Effective implementation of personalized marketing

To implement personalized marketing successfully, businesses must follow some essential steps. These steps are:

1. Collect Data: To create a personalized experience, businesses must collect data about their customers. This data can include demographic information, browsing history, purchase history, and preferences. By collecting this data, businesses can create a detailed profile of each customer and tailor their experience accordingly.
2. Analyze Data: Once businesses have collected data, they must analyze it to gain insights into their customers’ behavior and preferences. This analysis can help businesses identify trends and patterns and create a personalized experience that meets customers’ needs.
3. Use Personalization Techniques: There are several personalization techniques that businesses can use to tailor content and products to customers. These techniques include product recommendations, dynamic pricing, personalized emails, and personalized landing pages.
4. Test and Refine: To ensure that personalized marketing is effective, businesses must test and refine their approach continually. This testing can involve A/B testing, user testing, and analytics to determine what works and what does not.

Watch Google Analytics 4 Video Tutorial (2023)

Video by: Analytics mania

Top-paid personalized marketing services

Personalized marketing services are third-party providers that help businesses design, implement, and optimize personalized marketing campaigns. They use advanced data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to analyze customer data and generate insights that can inform targeted messaging, product recommendations, and promotions.

Let’s discuss the top-paid personalized marketing services that can help businesses take their marketing game to the next level.

Optimizely

Optimizely is an experimentation platform that includes tools for personalization. The platform includes features like A/B testing, personalization campaigns, and analytics to help businesses optimize their marketing campaigns and create more personalized experiences for their customers.

Learn how Optimizely will replace google optimize for marketing personalization

Adobe Campaign

Adobe Campaign is a cross-channel marketing automation platform that includes tools for personalization. The platform includes features like customer segmentation, personalized content creation, and multichannel campaign management to help businesses create more engaging and personalized experiences for their customers.

The Basics of adobe campaign classic tutorial

Salesforce

Salesforce is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that includes tools for personalization. The platform includes features like customer segmentation, personalized email campaigns, and lead scoring to help businesses create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.

Salesforce CRM Full Training Tutorial for Beginners

Video by: Nick Boardman

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management platform that includes tools for personalization. The platform includes features like social listening, social media analytics, and personalized content creation to help businesses create more engaging and personalized experiences for their customers on social media.

Watch this Hootsuite Video Tutorial

Real-Life case studies of effective personalized marketing strategies

Now, let’s take a look at some real-life case studies of effective marketing strategies that use personalization to improve the customer experience, increase customer loyalty, and drive sales.

Case Study 1: How Netflix uses personalization to improve customer experience

Netflix is a prime example of a company that uses personalization to improve the customer experience. Netflix’s recommendation algorithm is the backbone of its personalization efforts. The algorithm analyzes each user’s viewing history, search history, and ratings to provide personalized recommendations.

Overall, Netflix’s personalization efforts have resulted in increased engagement and customer satisfaction. According to a survey conducted by research firm Survata, 75% of Netflix users said that they regularly watch content recommended by the platform’s algorithm.

Case Study 2: How Starbucks uses personalization to increase customer loyalty

Starbucks is another company that uses personalization to great effect. Starbucks’ mobile app allows customers to order and pay for their drinks ahead of time, saving them time and hassle. But the app also allows customers to customize their orders, tailoring each drink to their specific preferences.

Starbucks also uses personalized messaging to communicate with its customers. The company sends personalized offers and promotions to customers based on their purchase history and preferences.

These personalization efforts have led to increased customer loyalty. According to a report by App Annie, Starbucks’ mobile app is the most popular restaurant app in the US, with over 20 million users.

Case Study 3: How Amazon uses personalization to drive sales

Amazon is a master of personalization. The company’s recommendation engine is one of the most advanced in the world, analyzing each user’s purchase and browsing history to provide personalized product recommendations.

But Amazon’s personalization efforts go beyond just recommendations. The company also uses personalized pricing, offering different prices to different customers based on their browsing and purchase history.

Overall, Amazon’s personalization efforts have led to increased sales and customer satisfaction. According to a report by McKinsey, personalized recommendations account for 35% of Amazon’s total revenue.

Case Study 4: How Coca-Cola uses personalization to Connect with Customers

Coca-Cola is a great example of a company that uses personalization to connect with its customers on an emotional level. The company’s “Share a Coke” campaign involved printing popular first names on Coke bottles and cans, allowing customers to personalize their drinks.

The campaign was a huge success, generating over 500 million impressions on social media and increasing Coke’s sales volume for the first time in over a decade.

The success of the “Share a Coke” campaign shows the power of personalization in marketing. By allowing customers to personalize their drinks, Coke was able to connect with them on a personal level and create a sense of emotional attachment to the brand.

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Finding potential partners for email collaboration is easier than one might think. In this guide, we will share the top tips that will help you boost email conversions and sales with the help of email partnerships. So, let’s get started! 

Partnership marketing resources 

There are many good reasons why you may want to collaborate with other brands to run an email marketing campaign. Email partnerships can help you grow brand awareness, broaden your reach, engage new audiences, and ultimately increase conversions.

But before entering a partnership, you should consider different partnership marketing resources. Hence, you can find the most productive way to collaborate with other brands with the end goal of converting more email recipients into paying customers. 

Best partnership marketing resources

To help you get started, here is a list of the best partnership marketing resources. 

1. Publishing websites 

Partnering with online publishers is a great way to boost sales and conversions, especially if your company offers informational and digital products. When collaborating with publishing websites, you must keep up with the high demand for original and high-quality content. 

The quality of the content you produce is as important as the content type and topics. That is why it is important that you choose a publisher that matches your niche well. 

