Stas Zaslavsky | One Vision | Digital Marketing: E-Marketing | Development : Mails

Enhancing your E-Marketing Campaigns Part IV - Planning & Process

StasZ — Wed, 25 May 2011 18:21:00 GMT

Overview

This post will mainly describe and examine an example of E-Campaign process.

Main Topics

How to plan E-Marketing campaign?
How to design the process of E-Campaign correctly?
What is an example of successful E-Campaign process for Enterprise Company?

How to plan E-Marketing campaign?

In order to create a successful E-Campaign you must first plan every step of your campaign. The meaning of E-Campaign is not simply sending one email to all your clients, get the statistics and forget that you ever did that.
Creating E-campaign is all about delivering right messaging to the right audience in convenient time for them while gaining insights, which later on you will convert to additional required actions.

Once you have launched an E-Campaign you would always want to achieve the best possible results. To enhance your results you should always plan several next steps in advance to be prepared for any possible scenario outcome, for example what will you do if your first messaging in your E-campaign achieved poor open rate, what should you do next?

In that case it would be wise to send the same messaging with different subject line, doing so will certainly grant you additional conversions. You always must plan ahead and have plan to any possible outcome.
Another example: you attained high open rate but your action item was neglected (low click thru). In that case you should analyze where the fault lies, maybe your content messaging was not that relevant or attractive or maybe your action item was not clear enough. In both cases I would recommend to redesign the email, change slightly the offering content and send the messaging again to the subscribers who have previously neglected your action item.

To help yourself create successful campaign it is always preferable to create a solid process which will include all the necessary planning arrangements.

How to design the E-campaign process correctly?

E-Campaign processes are very personal and differ from company to company, it depends a lot on your marketing team skills, company's profile and arrangement, the tools your team/company possesses.
To create a correct e-campaign process for your company these are the several things to start with: Write the Content/offering for any scenario available (fist messaging, reminder messaging, messaging for low open rate, thank you messaging and etc.)

Create the campaign graphical language along with several layouts
Define the correct target audience for your campaign
Set up solid KPI’s list
Gain Insight from statistics and convert it to the best next action

What is an example for E-Campaign process for Enterprise Company?

Below I present an example of five-step process for Enterprise Company E-Campaigns illustrated by chart.

Content Owner - Team in your company which generally provides the task and the content.
Online Studio – Team in your company which has technical skill of producing and distributing your e-campaign, seldom those teams will possess digital marketing skills.
Mail Data output – Some annalistic data output seldom provided from some E-Marketing tool.

Step 1: Creating the Content and possible scenarios for the Campaign
Step 2: Creating and approving Email Design & Reappearing the targeted audience list
Step 3: Producing Html Version of the Email
Step 4: Retrieving Statistics information & producing insight according to KPI’s
Step 5: Make Conclusions & Proceed to the next best action according the results and scenario plan

Enhancing your E-Marketing Campaigns Part III - E-Marketing KPI’s‏

StasZ — Sun, 15 May 2011 20:12:00 GMT

Overview

This post will mainly explain E-Marketing KPI’s, why and how to set them.

Main Topics

Why do I need KPI’s for E-Marketing?
What are E-marketing KPI's examples?
How to set KPI’s for my E-Campaign?

Why I need KPI’s for E-Marketing?

Companies invest a lot of funds in marketing; it’s no secret that every company expects some bang for their buck from the campaign.
Sometimes you are able to provide an accurate ROI (Return on investment), in other cases it’s may be hard to provide or calculate ROI accurately, however it can give you some measure of success of that particular activity.
In order to do so you must have a solid and clear set of KPI’s (Key Performance Indicator).
KPI’s allow you to define your strategic goals in the terms of measureable parameters to estimate the success of your current activity/campaign by it.
There is a particular set of KPI’s for your e-campaign which will allow you to understand and measure your progress.

What are E-marketing KPI's Examples?

