Tag Archives: email marketing

How to Master Email Marketing (2023)

Are you really just going to sit here and pretend that email marketing isn’t one of the most important parts of your business? We are? [MUSIC PLAYING] OK. For everyone else though, the data tells us that there are 4.3 billion, with a B, email users worldwide.

With certainly more than half of the planet using email, your business can’t afford to not have an email marketing strategy. And unlike those social media platforms with their confusing features and constantly changing algorithm and no one liking your posts for whatever reason, email marketing is relatively straightforward. What’s up? I’m Jamal from HubSpot. In this video, I’m going to teach you the basics of email marketing, setting you up with a foundation for success that can last for years.

If you find this useful, be sure to like this video and subscribe to the HubSpot YouTube channel. [MUSIC PLAYING] So, how do you become a master email marketer? Put simply, it’s divided into three steps. One, build your list. Two, maintain the health of that list.

And three, email that list with valuable content every time. Let’s start by building your list. When building your email list, there’s really one rule and one rule only. And that’s, never buy or rent a list. And actually there are more rules, but let’s just focus on that one for now.

Buying or renting an email list can lead to low open-rates, bad brand appearance, and even hefty fines from privacy protection agencies. So what should you do to build up a quality email list? Well, here at HubSpot, we built our email list by producing free ebooks that users discovered when searching for topics like introduction to data visualization or how to become an influencer.

Maybe you can offer free trial of your service or an online seminar or other experience. Whatever you offer, it needs to be something valuable enough to convince users to part with their personal email information.

In addition to the landing page, most websites will let you place a pop-up to collect email. Set one to appear after the user has spent some time on your site which indicates that they’re receiving value and might be open to more information.

And if your business involves online ordering, make sure customers are prompted to opt into your email list when making a purchase. Why is it important that users opt in? Well, having users opt in means they want to hear from you.

It also keeps you compliant with the ever-stricter antispam policies being implemented by governments as well as email services themselves. A double opt in is even more effective since it requires the user to open and click an automated email they receive when signing up. This not only prevents users from giving fake emails, but it also trains their email app to recognize quality messages from you. And with that, we just got to the spam folder. Way to go.

How you go about building your email lists, will set the stage for future success.

But just as important is how you maintain your list. This means periodically scrubbing your email list to remove emails that bounce or addresses that never open your emails. A good rule of thumb is to scrub your list every six to 12 months. You might be wondering, what’s the harm in emailing people who don’t open them?

Right? Why can’t I just– I should be able to do that, right? Well, another metric that email algorithms use to determine if something is spam, is the engagement ratio. The more you send emails that never get opened, the more likely the email services will eventually categorize your emails as spam. Makes sense?

The good news is that despite these increasing obstacles to email deliverability, the overall value of email marketing is actually on the rise. In 2010, Digital Marketing Association put the return on email marketing at $40 for every dollar spent.

By 2019, that return increased to $42 for every dollar spent. Why has the ROI gone up? Because I’m opening everyone’s emails for them.

No. But actually though, a major reason is an increased use of segmentation in email marketing. Segmentation means dividing your email list into smaller groups so you can send each segment content specific to their interests. You can segment your list by demographic data, like location, company size, or anything else that’s important for your business. But the real email managers use what’s called behavioral segmentation which is grouping based on how the user previously interacted with your brand.

Things like previous purchases, lifecycle stages, and customer loyalty. Creating triggered email flows for specific behaviors allow you to be responsive to your user’s needs. So it’s no wonder that 77% of email marketing ROI comes from these sorts of segmented, targeted trigger campaigns. It’s the best tool for getting your audience the valuable content they’ll want to open because they know it’s tailored to their interests. And that– that’s inbound, baby.

Which brings us to our final step in mastering email marketing. Send valuable emails. The average office worker receives around 120 emails per day. That is many. Out of that 120, 40 are important business emails that require a response.

That leaves 80 other emails vying for attention. The only way to stand out is by having a super click bait title for the subject line.

That’s a real tip. You should do that. No.

The only actual ways to stand out by offering something your subscribers want to click on because it somehow improves their lives. Think about a company like OpenTable who uses subscriber’s past behavior to offer useful discounts or recommend new restaurants. Or Spotify who send regular emails notifying users of new music by artists they follow. These are great examples of valuable emails that subscribers want to receive and are happy to open. One more useful tip.

