EDM marketing campaign entails a couple of more steps when compared to conventional email marketing. 

Let’s understand how to execute EDM marketing step-by-step.

1. Pick a suitable ESP

You can squirrel away your resources if you have an ESP in place. However, if not, you might have to invest some time in picking the right software tool. Check for functionalities like list segmentation, automation workflows, autoresponders, and analytics. You have a number of ESPs to choose from. Just research well and test the tool properly before you make the purchase. You can go for the free trial offered by different ESPs like Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign, and VerticalResponse. If you are looking for a “free for lifetime” kind of ESPs, you can explore the features offered by Mailchimp, Sendinblue, and ConvertKit. No matter which platform you choose, make sure that you have access to all the features required for EDM marketing. 

2. Focus on email list building strategy

The primary requisite for email and EDM marketing is a quality email list. You must invest in a robust email list building strategy that will get more people to fill up the sign-up form. 

Here are some ideas to help you out:

1. Have a short sign-up form

Long sign-up forms will frustrate the users and hamper your list building strategy. Therefore, you must include minimum fields on your sign-up form. Once they sign up, you can use profiling welcome emails to ask them for more information. 

2. Prepare a compelling lead magnet

Free trial, discount coupon, and an insightful resource are examples of good lead magnets. Your lead magnet must tempt the audience to sign up and offer something valuable in exchange for their personal details. 

3. Design a dedicated landing page

Your landing page should be designed in such a way that it compels maximum users to fill the form. Use visual cues, relevant imagery, and an engaging copy to encourage people to sign up. 

4. Use different channels to collect email addresses

In addition to pop-ups and floating banners on the website, you must take help of social media channels to collect leads. Add a “sign up” CTA button on social media ads to boost your email list growth rate. 

5. Pay attention to the offline mode

If you have a physical store, you can request the customers to share their personal details and email address. Let them know that you will use the email address to notify them about discount offers and other updates. 

3. Carry out list segmentation

Sending personalized emails is the key if you want your email campaigns to work. Hence, you must employ list segmentation to create different categories and customer personas. You can segment the list based on your business type and objectives of the campaigns. 

Broadly, you can segment your subscribers in four ways, namely:

A, Demographic segmentation

Demographic segmentation considers basic attributes like age, gender, ethnicity, and income details.    

B. Geographic segmentation

Geographic segmentation helps target the customers according to their physical location — country, state, city, and postal code. 

C. Psychographic segmentation

Factors like customer’s interests, personalities, life goals, and the like fall under psychographic segmentation. You can subtly ask the subscribers of these details through email. Once you get access to such information, you can send out hyper-personalized emails that are more likely to bring results. 

D. Behavioral segmentation

Parameters like past purchases, frequency of purchase, and order value are considered in behavioral segmentation. It is extremely valuable for eCommerce businesses. They can send out product recommendation emails according to the customer’s previous purchases. Automation workflows in the eCommerce sector are based on this type of segmentation. 

4. Build your email campaigns

Once you are through with the first three steps, you can start creating your email campaigns. 

Discussed below are some best practices to follow while building your emails.

1. Do not keep the subject line as an afterthought. Write an engaging subject line that would tempt the users to open your email. 
2. Keep your email copy brief and interesting to read. Use a lucid language that is free from any technical jargons. Focus on the benefits of your products or services rather than features. 
3. Adhere to the branding guidelines and maintain consistency in the email cadence, design, and tone. 
4. Take the help of visuals to reinforce your message. It will also make the email more readable by breaking up the content into small chunks.
5. Follow the email accessibility best practices. Choose the font size of at least 14px so that it is easy to read on smaller screens. Maintain an appropriate color contrast and avoid using any flashy images or animations. Add a suitable alt-text to every visual element.  (For more accessibility best practices, head to our guide to email accessibility)
6. Abide by the anti-spam laws and keep the unsubscribe button clearly visible. Include your contact details and physical address in the email footer. 

5. Set up the automation workflows

Triggered emails are messages that are automatically deployed according to the trigger events you have set in your ESP or CRM tool. 

A few examples of triggers are:

i. When a user signs up for your emails

ii. When a prospect makes the purchase

iii. When a customer leaves some items in the cart without checking out

iv. When a client downloads a content resource from the website

Test the automation workflows before you set them up so that you do not end up sending the wrong email. Keep optimizing these automated emails based on their performance.

6. Monitor the email marketing metrics

Tracking email metrics is one of the most essential aspects of EDM marketing. You must know whether your emails are bringing results or not. 

