The From Line

Is your brand in desperate need of a strategy to engage its customers, cultivate a stronger brand-to-customer relationship, create a more talked about social buzz, and drive repeat sales and returning customers?

Acquisition marketing can help significantly in each of these areas, and can improve upon your overall online marketing efforts.

But if you're like the majority of sales-based companies trying to navigate their way through the sometimes intimidating waters of digital marketing, you've probably missed valuable opportunities to acquire new email and mobile subscribers. It's important to keep in mind that each one of these missed opportunities leads to one less conversation, and one less purchase.

To determine how effective your brands acquisition marketing is, ask yourself the following:

• Are you asking for the customers email address at the exact point of sale, as soon as they land on your website, or not at all?
• Does your website have an email opt-in form that is easy to locate and simple to fill out?
• Most importantly, what are you doing with the analytical data you're collecting? 

Knowing exactly what you are doing with the data your brand is collecting allows you to push forward a more personalized, relevant customer experience. Choose to ignore data in your acquisition marketing efforts and you miss the biggest opportunity of all.

Permission marketing is all about getting your hands on a targeted marketing list that will give your content a competitive edge. You're striving to reach the email inboxes of people who could soon become some of your most valuable customers, if they're not already. However, a problem that continues to plague many businesses is how to move beyond permission marketing in a way that will reach out to those who might not ever get the chance to hear about your business otherwise.

Social media has answered that call for many businesses. The answer lies in being able to produce excellent content for your blog or your website that your visitors will deem as shareable. Here are a few ideas to get you thinking about whether or not you have created a website that prompts your visitors to share your content with their network of friends and family members.

Social Sharing Buttons
Of course, if you have worked with a professional website developer, you probably have social sharing buttons on your website now. However, many business owners are taking advantage of the multiple free website options that are available to them, which don't always include social sharing features. Being able to share your blog posts on Facebook and Twitter gets your content out into the world. You never know who you might reach, and social media has helped take many businesses far ahead of their competitors.

Create Visual Content
One look at the expansion and popularity growth of sites like Pinterest will tell you that social media is taking a swift curve toward visual content choices. The saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words" holds a lot of weight in social media these days, and if your business produces a product or a service that is deemed to be valuable to the public, you'll do well to include graphics and pictures in your content.

Consider Using SlideShares
The SlideShares website has increased in popularity tremendously over the past few months. SlideShares will help you take advantage of your customers' partiality to visual content by generating a slideshow presentation out of a blog post. These can then be used to grow your business even more.
 

Business email in the corporate setting is generally formal, where million dollar words are common and industry jargon is a must. Marketing messages however, are most effective when they are kept simple. To avoid alienating your audience with useless “fluff”, follow these tips.

1. Get Rid of the Big Words
You’re composing a marketing message, not playing a game of scrabble. Longer, more obscure words will not win you extra points. Avoid using words that are more than two syllables. This rule of thumb helps ground the writer to basic speaking rules and establishes a smooth cadence. The goal is to compose a message that is effortless for the recipient to read and understand. Certainly the recipient is capable of understanding bigger words, but simplifying the message makes it both universally accessible and faster to digest.

2. Omit Technical Terms and Jargon
Read the email after it is written. Are there industry specific terms? Drill them down to more generalized terms. Consider the recipient and their knowledge base. A great amount of time will be saved if industry terms and jargon are avoided. The recipient will understand the message and valuable marketing dollars will not have been wasted on a missed meaning.

3. Get a Second Set of Eyes
Is there someone in the office who does not know as much about the industry jargon as the author? Perhaps there is an intern or someone from a different department who can read the email. The idea is for the author to step away from the document before it is sent and to have an unbiased reader give it a once over. The author is invested in the words and will likely skip over terms that are possibly confusing. A separate set of eyes can point out terms that need clarification and can give input and suggestions to make the message as inviting and easy to understand as possible. An unfarmiliar reader will bring a fresh interpretation that can predict how the message will be received by subscribers.

The idea isn't to "dumb down" the email, but rather to compose a message that is readable by a person who does not understand all the jargon of the industry. The email needs to be written for an intelligent audience who is interested in being educated about the industry. Keep it simple but don't talk down to your recipient.

 

Email deliverability is the most crucial part of your marketing plan. You can have the world's most talented copywriters and the most eye catching graphic designs, but if your email ends up in the spam folder, or perpetually floating around cyberspace, your hard work is all for nothing. But how do you know that your emails are reaching their destination? Most importantly, what do you do when you find out they aren't?

According to the Global Email Deliverability Benchmark Report by Return Path, “only 81% of all permission based email makes it to the world’s inboxes. Globally, one out of every five emails lands either in a spam or junk folder (7%) or simply goes missing—blocked by ISP level filtering (12%)”. Though an 81% deliverability rate is certainly respectable, over time, that 19% difference can make a big impact on your bottom line.

Consider this: if you send out 1,000 emails, that is 190 customers who will never hear your message. 190 missed opportunities to make a connection with a person who might be looking for exactly what you are selling. If you snowball this as your email lists continue to grow, you could soon be looking at thousands of lost clients.

To combat this, monitor your email deliverability closely by analyzing bounce back errors, and act to rectify the problems as they arise. If the subscriber’s mailbox doesn't exist, you can remove it from your list. However, if it is a temporary issue, the email address can continue to be monitored and sent mailings periodically. List cleansing and email verification services like LeadSpend exist to aide marketers in this.

As more people use their mobile phones to check their email during the day, email best practices for mobile devices is becoming more important. According to Marketing Pilgrim, a poor email experience leads 30 percent of consumers to unsubscribe.

Marketing Pilgrim columnist Cynthia Boris said companies need to get up to speed with email designed for mobile devices:

A year ago, mobile email wasn't that common, so it was easy to forgive a  company for not getting on board. Now, though, there’s no excuse for a  poorly executed email.

Emails that display poorly on mobile devices will prompt 30.2% of consumers to unsubscribe, accoding to a report from BlueHornet. Only 6.3% of consumers would read the email despite its poor display, the report said.

Email frequency and relevance is another common reason for consumers to unsibscribe. Offering subscribers flexibility in how many emails they receive can combat this and keep subscribers from leaving. Many firms ask subscribers if they want one email a week instead when they attempt to unsubscribe from email subscriptions. Giving subscribers options will improve their relationship and help retain them in the long run. 

Best practices for mobile emails
One way to endear your emails to mobile users is to make coupons and special offers usable on their mobile phones. Instead of requiring users to print out e-mailed coupons, design the offers so they can be displayed and redeemed on mobile phones. The ideal mobile coupon can be scanned directly from the phone by a barcode scanner.

Designing emails for mobile devices can be accomplished through responsive design. The design queries the device that the email displays on, so that one email can be formatted differently for display on mobile phones, tablets and personal computers. For mobile phones, graphics should be streamlined for easier viewing.

For more information on crafting an email campaign that works on mobile devices, contact us today. Don't let your customers unsubscribe from your emails due to poor displays on mobile phones!