A Comprehensive Complete Guide to Digital Marketing

                                            Chapter 6.

     8. Digital Marketing with E-mails


                        The power of email marketing: 





To many, email marketing feels old and antiquated, but this is far from the truth. Now, the days of buying email lists are long gone, but emailing those who have opted into your list is still a prime strategy. And this is because many customers welcome communication from brands they already interact with.

Just like our own acceptance and use of snail mail coupons from businesses we frequent. Now, on one hand, your email marketing efforts will be about acquiring new subscribers to your list and on the other, retaining and generating revenue from those subscribers. 

With email marketing, you can inform existing customers of new products, upsell them to more premium packages, or even encourage them to share your business with their peers. Email marketing is very strategic. Each message needs to be carefully crafted; have a strong call to action; and arrive at just the right moment to get noticed.

If it's not relevant, it gets deleted. Think about your own email habits. What are you opening and why? What are you clicking on? Try to identify patterns and use those ideas to your advantage. Now, good email marketing is built on detailed customer segments. 

Anytime you acquire an email address, you should track where that subscriber came from. And if you have the resources, it would be ideal to also track which email addresses made purchases, how much revenue that individual subscriber drives, and even start associating demographics or persona information if you have it. 

For example, I might have multiple email lists for an online storefront. I can have a list of customers that made a purchase in the last 30 days, customers that are high value, and a list of people who added an item to their cart, but never converted. 

Each of those segments would receive a different email from me, and good email marketing is often hinged on the idea of a drip campaign. So, how this might look is you can take the abandoned segment. 

And from there, I might send an email in the first 24 hours that says, "Hey, you left this in your cart. There's only one step left to checking out." Maybe 72 hours later, I'll drop another email. "Free shipping, today only with coupon SHIPFREE. View your cart now." Now, that's just one example of many, but automated email marketing is a must have in today's digital landscape. 

There's just so much potential revenue sitting in that email list. To get the most value out of email, you won't be using a typical email client. Instead, you'll need to leverage an online provider such as MailChimp or Constant Contact. These systems will let you tailor your lists, set up automatic triggers, and track your results. Email marketing is still a valuable tool. Focus on generating and leveraging that email list.


How to develop an email marketing plan:


To get the most out of email, you're going to want to build a plan that is tailored to your target audience.

But before we even get into the emails you're sending, let's talk about how to go about gaining new members to your list. Now, beyond capturing emails through transactions or signups, common techniques are to run campaigns specifically targeted at capturing email addresses. 

You can build lead generation landing pages, or leverage your website to post an enticing message that prompts the user to share their email. Once you understand how you'll capture the audience, think about the actual email strategy itself. 

And I want you to start by identifying your goals. Maybe you want to generate more sales, or reactivate former customers. You need to make a list of your key goals and then make a note of which customer segments are most likely to convert towards those goals. 

Now, I often start by working the most valuable problem first, from marketing to abandoned customers. You've done all of the work to get someone to share their information, and then if they didn't become a customer, well you should work to develop campaigns that aim to close that deal. 

These nurture or drip campaigns can be very effective at recapturing revenue. Now, when evaluating what messages to send and why, put yourselves in the shoes of your customer. 

What does the customer need from you in order to take action? 

What will motivate them to follow through with the objective? 

You may find that many customers need a handful of emails before they'll take an action. And in that case, you might want to design a campaign that has three or four steps before your big ask. 

Now, when in doubt, refer to the marketing funnel model, and design your email to take that consumer through each phase of the funnel. Once you know what your customer needs, well then you can build your content to support that answer, might be an image, a video, testimonials, or even detailed instructions on how to complete a step in the conversion process. 

As with most things, short and sweet is key. The content needs to be compelling, the subject engaging, and the call to action apparent. The design shouldn't hamper the experience. So always test your design on mobile. Good content will be lost, if the email doesn't load properly on a mobile device. So make sure to outline any special considerations for mobile users. 

You might need to use smaller images, bigger buttons, and of course you want to be directing traffic to a mobile optimized landing page. And finally consider your timing. 

