Emails have always been an effective channel of communication for brands to connect with their customers.

• Quick data collection. Email surveys offer brands quick access to a diverse range of customer data. The responses come in almost immediately, enabling you to dive into timely analysis and data-driven decisions.
• Convenient to use. Creating email surveys and dispatching them to your recipients is only a matter of a few clicks. It’s also a simple and straightforward process for your subscribers to fill in at their convenience, thus making it a win-win situation.
• Reduced cost. A great advantage of email surveys is that they involve a very small cost. You can find a variety of free and low cost survey solutions in the market to create a dedicated survey based on your unique needs.
• Personalization options. Email surveys come with many personalization options to target recipients with tailored content. From adding their name to leveraging their purchase history, you can craft customized surveys that bring back an increased response rate.

• Make it clear. Your subject line should convey the purpose of your survey email in just a few words. It always works to include the actual words, such as survey or feedback, for readers to know exactly what the required action is.
• Include an incentive. If your survey email comes with an incentive (more on that later), your subject line should highlight it. Knowing there’s something in for them will give them motivation enough to take action.
• Use the first question. Consider adding the first question of your email survey to your subject line. This is a great way to warm your recipients up and directly engage them in a conversation, resulting in increased completion rates.
• Get creative. As with every email, adding some creativity in your subject lines is key for subscribers to open them. Include relevant and fun emojis, throw in some humor when appropriate, or bring out your audience’s pain points.

• 85% of users use smartphones to access email. (Adobe)
• Mobile accounted for 42% of all email opens in 2019. (Litmus)
• The ratio between received and sent emails is 3:1. (Radicati)
• 47% of consumers use a mobile application for checking their email. (Campaign Monitor)

Source: 99Firms

Using mobile-friendly survey designs is essential to improve your response rate. Even better, invest in a survey tool that comes with responsive survey templates that allow you to create and share mobile-optimized surveys.

This way, your email surveys will render well on every device, ensuring that all users share an equal experience when offering their feedback.

Regardless of how well you know your audience, you can never be sure what resonates with them every time.

To take the guesswork out of your email surveys, it’s important to dispatch them to a small group of your subscribers first to detect and fix potential issues.

Also, running A/B tests will help you determine which components bring the best results and incorporate them in your strategy. You can try out variations and experiment with different incentives, number of fields, or question types.

After measuring the results, you can tell what works and where there’s room for improvement. This process, along with customer feedback, will give you all the insights required to optimize your email surveys over time.

The post Email Surveys 101: The Guide to Success appeared first on Shout.com.

Edvinas Kazlauskas

Email marketing remains one of the best converting digital marketing strategies, even today. So, it’s important to keep up with the top email marketing trends of this year.

Technical developments and changed user behavior require you to alter your strategies continuously and stay up to date with any necessary changes. Maybe you are already familiar with some of these trends, but let’s not forget how much more important they are becoming over time.

Some other methods, such as personalized emails, A/B testing, mobile optimization, and perfect subject lines, don’t all need to be explained within this article. Nevertheless, email trends continuously change throughout the year, and you must stay updated with them.

7 Email marketing trends you should follow

Let’s not waste any more time because, in this article, we will identify the top email marketing trends for 2023 you need to follow this year.

1. Accessibility

Accessible emails will always be an email marketing trend. Ensure that your emails, in a way, ensure that all your users feel addressed regarding the content. This includes users that have visual impairments. Therefore, you mustn’t get super creative with your color section and implement strong contrasts. This can both help people who are color blind and more.

Additionally, try assuming that people who are blind are also part of your subscriber’s list. Blind people will use screen readers, software that captures the screen content and reads it out loud. So, for your content to be read, you should also perceive it as text. Therefore, you shouldn’t only place content into your images but also ensure you are delivering a message.

For HTML newsletters, you can use additional alt texts that put image content into words. For newsletter purposes, you can apply the following tips for accessible websites:

• Alternative texts for images
• Recognizable buttons and links
• Correct HTML formatting
• Clear test design and more

However, accessibility also refers to the language you are using. For example, every mail recipient is able to understand foreign words. Nevertheless, if you offer content in a simple language, you are promoting inclusion.

2. Commerce

Especially after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, e-commerce has managed to become a preferred channel for B2B and B2C. Social commerce and other super apps are becoming much more important. Digital self-service is now one of the most popular ways for B2B buyers through every customer sales journey. In fact, during the first year of the pandemic, more than 40% of sales increased on e-commerce sites.

E-commerce is considered an essential part of your email marketing strategy, and since sales have risen, you can send out friendly emails after users have made a purchase or even follow-up emails if they have abandoned a cart. It does make a difference!

3. Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)

Many companies believe that AI is one of the most powerful ways you can personalize an experience. However, AI is good at recognizing patterns but can’t replace humans in the factor of entirely understanding human beings.

What is the good news? First, you can use many email marketing tools to promote an AI human-like interaction form. The AI can promote maximum efficiency and help you adjust to customer preferences that are related to your target audience. Furthermore, it can help you know more about your audience and analyze the data independently.

Additionally, the AI can create mailing lists and send out emails to the right amount of people and even send out transactional emails after purchases are made. When it comes to email marketing tools, most people will choose Mailchimp, but it may be an expensive alternative in the long run. So, to have a solution for this, we recommend cheap Mailchimp alternatives for growing businesses. Here are some of them:

• Flodesk
• MailerLite
• Campaign Monitor
• GetResponse
• Mailjet and more

So, the entire point here isn’t to replace human beings with technology, but it’s more likely to make technology work for us. At the same time, we do more productive things and bring a higher level of efficiency to improve the overall user experience.

4. Privacy-friendly emails

As more people move online, people are becoming much more concerned about their online security and how sites use their information. As a result, consumers need to identify if their information is safe and how they can ensure security safety.

In case it isn’t enough to comply with GDPR standards, you need to do more depending on the industry you are in. For instance, if you’re in e-commerce, users need to put their complete trust to ensure their account details are safe and remain protected under the shopping experience. Whereas, if you’re operating on social media, privacy features are data protection compared to account security.

One way to include this is to remain transparent through data retention and make design choices that quickly and safely provide user information. So, where will emails fit into this? Well, there’s a direct way of telling existing customers about changes that can be made to your privacy, data, or account information.

Additionally, mail privacy protection is essential. Customers want to ensure their information is safe when communicating via email.

5. Data privacy impact

As we mentioned above, data privacy laws continuously change and might not always be the same year by year. Failing to comply with these rules can result in unnecessary fines. That being said, the email marketing channel will thrive in 2022. This is because email marketers possess many years of experience working with a regulatory framework that requires compliance following a few rules.

While there may be some changes, they may make data compliance much more challenging for you. So, depending on where your business operates, we suggest you carefully read your local data privacy laws or hire an expert to deal with it.

6. User generated content (UGC)

One thing many marketers leave behind is the power of user-generated content (UGC). Including your customers in your content is one of the most potent ways to increase your engagement levels. This is one of the most direct ways of getting to where you want and allowing users to engage with your brand.

Again, the open rate of death comes into play here. As brands seek more content with more engagement, they are also looking for content with higher engagement levels, and as of now, that’s UGC. According to statistics, UGC increases engagement levels by 28%!

It’s simple to think of; human beings will talk about things that made them more engaged and increased their trust in a brand. Of course, your target audience will get tired of UGC at some point, but it does increase trust between both sides and eliminates the distance between you and your customers.

It’s a good idea for every email marketer to optimize its UGC and is considered to be one of the most cost-effective methods for creating content. You can create entire UGC campaigns for your email marketing and speak to your customers about the type of content they are relating to.

7. Automation

Automation isn’t anything new in the email marketing world. Still, it’s continuing and becoming fairly popular. Before, it might be necessary to send an email weekly and schedule emails for the future. However, good automation requires user behavior. This way, you can effectively accompany users during their purchases.