2. Pinterest 

Pinterest Business offers a great feature that sends emails to users when products they have pinned go on sale. These emails are pretty simple, but they do deliver the right kind of marketing message. When it comes to sales and conversions, this co-marketing method proves to be very effective. In fact, studies show that 83% of US Pinners have made a purchase based on Pins from brands. 

3. Non-profits 

Nonprofits are another great partnership marketing resource. Partnering with charities and other non-profit organizations is a great way to expand your reach and increase brand awareness. Besides, by collaborating with nonprofits, you can fulfill your corporate social responsibility and enable positive change.

4. Educational organizations 

If your brand offers products or services appealing to students, college faculty, or students’ parents, educational organizations are your go-to partnership category. Choose an educational organization that offers majors in the field that matches your product line for a better product-market fit.

Non-competitive businesses 

Even though it is important to choose a partner that operates in the same industry, you should not collaborate with a competitive business. Instead, partner with brands that offer complementary products and services. For example, if you offer digital services, like web hosting, it makes sense to partner with companies, like Smartproxy, that offer similar but not identical products. This way, you can get the most out of co-marketing without risking losing potential clients to competitors. 

Choosing the right brand to partner with 

The key to increasing sales and conversions often lies in choosing the right brand to partner with. The general rule of thumb is finding a company with audience demographics that match your target audience demographics criteria. So, when choosing a brand to collaborate with, make sure to pick the one that shares a similar audience but is not a direct competitor. 

Besides similar target markets, you and your email marketing partner must share the same marketing goals. If you aim to increase email conversions and sales, it makes sense to choose a brand with similar marketing goals for email collaboration. 

How to start your email co-marketing campaign? 

Once you have defined clear co-marketing goals and objectives, and have found potential partners, it is time to pitch your collaboration idea. When you start sending out emails with partnership offers, you will notice that they all share a similar email funnel structure.

Advised email funnel structure for email partnership campaigns:

1. Introduction – explains who you are and reasons why the company you are emailing should be paying attention to your offer. 
2. Recognition –  explains your choice of a potential partner and compliments their work. 
3. Request – pitches the idea for collaboration and answers the question “What do you want another brand to do?”
4. Offer – covers what you will do if they agree to fulfill your request. 
5. Call-to-action – gives an instruction on what they should do to discuss the partnership furtner. 

Even though the email structure and content will differ from company to company, you can use this structure format as a reference when designing your partnership pitching emails.

Choosing suitable collaborative marketing form 

Collaborative marketing can take different forms. It can be something as simple as mentioning another brand in your email newsletter or sending out a promotional email offering a collaboration discount. 

To help you choose a suitable form of collaborative marketing for your email campaign, below is a list of email co-marketing ideas.

Email co-marketing ideas:

• Send out news emails introducing another brand
• Inviting subscribers to check out relevant content from another brand’s blog. 
• Subscribers to attend a collaborative event or shared webinar. 
• Emails sharing another brand’s important dates (e.g. another company’s birthday).
• Emails inviting subscribers to participate in a collaborative giveaway or contest. 

Partnering with another brand to run a giveaway 

By partnering with other brands to run contests and giveaways, you can expand your reach and ultimately increase your sales and conversions. And email is the perfect medium to invite subscribers to participate in your collaborative giveaway. All you need to do is send out an email highlighting the prize and explaining to subscribers what they need to do in order to enter. 

A few content types you can run to increase conversion:

• Sweepstakes
• Giveaways
• Enter-to-win contests
• Quizzes
• Surveys

To create some of these, a tool like Typeform can come in handy, where you can create no-code forms, surveys, or quizzes and share them in your email. Surveys also let you collect feedback and other relevant data that can help you enhance your marketing campaigns.

Besides increasing conversions, you can use email partnerships to run contests for gathering user-generated content (UGC). Here is how it works. 

Let us say you have partnered with another brand to launch a contest or giveaway. Then, you can use email to promote your contest and get more prospects to join the competition. When designing the rules for your contest, you can ask contest participants to create and share pieces of content.

For example, you can ask your email recipients to share a picture of your and your partner’s product on social media via hashtag. Later, you can use these user-generated content pieces as a form of social proof to build trust with other prospective customers.

Final Thoughts 

Email co-marketing is a great way to increase sales and email conversions. A clear co-marketing campaign structure is key if you want your collaboration to bear fruit. That is why before launching your email co-marketing campaign, make sure to clearly define your goals and objectives, and know what you have to offer. 

The best advice is to start small and build from successful experiences. This way, you can ultimately increase email conversions and sales and choose the best-suited partnership marketing resources. 

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Fact is, email opt-in is a powerful way for any small business to achieve steady growth by constantly acquiring high value dedicated users. If you have a website, or another digital asset with constant incoming traffic, you can tap into that stream of new users to build a firm base of loyal customers (and even vocal advocates).

What is email opt-in?

Opt-in email marketing is a method of permission based email marketing where users willingly opt in to your email list. When opting in users expect you to provide interesting and beneficial content, or they may otherwise opt out. Permission email marketing allows you to build a loyal customer base through newsletters, promotions, and more.

Single opt-in vs double opt-in

There are actually 2 kinds of email opt-in in widespread use today, a single opt-in nd a double opt-in. The different lies in the number of steps that a user is required to take before being added to your email list. There are pros and cons for each method.

In general the single opt-in is easier to achieve for most users, and hence gathers more subscribers. The trade-off is lower subscriber quality, meaning weeker loyalty and lower engagement. A double opt-in will produce less opt-ins but will ensure high quality, loyal followers that are more likely to be converted to paying customers.

While the heated debate over which is better, single or double opt-in, still rages on, this article will cover the benefits and use cases of each method in depth, so that you could decide for yourself.

