When it comes to engaging consumers through holiday emails, research shows that they respond to subject lines, CTAs, content and discounts differently during the busiest season of the year. But there is in fact some common ground between those that are successful. Marketers can focus on a variety of factors, including writing catchy, brief subject lines, mentioning the actual holiday, creating a sense of urgency, emphasizing savings, and more. Check out these tips for writing engaging holiday emails, according to a piece in Multichannel Merchant.

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Email marketing, on the other hand, has the advantage of being an opt-in channel—and conversion rates from promotional campaigns were way up in 2020, according to data from Omnisend. Marketers can focus on growing email marketing and consider other opt-in channels to communicate with customers, according to a piece in Multichannel Merchant.

Omnisend research indicates that conversion rates for promotional campaigns increased 111 percent year-over-year and automated messages saw a lift of 95 percent. Moreover, additional opt-in channels, such as SMS and web push notifications, also experienced a rise in 2020. SMS messages specifically increased nearly 400 percent and conversion rates were up more than 100 percent. Moreover, as the effectiveness of third-party cookies continues to depreciate, such channels will continue to increase in relevance.

For more on the advantages of using email marketing as an opt-in channel to reach consumers, read on in Multichannel Merchant.

The post Apple’s App Tracking Transparency Update and Email Marketing appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Cooper notes that brands are experiencing increased engagement from their newsletter products and that this type of content distribution has ultimately replaced newspapers and magazines. Beyond engagement, email communication is key to brands’ ability to identify consumers and effectively market to them—particularly when considering the phase out of third-party cookies that’s currently underway.

The biggest change in the email space, says Cooper, is that brands that have not traditionally embraced newsletters are now following in publishers’ footsteps. Big box retailers and CPG companies, for example, which have typically used brick-and-mortar locations as intermediaries to market and sell goods, are now seeking to own the direct relationship with customers that email newsletters can provide. Acquisition campaigns targeted toward subscribers are helping these brands create new marketing segments and distribute marketing campaigns as publishers have long been accustomed to doing. For more on the rise in email newsletters and what it means for marketers, read more in AdMonsters.

The post The Rise in Email Newsletters During the Pandemic: How Brands Are Engaging Audiences appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Typically, there are three different stages or types of an email campaign: the initial campaign, which may include product recommendations in the form of wish lists; last-minute deals that leverage FOMO to help sell a product; and the post-purchase campaign that offers thank yous and further discounts. Through analyzing your data with AI, marketers can tailor campaigns to customers depending on each stage.

AI software can assist with personalizing email messages. Using the data from past campaigns and predictive analytics, marketers can use AI to create the smallest possible segments. Machine learning software allows personalization of discounts and optimization of emails overall, from the content, offers and even the copy, ultimately increasing conversion rates.

Determining the subject lines that work best in an email campaign is another use of AI technology. Analyze your past email marketing campaigns to determine optimal subject lines, from the number of words to the choice of specific phrases. For more ways in which AI can assist marketers’ email campaigns, including retargeting, read on in Multichannel Merchant.

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1. INFOGRAPHIC: Five Insights from the 2020 Chief Marketer B2B Marketing Outlook

Our annual B2B Marketing Outlook survey results—including a handy infographic—is one of our most read B2B marketing stories this year. It looks at insights on topics that are important to B2B marketing success, including the channels most used by marketers to generate ROI, the greatest challenges to social media marketing and the types of content most effective for moving prospects through the sales funnel.

2. CMO Roundtable: Visa, Personal Capital, AKT and Zoom Talk 2020 Marketing Trends

To shed light on how modern marketing chiefs prioritize the range of tasks they’re charged with today, and how marketing trends in 2020 are influencing their roles, we spoke with CMOs, from Visa, Personal Capital, Zoom and boutique fitness brand AKT.

3. Oracle CX CMO Talks Customer Experience Trends for Marketers in 2020

Each interaction a consumer has with your brand has the ability to influence—and perhaps determine—customer acquisition. We spoke with Des Cahill, CMO of Oracle’s global customer experience business, about how CX is evolving, trends to look out for in 2020 and how AI and data management will influence the customer journey this year and beyond.

4. How to Effectively Use Marketing Content in the Mid-Funnel

Reliance on the start of the customer journey and the all-important end without considering the mid-funnel may decrease conversions. Indeed, what goes on between the intrigue and conversion stages can make or break a company. We look at how to use content more effectively in the mid-funnel.