How often do you need to send your message? 

Is it best distributed during the day or at night? 

Is it seasonal? Now there's no magical answer, but you'll have to use your data to help guide you in that decision. Email marketing plans evolve in scale as your audience grows, so it's normal to continuously try new ideas and even new content types.


How to measure the success of email


As you develop your email marketing strategy, you're going to want to keep tabs on a few key metrics that reveal the health of your campaign. 

For starters, we have open rate, and your open rate tells you how many subscribers actually opened up the message that you sent. This metric primarily gives you information into how well your subject line is working, and typically an open rate of 20% is considered really good. 

Now you'll also want to be using A/B testing to your advantage here. Most email marketing tools have the ability to test subject lines on a portion of your list, and then send the winning variant to your entire list. The next metric to evaluate is your click-through rate. 

This is how you'll understand if people are clicking on any of the links or calls to action within your email. When you're looking to increase that click-through rate, it's really important that you have a prominent call to action. It needs to be really easy for a subscriber to understand where to click and why. And keep in mind, click through rates are much, much lower than open rates.

A typical click-through rate might be two to 4%. Now another metric you have is your conversion rate. If you have a specific action that you're targeting. For example, an abandoned cart reminder, then you really want to pay particular attention to your email conversion rates. 

This tells you how many people click the link within your email, and then go on to complete a purchase, and also be sure you're keeping tabs on your bounce rate. This will reveal how many emails were undelivered most commonly due to bad email addresses. 

You'll want to routinely clean your list to keep this rate down, and be sure to measure it alongside spam complaints as these metrics can actually impact whether your message even makes it to the inbox in the first place. It's a good idea to also keep tabs on unsubscribes. Mostly just to see if you receive a spike in any subscriptions over your normal trend, this could reveal an oversight in messaging a loss of product market fit, or maybe a misleading offer. 

And finally, it's really important that you're looking at the device makeup of your email opens. If a lot of your users are opening emails on mobile devices, which they likely will be, then it's really, really important that your entire customer journey is ready for a mobile user. 

Now these are but a few of the key metrics, but they should give you a good sense of how your efforts are performing, and where you'll have room for improvement.


How to launch successful campaigns: Email tools


There are many great tools to launch successful email campaigns. And what you decide to use will depend on what you want to spend, the size of your business, and what you intend to do with your email marketing. 

When it comes to determining what business software is available, and just how popular it is, these days I find myself turning to g2.com as a resource for peer-to-peer reviews. 

This landscape is changing constantly. So it's great to be able to identify the market leaders as well as the contenders and even high performers. So according to G2, the top-ranked email marketing platforms are MailChimp, Constant Contact, and Sendinblue. 

All three of these tools are self-proclaimed all-in-one marketing platforms that extend beyond email. They'll layer in functionality, such as customer relationship management or CRM, prebuilt templates, a plethora of reporting, and deep integrations with everything from WordPress to Shopify. 

Now I can't dictate which tool will fit your needs, but I encourage you, read through the reviews on g2.com, sign up for any free trials, and then feel out which platform aligns with your objectives and requirements. Now if you have a very specific integration, or a non-standard use case, well, work to find the tool that solves that first. 

Most every email marketing tool will get the job done. So it often comes down to usability and price. Email is still a wonderful strategy to explore and to dive in deeper. I'm going to encourage you to watch the course "Email and Newsletter Marketing Foundations." It's packed full of insights on crafting a great email strategy.


            8.   Marketing Analytics skills


How to decide what to track in marketing analytics



Effective marketing is a science. In order to pinpoint a strategy, report on results, and evaluate opportunities for improvement, well, you need to be capturing and analyzing data. 

There's no excuse for relying on basic metrics, like website traffic and the number of conversions each day anymore. We live in a world that is data driven. 

We have the tools and resources to measure, well, just about anything we want. Reviewing analytics as part of your day to day will help you become a better marketer and provide you with ideas on how to further improve your marketing strategy. 