Single opt-in email marketing

A single email opt-in is done by giving your users just 1 required step in order to subscribe to your email list. This is usually done using a “subscribe” button. Once users give you their email address, they automatically get added to your mailing list and receive your emails.

Double opt-in email marketing

Double opt-in email marketing is the process of signing up for an email list in 2 steps. First users are required to click a subscribe button, then an email is sent to their inbox with a confirmation link, which they then have to click as a second opt-in step. Only when users click that link will they be added to the email list.

How can opt-in email marketing benefit my business?

Opt in email marketing will let you reach more potential customers and build up a highly targeted audience base that already gave you their trust and showed interest in what you have to offer.

An opt in email list helps you do the following:

• Build a deep and stable relationship with your target audience.
• Create a loyal base of potential customers.
• Measure your marketing success by tracking opens, clicks, and shares.
• Benefit from a highly-effective marketing strategy.
• Quickly build up an email list.
• Increase the open rate of your emails.
• Simplify the process of following up on a buyer.

It could help to see an example of what a great opt-in email form looks like so you can get a sense of what it entails. Here is one from the popular site Upworthy:

What makes opt-in email marketing such a high performing marketing channel?

Why put visitors to your website through the trouble of having to go to their email and take an additional step? There are a few benefits to doing this. These include the following:

1. Better quality mailing list

The double opt-in email list method reduces the number of people who sign up and are not really interested in getting your emails. Someone has to be a little bit more committed to receiving them in order to go through the process of opening up their email account, opening your email, and clicking on the provided link. The higher quality your email list is, the better your open and click-through rates will be.

2. Opportunity for immediate interaction

A double opt-in email strategy lets you interact with your new subscribers immediately due to the automated confirmation email that gets sent to them. The engagement with this email by the new subscribers creates the first two-way interaction between your business and your subscribers.

3. Low unsubscribe rate

Permission-based email marketing will also reward you with having a low unsubscribe rate. People who went through the extra step of the double-opt-in are committed to receiving your emails and are less likely to get annoyed when you send them emails (albeit without reason).

4. Better click-through rate

If you want to have a higher click-through rate, then a double opt-in email is the way to go. You will enjoy a low unsubscribe rate. People will welcome your emails and look forward to seeing what you have to offer them, leading them to click on the links provided in your emails.

What is a good email opt-in rate?

A good email opt in rate would normally be 5% and over. But no matter what’s your opt in rate you should always attempt improving it by making changes based on user behavior data (some companies boast opt in rates of 25% so assume anything is possible).

On average, email opt-in rates normally range between 1% and 5%, if you’re within this range then your doing OK. If you’re below this, then you likely have some serious UX or technical problem.

Keep in mind, that there are many of factors that affect your email opt-in rate depending on your specific website, so learning from others may not always work for you. You need to analyze your own website to locate YOUR friction points.

Even more still, opt-in rates may differ drastically between different industries or niches. In the end striving always to improve using AB tests, user testing and interviews is your only safe bet for continually optimizing your opt-in rate.

How do you write an opt-in email?

Since you obviously want to ensure your email opt-in rate is as high as it can be, you will want to follow a few steps. These will boost your opt-in rates sky-high and provide you with the most valuable subscribers that can turn into sales down the road.

1. Be clear about what your customers are opting into – Avoid bait-and-switch tactics because they will ultimately cause more harm than good. Your opt-out rate will go through the roof if your customers are not getting what they expected.

2. Split up your email lists – You don’t need to have a one-size-fits-all email list. What you can do is have different lists for different topics that you will be sending emails about. This lets your potential customers pick only what they are actually interested in.

3. Provide compelling offers – Put yourself in the shoes of your website’s visitors would you sign up for your email list? If not, then provide a more compelling reason to do so. You could offer a freebie of something to incentivize people to sign up.

4. Keep your opt-in short and simple – Two lines should be the max you should make your email opt-ins. Nobody wants to read a wall of text. Explain why they should opt-in and that’s it.

5. Create separate opt ins for unique email lists based on audience – Every landing page or group of landing pages on your website that promote anything unique should get a dedicated opt-in form. Going for a one shoe fits all tactic can cost you opportunities to get more subscribers with specific needs. This is also an opportunity to create a separate email list that target that audience with those specific needs.

6. Stay consistent – Consistency is key with email opt-ins. Whichever pages you decide to place your opt-ins on, make sure you place them in the same area. Also, keep the text the same to keep things simple.

Email opt-in best practices

To make the most of opt-in forms, you should follow a set of best practices. These will help you enjoy great success with this vital email marketing strategy.

1. Use as few form fields as possible

The less field you have on an opt-in form, the more successful it will be with getting people to fill them out. Studies have found that with each additional field you add to your opt-in form, you will get a 13% drop in the number of people filling them out.

This effect is called “interaction cost”, where each additional step a user has to take to complete a task will reduce the likelihood that they will ever complete it.

With this rule in mind, you should assess the necessity of each step and weigh its contribution to your business goals against its reducing effect on your form conversion (AKA the amount of people that will complete the form). But as arule of thumb anything more than 2 fields is not likely to be worth the extra information you gather.

2. Give an enticing offer or free gift

People love free stuff. Growing your email list quickly is possible when you offer something your audience will want.

Below is an example of something that works well as a free offer to encourage people to sign up. But take note that this seamingly opt-in email example walks the fine line between permission and non-permission based email marketing. Are users in this example opting in to your email list, or are they just opting in to get your free e-book?

It would have been better to add an additional opt in mechanism with a check box asking the user for permission to send her marketing, or promotional material.

For example: “Receive weekly emails with further reading recommendations and other offers”

Notice I was specific with regards to the frequency of the emails I intend to send and the nature of their content.

3. Stick to 3 opt-in forms max

You shouldn’t have more than three different opt-in forms. This ensures your website looks clean and provides visitors with an enjoyable experience.

