Oct 12, 2017 | Digital Marketing Insights
Why These Guys Get Astounding Open Rates and You Don’t.
You open your email inbox to be met with a flood of pitches and campaigns. So what causes you to click on one? Furthermore, what causes you to actually read an email newsletter? There’s a special sauce to these distinguished emails that make them stand out among the sea of worthless newsletters.
A well-crafted email marketing campaign for your Houston business begins with an eye-catching subject line that allows the readers to know how you’re about to blow their minds (AKA add value to their lives). You must remember, just like you, your readers are flooded with way too many email newsletters every day. It is essential to stand out.
In addition to snagging your audience’s attention from the get-go, email marketing campaigns must be written in such a way that cleverly constructs the main purpose of your email. I highly suggest you invest in a Houston content specialist to help you build your content marketing campaign via emails.
While it is certainly possible to launch a successful email marketing campaign on your own, content specialists know where to place certain calls-to-action, how to use short-form copy to captivate an audience, and they know how to properly edit your copy so your brand can present a clean and professional image.
Tons of big brands use email marketing to keep their audience engaged, share company news and leverage opportunities to generate new business because they know it works—but for whatever reason, Houston small businesses seem to shy away from this economical marketing tactic.
Today, I want to show you some of the best email marketing campaigns from big brands, in hopes that they inspire you to begin marketing your business via emails. We can help you construct campaigns that garner leads and generate sales—let’s get started today! In the meantime, here are five brands that got it right.
The Skimm: Short & Sweet Email Marketing
The Skimm has captivated my mornings since 2015, but the brand was founded in 2012 as an idea between friends. The email is a daily newsletter that focuses on delivering popular news to subscribers in a clever (and often downright hilarious) way.
How did they get it right? The beauty is in the simplicity of this email. I literally get my news digest in less than 5 minutes, and there are no fancy gimmicks. The brand uses catchy puns and punchy one-liners to deliver the news of the day.
The real shining star content aspect of The Skimm’s email marketing campaign is the personalization, added care and engagement the brand has with its subscriber base. The team celebrates your Skimm’versaries (milestones for how long you have been a subscriber) and your birthday. It truly feels like you are receiving an email from a good friend, and that’s why this brand has an incredibly loyal fan base. Check out the email I got from The Skimm this morning:
Uber: Simple & Promotional Email Marketing
Uber’s emails are far from fancy, but they are tasteful. They use a simple format, marketing that is tried and true, and personalization. You will notice that some of the best email marketing campaigns use personal touches to appeal to their subscriber base—because it works. I love how this company gets straight to the point in their welcome email. They congratulated me on my first Uber ride, and then they took it a step further by personalizing the message to my location. The email was personally “signed” by the Dallas-Fort Worth Community Manager, Nicole, which humanizes the brand. This is critical.
Uber took it a step further by giving little ole me a personal promo code to give to my friends and family that is mutually beneficial—personal codes are everything. It really makes people feel important, and the ego is a major driver in consumer decision making.
Apart from the crafty welcome email, Uber keeps it simple. They alert their subscriber base to new promotions, and they provide amazing summaries of your rides, with a detailed map of where you were picked up and dropped off, a breakdown of the charges, and a snapshot of your driver. Take a look at my welcome email and one of my ride summaries below.
DoorDash: The Power of Email Marketing Personalization
I’m low-key starving right now so this email I received from DoorDash has me salivating. I’m a DoorDash addict. It’s the easiest thing in the world to order food and have it delivered straight to your door. But let’s get real, that gets so pricey.
So how is DoorDash ingenious with their email marketing campaigns? They will often send me these email newsletters offering a $0 delivery charge for a handful of certain restaurants. And it gets me almost. every. time.
It’s always the same. They send me some gorgeous imagery that makes me want to stuff my face, then they show me a slew of restaurants that I can have delivered to my front door by a smiling driver, FOR FREE. Sold.
They personalize these choices based on my location and order history, and from personal experience, I can tell you that they hit the nail on the head every time. Take a look at my most recent email from DoorDash.
Madewell: Catchy Subject Lines, Great Imagery
Madewell is an American clothing company (with J. Crew being its parent company) that is incredibly good at taking all of my money via their email campaigns. I’m serious. I can manage to stay away from their website, but the email campaigns get me every time. Here’s why:
They understand their audience (those street smarts are terrible for my wallet!).
First of all, they leverage the ego of their audience by calling me a Madewell Insider and offering me free shipping and returns. I’m already hooked and feeling like the GOAT.