That said, the real issue tends not to be a lack of data but rather a lack of focus. There's no time for a 10 page report of all of the business metrics. So to avoid information overload, you want to focus on the metrics that matter most to your marketing vision, your customer needs, and company goals.

Now, what metrics you actually measure in these areas will depend on the stage that your business is in and those goals. And before we look at what metrics we'll want to pay attention to, I want to quickly talk about the five critical areas to any business. 

The first is Acquisition, which is converting your consumer. Then Activation, which is users having a good first time experience. Then we have Retention, essentially keeping the customer. Referral, this'll be customers telling their friends. 

And then Revenue, well, all of the money that you're bringing in. Dave McClure, a Venture capitalist and angel investor, described these areas as the Pirate Metrics, named because, well, when you take the first letter of each of the stages, it sounds like a pirate, AARRR. 

Now the goal is to identify a key metric from each of those areas. So for Acquisition, this might be the number of conversions. For Activation, this might be time on your site in your product or even your customer support ticket volume. 

Retention is your churn rate. Who's leaving? Referral is the number of conversions from a referral source. And then Revenue. Well, you're going to start looking at your actual monthly revenue. Once you start to invest actual marketing spend, you'll want to increase your focus, layering in more metrics. 

For Acquisition, think about conversion rate and cost per acquisition. For Activation, it's really about understanding that customer lifetime value. For Retention, it's your churn rate for recapture, perhaps your email open rate. 

For Referral, well, maybe you have an affiliate program growth rate. And Revenue, well, now you can get complex by looking at your compound monthly or annual growth rates. The goal is to make sure you're looking at your metrics daily and that you have metrics that cover the five critical business areas. 

Your key metrics should act as the vital science to help you understand the overall health of your product and serve to influence the changes you make to your marketing strategy.


How to generate reports for marketing analytics



In digital marketing, you'll have tremendous data at your fingertips. And in order to make sense of this data, you'll need to synthesize it into your reports, but your reports need to have purpose. Too many times, I see data collection and reporting just for the sake of having data, and that's not all that helpful, as it can actually distract from your overall goal. 

So every report that you create must have an actionable outcome and influence change. When you report on something, it's really important that you focus on what you want the key takeaway to be. For example, let's say we look at a chart like this, and I summarize that traffic declined significantly in July from the preceding month of June. 

Well, that isn't really enough. We need to layer in the context. Your report would need to show the decline, the supporting data that hypothesizes the source of the decline, and then whatever the key takeaway is. So I might layer in data that shows we decreased our advertising spend on say, LinkedIn, and then subsequently saw a drop in traffic. 

I can now connect the dots to what the ripple effect of this impact is and what we should do about it. Always tell a story with your data, and always have a clear takeaway, so that you can take action. If things are bad, explain why. If things are good, also explain why. If the data doesn't contribute to the story you're telling, well, then it's okay to leave it off your reports to help you simplify. 

Now, reporting doesn't have to feel overwhelming, and you don't need to summarize all of the data. Just find where the most actionable opportunities are, and keep the narrative simple and easy to understand.

 

Conclusion

How to continually build digital marketing skills



Thank you for reading till the end, I hope you've enjoyed taking this course just as much as I've enjoyed sharing it with you. Now, I encourage you to continue exploring the digital marketing landscape. 

You can dive deeper into each of the topics we covered right here. Your next stop might be my course on Growth Marketing Foundations. 

There, I'll teach you how to rapidly scale your marketing initiatives and develop new skills that can bring your ideas to reality faster. From there, I'd encourage you to dig into search engine optimization with the course SEO Foundations. 

You might also enjoy keeping up with the latest in marketing and for that I'd suggest watching Digital Marketing Trends so you can learn the newest tools and techniques that marketers are using to reach their customers. 

Now, we covered a lot of material in this course, so feel free to revisit it from time to time and brush up on your skills as you continue to explore the world of digital marketing. And if you'd like, connect with me directly on LinkedIn at the link below or simply email to waqargsk2016@gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you. 

                                        Have fun and good luck.