5. Five Ways to Make Email Marketing More Effective

If you depend on email to generate leads and drive revenue, it’s critical to understand how the email marketing environment has evolved and how to maximize email engagement. Consider these five tips going forward.

The post Our Top Five B2B Marketing Stories of 2020 appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Are you effectively capturing consumer consent to receive emails and making the most of your interactions with customers and prospects? Do your emails go to the right people? Is your marketing operation using the most effective targeting techniques? Is your team up to speed on how inbox service providers (ISPs) classify email senders as spammers? Are you practicing good list hygiene?

All of these are important questions, and if you depend on email to generate leads and drive revenue, it’s critical to understand how the email marketing environment has evolved and how to maximize email engagement. Here are five tips to consider going forward.

1. Be selective about how you acquire email addresses: There’s no excuse these days for sending email to customers who haven’t specifically opted-in to receive email from your company. It’s no longer acceptable to take shortcuts like pre-populating boxes to obtain passive consent, and it’s never a good idea to purchase email lists. Respecting consumer privacy is a must.

So, make sure your email lists contain true opt-ins only (again, do not buy lists!), and ensure every address on the list is valid before you launch your email campaign. Validating addresses is important because even opt-in lists can contain email addresses that have syntax issues and using lists with errors like that can get your company blacklisted as spam.

2. Engage with new subscribers: When customers opt-in to receive email from your company, get back to them right away—within minutes ideally, and no later than an hour. A timely welcome response is crucial because customers move on to other tasks, and if the response is delayed, they might forget they opted in—and you’ll lose the opportunity to engage.

A welcome message is a great vehicle for collecting data that can help you customize future outreach. For example, birthdays are an excellent data point—and an annual opportunity to reach out. The welcome message should also set expectations about what sort of content the new subscriber can expect from you as well as outreach frequency.

Other articles you might enjoy:

• Three Ways to Incorporate Video Into Your Email Marketing Program
• Four Tips for Getting Email Marketing Feedback
• Timing Matters in Email Marketing: Report

3. Know your delivery basics: Entire books have been written about deliverability (here’s a link to a helpful overview). An exhaustive account of email marketing best practices is beyond the scope of a single article, but knowing delivery basics is crucial. Develop a solid understanding of industry best practices and remain up to date, since the email environment evolves constantly.

Expert assistance from deliverability professionals is a great way to ensure compliance with federal and global laws and alignment with customer expectations and reputation management best practices. Finding a partner who specializes in email deliverability and following their advice will allow you to maximize campaign impact.

4. Carefully cultivate email contacts: When handled correctly, emails are an excellent way to build relationships with customers. Email campaigns that are tailored to customer interests, sent with the right cadence and consistently deliver value deliver ROI. You can get to know the customer through browsing, purchase and engagement data and customize outreach accordingly.

One massive mistake too many marketers make is to keep sending emails to customers who don’t engage. As a best practice, stop sending email if there’s no engagement for 60-90 days. Use email to encourage engagement prior to that, but if the customer doesn’t respond, stop emailing. If you continue past the 60-90 day window, ISPs may blacklist your company.

5. Practice good list hygiene: One of the best ways to avoid being blacklisted is to practice good list hygiene. Some marketers equate quantity with quality, thinking that a longer list is always better, so they’re reluctant to cull email addresses. That’s the wrong way to look at it; sketchy addresses can drag down the entire campaign, the good contacts with the bad.

Exclude inactive contacts and cull invalid addresses, accessing expert help as needed. It’s also imperative to promptly observe unsubscribe requests and to provide users with an option to change their address. Without an address change option, subscribers may unsubscribe and then opt-in again to direct email to a new address, but you lose all of their valuable data.

Resolve to make sure your company’s emails a welcome addition to customer inboxes in 2020.

John Landsman is Manager of Research Analytics at Sparkpost.

The post Five Ways to Make Email Marketing More Effective appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Creating modular email templates helped The Ohio State University improve branding consistency across the entire university system.

“It was challenging trying to maintain consistency sending email,” notes Bri Loesch, associate director of email marketing for the university. “We had tens of hundreds of looks and feels.”

There were numerous challenges.  The messaging had varying levels of mobile responsiveness, and there were numerous issues with emails rendering properly across different devices.

“They weren’t user friendly for our email pracitioners, and our audience was left wondering if these emails were all coming from the same university,” says Loesch, who spoke at Litmus Live in Boston recently.

The university wanted to create one visual identity, and make sure that no matter where in the organization the message originated, it had a consistent look and feel.