Side note: Do you notice how I am writing about this email as if it was sent to me and only me? That’s incredible marketing at work. I thought about going back and rewording it, but I felt there was no better way for you to see excellent email marketing in action, as well as the effect it has on the consumer.
Next, Madewell goes on to offer me a deal of some sort that is set apart from the rest of the email, giving me an easy call-to-action with “SHOP NOW.” Then, they offer great imagery and a hashtag suggestion, which will boost social interaction. *This is so good I could cry, y’all.* Take a look at this email in action below:
InVision App: Freebies, Content Overload
InVision’s weekly roundup of their standout blog posts are a gold mine—you can get sucked into this email for hours, as it’s chock-full of incredible content and information that is a perfect fit for the brand’s core customer.
The newsletter is mobile-friendly and downright beautiful (would you expect anything less from this brand?), and they even offer freebies every week, which is excellent for engagement.
The brand does an incredible job of placing a call-to-action after each piece of text content, which ups the engagement with subscribers as well. The consistency throughout makes it a beautiful newsletter to scroll through, and the call-to-actions aren’t simply “read more now,” but rather complement, and add substance and intrigue to the blog content for which they are assigned. Check out InVision’s email newsletter below:
Upgrade Your Houston Email Marketing Campaign Efforts
We’ve shown you how the top dogs do it. Now are you ready to leverage email marketing to appeal to your target audience and grow your Houston business? Let’s do this.
Apr 22, 2016 | Digital Marketing Insights
It’s no secret that closing a sale can be difficult for e-commerce websites, and retaining customers who have idled away from the site can be a frustrating experience. By setting up a few automatic emails to be sent to customers who don’t complete a sale, you can capture the potential for a massive increase in sales with minimal effort.
With 7 out of 10 shoppers abandoning their carts with products added, that’s a massive amount of sales potential going untapped. Autoresponders are an effective and easy way to reach out to these potential customers and draw them back to your products, especially when they are branded and optimized to reach the audience that’s viewing your website. However, you will need the email addresses of your customers in order to implement these particular types of autoresponders. While that may disqualify some casual visitors, it still means that you can use this tool for your long-standing customers and those who have purchased from your site before. In addition, you can offer deals such as a coupon when customers provide their email addresses on visiting the site. Be creative with your digital marketing and use your tools together to see even more impressive results!
While setting up these automatic emails requires a little time, after they are established they’ll go out automatically, with no effort on your part. With the massive amount of potential revenue gained, that small amount of setup time is well worth it. That said, taking the time to make sure that your autoresponders will actually be effective is also worth the investment. Be sure to include branding to promote your business and make connections, images to capture the attention, and call-to-actions to entice customers to take the action that you want.
Gather Valuable Marketing Data
Customers could leave your website without a purchase for a host of reasons. Discovering those reasons and overcoming them is the key to gathering important data to improve your marketing efforts in the future and capturing more sales.
If a customer leaves your website without a purchase, some effective email responder options include:
- Simply reach out to say that you noticed they didn’t complete their checkout. Ask for information on why, which you can use to tailor further responses. Be sure to include a link back to their cart and images of the product.
- Address the top objections you’re getting as responses, whether it’s how a product works, details on shipping, or something else.
- Tell a story, maybe including a testimonial. You can also throw in a coupon or discount to entice a purchase.
- After a purchase is made, the customer can be moved to continuing emails to develop future leads, notifying them of sales and other email topics in an ongoing basis.
With these messages set up to automatically reach out to customers that you’d otherwise be losing, you can start growing your sales without chasing down leads individually. There’s a massive amount of potential sales going untapped from abandoned carts, and autoresponders are an easy and effective way to take advantage of an opportunity to convert those into real sales.
Mar 18, 2016 | Digital Marketing Insights
Unfortunately far too many businesses fall prey to SEO companies that claim to be performing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on their website, only to discover that the company never obtained FTP access. Without this access, SEO simply cannot be performed, and too many businesses are being deceived into paying for nothing.
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, which refers to the ability to access the data the makes up a website. In order for your website to be optimized for search engines, many changes will need to be made to the website itself, including code, tags, images, and other elements. However, without FTP access, it is impossible to change this information.
Once an SEO company is granted FTP access, they will be able to change the website’s data as necessary – adding content, updating Title tags, etc. Paying an SEO company that has no FTP access is like paying a cleaning company that can’t get inside your home. The task simply cannot be performed.
In many instances, companies are taking advantage of a business’s limited knowledge of how SEO works to extract payment without benefiting the website at all. Even if rankings are increasing, some of this can be attributed to a website developing more backlinks and authority naturally overtime. However, a truly beneficial SEO effort cannot be made until the website itself can be optimized, which requires FTP access.