Furthermore, good newsletter automation can work when triggering customer actions. Nevertheless, it depends on how your customers act and their level of preparedness. However, at the same time, it might be more challenging if you don’t build up your email automation (follow-ups). A/B testing is another alternative method you can use to see if things are working out or not.

Thanks to the power of email automation, your email campaigns can can reach a wider audience and get much more things done quickly. You can react quickly and in an individual manner to each user.

Depending on how your customers act online, you can prepare the correct emails for them and send them in real-time. Alternatively, you can save resources with email automation, which will require fewer team members to complete and save you lots of time and money.

Wrapping up

That’s about it for the top email marketing trends for 2023. Take what you’ve learned and to start creating much more effective email marketing campaigns.

If you have any ideas for the list, don’t hesitate to get in touch and share your ideas with us.

The post 7 Overlooked Email Marketing Trends for 2023 appeared first on Shout.com.

Over these years, one marketing idea has remained constant – email marketing. In fact, it remains at the top of the list of most effective tools for every organization to reach their customers and engage them. The key to success here is that you would have to do it smartly and hence hiring Indian programmers for the same often works wonders!

Here are some of the statistics which prove that email as a marketing channel is here to stay:

• The global email marketing market reached $7.5 billion in 2020, with an estimate to reach $17.9 billion by the year 2027.
• Approximately 4 billion users make use of email daily. This number could reach 4.6 billion by 2025.
• 64% of small businesses make use of email marketing to connect with their customers
• 35% of marketers send their customers approximately 3-5 emails every week.
• 4 out of 5 marketers said they would rather not use social media than email marketing.

Email marketing is always trending, and for the same reason, you will find hundreds of email marketing tools in the market. How should you pick the one that works best for you?

10 Best email marketing tools

Email marketing can take many forms, and a tools value is defined by how well it fits individual use cases. Below, we’ve given you a brief overview of the 10 best email marketing tools, each offering a different angle for you to consider.

1. EngageBay

EngageBay is an all-in-one email marketing tool, specifically designed for small business owners. It is a modern, simple email platform that comes integrated with a free CRM, to help you manage all your sales, marketing, and customer service activities in one place.

EngageBay’s prominent features include lead capture and management, contact management, visual deals pipeline, email automation, activity tracking, visual sales reports, website visitor tracking, live chat support, and knowledge base.

You can integrate the platform with popular business tools like Plivo, DocuSign, LinkedIn, BulkSMS, Zapier, SendGrid, Mailgun, QuickBooks, Twilio, Exotel, Mandrill, Xero, Shopify, and many others.

2. Sendinblue

Sendinblue is multipurpose marketing software that covers many business communication types, which includes SMS, Email, Chat, Facebook, CRM, and much more. This software is designed to assist businesses of all sizes to get in contact with their customers. It allows you to concentrate on the crucial activities of the business and keep the rest of the activities on autopilot with automated tasks.

Using Sendinblue’s email builder, you can generate professional emails in a jiffy. By using the functionality of Facebook Ads, you can target your old contacts and also draw in new leads.

3. ActiveCampaign

With over 100K customers, ActiveCampaign is one of the most popular email marketing tools. It provides a perfect solution for B2C, B2B, and e-commerce businesses from around the globe. Their predictive tools and machine learning empower marketers to work in a smarter way and thus achieve higher ROI.

The additional advantage is that it is super convenient to use, provides exceptional deliverability rates (more than 99%), has high standards for security and compliance, and integrates with 870+ third-party tools. It comes with a built-in CRM system to control sales, email campaigns, and live chat.

4. Omnisend

Omnisend is another email marketing automation platform that allows you to do a lot of things. Using Omnisend, you can broaden your newsletters plus also boost your sales with automated emails. There is pre-built automation that aids in cart abandonment, transactional emails, and welcome series to help you supply streamlined and modernized buyer engagements.

You’ll have access to a vast template library to help you generate professional, attractive emails without any coding. It also offers excellent reports, analytics, and track sales reports to help you identify winning campaigns.

5. Hubspot

Hubspot is another popular tool that provides a dedicated CRM, landing page creation, online chat, and excellent email marketing features. It has an integrated WordPress plugin which allows you to control email campaigns directly from WordPress.

The plugin also gives you the ability to use the forms or a chat widget to capture contacts automatically from your CRLM.

6. EmailOctopus

EmailOctopus provides you with a platform that allows you to do email marketing that is simple, more intuitive, and superior than most competitors. Using the inbuilt editor which is simple drag-and-drop, you can customize the existing templates. The software also has a landing page creator wherein you can build everything that you would require in the lead generation process and multiply your email list.

Third-party integrations are in a draw card for smart and upcoming brands. Numerous tools which you might be already using, such as Gravity Forms, Shopify, and WordPress effortlessly integrate with EmailOctopus. All these features create an attractive tool for everyone.

7. AutoPilot

Next on the list is software that makes digital marketing simple. Autopilot offers one of the best-designed templates for building email automation sequences. It allows you to focus on creating optimal customer journeys.

Today, businesses want to do more with email marketing than just send bulk emails and weekly newsletters. Email marketing has to be smart in today’s world. You need to send the right message to the right lead at the right time. You can achieve all this by using Autopilot.

8. Convertkit

Convertkit is a great fit for creators and eCommerce businesses. It has a clean interface with rich features that makes the design create a great experience. Some of its features include email workflows, landing pages, opt-in forms, tagging systems, personalization, automation, data management, list segmentation, etc.

There are also useful integrations with other platforms, such as Stripe, PayPal, Woocommerce, and WordPress. One of its key features is that it allows you to automate your sales funnel. With this, you can send your content to the subscribers directly through customized email marketing campaigns.

9. GetResponse

GetResponse is one of the popular email marketing platforms used by a number of marketers across various industries. The software consists of email templates, email automation, segmentation, and personalization. It also gives users a cool Auto Funnel feature which helps them create a readymade marketing funnel for email marketing campaigns.

It has everything you would need as a marketing team – from A/B testing to an extensive analytics tool to track the performance of your email campaign undertaken. You can use the software to shoot welcome emails, educational series, foster leads automatically and send follow-up emails.

10. Benchmark

Benchmark is definitely an intriguing option to consider. If you look to send polished and professional emails without hiring an email designer, you must consider this option. The software ensures that everything gives an excellent user experience and helps you achieve it through its custom templates.

It is an affordable choice for small businesses that need a beautiful and easy-to-use email tool and marketing automation software. It comes with 1500+ integrations and excellent reporting features that help you improve as a marketing team.

Wrapping up

That’s our pick for the top 10 best email marketing tool for you to get started with. There is no doubt that these tools are key for every business as they help convert leads into customers.

You’ll have to analyze the tool and pick one that is affordable, easy to use, has high deliverability, and has the best reporting and analysis. We are sure the above list will help you narrow down your search.

The post 10 Best Email Marketing Tools of 2022 appeared first on Shout.com.

• First off, what is affiliate marketing?
• What is email marketing?
• 15 Tips for how to use affiliate email marketing to increase your affiliate income
• Wrapping up

Affiliate email marketing is the practice of promoting affiliate links to a targeted audience with compelling email content. However, you don’t want to start affiliate email marketing with a completely fresh email list, you’ll first want to engage your audience and build trust over time for these types of campaigns to be successful.

Read on for tips on how affiliate email marketing can increase income for your business.

First off, what is affiliate marketing?

An affiliate is a person or company that has an agreement with a merchant to refer customers to their business. The merchant then gives them a percentage of affiliate sales they make on affiliate products.

An affiliate income refers to a commission earned by referring customers to other businesses.

Affiliate marketers are paid commission in three ways, namely:

• Pay per click
• Pay per sale
• Pay per action.

Affiliate marketing is performance-focused marketing. A business pays the affiliate marketers for every user or customer that used their affiliate marketing efforts through affiliate networks.