4. Get to know your prospects

You should avoid making assumptions about your would be subscribers. To make highly effective forms you’ll need to know who your audience is. You’ll need to understand how your users are, what’s important to them, what they expect from you, what words they use within the context of your offering, etc.

This means you will need to do some audience research. It’s easiest to do by using an email list software that provides you with user metrics and stats. These will help you monitor and analyse how well your email campaigns are going and glean insights into what you may be doing better.

5. Be very clear on what you offer

People are picky on who they give their email address to, and a further truism is that no one will opt in to something they don’t understand. Understanding this you should be very careful to make it clear what it is that you’re offering.

In order to opt-in people will expect you to answer these questions:

• What content will I get?
• How do I know that I don’t get spammed?
• How often will I get these emails?
• Can I unsubscribe? Is it easy?
• Will my email be shared with a third party?

Below is an example of well made and extremely trust inspiring opt in newsletter from by a leading site on UX:

6. Use clear and widely understood wording

Some companies feel that users are bored with the word “newsletter” so they give their newsletter a “fun” name to spice things up. This can be a good idea, as long as you don’t stray so far from your meaning, so that people don’t understand what it is that you’re actually offering.

Would saying “join our Fresh Insight” be clear to users that you mean “subscribe to newsletter”? Clarity trumps New or Cool.

7. Consider adding and eye-grabbing image

Adding an image to your subscription form can pull the eye inI to it. But for this to work in your favor the image has to diver attention to the form. A know trick to achieve this is to use a photo of a person that is looking or pointing towards the form.

What you should avoid, is adding a person that’s looking directly at the “camera”, or even worse, looking away from the form. You have loads of free images you can use on this list of the best free image sites.

8. Use social proof in your copy

In the copy you write for your opt-in form, you can show off some of the social proof you have. If you have 10,000 subscribers to your email list, make it known! It tells people that you must be providing something of value.

9. Avoid using links to ask for subscribers

You want to avoid being one of those people who has a “Subscribe” link on your website. It’s not that effective and there are plenty of easy-to-use opt-in forms that will boost the number of subscribers to your email list. Don’t make it something people don’t like about your website.

What is the legal role of GDPR in permission email marketing?

We briefly mentioned about there being certain regulations in place when it comes to email marketing. The big one today is GDPR. Standing for General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR is considered to be the most stringent privacy and security law anywhere in the world. It was passed by the European Union and was effective as of May 25, 2018.

This new set of rules gives EU citizens greater control over their personal data. The law was meant to simplify the complex regulatory environment for businesses so that they and EU citizens could both benefit from the ever-increasing digital economy.

The types of personal data that GDPR protects includes the following:

• Basic information (name, address, official ID numbers)
• Internet data (location, IP address, cookie data, RFID tags)
• Health and genetic information
• Biometric data
• Information on race or ethnicity
• Information on political opinions
• Sexual orientation

Any company that stores or processes the personal data of EU citizens within EU nations will need to follow the GDPR rules. Even if your business is not physically located within the EU, you will have to comply with the new law. Here are all of the criteria. If your business matches any of these, then you will need to abide by it:

• Physical location in an EU nation
• Processing of personal data of EU citizens
• A company with over 250 employees
• A company with under 250 employees but processes data in a way that affects the rights and freedoms of EU citizens.

Permission-based email marketing vs non-permission-based email marketing

Given the reality of most businesses being required to comply with GDPR, you will want to brush up on what is permission-based email marketing and how it differs from non-permission-based email marketing.

With permission-based email marketing, you are only sending emails to a person who has provided you with their consent to receive some sort of communication from you. They basically understood what they were getting themselves into. They will have known that by signing up for your email list, they would be receiving some sort of enticing value, which could include:

• Free report
• Free trial
• Discounts
• Webinar
• Helpful content

In exchange for receiving something valuable, they will have agreed to sign up for your email list. They gave you their permission to send them emails. As long as you will be sending them emails that provide value for them, they will stay subscribed.

Non-permission-based email marketing, on the other hand, is when someone receives emails they didn’t sign up for. This is a rare occurrence, but it does still happen. Today’s spam filters are usually quite good at blocking these from ever clogging up your inbox but they will sometimes slip through the cracks.

Non-permission-based emails can come from the following sources:

• Someone buying an email list from a company selling them, which you can avoid by cloaking your email address on your website.
• Someone you gave your email address to then sold that contact information to a third party.
• Someone locating your email address somewhere on the internet and then sending you cold emails in hopes of doing business with you.

You shouldn’t come across these too often but it’s good to keep informed as to how they occur in the first place.

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Their broken email funnel leads them to unknowingly hemorrhage sales opportunities due to a bad email marketing customer journey, that is riddled with needless friction.

Learn to capture visitors and turn them into leads

In this guide, we will cover how to implement effective email marketing funnels stage by stage – for making the most of your most profitable marketing channel.

You’ll learn how to capture visitors and turn them into leads, as well as nurture your current clients to retain them for longer. All this by firing up your email automation tool.

How email sales funnels work

The traditional definition of the sales funnel defines it as a journey that a potential customer goes through from the first time they hear about your product to when they actually buy something from you. 

When you know the structure of your marketing funnel, you will have an easier time understanding how to optimize each step and convert more leads into buying customers.

The traditional sales funnel contains the following stages:

1. Awareness
2. Interest
3. Decision (often called Consideration)
4. Action 

Awareness

Awareness is the first stage of the email marketing funnel. At this stage, people who have a particular problem are looking for available solutions. This is where they meet your brand for the first time.

Interest

Once your potential clients know about your business, you need to keep them interested and engaged to make them come back. This is what you focus on during the Interest stage of the email marketing funnel.

