Drive Engagement with Email Marketing

Another title for this post could be ‘How to Actually Generate Interest in Your Products and Services From People That Have Expressed Interest But You Have Not Provided Any Value to So They Are Ignoring You’ but that title would violate a few best practices for optimizing blog post titles.

Clean It Up

Data experts say that between two and three percent of contact data goes bad every month.  That adds up quickly especially if you have never cleaned up your email marketing data.  Cleaning up your data or email validation can be done quite easily using any number of online services.  The two we have used are http://www.strikeiron.com/ and http://www.briteverify.com/  but there are lots more to choose from.

The biggest reason to go through the process of email validation is to avoid receiving a notification from your email service provider that your bounce rate is too high.

If you have ever purchased lists this step is even more important since the quality of purchased lists tends to degrade faster than your earned email leads lists.

If you adopt best practices for Inbound Marketing your list quality will stay at a high level since you will be engaging with the contacts and will know when a contact unsubscribes, bounces, or is engaging with you.

Sort It Out

Email marketing campaigns are always more powerful when you can target your contacts with specific content relevant to them.  Sending all contacts the same bland email content is a recipe for low engagement measured in low open and click rates. 

Ways to segment your lists include industry, job title, and geography, even down to a specific company.  Segment your lists in whatever way that makes sense to your prospects and customers, not how you think they should be segmented.  Your segmented lists should have common interests, similar issues that you can address, value the same things, and look for solutions in similar ways.   In short, your segments should want/need/look for the messages and value you are sharing.

Some ideas for things you can do with your segmented list include:

• Geo-targeted content
• Sending different messages to leads and customers
• Promote a contest to leads on a certain social media site
• Exclude contacts from certain messages
• Persona-based content (this is another subject to write about but you should have developed targeted ideal prospects types called personas)
• Industry-specific content

Say It

The goal of an email is to drive engagement of the recipient with something you offer or share.  Links, videos, articles, blog posts, whitepapers, e-books, lists, calculators, surveys, or anything else your target audience finds interesting is the content of an email.  Create a great, engaging subject line (Google ‘email subject lines’ and you will find a wealth of good content on how to write a great one) to drive initial interest and increase open rates.

Then say it.  Think of Sam Kinison in this video when you are writing your email.

Do not mess around with fluffy nonsense marketing speak.  Get to the meat of the message fast.  In the first sentence in the first words make your point.  Make it about them and their issues and why this matters to them.

Add links to your relevant offers as well as call-to-action graphics if you have them.  Guess what, tracking which links your contacts click on is another way to segment your lists.  Let your lists tell you what is important to them by tracking what links they click.  There are lots of email tools out there that allow you to do this, if you do not have this capability you should get it.

Do not say it with over-the-top graphics and bells and whistles in your email design.  Keep it simple, clean, and personal.  Just read a great article about this on HubSpot's blog here.

So clean it up, sort it out, and say it to get the most of your email marketing list as a part of inbound marketing best practices.