, , , , ,

Email Marketing 101

Person golding phone in front of laptop on desk

This week’s blog is an introduction to email marketing. With the rise of social media, some believe email is “dead”. In reality, email is still essential, and there are over 4 billion email users daily and most customers prefer to receive communications from brand by email. Email marketing is an incredibly important tool for reaching and communicating with your audience, community, customers, or clients and keeping them engaged. We’re going to provide you with some essential starting tips for effective email marketing. 

Email Marketing Platforms We Recommend

If you have any experience with email marketing, you’re familiar with email marketing platforms. These help you create emails and campaigns, manage your audience, set up automations, and more. They make email marketing possible and effective. The best ones have toolsets to create visually impressive and gripping emails and tailor specific parts of your audience. Today, there are countless services out there and most offer comparable functionality so here are our top picks. We ultimately recommend testing out the email builders and automation tools in each to see which you prefer. Those listed here are all free to try with advanced functionality behind premium plans. 

  • MailChimp 
  • Klaviyo 
  • Drip

Create Templates

Every email marketing platform will let you create templates. These provide a basic structure for you to insert content. With these as a foundation, you will significantly cut down on the time needed for making emails. If you regularly send different kinds of emails, build a template for each. Use some variety to prevent them from being identical but ensure each also matches your branding for visual continuity and recognition. Consistent templates will also improve that recognition between your emails. 

Piquing Subject Line

Most inboxes receive a torrent of emails daily, with a large portion of those going right to the trash. For effective email marketing that gets clicks, you first need opens. That means you need an enticing subject line. Effective email marketing uses subjects that create urgency and kindle curiosity to encourage opens. Using words and phrases like “still time”, “expiring”, “last chance”, or enticing questions will quickly generate more opens. Be careful about certain other words like “Winner”, “Cheap”, “Satisfaction”, or “100% Free”. These can immediately trigger spam filters. 

Personalization

An extremely effective way to generate opens is to personalize emails. A personalized subject line can increase open rates by 50%! When having people signup to your newsletter or audience, try to collect their first names in a website popup or signup in your website’s footer. If your email marketing platform is hooked into your website’s back end, it will be able to then add their names into the subject line or email body to create a more personalized touch. 

Call to Action

It’s great if you are getting good open rates on your marketing emails. You need to ensure those generate into clicks and, even better, sales. Include call to actions in your email that incite readers to follow through to your website, store, forward the email to others, and complete any other action you are hoping they perform. Simple commands or buttons with “Order now” or “Read More” will direct readers to your desired outcome. For promotional emails, include product or service images that are clickable. 

Link Everything

It’s great if your email has call to action that encourage readers to go beyond and visit your business’ social platforms or website, shop for products/services, or subscribe to more emails. However, any call to action also needs to be quick and convenient, else readers are unlikely to follow through. Provide visible and accessible links for readers to easily click and act. Don’t just link text either; add a URL value to any of the images you include in your email. A dead link is a missed opportunity. A logo at the top should link to your website’s home page. A product image or blog image should link and open their respective landing pages on your website. The goal is to make it as easy and convenient as possible for your reader to follow your call to action. Show some restraint though, and do not flood your email with links. Too many URLs in an email will trigger spam filters.

Email Automations

Email automations are useful, and if you have a moderate to large-userbase, completely necessary. They automatically contact your customers and users at certain triggers without you needing to manually write and send them yourself. They can update customers about shipping information, provide product suggestions, and reengage old customers. Without email automations, this would be an infeasible amount of work. If you want to learn more about email automations and the kinds you should start with, check out our blog post here.

Manage Your Audience

Email automations are also a perfect way to manage your audience. At some point, certain members of your audience may become disengaged. They receive but don’t open your emails and haven’t for months. While a larger audience number seem more impressive, a disengaged audience impairs your open and click rates. Users immediately deleting your emails or even marking them as spam can also impair your sender rating, affecting your ability to reach the engaged members of your audience. It’s a good idea to actively try and reengage this disengaged audience. If they still don’t open your emails, remove them entirely. This kind of list cleaning should be done once or twice annually. You can use email automations to do this regularly.