Some of the most common E-marketing KPI’s examples and tips on how to improve your E-campaign are listed in the table below:

KPI	What’s it mean	How to measure (in %)
Email Open Rate	If you get low Open Rate it’s usually means that your subject line is unattractive. Consider sending the same email with different subject line to the subscribers that didn’t open the previous one to increase your campaign stats.	(Mail opened / total mails sent) X 100
Click Thru Rate	If you didn’t reach the desired click rate, it means that your offering’s content wasn’t clear or attractive enough, maybe you placed your action items not in a “visible” enough location. Try changing your content or make Call for Action item more attractive.	(Unique Clicks / total Opened) X 100
Bounce-Back Emails Rate	If you see that your Bounce-Back rate is increasing from campaign to campaign, it is a good practice to check and clean your customer database. Be sure to notice difference between soft and hard Bounce-Back.	100 X (Total bounce-back email count / Total mails sent)
Unsubscribe Rate	If your campaigns unsubscribe rate is high, it means that your offering generally is irrelevant to that campaign’s audience. The lack of attraction in your offering may also be the reason. Try to present your content in a more attractive and innovative way. Exclude irrelevant customers if you know they won’t be interested in your current offering. You can read more about how to target your audience correctly in my previous post.	100 X (Total unsubscribe recipients / Total recipients sent)
Subscribe Rate	If you want to increase the number of subscribers, it will be wise to appeal to the relevant audience group through social media and introduce your offering to them, nudging them to learn more about your offering by subscribing to your communications. You may add several social media share buttons to your email; also you may add a “share to colleague” button. But keep it in proportion you do not want to draw your subscriber’s attention away from your main offering.	100 X (New Subscribers / Total Subscribers )

There are a lot more KPI’s you can set in your campaign in more customized way, for example if your campaign is sales driven, you can track the percentage of sales resulting from that communication, or how many potential leads you generated.

It’s very important to set a solid KPI’s list for your E-Campaign, and keep measuring the progress from campaign to campaign. It will help you understand if you are moving in the right direction, or that it is a time to review your methods.

How to set KPI’s for my E-Campaign?

Setting KPI’s for E-campaign is a task that requires, planning, and a lot of learning especially in the beginning. KPI’s results are usually very case specific and can’t be compared to results of other companies. It’s depends on and differs by your audience type, your line of business, current state of your market, your competitors, your company size, number of your customers. Consequently it’s not wise to compare yourself to other companies especially if you are not aware of every detail involved, but it is always a good practice to learn from others and see what they do and how they achieved success.

With time, when you learn to set your KPI rates right, try to increase the required results from campaign to campaign, and see if you successfully achieve your goals, if not, try to understand what prevents you from succeeding and improve that fault in your campaign.
The most important thing is to learn more constantly, and try to understand your target audience better.

Enhancing your E-Marketing Campaigns Part II - Targeting your Campaign & Personalizing Messaging Content

StasZ — Sun, 08 May 2011 21:55:00 GMT

Overview

This post is going to be focused on introducing ways to classify and target your E-Campaign audience and achieving better results with personalized campaign content.

Main Topics

How can you target your audience and why you should do it at all?
Why & How should I make personalized content at my E-Campaigns?

Marketing is all about to delivering right message with the right content in the right time. It’s no different with E-Campaigns.

Let’s assume for example that you are Online Marketing Manager at some company. Your company has just launched a new product and you want to inform about it your current and potential customers. Your product is intended to serve mainly other companies and corporations (b2b). Also let’s assume that you own a detailed Database of all your customers and potential leads.

How can you target your audience and why you should do it at all?

Let’s assume you didn’t focus your campaign and just sent communication to your entire Client Database. You assumed that whoever needs the information will use it and others will just ignore it, and may be you are right, it is also possible that you will even achieve good results from your campaign, but those results have a heavy price. Each time you will “spam” your customers that way the less impact your communication will achieve. People will begin to unsubscribe to your communications and at the end your company will lose its integrity and credibility in your customer’s trust.

The worst mistake you did is let yourself believe that your customers will by themselves sort the information they need from all the communications you send them.
Today your customers want to receive only relevant information in relevant period of time with clear and short messaging.