The metrics that you must keep tabs on are:

1. Open rate: Number of people who opened your email
2. Click-through rate: Number of subscribers who clicked on an email link
3. Click-to-open rate: Comparison of the number of unique clicks and unique opens
4. List growth rate: Number of new subscribers on your list
5. Email forwarding rate: Number of people who forwarded your emails
6. Conversion rate: ROI generated through your emails
7. Unsubscribe rate: Number of unsubscribes 
8. Bounces: Number of people who did not receive your emails due to a temporary or permanent error (Soft bounces or hard bounces)

7. Take an omnichannel marketing approach

Let me explain this with the help of an example.

Check out this email by Rue la la in which they have promoted their spring styles. 

Now, if a user stumbles upon their Instagram page, they are ushered in with the same type of posts and product images accompanied with a descriptive caption. 

In case a user does not convert through email, you have another chance to convert them through social media channels. The same applies to retargeting ads, pay-per-click ads, SMS remarketing, in-app notifications, and other advertisements.    

Wrapping Up

In the nineteenth century, marketers focused on traditional direct mails, hoardings, and TV advertisements. Now, the revolution has turned to powerful CRM tools and EDM marketing. The best way to accomplish your marketing goals is to take a customer-centric EDM marketing approach and switch to complementary marketing strategies along with email marketing.           

Need help with setting up autoresponders and creating impressive email campaigns?

Email Uplers can help>>

The post EDM marketing: The 7-step guide to drive faster business growth appeared first on Email Uplers.

For the uninitiated, chalking out an effective email acquisition strategy can be quite overwhelming. To help you gain familiarity thus, we’ve compiled this article that will walk you through a host of inventive and reliable email acquisition tactics. Before we dive into that, however, let us first understand why building an email list is so vital in the first place.

Importance of Building an Email List

When it comes to acquiring new customers, email is 40 times more effective than Facebook or Twitter. Hence, it can be rightfully said that a growing email list translates directly to the growth of your business. The following reasons shed light on the importance of building an email list.

Increases Your Reach

In 2020, the total number of global email users stood at a staggering 4 billion. By 2025, this figure is expected to swell further up to 4.6 billion. Even though roughly 1 in every 6 emails ends up in spam, the resultant reach is still head and shoulders above what other marketing platforms would be able to provide you. You’ll be hard-pressed to find any other channel that has such an extensive user base. Therefore, the more effort you put into building your email list, the more visibility and reach your business will obtain.

Gives You Absolute Control

While social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are great platforms for building an audience, at the end of the day, the data regarding these contacts remain with the platforms themselves. On the other hand, when you’re amassing contacts on an email list, you have all the important data points at your disposal, such as name, contact number, and email address. Subsequently, this allows you to exercise absolute control over the direction you want your email marketing campaigns to take. Moreover, third-party platforms often levy certain restrictions that greatly dictate how you interact with your customers. This is not the case with email.

Lets You Send Personalized Messages

Email marketing does not just let you reach a large number of prospects, it also enables you to send personalized messages their way. It doesn’t matter how many contacts are on your list, email allows you to personalize your communications at scale. This is made possible by email list segmentation which lets you divide your customers into separate segments based on various parameters such as gender, location, ethnicity, age, occupation, buying history, and position on the sales funnel. 

Take a look at this personalized product recommendation email from Honey. We don’t know about you, but we find ignoring emails like these very difficult!

Drives Traffic To Other Channels

Many businesses out there start building their email lists even before they start developing their products. And the reason for that is pretty simple- email campaigns are largely responsible for driving traffic to a business’ website as well as all other relevant channels. Needless to say, an extensive list correlates to greater traffic and engagement for your products and services.

Email Acquisition Best Practices You Need To Implement Now

Acquiring the email addresses of prospective clients is a rather tricky affair. You need to be creative and smart with your approach and put in a lot of hard yards to ensure that your plans are executed to perfection.

Make Your Email Content Unique and Compelling

Now, this might be the oldest trick in the book, but it continues to be as evergreen as ever. When your email’s content is engaging, informative, and insightful, it encourages your existing subscribers to forward your emails to their contacts. As a result, this helps you rope in scores of new subscribers, all without spending any additional penny (well, you do spend your creativity, but can’t really put a price on that now, can we?)

Avocode’s engaging newsletter is a brilliant example of how one can leverage content to captivate the imagination of their subscribers.

Use a Single Opt-in

The single opt-in subscription process is the email acquisition technique of choice among many marketers because of its low failure rates. The underlying reason behind that is pretty simple. The less friction in the subscription process, the less will be the number of disgruntled subscribers. Besides enhancing the customer experience, using a single opt-in also paves the path for a faster list growth. Typically, it also facilitates higher conversions since all the customers are required to do over here to sign up for your communications is provide their email addresses. There are no additional steps.

