by Marianna Muscat | Jun 2, 2020 | E-mail Marketing
The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the entire business world into crisis mode. Marketing functions, such as email marketing, have had to be modified to keep up with the disaster. Email marketing remains an important strategy and you still have the capacity to reach a large audience – in fact you might even have a larger captive audience, with so many people sitting at home. Here are the practices you need to adopt to keep your email marketing relevant at this time.
Always acknowledge the crisis
Don’t try to pretend the crisis isn’t there and just blithely go on promoting your product. Acknowledge the situation and work it into your content as far as is possible. Data indicates that people are opening and reading more emails than they were before the crisis, particularly those that mention COVID-19.
Relook your automated emails
If you have been sending out automated emails since before the crisis began, take another look at them now and ensure that the tone and content is still appropriate. You don’t want you audience to think that you are out of touch or insensitive, simply because you failed to updated your automated mailers.
Assess the atmosphere
Watch what your competitors and marketers in unrelated fields are doing. Look up great and poor examples of email marketing and emulate where applicable.
Be sensitive and do not try and leverage fear
While you do want to acknowledge COVID-19 and demonstrate that you are working around it and are being conscious of its effects on your audience’s lives, do not stretch your mentions of the pandemic (or any crisis) to instil or leverage off the emotion of fear. It’s all too easy to do – especially in certain industries – and it must be avoided. You will find that your brand and your sales will all the better for keeping a positive tone and working to provide an antidote to fear.
Do you need help formulating a top notch email marketing strategy? Contact WSI OMS.
by Francois Muscat | Apr 9, 2020 | E-mail Marketing
The benefits of using email marketing in your 2020 marketing strategy are that this type of marketing can be highly targeted, customised to reach your intended audience and the performance is fully measurable.
Refresh your 2020 marketing strategy with these 5 email design trends:
1. Adopt AMP
AMP in an email allows the recipient to respond to a survey or complete the purchasing checkout process from the email itself, without being redirected to the landing page of a separate website. Users can even fill out forms and subscribe to a service from the email itself.
2. APNG Animations
GIFs will always be popular, but in the coming year, animations will go a step further with high-resolution APNG images. APNG animations fill the whole screen with a visual image, allowing no space for distraction.
3. Gamification
The use of gamification in emails prompts the recipient to play a game within the email, without leaving the inbox at all. The reward for completing the game would then be incentives such as discounts or something for free.
4. Minify Email Design
The trend to minify email design has the value of highlighting the purpose of the email, instead of overwhelming the reader with unnecessary clutter. Minifying consists of ample white space with illustrations that present a monochromatic effect.
5. Typography
Nothing makes a reader exit an email faster than the first perception of ‘another boring email’. Industry development means more readers can now view web fonts in their email, giving scope for the use of different fonts. One can even send emails with no imagery and only bold typography.
Email marketing is one of the lower-cost marketing solutions. WSI OMS in South Africa can help you build interactive relationships with existing and prospective customers. Contact us to find out how email marketing can maximise your customer retention rate.
by Marianna Muscat | Mar 24, 2020 | E-mail Marketing
Client engagement is an important aspect of digital marketing. However, there is just not enough time to interact personally with every customer. So, to be not only effective in your client-engagement strategy, but also cost-effective, marketing automation would seem to be the logical answer. However, a couple of common reservations are that marketing automation is impersonal and takes away from your personal interactions with clients. Yet, if done right, marketing automation can include all the touch points and interactions that allow people to know you, trust you and ultimately build your brand.
In other words, if you want to boost your bottom line, then you need to invest in marketing. You can’t sit back and hope that people will magically find your business. Fortunately, marketing automation makes it easy to engage with clients in a meaningful way without losing precious time needed elsewhere in the business. Here are some easy ways to incorporate marketing automation into your engagement strategy.
Personalised Emails Can Nurture Valuable Relationships
You can set up your email marketing to blast out quick and simple emails, or you can create a complex set of emails that need to be delivered to recipients in a specific sequence based on pre-defined triggers and behaviours. The better you get with email marketing, the more personalisation you can add to them. Consider the impact of sending personalised promotions or following up with customers who have abandoned their shopping carts. It can work wonders for your business.
Go Mobile
You can create a consistent experience with your brand through mobile apps and mobile marketing. Everything from push notifications to delivering the right message at the right time can be used to create a seamless experience with your business.