Lest review how you should target your audience in that case:

Divide your current customers from potential ones -You should divide your communication and by send different communications with different messaging content to your existing clients and potential ones clients (leads).
Divide your distribution list by contact executive level – You shall send different communications to senior management and company decision makers from the ones sent to the regular contact.
Divide your messaging by your contact support level – If you know your contact is supportive to your idea you may send some addition information that you won’t want to send to non supportive contact or otherwise.
Exclude irrelevant contacts by Job Role, Company, Department – For example you won’t want to sent communication to some technical engineer in Support department (unless he is decision maker or can influence one), conversely you want to target some decision maker in purchasing department. Yet another example: you don’t want to bother companies that have already purchased your product recently.
Exclude bounce backs and inactive contacts - If you see that your contact is constantly uninterested in your communication exclude him from the list (you don’t want to annoy him) and check on him (it may be possible that he has left his post, or moved to another company)
Check up and Exclude private emails – Your company's main audience is b2b, you are not interested in delivering your messaging to private persons, so check up your contacts lists for the known private email extensions such as gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc.. if you find an irrelevant contact exclude him or get his company email.
Exclude suspicious contacts - Make sure to exclude suspicious contacts, especially with partial data information, those may be competitors trying to sniff out information regarding your offerings.

While following at least several tips from that list, you can guarantee to make your communication less annoying more relevant and your campaign results more accurate and successful.

Be mindful to analyze, keep and update the results from each of your campaigns, it will help you to understand and classify your target audience.

Why & How should I make personalized content at my E-Campaigns?
Generally it is good practice to personalize your content, by doing so you can increase the interest of your subscribers by providing them with information that personally concerns them.
Another example is addressing your subscribers by fist name, or send the mail from e-mail contact that they familiar with, that way the communication will receive an appearance of a more unique and private email which will draw more interest and attention from your subscriber.

But be careful not to play “Big Brother” on your subscribers, doing so may scare them off and drive them away.

Creating personalized emails these days is an easy task, there a huge variety of tools that provide you a way to personalize your with communications.

I will describe more about those tools in my following posts.

Enhancing your E-Marketing Campaigns Part I - Design & Innovation

StasZ — Tue, 03 May 2011 21:58:00 GMT

Overview

This post is going to be mainly about Email design and innovative ideas for E-Campaigns

Main Topics

Why shall I send emails to my customers and partners?
How to achieve successful E-campaign?
How to design good emails?
What is it that makes E-Campaigns look great, unique and innovative?
What are the examples of innovative emails?

Why shall I send emails to my customers and partners?

It’s very important to maintain live connection with your customer or partner, creating opportunities maximizing profit as a result.
One of the most cost-effective methods is E-Marketing.
E-Marketing allows you to reach mass audience, and deliver messaging involving them in your Company/ Business Offerings/ Products.

How to achieve successful E-Campaign?

There are a lot of ingredients that are required for your E-campaign to achieve desired results, including:

Understating your Audience – Understand what your clients expect from you, and know what competitors do. For example: How they view your messing is it by computer or by mobile phone, are they used to more textual email or more visually designed and etc, what is your clients' median age, what is your business line: is it b2c or b2b, and so on…
Keep it Relevant – Send to your subscribers only relevant propositions and information. You don’t want to be considered as spammer and consequently lose your integrity.
Neat and Detailed Customer Database - You must have detailed information about your subscribers/customers, segmented by their company, job role, geographical location, language and culture. For example you don’t want to send by accident a message to your client in a language that he can’t read, that will be most unprofessional.
Don’t be too pushy or annoying – – you really don't want to send too many communications to one customer in short time period, that will just annoy him and greatly reduce the odds of success.
Call to Action – try involving "call to action" items in your messaging if you want to convert your campaign to opportunities. But be careful not to overdose - too many "call toactions" are as bad as none.
Personalize your content – try to personalize your content using your customer database to achieve better impact.
Innovation Design and Presentation of the Content & Brand – you must constantly search for the next idea, for more innovative look. But make sure you don’t exaggerate too much, if your recipients don’t understand your motive and your intent they will consider it trash. All your communication should be created from one solid brand but yet contain individuality, presence and evolve interest.
Technical skill – make sure that clients receive your communication as intended. Today there is a wide variety of mail clients that users use to view their mails like: Gmail, Thunderbird, Outlook and etc. You must have some technical skill and follow certain rules to make sure that your email looks the same in all mail system clients.