Decision

The next stage is called consideration or Decision. At this point, prospects know exactly what they need and they are evaluating different solutions. In this phase, they want to know more about your brand, product/service, and how well it worked out for other people that used it. 

Action

The last stage is the action or conversion itself. This is where leads finally become your clients/customers.

This is, of course, a simplified overview of the whole process. There are a lot of great guides on sales funnels out there that explain it in more detail.

We have a different focus in this article, and that is to show you different ways in which email marketing can be utilized at each step of the email sales funnel.

1. Awareness stage: Generating your leads

Any business that is not an industry leader in its niche and a recognizable brand in general needs to put a lot of effort into increasing its brand awareness. That is the only way to reach qualified leads.

Without investing in the awareness stage no one will ever enter your email marketing customer journey, since they will never see a sign pointing them to your solution on their search to solve their problem.

In most cases, businesses rely on organic traffic and a vast array of paid advertising options to build awareness and create that initial connection with their potential customers. However, email marketing can be used at this stage too – with cold outreach.

Use cold outreach to start people on your email marketing customer journey

Cold outreach is an email sent to a person who presumably hasn’t had any contact with your brand yet. It is used by some companies to attract people who could be potentially interested in their product or service.

It is also a viable method for spreading awareness about an innovative solution that people don’t even know exists (so they won’t search for it themselves). 

The problem with cold emailing is that you are reaching out to people who might not be ready to engage with your brand in that particular moment – and if you are persistent or pushy – you risk that your emails get marked as spam. 

Email signatures

Besides reaching out to the right person and not being too pushy, a good way to increase the chances of getting an answer is to create an email signature. A proper email signature makes your email look more professional and increases trust in the legitimacy of your offer so you do not end up looking like a scammer. You can get much more out of adding an email signature by leveraging email signature marketing.

In general, cold outreach works better for B2B rather than B2C. As you can imagine, sending an email to the right person (like the one used in the example above), has way more chance to garner real interest than if you send a blast email to random people in their twenties telling them you’re selling a new type of smartwatch.

One thing you should keep in mind is that this email outreach technique requires a lot of repetitive work. So if you are going to use cold emailing for your business, make sure to find a great sales automation tool and learn the art of cold emailing.

2. Interest stage: Warming up your leads

When people come to your website or blog for the first time, it is very unlikely that they are ready to buy. However, they may enjoy the content and have a great first impression.

To bank on that positive experience, you can use a vast array of different lead magnets to encourage them to subscribe to your email list. 

This is a small step for the prospect, but a big step for the business because now you have a way to nurture your prospects through email marketing and lead them on a path to conversion. 

If you take a closer look at your emails in which you send over lead magnets to people who opted-in for one of your checklists/guides/white papers/etc., you will notice that not every email is opened.

It is not that rare that people never actually open or download the lead magnet you’ve sent over and just stop their engagement with your brand. Sometimes it is a technical issue, sometimes they just forget and lose interest.

Things you can do to keep users engaged right from the get-go:

• send them a welcome email (you have probably got one if you ever subscribed to any kind of newsletter)
• set up an email sequence where a follow-up is sent 2 or 3 days after the initial email to every subscriber who hasn’t opened your initial email
• set up an email sequence where you follow up with people who did open the email and download your lead magnet, asking if it was helpful and possibly send another related content which they might find useful

Here is an example of a welcome email campaign from Naturally Curly:

If someone opts in for a lead magnet, the only thing you know for sure at this point is that they know you exist. However, if they didn’t really open the email and engage with your brand in any other way since then, it means they probably are not that interested in what you have to offer.

This is why many brands use welcome emails that invite people to take certain action like completing their profile, verifying their information, giving feedback, etc. The idea is to make people have another contact with the brand and invest a little more of their time to engage with you.

Lastly, it is important to note that sometimes, technical difficulties could be the sole reason why someone forgot about your brand.

If the email confirming their subscription/containing the desired lead magnet ended up in their spam folder or if it was delivered with a long delay, you can’t blame them for losing interest.

To ensure that doesn’t happen, make sure you are using a reliable email marketing service that has all of the automation and tracking options you need.

3. Decision stage: Nurturing your leads

Once you found a lead generation strategy that works for you and when you can have a couple of interactions with them, it is time to guide them into the next stage of your email customer journey.

You can select subscribers who engaged with your emails on multiple occasions (which shows they have some interest in your brand and what you offer) and try to move them further down the sales funnel.

During the decision/consideration stage of the sales funnel you need to build trust, provide value, and develop a relationship with your leads. And you can do all of that through email marketing.

What you can send your subscribers: 

• testimonials
• reviews
• success stories
• subtly promote your notable achievements 
• case studies
• positive news about your business
• etc.

Everything mentioned above works as strong social proof because people really value real-life stories and trust recommendations from their peers. It is the best way to explain to your subscribers why should they buy from YOU.

If you see that some subscribers stop engaging at this stage, you can craft a re-engagement email marketing campaign to get them back on track. A good example is this email from Paul Mitchell that starts with emotional words “We hate Goodbyes”.

Notice how the email uses the FOMO principle (fear of missing out) and encourages subscribers who are still interested in the brand to reconfirm it.

4. Action stage: Creating (loyal) Customers

When you succeed in lead generation and nurturing your clients, it’s time to convert your leads into paying customers. At this point in your email marketing customer journey, you have hopefully built enough brand trust and shown enough value that your subscribers are ready to commit.

There are a lot of different email marketing strategies you can use at this stage to try and trigger a conversion.

In the B2C space, brands like to send limited-time offers to create a sense of emergency. You can create emergency-based offers. For example, here is the last-day offers from Express:

This is literally the last chance to get a product with a discount, and usually, it urges leads to act fast. 