It is also valuable to section off your audience for specific communications. Email marketing services hooked into your store’s backend can create “personas” according to your users’ purchase and browse history to identify their interests. You can then tailor emails to these sections. For example, if you provide various services, you may have some clients who should receive emails about service A while other clients will be interested in emails about service B. This ensures users are receiving communications that matter to them.

Email Marketing Law

Canada’s anti-spam legislation limits to whom you can send emails and what you must include. You specifically need consent from any user to send them emails. For newsletters, this means readers need to be subscribed. However, automated emails like product recommendations or an abandoned cart have consent so long as user purchased or visited your site within the past year. However, there’s still a limit to how many communications you can send, and all emails need to include unsubscribe links so that users can revoke consent at any time. All your emails also need to provide alternative contact information such as your physical address or phone number.

Email Marketing Key Performance Indexes (KPIs)

Lastly, you need to track how your emails are performing. These are tracked with primary statistics called “Key Performance Indexes” or KPIs. An email marketing platform will provide you plenty of data to parse, but not everything might be pertinent and each needs to be interpreted differently. These are the essential email KPIs:

  1. Clickthrough Rate – The percentage of readers that follow a link in an email.
  2. Conversion Rate – The percentage of emails that turn into sales or other activity.
  3. Bounce Rate – The percentage of emails that don’t reach the targeted inbox. 
  4. List Growth Rate – The rate at which the email audience list grows.
  5. Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate – The percentage of emails that are forwarded or shared to others who did not receive the original email. 
  6. Overall ROI (Return on Investment) – The financial return generated from an email campaign. The simplest formula is: ROI = (Gross Return – Cost of Investment) ÷ Cost of Investment
  7. Open Rate – The percentage of emails opened.
  8. Unsubscribe Rate – The percentage of readers who unsubscribed after receiving an email.

More to Learn

There’s plenty to learn with email marketing, but for now we’ll stop the lesson here. If you’re practicing these essential tips, you are already most of the way there. If you have questions or are looking to improve your email marketing, contact us at Rosewood. We’re email experts and provide a variety of email services for any stage of the email marketing process whether your business is ecommerce or service based. 

/0 Comments/by
, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How Apple Privacy Policies Affect Your Marketing Metrics

Apple Privacy Policy Affects Small Business'

Pumpkin Spice season approaches, and that means the next iOS is right around the corner. Just like the last couple updates, Apple has announced a repertoire of new privacy features for iOS 16 to help protect users’ privacy. Android 13 released just yesterday with some new privacy features as well but for now is still behind Apple. Data protection is important for users, but how does it affect the metrics you collect for effective of your marketing?

Data Collection and Privacy

The data you receive from consumers, users, and your audience is incredibly informative. Information like what products someone views or what pages someone visits, allows you to tailor your promotions or content to their interests. It lets you communicate effectively and efficiently. It shows you what marketing is working and what is not. All of that can help your company grow. That data and the metrics they create are incredibly important for your business, but for users, that data is also precious. It is something they trust you with, and they do not want that trust and their privacy breached. 

Data privacy has become an increasing concern on the internet. In a KPMG survey from last year, 86% of users were concerned about their data’s privacy. That worry is valid. The past month saw a dozen security violations with large corporations. A mother and daughter were recently shocked and angered when Facebook gave Nebraska police their private message logs. User information is not just a shopping cart or wishlist. It also includes more sensitive, personal information like messages, emails, addresses, and credit cards that users are regularly providing businesses. In turn, many nations and the European Union have passed legislation that restricts when, how, and what kind of data companies can collect. The FTC in the US announced just five days ago that it would be “cracking down on commercial surveillance and lax data security practices.” Software developers and device manufacturers like Apple have also been increasing the default privacy protections they provide. This is great for users’ security but affects the kind of information you can collect and how. 