Use a Double Opt-in

Going a step ahead of single opt-in, in a double opt-in subscription process, the subscriber has to confirm their consent twice before they get added to your contact list. After they provide their email address, an email is sent their way asking them to confirm their subscription. Now, double opt-in might experience higher failure rates than single opt-in but at the same time, it also ensures that the quality of your list is top-notch. Everyone who has been added to your list on the back of a double opt-in process is certainly looking forward to interacting and engaging with your content. 

Avoid Buying Lists Like The Plague

In a bid to quickly grow their email list, marketers sometimes fall prey to the temptation of purchasing one. Now, this is something that you should avoid at all costs. Buying an email list is problematic on multiple levels:

• It violates the rules of consent stipulated under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a privacy act prevalent throughout Europe that regulates how digital marketers can utilize customer data. Purchasing email lists is non-compliant with GDPR.
• It damages your sender reputation and brand identity.
• The quality of leads of a list that is up for sale is substandard and inauthentic.
• It hampers your email deliverability rates.

Create a Gated Offer

Also known as “lead magnets,” this practice involves providing a resource such as an ebook, cheat sheet, white paper, or checklist in exchange for the customer’s email address. Typically, these resources are hosted on the business’ landing page. Bear in mind that these resources must provide some value to the customer and must be relevant to them. That said, be flexible with your gated offers because there’s no guarantee they will work their charm every single time. At times, you might also need to provide your visitors with some free bonus content or peddle some of your high-performing content pieces as “upgrades” at the time of their sign-up.

Host an Online Contest on Social Media

What’s a better way of grabbing your audience’s eyeballs than organizing a free giveaway on your social media platforms? All they have to do to participate is provide their email address. Some contests even require their participants to tag a couple of their contacts in the comment section to be eligible. Social media handles can be leveraged in various other ways as well. For example, you could take the hero image or the landing page of your email newsletter and make it the display picture on your social media platforms. This instigates the curiosity of your social media audience and incentivizes them to submit their email address to sign up for your newsletter.

Collect Feedback From Your Visitors

Asking your visitors to provide feedback on items pertaining to their interests is a great way to acquire their email addresses. You could do so by either using a simple form or a live chat tool wherein visitors can enter their name and contact information along with their feedback. Alternatively, you can employ these mechanisms to collect their queries as well and subsequently follow up with them on their provided email addresses.

How Can You Maintain Your Email List?

Along with acquiring new addresses, it is equally important that you work dedicatedly towards preventing the decay of your existing list as well. Here are a couple of practices in that direction.

Create Multiple Buyer Personas

Customers these days no longer respond to generic marketing and promotional emails. To grab their attention, you need to intercept them with targeted and personalized messaging. An excellent way of going about this is by segmenting the contacts on your email list into different buyer personas on the basis of their interests and preferences. Engaging different segments of your audience with different, customized messages minimizes the likelihood of them unsubscribing from your email list. As a matter of fact, marketers using segmented campaigns reported having registered a 760% increase in their revenue. 

This email from Spotify is a good example of a targeted email. Sending you a song recommendation based on the artists and genres you frequently listen to is assured to reduce the likelihood of subscribers opting out of your communications.

Don’t Give Up on Your Old List

If there’s a certain segment of your customers who haven’t responded to your communications in a while, don’t give up on them just yet. Use whatever data you have regarding their profile to craft and send compelling re-engagement emails their way. If you feel that they’ve outgrown the nature of communications they had signed up for initially, reach out to them again and give them the choice of subscribing to a more curated and targeted list. Remember, acquiring a new customer can cost you five times than retaining an existing one. So, do make sure that you try out every single trick in your book to re-engage your old, disengaged customers before you consider removing them altogether from your list. 

Wondering how you should go about your re-engagement emails? Draw some inspirations from this example by Animoto.

Use Preference Centers

Preference centers allow your subscribers to explicitly specify their areas of interest, thereby enabling you to send targeted messages their way. Take a look at this email from Penguin Random House.

It asks the subscribers to specify their genres of interest so that Penguin can send them book recommendations accordingly. Not many will unsubscribe from a newsletter that provides them with curated recommendations, will they?

Wrapping Up

As you might have already realized, to increase your business’ email list, you need to implement multiple strategies before settling in on a select few that you think work best for your business. And while this entire process can be a touch taxing, the rich dividends that it yields, in the long run, make all the hard yards absolutely worth it. 

The post Email Acquisition Best Practices To Skyrocket Your Revenue appeared first on Email Uplers.

But what kind of companies would benefit from running a virtual event?

It could be a brand looking to showcase products to secure new trade customers. Or it could be a large organization that wants to connect a team at an international conference. It could even be an agency running a job fair or a public relations firm promoting new releases from clients.

No matter what type of event you’re hosting, the secret to success is making new connections. 

The question is, how do you follow up with leads from a virtual event? Read on to find out.