Some of the benefits of affiliate marketing include a chance to earn passive income means you can make money while you sleep, the ability to work remotely with an internet connection, and affiliate marketing strategies have a low risk of failure since you only work on commission and do not invest in inventory.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a form of digital marketing and advertising. In email marketing, businesses send commercial emails via email services targeted at individuals who have opted to receive relevant content.

Most email campaigns typically advertise products or services to entice consumers into buying them. 

Some of the essential aspects of email marketing include:

• A call to action – You want your readers to know what you ask them to do by visiting your website.
• Contact management and segmentation – You can also break up your list into smaller segments that will receive different emails based on their individual preferences.
• Personalization – The more you know about your customers, the better you can personalize your email list messages.
• Great copywriting and content – Email marketing campaigns grant your readers direct access to act on the message you send.
• An effective subject line – The subject line is one of your most important tools because it’s what will get your email opened and read.

Email marketing efforts offer many advantages over other forms of online marketing, including that  it’s cost-efficient, email marketing channels provide a more targeted audience, you can track email activity (including click-through rates), and it allows you to communicate with customers more personally.

Take a look at our complete email marketing guide for more information how you can grow your business and increase profits.

15 Tips for how to use affiliate email marketing to increase your affiliate income

An email list can be one of the most powerful tools in an affiliate product marketer’s arsenal. Here are tips for using email marketing to boost your affiliate sales and income.

1. Use the best email marketing tool for the job

If you’re going to use email marketing to boost your affiliate income, do it right. Use a suitable email marketing tool. One with excellent features such as drip campaigns, personalization, an analytics dashboard and specific email marketing services for affiliates.

You will be able to send out newsletters and build your lists. With a reliable email provider, you’ll also have access to much information from other marketers.

2. Build an organic email list

Building your email list organically is key to your strategy as then you know you are targeting those who are actually interested in what you have to offer. You need to generate leads through people signing up and subscribing to your email list.

If you have to do this and you opt for cold outreach then you risk alienating consumers and ending up being marked as spam.

If you’re struggling to build your audience, take a look at this lead of lead magnets to help you grow your email list.

3. Segment email lists to track referrals

Segmentation will allow you to focus on sending out more emails to people who are more likely to convert into paying customers.

For example, you could create a segment based on contacts who open or click above 80% of the time. Targeting your most engaged contacts will ensure a higher conversion rate for your affiliate email marketing campaigns.

With Shout, it’s simple to segment your contacts based on email metrics, contact information, and even survey data.

4. Write relevant content

Some affiliates have built up a huge subscriber base and generate significant revenue from regularly sending follow-up emails to their subscribers. The key here is to get to know your audience and then to offer valuable content through your affiliate dashboard and give your subscribers something useful.

Your subscribers signed up for your email list because they want information from you. Therefore, your affiliate email marketing campaigns should provide value first and promote affiliate links second. This is the only way to truly build trust with your audience and increase conversion in the future.

5. Keep your affiliate marketing goal in mind when crafting an email

Make sure to keep your end goal in mind when drafting your emails. Are you trying to get a user to subscribe, purchase something, or make a return visit?

Once you know your goal for each email, keep it in mind when writing a copy. Every email should include a link back to your site so readers can accomplish that action and then convert into paying customers.

6. Do not hard sell or spam

Hard sell means directly pressuring your prospects to buy your product or service with coercive tactics. Emails should not be vehicles for blatant salesmanship. Instead, they should give valuable information in exchange for your audience’s fair amount of trust and goodwill.

Spamming people is also a bad form. You don’t want to fill someone’s inbox with unwanted emails just because you can.

7. Use the right type of emails

People are more likely to open an email and click on links in emails sent from companies they trust and recognize. Some of the most common types of emails include:

• Welcome emails – used to welcome new subscribers to your list.
• Sales/promotional emails – used to promote your favorite products or services.
• Relationship-building emails – are used to build a rapport with your subscribers.
• Educational emails – are used to educate your subscribers about a particular topic and provide them with information.

You must utilize the affiliate marketing emails relevant to your niche and situation to boost your affiliate commission. Whichever type of email you choose, always make sure that you personalize it as much as possible. Personalized emails have a higher chance of being opened.

8. Automate your promotional email sequence

Most people do affiliate email marketing manually, so you have to spend time drafting and sending content emails. Instead of doing that, consider automating your promotional emails.

Doing so will help you promote your content more efficiently and allow you to earn more and scale as needed. Many tools are available for automation, so be sure to utilize them.

9. Naturally include multiple affiliate links

It’s tempting to include just one or two affiliate links but have at least five in every post you write. The more you naturally include affiliate links, especially ones that point to high commission products and categories, will help boost your affiliate income. Ensure that these links are relevant to your readers and offer value.

This applies to when you’re directing contacts to a landing page or blog post that, you don’t want to fill your email content with a bunch of links. This will appear spammy to contacts and email senders.

Creating content outside of emails allows you to share it across other platforms, such as social media.

10. Cover the entire buyer journey

As an affiliate marketer, you’re trying to help guide potential customers through every stage of their decision-making process. Be sure that your emails cover their entire journey as a customer and includes everything a buyer needs to make a purchase.

When making a purchase there are three stages a buyer goes through; awareness, consideration and decision.

In the awareness stage they have recognized their need, in the consideration stage they are weighing up their options and in the decision stage they’ll make their purchase. Your emails need to contain enough information and persuasion to get them to the last stage.

11. Utilize any affiliate email marketing assets you have

If you have an established email list from another business or site, utilize it to promote your affiliate offers. You can set up a campaign in any tool that you want to send out emails regularly to all of your subscribers.

It could be a signup form for an opt-in mailing list or free eBooks or whitepapers that you used to distribute. You can refer to these assets for ideas on what to write about next which will help boost your affiliate income.

12. Highlight the product featured

To boost your passive income, try to highlight your favorite products in each email you send. Doing so will make it easier for readers to click through and purchase items that interest them.

Make sure that you aren’t spammy with these emails. Use an opt-in form to collect names and email addresses to build a list of interested contacts.

13. Add a coupon or discount

Offer a discount on your product to people who sign up for your email list. Discounts will incentivize them to sign up, giving you an easy way to build relationships with customers in your niche.

You will make more money than you could have by selling just one product at a total price. Just keep track of how many sales each campaign generates, so you know which ones are worth repeating.

14. Monitor your affiliate related insights & trends

One key to successful affiliate marketing is to have a good understanding of your customers.

But, there are also third-party sales insights to get a better idea of what kind of offers might work best for your audience. It’s essential to keep an eye on these metrics, as they can help you make decisions that will boost your income.

Another thing to consider is any trends that come about. You need to ensure that you are ahead of the game so that your emails and your affiliate links get noticed over and above any one else.

15. Create a sense of urgency and need for action

You can do this by placing a countdown timer, an event countdown, or even an event registration form in your email.

You can also insert specific deadlines into your emails that trigger subscribers to take some action you have set up. Such affiliate efforts will increase conversion rates, open rates, and click-through rates.

Wrapping up

While it may seem like a lot to juggle, email marketing can work wonders for your business and for your affiliate marketing strategy. And when you consider that there are a number of email marketing tools available to automate this process, it really is a no brainer.

Combining the two will ultimately lead to an increase in sales numbers.

By optimizing your subject lines and including calls-to-action, you’ll be able to get your subscribers clicking through on their favorite emails in no time. More subscribers will lead to more clicks on your expertly placed links, leading to more sales, which will lead to more affiliate income.

The post How Affiliate Email Marketing Can Increase Income appeared first on Shout.com.