Apple Privacy – Mail Privacy Protection

Last year, Apple released Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) as part of iOS 15. MPP hides users’ IP addresses so senders cannot see their location, related internet activity, or even whether they opened the email. That’s all potentially valuable information for a business or marketing team. Android lacks a similar feature, but in Canada, over 57% of people are using iPhones. In email tracking services, MPP can also falsely inflate your open rates. Any inbox with MPP active will be recognized in the tracker. However, MPP can open an email without the user ever actually opening and seeing the email for themselves. Unfortunately, a tracker cannot tell the difference whether this was an MPP “open” or your recipient’s. 

Those false positives lead to bloated open rates and a false, larger discrepancy in open-to-click rates. Most email services will allow you to ignore MPP opens, and it is best to do so. They are simply not a reliable or informative data set. Remember, MPP only affects open rates. Your click rates will still be accurate. Focusing on those clicks will allow you to keep track of your engaged audience and ensure your catering to their interests and preferences.

MPP will still deny other information that may valuable, such as location and other internet activity. The goal then, is conversion rates: getting recipients to visit your site, where they can provide you with more information. 

The End of Third-Party Data

The information users provide to your site when they access and use it is first-party data or cookies. This is any information you gather from your customers directly. For the past while, internet advertising has relied primarily on third-party cookies. Third-party data works through websites sharing information between one another. This is how Google Ads and Meta Business (Facebook and Instagram advertising) work. They use a user’s wider internet activity to target them with appropriate ads according to their browsing history. This is why if you put something in your cart on one site, you might suddenly start seeing ads for that very product elsewhere or even everywhere.

More recently, marketing has started moving away from third-party cookies. Some internet browsers have started blocking these trackers by default, like Mozilla Firefox and Safari (remember that 57% market share of Canadian phones?) Apple and Android have similarly been allowing users to block tracking in apps. Notably Google Chrome, which 65% of people worldwide use, still allows third-party trackers. Google has said they will also be blocking them for the past two years, but last month again delayed those plans to 2024. Third-party ads are still an important part of Google Ads, which makes up 80% of the company’s revenue. Similarly, Facebook advertising is a staggering 98% of Meta’s revenue. Those same ads have also been especially important for small businesses. The move away from third-party ad targeting is and will more severely affect smaller businesses that have relied on them to grow and reach potential customers and clients. They will need to invest into new marketing efforts.

Leaving Third-Party Data Behind

So, while third-party cookies will still work for targeting Chrome users, companies should also focus their marketing on first-party data. Your emails and websites can still gather valuable information about your audience and customers as the world moves away from third-party data. As a result, marketing should focus on converting customers. Creative marketing on social media is a productive method for attracting and expanding an audience and convincing potential customers to visit your website. Effective email automations will have customers regularly returning. Fun, survey quizzes with a bonus discount code are a great incentive for customers to provide you with more detailed information.

Rosewood Can Help 

Currently third-party tracking can still prove beneficial for small businesses, but they will see increasing decline in ROI in this sector as Apple and other companies increase dedication to privacy. Rosewood recommends every business start investing into first-party data collection with effective social media, tailored email automations, and creative content that drives conversion rates. 

Rosewood’s web design and marketing services will make sure you are collecting and effectively using that precious data from (potential) customers. We will soon be officially offering email marketing services as well. We are familiar with a suite of both third- and first-party tools and services so you can learn more about your customers and help your business grow in the face of increasing internet privacy. With an elegant website and effective marketing, users will want to trust you with their information.

New Privacy Policy Changes Information Gathered From Customers.
/0 Comments/by
, , ,

Effective Email Automations for ECommerce

Email Automation

What are Email Automations? 