1. Turn attendees into leads by making the virtual event worthwhile

These days, business is fast-paced, and your attendees will only have a limited attention span. If your event is dull or uninformative, any potential leads may quickly disappear.

On the other hand, your leads may even track you down for more information if your event is engaging. This makes the task of following up much easier.

StuDocu recommends keeping sessions short and sweet to create engaging virtual events, limiting each session to 15 or 20-minute blocks. “Use short, five-minute interviews to break up the monotony of droning hour-long keynotes. Add interactive questions and answers from the audience to improve engagement and deliver on authenticity.” 

Consider securing special guest speakers, such as a local personality or a leader in your company. You want guests to talk about your event and share their experiences with others. This could provide you with leads that weren’t even there on the day.

Make sure you take the time to plan the event properly. Disorganized events can cost time and money, and you could lose your one chance to wow attendees and turn them into leads.

Following up on your leads from the event would be part of the final closing process.

2. Give your attendees a value-add

To encourage participation and attendance, you may want to give your invited guests an incentive. For example, if you run a stationery brand, you could offer attendees a free sample pack as a thank you.

The catch is that you only send them the stationery once the event has finished. Not only does it tempt them to attend, but it also opens the door for you to chat about business afterward. 

Creating buzz before your virtual event and building relationships early can help your post-event networking efforts.

Find ways for your attendees to connect with you and other attendees afterward. For example, you can send feedback emails or have a dedicated event Facebook page where your guests can share feedback and view replays of their favorite sessions. Or to create even more engagement with attendees, you obtain their feedback using Instagram poll questions.

3. Use the right software and tick all the boxes

Choosing the right platforms will help you communicate with leads both during and after the event. 

Webinar software can be used to hold virtual question-and-answer sessions. When you connect individuals in the moment, following up with leads afterward will feel natural. 

The webinar tools you choose will depend on the type of event you are running and the features you need. This guide to the best webinar software compares some of those different solutions side-by-side.

Once the webinar is finished, send an event follow up email to your guests which includes additional resources or a copy of the video. 

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4. Connect your attendees to the right people

If you’re hosting a large event, you’ll want to connect your leads to the right people. You can do this by hosting different sessions with the opportunity for questions and comments. 

If it’s a job fair, the goal is to connect employers and candidates. You could send an event follow up email asking job seekers to upload a resume that you can send to a specific employer. 

As the go-between, you can then check in with both parties to determine whether they found what they were looking for. 

For those running B2B events, think about services the attending businesses may need. For example, they may want to outsource time-consuming roles such as HR and accounting. 

You can also invite industry experts to offer advice, tips, and resources for success. 

By sending follow up email after event, you can remind them of what they learned and who they spoke to. For smaller events, you can send a pack in the mail with business cards from participating PEOs.

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5. Send personalized emails

So, you’ve planned your event and made sure you’re giving your attendees a well-planned value-added experience. If you have access to tracking and statistics, you can view logins, attendance, and potentially chat transcripts and downloads.

This information will be useful to understand what worked and what didn’t. It’ll also help you create personalized follow-ups.  

We know that generic emails don’t work. At best, a prospect will read it and delete it. At worst, your email will end up spending eternity trapped in a spam filter.

Reply suggests you identify and meet the needs of your leads as part of the sales development process. It said, “rather than trying to use email blasts with zero targeting, help your SDRs (sales development representatives) use what they’ve learned about your ideal customers to send relevant messages that are personalized to them and their needs.” 

If you can, try to personally address all communication and make mention of a session they attended or a conversation you may have had.

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6. Approach them at the right time

Don’t let too much time pass before contacting your leads. Even highly targeted emails and phone calls will be a waste if the event isn’t fresh in their minds. They will have moved onto other things.

The perfect time to send an event follow up email to your leads is within the first 24 hours. You can have your responses ready to go and take advantage of the buzz your event created.

Depending on how many visitors attended, you may be able to sort your leads into different categories. For example, a hot lead may get an immediate follow-up phone call, while a warm lead may get a personalized email the next day.

When sending emails, be sure to include a call to action (CTA). What can they do next, or where can they find more information? 

You may want to use integrations such as a “buy now” button or a survey for your CTA. Be prepared to give a quote or estimate if your lead circles back with interest.

Following up with your leads after a virtual event

Virtual events and physical events are similar, but the advantage of going digital is that you get access to stats, instant sign-ups, and data tracking. 

You can use this information to target leads and give them a personalized follow-up message. Hence, sending a follow up email after virtual event can significantly amp up conversions.

Of course, your leads will want to know you have something to offer. You should plan your events carefully, use the right software, and give them a value-add. Don’t forget to include interactive webinars and help them connect to the right industry professionals.

When you have a smooth, informative event, following up with leads will be a breeze. They may even approach you themselves.

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