• Email subject line best practices
  • Personalize subject lines
  • Keep them short and sweet
  • Be descriptive, but don’t give away too much
  • Use action-oriented verbs
  • Avoid spammy words
  • Don’t overuse punctuation
  • Never use ALL-CAPS
  • Limit the use of emojis
  • Couple your subject line with a persuasive preheader text
  • Test email subject lines
• Writing email subject lines that increase open rates
  • 1. Create a sense of urgency
  • 2. Tap into their natural curiosity
  • 3. Share offers and deals
  • 4. Tailor to your audience
  • 5. Establish your authority
  • 6. Drop famous names
  • 7. Use numbers and statistics
• Wrapping up

When it comes to email marketing, collecting email addresses is only part of the battle. Now you have to find a way to increase opens and clicks. Email subject lines are often the deciding factors in whether or not subscribers click to open. Its purpose is to convince readers that your campaign has value and they’ll benefit from reading it.

Much like to title tag of a webpage or H1 or a blog post, they have to be optimized in a way that encourages engagement. They’re not meant to give all the information to subscribers in one space, but rather to summarize your content or inspire a specific action.

Email subject line best practices

Below, we’ll go over some of the best practices for writing good email subject lines that naturally encourage higher open rates.

Personalize subject lines

Personalization is one of your strongest tools when it comes to marketing. And by this, we mean more than just throwing a subscriber’s name into the subject line, everyone already does this.

If you want to catch their attention and encourage more opens, you’ll need to be more specific. What are their hobbies and interests? What’s going on in their city? Is there a milestone you can reference? These kinds of details are more likely to engage subscribers than something that can be applied to everyone.

With Shout, you can use Merge Tags to personalize email subject lines with the information you’ve stored in custom fields. You’ll have access to all our default tags (like name, email, and company) but you’ll also be able to create and use your own.

Keep them short and sweet

Your subject line should be short, sweet, and to the point. Email clients will only display a set number of characters before trimming the rest of the text, and you don’t want to fall victim to this.

But beyond this, you have to put yourself in your subscribers’ shoes. The average office worker receives 121 emails per day, that’s a lot of subject lines to read through (and you know we really mean skim through).

So, don’t compound the problem by writing something too wordy.

Backlinko suggests that subject lines that do not exceed 16 characters perform better with recipients.

Be descriptive, but don’t give away too much

You want to encourage opens by showing you have something of value to subscribers, but you don’t want to reveal your hand too soon. If you give them everything they need in the subject line, they have no reason to open your email.

A great way to do this is to ask your subscribers a question, like:

“Do you need more organic traffic?”

By doing this, you’ve highlighted the topic of your email and engaged them immediately.

Use action-oriented verbs

Subject lines are very similar to calls-to-action (CTAs), in that they use specific language to encourage readers to take action.

Here are a few examples of action-oriented verbs:

• Learn
• Improve
• Download
• Increase
• Join

All of the above words give you a glimpse into the context of the email and inspire people to take action.

Take a look at some other powerful words you can use to capture your subscribers’ attention.

Avoid spammy words

There are also words that you’ll want to avoid using in your email subject lines to avoid being blocked by spam filters.

Here are a few examples of words that may trigger spam filters.

• Buy
• $$
• Extra income
• Bargain
• Cash
• Get paid
• Passwords
• Open
• Opt-in

Take a look at this more comprehensive list of email spam trigger words.

Don’t overuse punctuation

Often, subject lines are written with the best intentions but are perceived in a completely different way by recipients.

Especially when certain punctuation is used, like exclamation points (!).

They can be a great way to convey tone but you don’t know how it will translate when read by others. You might intend to express excitement but you risk it being read as aggression.

If you think it’s adding value to your subject line, by all means, go for it. But only use it once.

The overuse of punctuation can also be a red flag to web servers, and your email may be marked as spam. Plus, this doesn’t look great:

“60% of all products for the next 3 days!!!!!!”

Never use ALL-CAPS

Using all-caps is also bad practice. These subject lines never read well and won’t do your open rate any good. Think about how this looks:

“LOWEST DISCOUNT EVER, BUY NOW”.

It will catch your recipient’s eye, but not in a good way. Establish trust and build authority with non-spammy subject lines to improve open rates. Don’t use cheap tactics, NOBODY LIKES IT.

Limit the use of emojis

Once upon a time, emojis were a fresh way of making your emails stand out from the crowd. When done right, they can still add something to subject lines, but there is a risk of making your email look tacky.

Here’s where your own judgment comes into play, as there’s no hard and fast rule for this. If your brand or emails usually have a playful tone, you’ll be able to pull this off.

But if you’re just adding emojis so your subject line stands out, you can alienate your audience.

Exercise caution and question what works for your tone of voice.

Couple your subject line with a persuasive preheader text

You’ll also see this referred to as Preview Text, it’s a customizable email field that shows next to or below your subject line in inboxes.

It’s intended for giving recipients a sneak peek of your email content. The amount of text that shows is dependent on the individual’s settings, so you want to pack a punch in the first few words.

Use this in tandem with your subject line to demonstrate everything you have to offer. Not writing preheader text would be a folly, as email clients will pull the first lines of your email by default. That never looks good.

Test email subject lines

It’s always best practice to run your subject lines past colleagues or friends before sending your email. If you don’t have anyone to consult, there are some great free tools you can use to improve your subject lines, for example, OmniSend.

You’ll also want to track the performance of your subject lines after you’ve sent the campaign. Email open rates can be a good indication of how effective your subject line is.

Finally, you should also consider A/B testing. You can use the results to determine:

• How long your subject lines should be
• What phrasing works best
• What power words you should use

Split testing isn’t a one-stop-shop, ideally, you would be testing for each subject line, but that can be time-intensive. So, we recommend that you perform an A/B test for your most important campaigns.

Writing email subject lines that increase open rates

Now that we discussed the best practices for writing subject lines, let’s get stuck into some specific tips for increasing your open rates.

1. Create a sense of urgency

Creating a sense of urgency in your subject lines encourages subscribers to take action. If you state your offering and put a time limit on its availability, people will want to act before they miss out.

Here are some keywords that create a sense of urgency:

• Expiring
• Last chance
• Limited time
• Now
• Still time

Don’t flood inboxes with constant updates. This applies to your current email series and any others you may have plans.

The number of emails you send should be based on the length of time you have set.

For example, if your recipients have 5 days to claim a discount, you should send one email at the start of this promotion, then one just before the discount is about to expire.

You want to send enough emails to ensure you’re at the forefront of their mind, but want to avoid spamming their inboxes.

Then wait a little while before you use this tactic again. The more often you try to create a sense of urgency, the less effective email subject lines will be.

2. Tap into their natural curiosity

By our very nature, people are curious. If you can find a way to tap into this you’ve taken a big step towards writing compelling subject lines.

One way of doing this is to present an information gap between what you know and what your subscribers know.

Or share interesting stories that want to be read. For example: “How this CEO doubled his business in 3 months”.

It’s absolutely essential that you deliver on the promises you make when using this strategy. If your email content doesn’t live up to the subject line, you’ll lose all the trust you’ve worked so hard to build with your subscribers.

Here’s a great article if you want to learn more about curiosity subject lines.

3. Share offers and deals

If you have an active discount or deals, you should communicate this with your readers in the subject line. People love to save money, so you’re guaranteed to see an increased open rate when using this strategy.

The deals and discounts don’t even need to be something you’re offering for free yourself. Think about other things your readers are interested in or tools they may use (things that are not in direct competition with your own business or offering). Then create a curated list and share those with your audience.

Here’s a list of email subject lines for deals and offers.

4. Tailor to your audience

Low open rates are often a result of low interest. Just because people have subscribed to your email list, doesn’t mean they’re all interested in the same thing. It’s essential that you learn more about your audience in order to create tailored email campaigns based on personal interests and needs.

You can learn more about your subscribers by analyzing what emails they’ve opened in the past and sending similar content.

Or you can just ask them. Send an email asking what content they’re interested in or why they signed up in the first place. Maybe it was because they wanted to be kept up to date or just because they were interested in a series of content. Identifying that will go a long way in improving the way you personalize subject lines and increase open rates.