Loesch wanted the email templating initiative to be collaborative, and driven by the  Ohio State email community. Users across different departments were surveyed, to discover what their challenges were and uncover why brand standards weren’t being followed. “We wanted to make sure we could provide support,” she says.

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Then, focus groups were created to take a deeper dive into the best ways to address core issues. Past emails were also audited, to identify which of the existing templates were used the most often, and see what types of messaging and modules were the most commonly deployed.

The team wanted the new modules and templates to be easy to modify, with numerous possible combinations. And, at same time, Ohio State was also transitioning to a new marketing automation tool, so an easy transition to dynamic content that could be plugged in without the risk of broken code was also a consideration.

“We wanted to allow for flexibility, but wanted to have some requirements in place, for consistent look and feel,” Loesch notes.

Two basic requirements were that every message had to have the same masthead and footer designs, with the primary university logo at the top. The footer could include the unit’s secondary logo if desired, and had to include typical required footer information, such as the address and a preference management link.

An email toolkit was created to assist departments in using the new templates, including brand guidelines, a quick start guide and a landing page explaining the modular design.

“Because of various skill levels, we wanted to provide every module configuration they might need, in regards to text and image placement,” she says. “We also wanted to make sure people understood the why behind what we were doing and why brand consistency and accessibility are important to our email marketing efforts.”

The university adapted to the new system quickly: in four months, there was 96 percent compliance with the new templates.

The post Email Templates Help Ohio State Create Consistent Branding appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Companies that observe email marketing best practices often don’t think blacklisting should be on their worry list. Think again.

“Most people believe they are better than companies that get blacklisted, but it can still happen,” says Melanie Kinney, email marketing manager at GasBuddy. “It isn’t contagious, but it still happens.”

At Litmus Live, Kinney shared her story of what happened when GasBuddy suddenly found itself blacklisted, and how they got themselves unblocked and back into inboxes.

GasBuddy creates apps to help users find the best prices on gas and earn rewards. The company maintains engaged and lapsed user files. The engaged list is segmented in several ways—such as gas prices in a user’s area, or the type of vehicle they drive—to help make email marketing more targeted. “We believe in sending relevant content,” says Melanie Kinney, email marketing manager of GasBuddy.

Kinney and her team were doing a final test of a round of emails on a Monday morning. She sent out a proof and waited for feedback. When no one had responded after a few hours, she checked and found out no one had received the email. Thinking it was a Salesforce glitch, she sent them again—and found all the emails had gone into spam.

Her initial thought was that maybe a broken image resulted in the messages not getting through, but when that wasn’t the case the team feared the worst. A hold was put on all outgoing email blasts, and the team began looking at all triggered and ad hoc emails to investigate what might be happening.

Several things can land a domain on a blacklist, notes Kinney, including a sudden surge in list size, a number of bad addresses or poor links in the message itself. Human error can also be a factor.

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GasBuddy ran a spam test in Litmus, and found that it failed DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Email, which allows senders to associate a domain name with an email message) and DMARC  (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance, a protocol used to determine the authenticity of an email message).

Two other key acronyms for email marketers to consider at when something has gone awry with delivery are SORBS (Spam and Open Relay Blocking System, which uses a daemon to check all servers from which it received email to determine if an email was sent via various types of proxy and open-relay servers) and RATS (Really Annoying Trouble Spots, or non-conforming IP addresses that could be related to problems like compromised servers).

“These are not things to overlook,” Kinney says.

GasBuddy ultimately found that it had an email domain with a lapsed registration. The lapse happened over a weekend, which triggered the failed authentication, leading to the blacklisting. With this information, Salesforce was able to submit an unblock request. Forty-eight hours later, GasBuddy was off the blacklist.

“If you haven’t been on an unblock list before, getting off can take a relatively short time, but it gets harder for repeat offenders,” she notes.

Kinney offered four key tips for surviving a blacklisting:

Know who has the keys. Know who controls the email domains in your organization, so you can open the appropriate communications channels in an emergency and know who to contact quickly.

Seize the moment. If you end up on a blacklist, take the opportunity to consider putting new data hygiene strategies in place. “There might be a partner who can help in the future,” she says.

Learn from your mistakes. Again, take the time to access what happened and better understand your overall deliverability situation, to prevent the same thing happening again.

Educate yourself. No one wants to talk about being blacklisted, but it is important to know what steps to take if it happens. Before your organization finds itself blocked, educate yourself about what needs to be done if it happens to you.