How to design good emails?

To create a positive impact you must understand that the way you’re messaging looks is directly linked to your customer satisfaction and impression about your way of conducting business. Every outgoing communication with your clients is company's business card , emails & newsletters are no exception to this rule.

Several Guidelines on how to make your email look great before you begin the design process:

Understating your Audience - Your design should be modified accordingly to your audience group, culture, and business line and audience preference.
If you don’t have such information you can conduct online research by learning what your competitors do. The other possibility is by “try and catch” method, it’s simply try and learn from your mistakes, gaining insight and drawing conclusions each time of what you did wrong and how to improve it the next time.
Keep it Relevant – Try not to make your email too long, a scrollable email are much less effective than a short mail with sharp targeted content. If you have to transfer a lot of content in single mail, try to use links and landing pages for more content. Understand, that your client receive not only your emails but also emails from other companies, he rarely has the time to read long, unfocused communications.
Neat Design – The mail should be designed neatly, smoothly and clearly, according to your brand, try to be innovative but try not at the expense of messing up your mail.
Call to Action – The call to action links or buttons should be designed in such a way that the user can notice them immediately and placed where they will draw the most focus and attention. Placing your action items at the bottom of the long email is an example of bad email design.
Innovation Design & Brand –try to be innovative and creative. But don’t go over the top about it, your recipient should always be able to understand from a first glimpse on the email that it is from your company by recognizing its brand mark. Solid brand mark adds a lot of reliability to your messaging.
Technical skill – There a lot of technical limitations you should take into consideration before beginning the design

Width – the email can’t be too wide; it may cause the mail not to be displayed correctly in your client mail program. It is recommended to stick with 650 pixels width.
Length – long email will cause a long scroll, it will annoy the user and create deterrence.
Long Headers & Meaningful Header – Exceedingly long email headers are drawing too much attention from your content, if you are going to use long headers make sure they are meaningful and not just another cute picture from Istock which has no additional added value.
Using Images – by using images in your email (or creating email that is made entirely from one big image) you can create much more beautiful communication and by that achieve better impact. But make sure you know your audience, and they can see your email properly. Some email clients block images (for example not all mobile phones support images in email).
Don’t use background images at textual email - You can’t use background images at textual (live text) emails – most email clients programs are blocking them, and your mail won’t be received as you expected.
Weight – if you are using too much images your mail can exceed great weight which is not very recommended, heavy emails sometimes may not reach your client, or your client will delete because of some limitation of space he has on his company email.
Alt Tags and Image Titles – try to always use “alt” and “title” tags for images in your email, especially if your emails constructed only from images.
Alternative Email View – Make sure to include web version link of the email, to allow people to view the email via browser if they didn't receive it correctly.

What are the examples of innovative emails?

To learn more about innovative examples you may use companies like Apple, Adobe and Nike as a benchmark. Just go to their sites and sign up for their mails and newsletters.

Later I will write a post with dedicated examples and their detailed analysis.

Enhancing your E-Marketing Campaigns (Five Parts Post)

StasZ — Tue, 03 May 2011 18:58:00 GMT

Overview

This post is a part of six posts that are going discuss E-Marketing method. E-Marketing allows you to impact and enhance your company/product with mass audience at low cost.

In the following Posts I will share my experience at the field and hope to provide you Useful Information & Tips which may enhance your Online Marketing Skill.

Post List:

Enhancing your E-Marketing Campaigns Part I - Design & Innovation
Enhancing your E-Marketing Campaigns Part II - Targeting your Campaign & Personalizing Messaging Content
Enhancing your E-Marketing Campaigns Part III - E-Marketing KPI‏'s
Enhancing your E-Marketing Campaigns Part IV - Planning & Process
Enhancing your E-Marketing Campaigns Part V - Useful Tools

Audience

Marketing Managers
Web Masters & Developers

Required Skill

Basic knowledge at Online Marketing