To go one step further and increase the amount of valuable information you can compile about your subscribers, create a survey to learn more. If you’re concerned you won’t get enough feedback to make an informed decision, take a look at our tips on how to get more people to respond to a survey.

5. Establish your authority

People subscribe to email lists in order to solve a problem, and a lot of the time that problem is a lack of information. You can establish your authority and build trust with your readers by writing timely and relevant content.

Research what’s new in your area of expertise and consider how it could impact your audience. If you can identify something in your research that could be a problem for them, translate this into an eye-catching subject line and allude to the solution you can provide.

Or you can even just compile a list of articles that may be of interest to them and provide snappy summaries for each.

6. Drop famous names

This isn’t always the right choice for your email, especially if the name in question doesn’t relate to your business or brand in any direct way. But, dropping a famous name into your email subject line is a surefire way to increase open rates.

7. Use numbers and statistics

Using numbers and statistics in your subject lines presents a more subjective and descriptive view of your email content.

Research has found that using numbers in blog posts increased clickthrough rates by 206%. Whilst that exact statistic may not be directly transferable to subject lines, we can still infer that you’d likely see an increased open rate using this tactic.

In blog posts, you’ll often see examples like: “15 tips for increasing site traffic”.

You can see this clearly demonstrates value in the content.

Wrapping up

Email marketing is still one of the most effective methods of increasing sales and engaging your audiences. But if people aren’t opening your emails, your time and resources are being completely wasted.

By improving your subject lines, you’re much more likely to increase the chance that people will open and read your content.

To do this, your first port-of-call should be to adhere to the best practices for email subject lines:

1. Personalize subject lines
2. Write as if you’re speaking to an individual or exclusive group
3. Keep them short and snappy
4. Describe your content, but don’t give away too much
5. Use action-orientated words
6. Avoid spammy words and phrases
7. Don’t overuse punctuation
8. Never use ALL-CAPS
9. Limit the use of emojis
10. Couple your subject line with persuasive preheader text
11. Test your subject lines

Once you’ve followed these best practices, you can then focus on strategies for increasing your email open rates further:

1. Create a sense of urgency
2. Tap into their natural curiosity
3. Share offers and promotions
4. Tailor content to your audiences
5. Establish your authority
6. Drop famous names
7. Use numbers and statistics

Now that you know the specifics of writing email subject lines, you need to evaluate your email marketing campaigns as a whole. Take a look at our complete guide to email marketing.

The post Best Practices for Email Subject Lines in 2022 appeared first on Shout.com.

• What is email scrubbing?
  • Why email scrubbing is important
  • How often should you scrub email lists?
• Thing to consider before email scrubbing
  • Bounces
  • Email clients
  • List building and consent
  • Inactive customers
• How to clean email lists (email scrubbing)
  • 1. Identify inactive subscribers
  • 2. Segment the inactive subscribers
  • 3. Attempt to re-engage those contacts
  • 4. Clean the segment
  • 5. Remove duplicates, spam and bounced contacts
  • 6. Re-engage your clean email list
• Keeping your list clean after email scrubbing

What is email scrubbing?

Email scrubbing is the process of removing subscribers that are impacting your campaign performance and sender score with ISPs.

Here are some examples of contacts you should remove when scrubbing emails:

• Unused email addresses
• Inactive respondents (with low open and click-through rates)
• Duplicate emails
• Those who report your emails as spam
• Email addresses that cause bounces

Why email scrubbing is important

ISPs monitor your campaign stats and the number of bounces, blocks and spam reports to determine your sender score. If you have critically low rates of engagement and high bounce rates, you’re likely to receive a lower sender score.

The absolute worst thing that could happen is your email domain is blocked. By scrubbing your email list, you will:

• Receive fewer spam complaints and avoid your emails being sent to the spam folder
• Increase open rates and click-through rates
• Improve email deliverability
• Increase sender reputation (score)
• Save money per campaign and increase ROI

Maintaining a clean email list will allow you to continue producing email marketing campaigns that your audience engages with.

How often should you scrub email lists?

This is entirely dependent on your industry and the frequency of your email campaigns. If you’re a seasonal business, it’s probably not a good idea to clean your lists more than once a year. You’ll want to see what your engagement rates are like at your peak times and use that data to determine whether you should scrub email addresses.

But if your campaigns are more consistent, say two or three times a week, you’ll have a lot more data to benchmark on. You should consider cleaning your list at least once a year, but the higher number of emails you send the more of a foundation you have to make a decision.

Thing to consider before email scrubbing

Before cleaning your list, you’ll want to determine if there are any other reasons why your emails might be performing poorly.

Bounces

Before cleaning your list, you’ll want to determine if there are any other reasons why your emails might be performing poorly.

For example, is there a technical reason your emails are bouncing? Is there a way you can remedy that without losing valuable contacts?

Email clients

Or, are all your inactive users using the same email client, e.g. Gmail? This may be a sign that this particular client is diverting all your emails to spam or junk folders. You may have to query with the support team of an individual email client to resolve issues like this.

List building and consent

Or, are all your inactive users using the same email client, e.g. Gmail? This may be a sign that this particular client is diverting all your emails to spam or junk folders.

It’s also important to consider how you collected the email addresses and how they’re segmented into lists/ groups. Have you given contacts an option to change what email lists they’re subscribed to? Maybe they only want to receive emails related to products and services as opposed to marketing content.

More importantly, did you collect consent to send emails with a double opt-in? If you haven’t collected consent from contacts there’s a higher chance you’ll end up sending emails to a spam trap. These addresses look the same as all others but are sued by ISPs to identify senders who aren’t maintaining a healthy list.

Inactive customers

You should also be cautious when removing paying customers from email lists. The best course of action here would be to group customers into an ‘inactive customers’ list and break them down into product life cycles. If you have customers subscribed to an annual plan, they might not feel it’s warranted to read your emails.

It’s up to you to decide whether you continue to send emails to these customers, but why not consider a more personalized approach, where an automated email with new features or plans is sent towards the end of their current subscription.

How to clean email lists (email scrubbing)

Once you’ve explored all the avenues above, it’s time to start email scrubbing. We’ve broken this process down into six easy steps:

1. Identify inactive subscribers
2. Segment the inactive subscribers
3. Attempt to re-engage those contacts
4. Clean the segment
5. Remove duplicates, spam and bounced contacts
6. Re-engage your clean email list

1. Identify inactive subscribers

What is an inactive subscriber? These are contacts who haven’t engaged with your emails over a set period of time. This period of time is determined by you and should be based on how frequently you send emails.

For example, if you only send emails once a month, inactive subscribers could be defined as those who haven’t opened an email in six months. But if you send multiple emails a week, you can reduce the defining period of time to three weeks.

Of course, there are those who’ve never engaged with your emails. These may be people who’ve signed up with a secondary email address or even bots that have subscribed to your list. You can easily identify these contacts and remove them from your email list.

2. Segment the inactive subscribers

The simplest way to do this is from inside your email marketing tool.

With Shout, go to “Contacts”, select “Segment” and create a new segment. Enter the criteria you’ve set to define inactive subscribers and then give your new segment a name, like “Inactive Subscribers”.

3. Attempt to re-engage those contacts

If you can save some of the contacts you’ve worked so hard to collect, now’s the time to do it. Think of something enticing to get your subscribers to re-engage with you. For example:

• An exceptional piece of content
• A discount on their next purchase
• A competition or prize draw
• Early access to a new feature or product

Ask yourself why they signed up in the first place, there had to be some reason. Very few people will subscribe to your email list out of the good of their hearts. The problem may be your campaigns have veered too far from what contacts originally wanted or needed.

Or maybe that isn’t the problem, maybe you already solved their problems and that’s why they don’t feel the need to read your emails anymore.

Here’s your chance to make a survey and ask your subscribers why they don’t read your emails and what you can do to spark that interest again.

4. Clean the segment

Think of an amount of time you’re happy to wait and see if your subscribers re-engage, maybe that’s a week, maybe it’s a month, it’s up to you.