Email automations are the main way to create timely emails for your customers or users without needing to write and send one every time. By now, most of us are used to some of the standard automations, especially the order confirmation email after a purchase. However, they can go much farther. Effective email automations can increase your website’s functionality, attract new customers, retain old ones, and generate sales. The best part? It all happens automatically and saves you time. 

Automation will also keep track of each user’s engagement with emails and can be connected to your ecommerce platform (for customer relationship management). Those metrics are extremely valuable because they can create personalized email automations. Someone hasn’t opened an email in 3 months? Someone else hasn’t bought something from your website’s store in 6 months? Email automations can entice them to renew their interest in your business. 

Creating Email Automations 

There are a few standard email automations that are effective for nearly every business: 

  • Order confirmations – confirm a customer’s order with purchase invoice 
  • Shipping confirmations – notification of package shipment with tracking information 
  • Birthday Greetings – a personalized birthday message 
  • Abandoned Product/Cart – reminder of product(s) placed in cart, but not purchased 
  • Welcome to New Subscribers – friendly welcome to a new newsletter subscriber which often includes a one-time discount 
  • Cross-sell or Upsell – notification of products similar or related to those previously bought by a customer 
  • Win-back – notification to unengaged subscriber who has not opened any emails after X days 
  • Sunset Email – notification that an unengaged subscriber will be unsubscribed 

The strength of these automations will depend on their design, how they are scheduled, and their workflow. Order and shipping confirmations should be instant notifications, but an abandoned cart email should wait at least an hour or more before reminding a customer. 

Workflows refer to an email’s set of conditions that can then flow into another email automation. A common workflow is a win-back campaign. The win-back email sends when a subscriber has not opened an email in X days, e.g. 90. The win-back entices them to open the email and open future ones as well. If they open it, they loop back into the normal subscriber segment. If they do not, then they move into the sunset email’s workflow. After another set of days, they receive an email that tells them they will stop receiving emails unless they want to stay subscribed. If they open the email and want to stay subscribed, they move back into the regular segment. If not, they will be unsubscribed from the list. It may seem like a bad thing to “lose” subscribers, but this kind of workflow curates your subscriber list. A smaller subscriber list engaged with your emails is much better than a massive list that never even sees them. Besides, un-engaged subscribers can actually damage sender reputation. 

Best Practices 

Don’t Spam: There are countless kinds of email automations that you can set up for your business’s website, but you don’t want to flood clients’ inboxes. They’ll unsubscribe, block your emails, or, even worse, mark them as spam. That last one can prevent others from receiving your emails because they become targeted by spam filters. To get past these filters you also want to make sure you aren’t making ad heavy subject lines and are following Canada’s anti-spam legislation, such as always including unsubscribe links. You need to determine what kind of automations best suits your business and users. 

Personalization: It may be surprising that a strength of email automation is personalization. One of the simplest ways email automations personalize emails is by using your customers’ first names. Setting up an automated email that addresses someone by their name immediately increases open rates. It can go even further though. Email automation with the assistance of your CRM (customer relationship management) will track if someone opened the emails, visited a link, what they have purchased, and more. You use this valuable information about each of your customers to segment subscribers based on their interests and behaviours to send more specific product recommendations or notifications. Your customers are giving you a lot of valuable data; use it to their advantage, and yours. Personalization will make customers feel like they are receiving tailor-made emails from a friend. This will quickly increase email engagement and click-through rates, meaning more visits to your site and potential sales. 

Design Templates: Visually striking and well-designed emails will increase engagement, but they can take time. Create email templates in your email automation service to save future time. Email marketers can focus on the content and plug them into the template for each campaign. Use the same template styles for all other automated emails. This will also give your emails consistent branding, which keeps users engaged.

In Summary 

Effective email automations have become an essential part of ecommerce. They are key for retaining your customers, gaining customer loyalty, and will save you a lot of time in the future. Want some help figuring out your email automations? Rosewood can help you pick the right service, get set up, and build effective workflow automations. Contact us today.

/0 Comments/by