Whenever you’re recommending something to your subscriber, be sure to remind them of the activity that triggered the recommendation. That way they associate the good feeling of the previous experience with the new one you’re offering. Now, when it comes to emails, conveying value starts with the subject line. This can mean literally telling the recipient what they’ll get from opening the email.

And try to do it in 50 characters or less.

Use those 50 characters to peak the customer’s interest. Don’t give everything away up front. Like me with Bobby Jenkins in the fourth grade. I gave him my Goku action figure. And then he just– he didn’t talk to me anymore after that.

Leave a bit of mystery so they’ll feel compelled to open the email to no more. Just be sure that whatever you tease in the subject line is actually delivered in the body of the email. No one likes deceptive click-baity subject lines.

I was kidding before. And 69% of spam reports come from subject lines alone.

So watch out. Now, you can also use the preheader. That is the first few words in the body of your email that get previewed in your inbox to support the subject line. Most email marketing systems will allow you to set the preheader when you enter the subject line, so you don’t have to worry about altering the actual body copy of your email. And always A/B test your subject line so that each email you send, teaches you something for the next one.

So all the messages from your email list have been delivered. And thanks to your brilliant subject line and preheader, good job. Folks are itching to read what you sent them. So what are you going to say? [MUSIC PLAYING] Crafting killer email copy could be its own video.

Until that time, here’s some tips. Tip number one. Keep text neat and simple with the main point upfront. Use short sentences with lots of paragraph breaks. Save those verbose-think pieces for your blog.

This is an email. Tip number two. Write for your audience. Remember those list segments we made? This is why they’re so important.

And tip number three. Write in a friendly one-to-one style. This isn’t just a good way to treat your customers, it also helps for your email from getting tagged as spam. And speaking of spam, HubSpot keeps an extensive list of spam trigger words that you should avoid when writing email copy. There will be a link in the video description below.

And if you don’t click on it, I’ll be sent to the spam folder. You should also run your email through a spam test before sending it, to make sure your formatting punctuation and fonts all pass through the filters. There are plenty of free spam checkers online you can use. You’d be amazed how a few tiny tweaks can make a huge difference. So, when it comes to email marketing, sending valuable content in a compliant format to users who you know want to receive it, will allow you to execute successful campaigns for years to come.

Happy email. I’m off to the spam folder. I don’t know why that’s like my “I messed up sound.” But it is, and we’re rolling with it. [MUSIC PLAYING].

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Introduction To Marketing | Marketing 101

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8Sj2tbh-ozE

If you’ve ever wanted to know: What marketing is, how it works and how it applies to your business, then stick with me, because in this episode I’m going to be breaking down exactly what marketing is, how it all works and why it’s such an important, if not the most important, element to business success. Let’s get to it. Hey there my name is Adam Earhart, marketing strategist and welcome to The Marketing Show where we help you grow your business generate more leads, customers, and sales by making way better marketing, so if you’re interested in learning the latest and greatest marketing strategies, tools, tips, tricks and tactics, well, you may want to consider subscribing and hitting that notification bell.

Alright, let’s talk marketing, something I love to do. As I fell in love with marketing years ago, when I first got interested in figuring out why people buy and act the way they do and later how to influence and persuade essentially affect human behavior.

Because, whether you have a business or not Marketing happens pretty much every day. Any time you try to convince friends or family to see a certain movie or eat at this restaurant or not that or basically try to convince them to do anything, Marketing is happening. Also, marketing is really important to understand, because you are constantly being marketed to by everyone from everywhere. From something as simple as someone trying to sell you a pair of shoes to something a lot bigger, like buying a new house or moving across the country or even changing careers. All of this, requires and uses marketing.

So, with all that said, let’s dive into it. But first, let’s cover what marketing is not, so once we’ve got that clear, we can cover exactly what it is.

Now, I know when I first got involved with marketing my understanding was pretty limited. I didn’t really have a clear picture of exactly what marketing was so I also kind of fell prey to the notion that marketing was advertising. Well, in reality marketing isn’t advertising but advertising is marketing.