If they haven’t opened your email in that time, it’s probably time to remove inactive contacts from your email list. If they’ve opened the email, but haven’t clicked any links you need to decide how valuable those contacts are to you. We’d recommend keeping them and continuing to deliver top quality content, you might just have to find the right fit for them.

To scrub your email list with Shout, all you’ll need to do is select the segment then choose “Unsubscribe” from the dropdown.

You might want to export the list beforehand and keep the inactive subscribers on file, again this is your call.

5. Remove duplicates, spam and bounced contacts

You also need to remember to remove any email addresses that cause bounces (especially hard bounces), report your campaigns as spam (which can have a negative impact on your sender score) and any duplicates that you may have on your list.

If you’ve uploaded contacts to Shout, we’ll automatically flag any duplicates as the list is being uploaded. And even if they subscribe multiple times using an [online form], you won’t be charged for duplicates and we won’t send multiple emails to them.

To identify any subscribers that fit the above criteria, you can navigate to “Contacts” and filter by bounces, spam reports or duplicates to find them. You can then use a bulk action to unsubscribe them for a clean email list.

You could also consider using an email validation tool (email list cleaning service) such as Zerobounce, which provides a bulk email verifier. Essentially, you can upload your mailing list and their tool verifies email addresses for you.

6. Re-engage your clean email list

Now you’ve finished your email scrubbing, it’s time to set a benchmark performance. Create a campaign and send it to your newly scrubbed email list, wait the usual amount of time you would before analyzing performance and then take note.

You can compare this to your last performance review (before you cleaned up your email list) to visualize the effectiveness of email scrubbing, but more importantly, you’ll want to use these email metrics as your new benchmark.

Keeping your list clean after email scrubbing

Once you’ve cleaned your email list, you have to strive to maintain that standard. When collecting new subscribers, ensure to use a double opt-in process and send email campaigns that are relevant and useful.

This should be at the forefront of your mind from the very first email you send to contacts. Take a look at how to create a welcome email that engages subscribers and keeps them coming back for future emails. Then, once you’ve learned more about them, move onto creating drip email marketing campaigns that deliver valuable and personalized content.

Another way you can maintain list health is by allowing contacts to manage their own email settings. So, create a form they can use to change list preferences. If you don’t do this, their only option will be to unsubscribe, which means you lose them altogether.

Hopefully, we’ve given you everything you need to clean up your email list and improve the performance of your campaigns. If you’d like more tips, head over to our complete email marketing guide.

The post Email Scrubbing: How to Clean Email Lists appeared first on Shout.com.

• What does RACE stand for?
  • Plan
  • Reach
  • Act
  • Convert
  • Engage
• Why choose the RACE model

The RACE model is a framework for the strategic planning of digital marketing activities or omnichannel communication plans.

The model consists of four stages, each aimed at customers in a different stage of the customer lifecycle, with the aim of building relationships and increasing customer loyalty.

It was developed by Dave Cheffey, from Smart Insights, to help marketers integrate digital marketing with more traditional marketing activities.

What does RACE stand for?

RACE is an acronym formed of the four stages of a marketing framework. These stages are Reach, Act, Convert, Engage.

Each stage is its own ongoing process, but all aim to move leads down the pipeline to eventually become advocates of your business or brand.

However, there is a stage prior to any of the others: Plan.

Plan

It’s essential that you begin your digital marketing strategy by planning and setting goals. Your strategy is liable to change the longer it is in place, and that’s a good thing, but when you’re starting out you do want to make sure your goals are SMART.

If you’ve not heard that term before, SMART is a way of setting goals for campaigns and projects that are trackable and set a foundation for success.

Each letter is SMART stands for something that can help you set these kinds of goals:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

Reach

In the Reach stage, your aim will be to generate exposure for your brand, product or services using both online and offline media.

You can measure the success of your efforts by tracking the traffic generated by your campaigns to your website or social media pages.

This stage of the RACE model is hugely important when launching a new website or product, as early exposure will lead to a higher return on investment.

You might be stuck for ideas on how to increase your reach. Well, you can do this by utilizing your earned, paid and owned media.

What are earned, paid and owned media?

Earned media

• Reviews
• Testimonials
• Mentions
• Social shares
• Influencers/ plugs (free)
• Guest posts
• Media coverage

Paid media

• Pay per click (PPC)
• Display ads
• Paid social
• Native ads
• Remarketing
• Retargeting
• Influencers/ plugs (paid)

Owned media

• Website
• Blog
• Social media pages
• Emails
• Profiles (e.g. on review sites)

Take a look at this article from Mention for tips on how to increase your organic reach on social media.

Reach KPIs

• Unique visitors (to your website)
• Value per visit
• Followers (on social media)

Act

The A in RACE stands for Act, which is short for Interact. In this stage, you’ll want to start generating leads for your business. It’s all about offering something of value to prospects to encourage the start of a relationship.

The more leads you capture and the quality of the relationships you start with will determine how high your conversion rate is in the future. So, this step is a crucial one.

But don’t let quantity be a detriment to quality. If you only have the resources to create 5 strong lead magnets that collect qualified leads, focus on those and get going. Need some suggestions? Here are 13 lead magnets and how they can grow your email list.

However, there’s more to lead generation than collecting email addresses, there are also specific interactions you can track that signal potential leads. These are interactions like ‘viewed product’ and ‘added to basket’, which can easily be tracked as Goals with a tool like Google Analytics.

You also want to encourage prospects to share your content with other people. Try thinking of content that you’d share with friends or colleagues and recreate that for your audience.

A great example of a lead magnet with high shareability is a quiz. People naturally want to share their personalized results with their friends, which encourages those others to take your quiz to see what they’d get. If you like this idea, take a look at how to create an effective lead capture quiz.

Act KPIs

• Leads
• Lead conversion rate
• Time on page/ site
• Shares, comments and likes

Convert

The Convert stage requires you to take your leads and turn them into paying customers. These could be from online transactions or offline channel purchases.

You’re likely to be chopping and changing your strategy and content in this stage, after all you can’t get it all right the first time around. So, don’t be disheartened if you don’t see the conversion rate you were hoping for immeditetly. Step back and and assess what’s working and what isn’t, then change what you can. It’s as easy as that.

An effective method for finding what works for you is to A/B test (split test) content. Make minor changes to each variation of your content/ campaign and collect as much data as possible to identify which performs best with your target audience.

For example, you could split test the same product page with varying CTAs. Take a look at our article on writing a call-to-action that converts for some tips on this.

Another way to approach this would be to simply ask your audience about themselves. Create a survey, send it to your target audience and start to build customer profiles based on what you learn. Adopting data-driven marketing strategies will go a long way in personalizing content and increasing conversion.

Convert KPIs

• Online and offline sales
• Revenue/ profit
• Average order value

Engage

Everything in the Engage stage is aimed at developing a long term relationship with your customers. Essential, you want to turn first-time buyers into loyal customers (or subscribers) who’re advocates of your brand, products or services.

Most brands engage their customers across social media platforms and through email campaigns as a minimum. You need to think of content and incentives that build customer loyalty, which will boost customer lifetimes and increase the success of your top-level goals.

However, it’s more than engagement that can influence loyalty. You need to consider your customers’ entire experience to create long-lasting relationships with them. Take a look at our article on measuring and improving customer experience to learn more.

To track your success in this stage, you’ll want to take a look at your repeat purchases, customer retention and positive mentions of your brand on external sites (e.g. review sites).

You should also consider conducting customer satisfaction surveys at least twice a year. These will give you essential feedback on what your customers like and where they feel there is room for improvement. If you’re struggling to collect enough feedback to inform action, take a look at how to get more survey respondents.

Engage KPIs

• Repeat purchases
• Satisfaction and loyalty
• Advocacy

Why choose the RACE model

The RACE model allows you to plan your digital marketing strategy out as bitesize tasks and encourages you to set easy to track goals.