If you think that your subscribers need more convincing, alongside your purchase offers, you can include things like a customer review or a notification that this is a top-selling product.

When you’re trying to close a sale with another business, however, email marketing tends to be used a little bit differently. For example, if you are selling a product or an app, the emails you send over do not necessarily have to urge you to purchase, but instead, invite the prospect to “start a trial”.

In addition, especially if we are talking about expensive products and services, email marketing often takes a supporting role. Instead of being your main salesman, you use email marketing to invite your leads to jump on a call with you so you can close the sale in person.

Using email marketing funnels to improve client journeys and solidify retention rates

Now that your subscribers have been consistently converting, you may think that your job is over, but that’s far from true. Now you have to work on the last stage of your email marketing customer journey – turning customers into loyal customers.

Done right this will drastically increase your revenue by improving your customer retention, which in turn brings up your customer LTV (lifetime value).

Email is one of the most successful ways to keep in touch with your existing clients, improve their experience, and make them fans of your brand. It’s similar to nurturing prospects, but you have more freedom to talk about your service or product directly.

According to LiveClicker, 57% of all email subscribers are inactive. In other words, out of every 1000 subscribers, 570 of them are passive. What an untapped potential! You can send them re-engagement emails with eye-catching subject lines or a discount.

Grammarly, for instance, keeps customers engaged with the product and reminds them about their achievements in a weekly email newsletter:

Their emails give their users visible statistics and compliments (“You were more productive than 82% of Grammarly users.”) along with CTA buttons encouraging them to visit their website.

Using a surprise birthday email with a freebie is also a viable client retention strategy, admittedly more so in the B2C environment. People love birthdays! It’s all about them on this day and about presents. See this example from Linoto:

Would you not rather spend money on the brand that acknowledges your birthday and offers a great suggestion on what to spend money on? Let your customers know you appreciate their special day.

Those are just some of how you can keep your clients and customers interested in your brand through timely and carefully crafted email campaigns.

With a lot of work and a little bit of luck, loyal customers will turn into brand advocates – and all that time you’ve invested into crafting perfect emails and providing additional value will be well worth it.

To Sum Up

While email marketing might not be the most effective technique at generating brand awareness, it is pretty obvious that guiding leads through your email marketing sales funnel would be an extremely hard thing to do if email marketing didn’t exist. 

While paid advertising alone could get the job done, email marketing is often a much cheaper and more sustainable alternative. 

Robert Brandl’s passion has always been web tools that make your life easier. That’s why he founded the WebsiteToolTester, where you can find reviews and tutorials for the world’s best website builders and e-commerce platforms.

The post Mail funnels optimization: create near-perfect email customer journey appeared first on WiseStamp.

What is email onboarding?

“Onboarding” is a customer relations strategy that is designed to welcome new customers or employees to your business and familiarize them with your product or service. There are many ways to onboard customers, but one of the simplest, most efficient, and most scalable ways is to create a short sequence of onboarding emails.

A sequence is like a series. And like a series (TV shows, sports, lectures), your onboarding emails need to develop as they move along, and continuously provide value to your customers. They also need to take your customer on a journey, so to speak, from point “A” to point “D.” Luckily, there is a formula for developing this series, and we have broken it down for you!

When creating your onboarding email campaign, you want to chronologically focus on the following: Welcoming, unboxing, content, support, feedback, and upselling.

Email onboarding sequence

1. The Welcome email
2. The Unboxing email
3. The Content email
4. The Support email
5. The Feedback email
6. The Upselling email

How to create each email in your onboarding campaign

Now that you know what onboarding is and have seen a general outline of the sequence you need to set up, let’s look at what needs to be done in each step of the sequence.

1. The Welcome email

When you acquire a new customer or client, your next step is to welcome them. The goal of this email is to make the customer feel confident in their decision to do business with you and to give them some useful information about your company. The tone of the email should represent your brand’s voice and personality, but make sure to convey a message of gratitude and excitement.

Provide some useful links so they can learn more about your business, but do not overwhelm the customer with too much information. Keep the email friendly and concise, as we see in the example from Moz below.

 2. The Unboxing email

After you’ve welcomed your new customers and shared some information about your business, now it’s time to give them a little tour of your products or services, i.e. “unbox” the goodies! The goal of this email is to help new customers become familiar with the product or service they have purchased. It’s a great opportunity to let your product or service shine and give more details that your customer may not have known. Highlight the most important features of your product or service and contextualize it for your customer. In other words, help your customers imagine exactly how and when they will use your product or service to its fullest potential.

Here’s an example from Typeform of how to “unbox” your product. Notice how they invite customers to “get started” and include a tutorial video to walk through building a Typeform survey for the first time.

 3. The Content email

When you onboard your customers, make sure your email campaign isn’t only about your business and product or service. You should also send an email with useful content related to your customer’s interests and your business.

At WiseStamp, we regularly produce and share content on marketing tips, tools and trends to help our community of users grow their businesses. We make sure to find, test, and recommend the best marketing products for our users’ needs to help them attain their marketing goals.

Of course, we mention our products when relevant. But, when we share content, our goal is to offer marketing advice, not to simply promote our tools. Here’s an example of how we do it:

4. The Support email

At this stage in your customer relationship, it’s wise to check in and ask if your customer has any questions or needs support. Point your customers to all the support resources you have for your business, for example, your FAQ page, user guide, support contact form, or any other resource you provide. Before you send the “support” email, make sure you are prepared to handle the response.

5. The Feedback email

Imagine having a friend who did all the talking and never allowed you to talk. It would feel like a very one-sided friendship. The same goes for business relationships with your customers. One of the best ways to build customer trust and confidence is to give your customers a voice and welcome their feedback. So, later in your onboarding campaign, invite your customers to voice their opinions. It will give them a chance to be heard, and will also give you give your valuable insight on what is working well and what you can improve.