Let me explain. Basically, marketing is a major business function that’s made up of a bunch of other parts, one of which of course is advertising, but there’s also a ton others like: PR, market research, social media, content marketing, search engine marketing or search engine optimization, pricing and pricing psychology, copywriting and one of my personal favorites, direct response or direct response marketing and quite a few more.

So, saying that marketing is just advertising and kind of like saying that finance is just taxes or HR is just hiring people or legal is just not getting sued. Sure, these are all important but there just one piece of the entire puzzle. This is why if you’re just getting started in marketing can seem pretty overwhelming which is why my suggestion is to find an area that you find interesting, fascinating, like say social media or content marketing, start there really get some roots and branch out later.

Alright, so now that we’ve got that covered, what exactly is marketing? Well, as I’ve just covered, you know that marketing is made up of a bunch of different sub segments things like: content marketing, email marketing and social media, all the things we talked about.

But what exactly is the nature of marketing, which sounds like some kind of documentary “The Nature of Marketing” – on this week’s episode of The Nature of Marketing – Well, one of the first things you learn in any first-year marketing course is the four P´s of marketing: product, price, place and promotion. Product being the details around whatever product or service is being sold. Price being the price, kind of obvious, but there’s obviously a lot more that goes into it than just that.

Place is where the products being sold and promotion, we’re just kind of the fun stuff. This is essentially how you’re gonna sell more of the product and what you’re gonna do to get the word out about your service and while all of that is accurate and true and the four P´s do make up a part of marketing, well, I prefer a simpler easier to understand definition. Marketing in its most basic sense, is communicating value to your customers. It’s essentially answering the question of your customers “Why should I care?” Marketing helps people solve their problems by clearly defining and delivering solutions and really explaining the benefits of the solution so they can get better results.

Marketing is about connecting with people, understanding their pains and their problems and their frustrations, making them feel understood so that you can position your business as the solution to their problems and essentially just make them feel better and marketing is a really powerful force. As anyone that’s been in business for any length of time can tell you, it’s not always the best product or service that wins, in fact it rarely is, rather it’s the product or service with the best marketing. Like it or not, that’s just kind of how it works which is why having good marketing is just so important.

So my favorite definition of marketing is that it’s communicating value to your customers but there’s another side entirely that’s rarely talked about but still equally powerful and that’s creating value for your customers. You see, marketing can create value and your marketing in and of itself can be valuable.

An example could be a blog post that helps someone out, even before any money has changed hands or an advertisement someone sees that brightens their day and makes them laugh whether they choose to buy or not or the way that a product or service is delivered, the packaging let’s say which is so luxurious and over-the-top that it makes the customer feel special just for having purchased it. You see, economics assumes that people make buying decisions rationally, logically and with perfect information but this is rarely, pretty much never the case.

We as humans are emotional, often highly illogical and rarely have the full set of facts when making any decision, which explains why marketing is so important and so powerful. After all, if we made all of our purchasing decisions based solely on logic and utility and the value we would get from these products, well, the entire luxury goods market wouldn’t even exist but not all marketing is created equal. You see, when it comes to marketing like when it comes to pretty much anything, there’s good marketing and there’s bad marketing.

Bad marketing is all of the reasons that marketing gets such a bad reputation. It’s that hype, spammy, over-the-top sleazy salesy icky kind of marketing that we all know we’ve all seen and nobody likes.

It’s the stuff that looks cheap, makes people feel dirty, even just looking at it and promotes bad products or bad services that really helps nobody. It’s the fake countdown timers you sometimes see on websites the going-out-of-business sales that never end and the pushy promotion of useless products. That’s bad marketing.

Good marketing on the other hand, helps customers achieve their goals, makes them feel better about themselves and has the power to truly change the world. So my question to you is: What kind of marketer do you want to be? That that was a rhetorical question. If you say the bad guy, I got nothing for you but if you say the good kind and I know you did, then make sure to check out this video right here which I’ve got linked up on the page which is going to give you even more practical and effective marketing strategies to help take your business and your marketing to the next level and way beyond that. Alright, so thanks so much for watching, make sure to check out that video now and we’ll catch you next time on The Marketing Show

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