This streamlining makes identifying the strengths and weaknesses or your strategy effortless, enabling you to make changes and improve your overall strategy quickly.

It’s important to keep a record of the different changes you make to benchmark your progress and rollback your strategy if you change the wrong element.

The key thing to remember is that this isn’t a one-stop-shop, it’s going to take time and monitoring to see any real success from this model (as it would with any other). But the RACE framework is a simple and effective method of improving your ROI.

The post RACE Model: Improve your Digital Marketing Strategy appeared first on Shout.com.

• What is drip email marketing?
  • Why are email drip campaigns so effective?
• How to create a drip campaign
  • 1. Decide on a target audience
  • 2. Give your drip campaign an objective
  • 3. Set up your trigger
  • 4. Create your emails
  • 5. Monitor your campaign metrics
• Wrapping up

What is drip email marketing?

Drip email marketing is the process of sending a series of emails automatically according to a schedule. For example, you’d have a welcome email ready to be sent for when someone subscribes to your list and then another a few days down the line.

The main advantage that drip campaigns have over email newsletters is that contacts will experience your entire campaign as opposed to just your latest email. Which means you’re nurturing each and every relationship in the same way.

The other benefit is that you can send emails based on your contact’s actions, which goes that one step further in personalizing their experience with you.

Essentially, these emails would be triggered based on events you’ve set up linked to contact’s actions. For example, sending an abandoned cart email to those who don’t follow through with a purchase.

Why are email drip campaigns so effective?

Drip campaigns are so effective because their content can be personalized based on your audiences’ behaviour. And the more relevant an email is to your audience, the higher your engagement rate will be.

They also allow you to nurture leads over a series of emails, building relationships, earning their trust and moving them through the sales funnel. Here are a few drip campaign statistics that will illustrate this:

• Open rates are about 80 times higher than standalone emails
• They generate 50% more sales-ready leads
• Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads
• Relevant emails generate 18 times for revenue than generic emails

Automated campaigns are an extremely rewarding marketing strategy, but they can be time-intensive in the beginning. This is especially true if you’re targeting multiple segments of your audience, as they’ll each need a drip campaign to match their needs.

How to create a drip campaign

The basics of a drip campaign are always the same, whether you’re trying to convert free users, cross-sell a product or onboard new customers.

So, here are 5 steps to helping you create an email drip campaign:

1. Decide on a target audience
2. Choose an objective
3. Set up a trigger
4. Create your emails
5. Monitor your campaign metrics

1. Decide on a target audience

First off, you’ll need to decide what segment of your audience you’ll be targeting with your drip campaign.

This is important, as your message and objective will have to be as personal and relatable to your audience as possible for it to be successful.

Here are a few examples of target audiences:

• New users
• Newsletter subscribers
• First-purchase customers
• Lead-magnet conversions
• Free Trial users

2. Give your drip campaign an objective

You’ll then need to set an objective for your campaign. What are you setting out to achieve? What series of actions do you want contacts to perform?

• Welcome series
• Collect customer feedback
• Up-sell new features or products
• Onboarding
• Measure customer satisfaction
• Lead nurturing
• Increase conversions from Free Trials or Freemium accounts
• Engaging users to improve customer relationships
• Courses (webinars etc.)

If your campaign is focused on collecting feedback, you can easily make surveys and send them to email lists with Shout. We even have tools for you to build quizzes if you just wanted to engage subscribers or create lead magnets.

3. Set up your trigger

Your email drip campaign can be triggered by an event or a condition that your contacts meet. Events are usually link clicks, page visits or other user actions on a page that are easy to track. For example, if a lead fills out a form or download a lead magnet. We’ve covered lead form optimization and how lead magnets can grow your email list in other articles if you’re interested in these specific strategies.

Alternatively, you can use a single trigger to deliver a whole online course or series of blog posts across multiple emails.

In regards to conditions, these can be more specific to your product, service or audience. If you’re a SaaS company, you could set use drip email marketing to encourage users who’ve been using a Freemium plan for a specific amount of time (e.g. 1  month) to become a paying customer.

But another (more general) strategy would be to trigger an email series based on contacts’ open rates, e.g. send to all with an average open rate of 80%. In doing so, you’re targeting contacts who’re already engaged with your emails, which will lead to a more successful drip campaign.

This kind of automation ensures you never miss an opportunity with someone who’s engaging with your content.

4. Create your emails

After you’ve set up your trigger, think about how many emails your drip campaigns will consist of and how frequently you’ll need to send them.

Ensure that your design is consistent between all your emails and that content is written so readers can easily scan it.

You must focus on providing value in your emails, from the first to the last. There should always be some advice or advantage that your audience can take away to keep them coming back. Take a look at our complete email marketing guide for more tips on creating engaging emails.

Don’t send all your emails in one day, schedule them at least a day apart so that you aren’t spamming inboxes. Go one step further by setting up triggers within your workflow to send emails based on engagement and interaction. E.g. send a discount code to a contact who clicks a product link but doesn’t make a purchase. 

If your drip campaign is a welcome series, take a look at our article on how to write welcome emails that keep subscribers reading.

5. Monitor your campaign metrics

Even though your drip campaign is automated, you’ll still need a hands-on approach to monitor its success. There are a few KPIs you’ll need to track in order to do this:

• Open rate
• Click-through rate
• Unsubscribe rate
• Bounce rate

However, there are a few other key metrics to keep an eye on to determine if your drip campaign is successful, such as click-to-open-rate and list growth rate. Head over to our email marketing metrics article for more information.

If you’re experiencing a large number of drop-outs or unsubscribes during your drip campaign, try to identify where in the workflow it’s occurring. E.g. If you’re seeing dropouts after ‘Email 3’, then you’ll just need to spruce up the content or add more value to that email.

You should also conduct A/B tests on email content and subject lines to determine what performs best and maximize conversions.

Because you’ll have triggers set up on landing pages (and in-app if you’re a SaaS company), you’ll also need to monitor traffic and link clicks there too. If a page has low traffic, you might want to consider moving the trigger elsewhere or reconsidering whether you’ve created a drip campaign for too small an audience.

It’s not always a problem if your target audience is too small, this will likely lead to more engagement and higher conversion rates. However, you have to weigh those rewards against the amount of time it takes to create and monitor the campaign.

If the page has a good level of traffic but has a low click-through rate, your call-to-action may be the issue. The CTA must be strong, stand out amongst all your other content, and illustrate clear value to leads. Learn how to write a call-to-action that converts.

Wrapping up

Whatever kind of drip campaign you create will depend on your industry and your specific objectives. But their purpose should always be to nurture leads through the sales cycle and increase customer engagement with your brand.

Always aim to provide value for your audience, show them that you appreciate their time and loyalty by giving them something can’t find elsewhere. Treat them like VIPs.

But don’t forget to work your own personality into the drip emails, no one will commit to an overly corporate buzzword fest. Find a personable tone and align your messaging with your brand values and you’ll find an audience who comes back for each email.

And most importantly, never forget to track the success of your campaign. Find out what’s working and what needs improving, either by referencing email metrics or by asking contacts for feedback. Then optimize your campaigns based on your findings.

The post Drip Email Marketing: How to Create a Drip Campaign appeared first on Shout.com.

• What are email marketing metrics?
• What are the primary email metrics?
• Other email marketing KPIs
• Wrapping up

What are email marketing metrics?

Email marketing is one of the most prolific digital marketing strategies, not only because it enables you to reach your audience directly, but also because there are so many email marketing metrics (or key-performance-indicators) you can use to improve your campaigns.

These KPIs allow you to analyze the success and impact of your emails and take a data-driven approach to improve them.

So, it’s important to identify these key metrics before you start a campaign. 

What are the primary email metrics?

The best thing about email marketing is the ability to measure the success of each campaign and clearly identify (for the most part) where improvements have to be made.