6. The Upselling email

After you have properly welcomed your new customers, guided them around your main product or service, providing them with useful content, offered them support, and invited their feedback, now is an appropriate time to spark their interest in more of your products or services or “upsell” them.

Do your research for the upselling email. Look at the performance of your onboarding email campaign thus far and analyze which emails performed the best and why (open rates, click rates, reply rates). Use these insights to determine how you’ll present your new product offer. For example, this email is a wonderful opportunity to offer a “sale” for new customers.

Overall tips for your Onboarding Email Campaign

As with any email campaign, you should strategically plan the timing of your onboarding emails. No one wants to be bombarded with a series of emails in a short period. We recommend to distribute one email per week and checking the performance of each. Look carefully at the open and click rates of each email and adjust the next scheduled email accordingly. For example, perhaps you have a higher open rate at noon instead of 9 AM.

It’s also important to personalize the emails at every opportunity you have. Take all the information you know about your customer and find ways to incorporate it into your email content. This could be something as simple as addressing your customer by name in the email subject line, “Dave, here’s a discount code for you!”

Remember, welcoming your customers to your business and familiarizing them with your products and service is no different than welcoming a guest into your home. It makes a huge difference between whether or not your customer will ever visit again.

The post Email onboarding: how it’s done start to finish appeared first on WiseStamp.

Stop drowning in acronyms and take the power back

Take Samantha, a hypothetical hotel owner who inherited a small family-run hotel from her grandparents and took over without any hotel or business experience. 

When she met with colleagues, investors, or potential partners who threw around fancy terms she’d never heard, she had to pretend she knew what they were talking about.

The acronyms, in particular, made her feel like she was drowning in alphabet soup. She had a suspicion there was something she was missing and not doing right, especially with marketing. 

Asking for clarification was embarrassing, but once she was faced with the threat of losing the family’s hotel, she had no choice. 

Are you in the same boat? If so, you are not alone.

Here are 11 acronyms that will help you understand how to market your business and sound like a pro:

1. CTA – Call to Action

And that means. . . what?

You may not know it, but you’ve responded to CTA’s more times than you can count.

• That time you clicked on a button to download a sample of a book?
• That time you clicked on a link in an email to subscribe to a newsletter?
• That time you clicked on a pop-up window and donated to your favorite charity?

Yup. Those were all calls to action that were intriguing enough to get you to respond.

What is a call to action?

A call to action is a button (with or without an image) or line of text that prompts action, such as:

• Buy
• Sign-Up
• Book Now
• View Demo
• Subscribe
• Download [sample, .pdf, trial, etc.]

CTA’s are most often associated with websites, but they’re commonly used in marketing emails and social media campaigns. To learn how to fine tune your CTAs and drive up your online transactions we advise you to read our tips for making click-worthy calls to action.

For example

Think about the website for Samantha’s hotel. When the hotel first opened, the website was gorgeous and easy to navigate. The images of her hotel were so breathtaking they made even the most reluctant travelers want to get on a plane.

So, why weren’t visitors to her site making reservations? There could be many reasons. But the most obvious answer is that there was no CTA, like an attractive, impossible-to-miss, tempting button asking customers to “reserve now.”

This CTA from Villa Florence in San Francisco makes it easy to reserve a room directly from Facebook:

You need to know this term because:

Imagine that you’ve seen a fantastic offer from your cell phone provider, and you’re willing to spend more money every month to get more in return.

You go to their website, but you can’t figure out how to upgrade. How much time would you be willing to put into searching?

The last thing you want is for potential customers and clients to become frustrated while they’re trying to find what they’re looking for, or not be sure why they’re even visiting your site.

When you truly understand what you want your customers to do (sign-up for your webinar, order your product, watch a video, etc.), you’ll know how to make it easy for people to take advantage of what you have to offer.

2. CTR – Click Through Rate

And that means. . . what?

Voila. You have a bright and shiny new call to action right in the middle of your homepage. Great! Right? Well, probably. But to know how effective your CTA is, you need to know the CTR, or how many people are clicking on it. The same goes for ads. 

For example

Samantha just paid a significant amount of money for an ad that’s prominently featured on the website of a local winery. Is the ad attention-grabbing? Is it worth the money? She’ll know the answers to these questions once she knows the CTR.

You need to know this term because

If your ad or call to action has a high CTR, you know to keep doing more of the same (with improvements and changes as necessary). If not, well, you know that something needs to change, and in the meantime, you can stop wasting time and money.

3. Conversion Rate

And that means. . . what?

Another measure of success is your conversion rate, meaning the number of clicks (see above) that result in a conversion (new customers, clients, or buyers).

For example

Samantha’s online reservation form might be getting more clicks than she expected, but the only way that will help her is if an appropriate percentage of those clicks results in an actual reservation.

What should that percentage be? In Samantha’s case, if she were measuring conversions directly from her website, she’d be in the typical range with a CR of 2-3%. Yes, that seems low, but it’s all relative.

You need to know this term because

You may be getting an unbelievable number of clicks on an ad or call to action, but are the right people clicking? If not, you might not be promoting your business in the places that will help you most.

Your conversion rate will help you figure out who your target audience is and how best to reach them. Increasing your conversion rate may take some trial and error, but you’ll get there.

4. BR – Bounce Rate

And that means. . . what?

A high CTR is great, and a high CR is even better. But what about the opposite side of that coin?

Your bounce rate will tell you how many people are coming to a specific webpage without clicking or taking any action and give you a hint as to the effectiveness of your CTA.

For example

Before Samantha redesigned her website, the bounce rate for her homepage was really high. She had a link to a virtual tour of her hotel, but most of her visitors didn’t click on it, and even fewer made reservations.