The post Surviving the Blacklist: Email Tips for Getting Your Domain Unblocked appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Personalized email is helping the Bernie Sanders campaign create a spirit of community to engage subscribers—and donors—for the presidential candidate.

“We have so much data available, so we can make more relevant asks of subscribers and get them to engage,” says Robin Curran, vice president of digital strategy at Aisle 518 and digital fundraising director at Bernie Sanders for President. “Community is a broad movement and is at the center of everything we do.”

When getting started with personalization, it is critical to take the time to tailor content to recipients, notes Curran, who spoke at the recent Litmus Live conference in Boston.

“It is a privilege, not a right, to be able to send email to our donors,” she says. “We create a two-way relationship with subscribers by showing what we know about them and what is valuable to them.”

Curran shared a number of examples of ways the Bernie 2020 campaign is personalizing messaging to donors and supporters.

Donor History: Showing a donor’s giving history to the campaign in an email illustrates what supporters have done in the past—and then pivots attention to what they can do now. The campaign created a visual map taking the donor from the exact date of their first contribution to the campaign, to how many donations they have made, to the total amount donated since Sanders announced his candidacy.

“It’s because of you that our campaign is off to such a strong start.,” reads the email copy. “But we still have a long way to go in order to win this election and transform our country. Can Bernie count on you to add another contribution today?”

The visual road map of donor history generated two times more than the typical email blast, she says.

Local Events: Bernie 2020 kickoff event emails were personalized using subscribers’ zip codes. This enabled the campaign to inform supporters about the event nearest their geographic location. The call to action was an invitation to RSVP and attend.

“It was effective at building community and getting them plugged into the work,” says Curran.

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Year in Review: Taking inspiration from the Spotify Year in Review emails, the campaign created a year in review message showing what events supporters had RSVP’d to, what donations they had made, whether they had shared stories about why they support Sanders with the campaign, and any Bernie 2020 purchases they had made, such as t-shirts or bumper stickers. The email also showed how many people from the donors state had also contributed.

Things the supporter had done were shown in red; activities the supporter hadn’t yet done were shown in light grey, to illustrate what they still could do for the campaign.

“It really helps build community,” she says, noting some contributors shared the email via social media. “People latched onto stats like the numbers of donors in their area.”

Maxing Out Contributions: This messaging identified those who had given single contributions of $500, or $1,000 total, to acknowledge these donors had given more than most (the average donation for Bernie Sanders is $19, low for a presidential campaign), and asking if they are able to max out their giving to the maximum allowable amount. This very targeted email raised an average of $25 per recipient, versus the typical average of $.09.

2018 Midterm Election Data: This messaging was based on a comprehensive spreadsheet of who was on the ballot in every state around the country, to show supporters the candidates in the top races and highlight the states of the election nationwide. A link to look up local polling places and the suggestion to donate to the campaign was also included.

The post Email Personalization Boosts Bernie 2020 Donations appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Carly Wirkus, manager, marketing automation at Jamf, notes that her team walks through their results each month with the company’s global team, to discuss what is and isn’t working.

“Having those actual conversations can give you context for your theories,” says Wirkus, who spoke at Litmus Live in Boston this week. “It’s a great way to orient your [entire organization] around the same goals, and figure out how to carry results forward.”

Jamf is a cloud based Apple-technology management solution for businesses and educational institutions. The Minneapolis-based company has over 1,000 employees in 10 countries who help 30,000 global customers use Jamf to manage over 13 million Apple devices.

Wirkus offered several ideas for getting feedback and data to improve email marketing initiatives.

Regularly go over your results. Test regularly, and make time each month to review and record your results, to make sure they are statistically significant and support your initiatives. “Even if you are a team of one,” she says, “make sure you block off time to review your A/B tests.”

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Don’t exist in a silo. Get out of your bubble. Do you share results with your content team? Your social team? What about your website, UX, advertising and customer success teams? If you’ve had a big win with one of your email marketing campaigns, everyone will want to know about it. “If something works for marketing, it might work for outreach,” says Wirkus. “Your success can help fuel results across channels.”

Ask other departments for help. If you’re in a large organization and have resources like a UX team that regularly conducts live research, see if they can incorporate questions about your email templates in those efforts. Other departments like customer success and product management regularly speak with customers, so don’t be shy about getting them to ask customers if they are opening your emails.

Take email into the real world. Does your organization have conferences or user events? Ask attendees what they think about your company’s email marketing communications. Are they engaging with your messaging? If the answer is no, why not? “It’s great to get real feedback from real people,” she says. Face-to-face and real time research is super important to incorporate into your program.”

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