When you create and launch a campaign with most email service providers, you’ll have access to at least the following metrics:

• Open rate (OR)
• Click-through-rate (CTR)
• Bounce rate
• Unsubscribe rate

Open rate (OR)

Your open rate is the percentage of recipients who opened your email compared to the total number of sent emails.

Usually, an email open is triggered when an invisible image is loaded in your email. If your recipients don’t have images set to automatically download and they do not enable image loading manually after opening your email, they won’t be counted towards your open rate.

The average open rate for email is between 15%-25%. This can vary based on your industry, but anything at the higher end of this range highlights you’re doing something well.

If a recipient opens your email multiple times, your overall open-rate will be inflated. However, most service providers will also provide you with a Unique Opens metric.

This metric only includes one open from each recipient. If your overall email open rate is far higher than your unique opens, this may show you’ve created a truly special email. As it’s lear people keep coming back to read it.

A poor open-rate might indicate that your subject line isn’t effective enough. Other than the email sender, this will be determine whether or not a recipient opens your email.

A good subject line is personalized and impactful. You can create impact by writing a subject line that targets some emotion in recipients, i.e. anger, interest, curiosity or happiness. Alternatively, you can allude to solving a problem in your subject line.

Let them know you have some information that can address what they need. But don’t give away too much in the subject line, you still want them to open your email.

Click-through rate (CTR)

Your click-through-rate is calculated by the number of clicks in your emails divided by the total number of emails sent.

Naturally, your emails will contain buttons or links to other content you want to share with recipients, whether it’s your product catalogue or a blog post.

Average CTR varies much more wildly based on your industry than open rates, so feel free to refer to this list of email click-through-rates by industry.

How many clicks you receive will depend on the quality of your CTAs, copy and email design. The quality of an email will be subjective to your audience members, so it’s hard to say exactly will improve clicks.

But like we said above, try to solve a problem or fill a gap in knowledge for your audience. This is what readers tend to respond to (and keep coming back for).

For some killer tips on generating clicks, go take a look at our article on writing a call-to-action that converts.

Bounce rate

Your bounce rate is determined by the number of email addresses that returned an error and were unable to be delivered to recipients.

Bounces will fit into one of two categories: hard or soft.

Hard bounces

Hard bounces occur when an email is sent to a non-existent or invalid email address. For example, email addresses that have been closed or those with text errors.

These are categorized as ‘hard bounces’ as the email will never be delivered to those addresses.

Soft bounces

Soft bounces occur when there is an issue that causes deliveries to fail temporarily. For example, their inbox could be full or they may need to whitelist you on their email server (depending on how it was set up). Once the issue has been resolved, your email should be delivered.

Why a low bounce rate is crucial

A high bounce rate means a whole bunch of your emails aren’t getting delivered. Too many bounces occurring continuously can also affect your Sender Reputation with your service provider. This can lead to restrictions being placed on your account. So it’s best to address bounces quickly.

If you do have a large number of bounces, it worth checking if a specific email client is causing this. You don’t want to be in the bad books with Gmail or Live, so if you spot a pattern it’s best to get working on a solution quickly.

Your list health is essential to your campaign success, so remember to clean your email list regularly. You should be removing any emails that result in a hard bounce and also any recipients who never open your emails.

On average, any bounce rate below 2% is no cause for concern, but you should be checking how many of these are hard bounces. If you start seeing bounces rates as high as 5% or 10%, stop sending emails and investigate immediately.

Unsubscribe rate

This is the number of people who have unsubscribed from your email list.

If you start to see an increase in unsubscribes, you need to identify why this is happening. Do unsubscribes occur after a particular email in your chain? Or is it more of a slow burn?

You can change the content in your emails easily enough and even run a few A/B tests to see what results in a decreased unsubscribe rate. Again, you have to continuously provide value to subscribers.

It could also be a result of how frequently you send emails. If you send too many emails in a short time, it can result in fatigue. Try to find that sweet spot with your respondents.

Hey, you can even ask them how often they’d like to hear from you and what other content they’re interested in. Why not create a survey and send it to your audience?

A double-opt-in process for subscriptions can also reduce your unsubscribe rate in the future, as you’ve gone out of your way to ensure your subscribers really want to be on your list.

The average unsubscribe rate is 0.49% according to Smart Insights. But as with all email marketing metrics, this varies based on industry.

Your unsubscribe rate should always be lower than your number of new subscriptions, this is the sign of a healthy subscriber list. We’ll go over how to calculate your list growth rate a bit further down.

Other email marketing KPIs

Whilst we’ve covered the primary email marketing metrics above, they aren’t be be-all and end-all of measuring successing.

Here are some of the other email KPIs you’ll need to track to improve your campaigns:

• Click-to-open rate (CTOR)
• List growth rate
• Opens by device
• Spam score
• Conversion rate
• Return-on-investment (ROI)

Click-to-open rate (CTOR)

The click-to-open rate compares the number of unique clicks to unique opens and therefore is the best way to measure interaction with your emails.

If your CTOR is low, this is likely an indicator that your email design or messaging is off the mark for recipients.

To resonate with readers, your email needs:

• 
  To be scannable
• 
  High resolution images
• 
  Clear, acitonable CTAs
• 
  Valuable advice or information

Why not perform some split tests with your email content to identify what works best with your audience? Once you have it down, creating future emails will be so much easier.

List growth rate

Your list growth rate is pretty self-explanatory, it’s the rate at which your number of contacts is growing.

You can calculate your growth rate by subtracting your unsubscribes from your number of new subscribers, dividing that by the total number of contacts in your list and multiplying it by 100.

(New Subscribers – Unsubscribes) / Total Number of Contacts * 100 = Growth Rate.

To improve your list growth rate, you have to ask yourself what value you can provide to potential subscribers. We recommend you consider creating a lead magnet, which is a piece of content exchanged for a subscription to your email list. 

Take a look at these 13 lead magnets and how they can be used to grow your email list.

Opens by device

This email metric is pretty straight forward. It highlights what device (desktop, tablet or mobile) your recipients are reading your emails on.

Why is this useful? Well, for example, if most of your recipients are opening on mobile, you can focus on more mobile-friendly designs.

You could also compare opens by device to other email marketing metrics like CTR. If clicks are low on mobile or tablet devices, you may need to see if your design is as responsive as you thought it was.

Spam score

Your spam score is calculated by how many similarities your email has to others that have been blocked by spam filters.

Most spam filters will give you a score between 0-10, but each has a different bar within that range for what they consider spam.

On average, if your score is below 5 then you should be fine. But you need to aim tog et your score as low as possible to ensure you’re below the threshold for all filters.

Take a look at how each spam filter scores emails.

If your provider doesn’t have a spam score calculation built-in, you can always use a free tool like Mail Tester.

Conversion rate

Now, to track your conversion rate, you’ll need to integrate your email marketing software with an external analytics tool (such as Google Analytics).

Your conversion rate should be linked to an action you can clearly track, like a purchase, landing page visit or form submission.

You can then measure how effective your content is in encouraging readers to complete that action. If your conversion rate is low, then you need to do some more testing with new messages and CTAs.

This is an important metric for content marketing, where your whole goal is to get eyes on the content you’ve created. 

Return-on-investment (ROI)

Your ROI is directly linked to the cost-effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. It is calculated by subtracting the cost of a campaign away from the total revenue made, then dividing that number by the cost of the campaign and multiplying that number by 100.

(Total Revenue Made From Campaign – Total Cost of Campaign) / Total Cost of Campaign * 100 = ROI

To this day, email marketing still has the highest potential ROI of any other type of digital marketing. So, this is an extremely important metric to track and work to improve.

Wrapping up

Email marketing metrics aren’t a one-stop-shop, you have to continuously track their progress from campaign to campaign to identify what you’re doing right and what’s still needs work.

A data-driven approach is the best way to increase engagement with emails and your ROI.

Want to learn more about measuring email campaigns success over time? Head over to our Drip Email Marketing article.

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