Once she started including CTA’s and understanding her site’s CTR, she refined her site. Her bounce rate decreased dramatically.

You need to know this term because

When you have a party, you don’t want guests to leave before they’ve even tried an appetizer. And you don’t want visitors to visit your site and leave before they’ve clicked on even one link.

5. KPIs – Key Performance Indicators

And that means. . .what?

At first, KPIs can seem complicated. But it’s not as complicated as some make it sound. A KPI is simply a measure of how well a particular strategy or method you’re implementing is working in your favor. Wait, are you wondering if a KPI is the same as your CTR? It could be. But in most cases, a KPI measures something more specific than clicks.

For example

Samantha has dedicated a percentage of her budget to advertising on social media. How well are her ads working? The number of times people click on her ad (or, the CTR), is a KPI. An even more accurate and useful measure of how well the ad is working would be the conversion rate.

Samantha also measures:

• The number of five-star reviews her hotel receives on TripAdvisor.
• The conversion rate of a blog post about the hotel and the area.
• How much profit does she earn from specific packages and special offers?

You need to know this term because

• You don’t want to waste time and money on strategies that aren’t helping you grow your business.
• You need to know what’s working and what’s not.

6. ROI – Return on Investment

And that means. . . what?

You’ve measured your CTR, CR, and BR, and implemented KPIs. What’s next? What about your money? That’s where ROI comes in. ROI is the ratio between what you spend and how much you get back in return. As in, if you spend $2.00 and make $7.00, your ROI is 250% (or $5.00).

For example

Email marketing has an ROI of 4,300%, meaning that if the cost of sending one email is $1.00, the return is about $43.00.

If Samantha spends money on new TVs for her rooms, will she be able to justify raising her rates enough to earn the money back? She’ll have to calculate the ROI to find out. 

You need to know this term because

Understanding ROI prevents you from spending money and time on things that aren’t beneficial to your business. Use a free ROI calculator to get a better understanding of your earnings. But keep in mind that to know how well you’re really doing, you need to be aware of how much your competition is earning.

For example, if a hotel owner like Samantha charges $75.00 a night for a basic room, and the hotel down the block charges $125.00 for a similar room, you need to raise your rates, even your hotel is already making money.

7. B2C – Business to Consumer

And that means. . .what?

Your CTA’s are working, and you’re feeling pretty successful. You’re building an audience. What now?

You communicate. As soon as you can, as much as you can, however you can (all within reason, of course). “B2C” is communication, including marketing, between a business and prospective or existing customers.

You need to know this term because

Staying in contact with your customers, and understanding their needs and wants is an essential part of running a business. The more you know about your customers, the more you’ll have an upper hand when you’re figuring out your marketing strategies.

8. B2B – Business to Business

And that means. . .what?

Don’t forget, other businesses are potential customers, too. “B2B” is communication between two businesses, which can include marketing or any sort of partnership.

For example

Think of Samantha’s communication with the company that sells the linens she buys for the hotel, or her contract with the coffee company that rents a small space in the corner of her lobby.

She’s working on marketing her banquet space to event planners and caterers and selling blocks of rooms to companies for their retreats and conferences. These are all examples of B2B.

You need to know this term because

As a small business owner, you can’t exist in isolation. There’s no reason another business can’t be one of your customers, and there’s definitely no reason not to form partnerships. Two businesses are better than one!

9. CRM – Customer Relationship Management

And that means. . . what?

Now that you have so many business contacts and customers, you’ll need a way to keep track of them

A CRM helps you organize and keep track of all of your business relationships. A CRM for a new, very small business can be a spreadsheet with your professional contacts. But as businesses grow, they usually need a more sophisticated system.

You need to know this term because

A CRM offers so much more than just a list of customers. By having a well-organized, up-to-date CRM, you can learn about your target audience, reach out to prospective customers (leads), and figure out new marketing strategies.

Samantha would do well to meet with the owner of the local water park to work on joint marketing efforts that combine the data from both of their CRM systems and work together on their marketing efforts.

10. CMS – Content Management System

And that means. . .what?

Until now, we’ve been talking about creating content. But what hasn’t been talked about is the technical side of creating your content and how to organize it. A content management system keeps track of all the content you put on your website, from the moment a piece of content is uploaded or created to the moment it’s published and distributed.

For example

WordPress and Wix are two of the most popular content management systems. Both allow the creation and publication of content with navigation and organization built-in. WordPress plugins can even help with distribution on social media.

You need to know this term because

If you create every page of your website from scratch, you have to create your own organizational system.

No matter how much time you spend creating folders, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to create a system as streamlined and quick as a tool like WordPress. As your business grows, so will your content, and you’ll want to save all the time you can.

11. SEO – Search Engine Optimization

And that means. . .what?

With all the time you spend creating content, you’ll want to be sure people find it. SEO is a group of strategies and techniques for bringing more visitors to your website. Using these strategies will improve the chance of your website appearing high on the list of search engine results.

For example

Samantha’s hotel is located near a famous beach that attracts a huge number of visitors each summer.

She’ll want to make sure that the name of the beach is one of her keywords so that people who google the beach see search results for her hotel. Just remember that as important as SEO is, engaging and meaningful content matters more than anything.

You need to know this term because

A website won’t do you much good if it comes on page two or three of a long list of search engine results. With SEO, you can make sure you literally and figuratively work your way to the top.

Takeaways

These acronyms shouldn’t be dismissed as jargon or fancy lingo. They represent marketing concepts that are crucial to the growth and success of any business.

Without understanding these terms and using the strategies they represent, our hotel owner Samantha would be treading water, or worse, sinking. But now the hotel is thriving and she’s speaking and marketing as a true pro.

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