Schedule Content and Make it Shareable
You can automate all of the following:
- Schedule posts in advance,
- Create polls and other content that people like to engage with, and
- Include share buttons on all your website content to allow your website visitors to share their content with friends effortlessly.
Need professional help? Contact WSI OMS for assistance on marketing automation.
by Marelise da Silva | Mar 20, 2020 | E-mail Marketing
If you have an email marketing strategy, then you’re already ahead of many businesses. However, if you don’t use KPIs, it’s nearly impossible to sustainably create successful email marketing campaigns.
The best KPIs to include in your email marketing strategy
1. Emails delivered
You could have 10,000 email addresses on your email list, but if only 1,000 emails get delivered, your strategy isn’t very effective. Alternatively, keeping an eye on your email delivery rate can tell you whether a certain server- such as gmail- develops a problem with your email address.
2. Emails opened
If your emails aren’t being opened, then no one is reading your content and- more importantly- no one is responding to your brand.
3. Click-to-open rate
This metric compares how many people opened your email to how many people clicked on a link in said email. The CTO rate can tell you if both your subject link and your link were effective.
4. Unsubscribe rate
If you notice significant changes to your unsubscribe rate, it means that some change you made to your email marketing strategy didn’t go over well with your audience.
5. Conversion rate
This metric is often hailed as the most valuable KPI. It measures how many people open your email, click on a link and take a specific action. The action is typically related to your CTA, such as downloading a resource, “liking” your social media page or making a purchase.
6. List growth rate
When your email list is growing at a healthy rate, you know that part of your email marketing campaign is working.
7. Sharing rate
When email recipients hit “share,” it means you’re producing quality content.
Having an effective email marketing strategy is crucial to the success of your inbound marketing efforts. If you don’t know how to create a successful strategy and track key KPIs, don’t worry. That’s what digital marketing agencies are here for! Contact us today to learn how we can help.
by Marianna Muscat | Mar 10, 2020 | E-mail Marketing
If you’re looking for ways to improve your email marketing, you can’t go wrong with interactive email and email automation. These are highly effective ways to reach your audience with targeted content that can establish your authority in your industry and drive increased sales for your business.
Interactive Email Explained
An interactive email allows your reader to perform an action that activates or sets off an event in the said email. Using interactive email in email marketing is a very effective tool as it keeps the user intrigued and in the inbox for longer periods of time as they perform the required actions.
Email Automation Explained
Email automation allows for an email to be automatically sent when a specific trigger or action has been met. For example, when a user subscribes to your webpage an automated email welcoming them and helping them to get started might be sent.
Now that we understand what interactive email and email automation are, we can look at what steps need to be taken to ensure a successful email campaign.
Step 1 – Determine Your Goals
It would be in your best interest to understand your goals and know exactly what you would like to achieve through your email campaign, as this will ultimately determine who needs to be targeted, what type of email is to be sent and what marketing automation content is required.
Step 2 – Two Ways to Build Your Email List
Your email list can be built in one of two ways, depending on whether you want to target existing users or whether you want to obtain email addresses that you might not already have. Here is how to go about it:
If it is existing customers you plan on getting in touch with, you can simply import a list of your known contacts’ email addresses into your chosen email marketing tool.
On the other hand, if it is new customers you plan on acquiring, then this will be done by manually building a new list from scratch.
Step 3 – Determine Which Type of Email Campaign You’ll Need
Should you be sending out a newsletter, a marketing offer, an event invitation or simply just an announcement? Ultimately, what you decide on here will be influenced by the goals you decided on in step 1.
Step 4 – Craft Your Email Campaign
Now that your goals are decided on and you have built a list of email addresses and selected the type of campaign you would like to send out, you can begin to build your email. In short, it should be easy to read, have engaging images and visual content, be personalized and be relevant to each subscriber.
Our guide will help you to launch your email campaign – quickly and easily. You are only 4 steps away from sending out your first well-crafted email and improving your email marketing strategy. Contact WSI OMS for help with your email marketing strategy.
by Francois Muscat | Mar 3, 2020 | E-mail Marketing
Still getting unsubscribe requests after meticulously crafting your email marketing content and making your communications as user-friendly as possible? It happens to the best email marketers in the business. Some people just don’t like engaging with brands via email.
Don’t let this fact get you down, rather identify the reasons for unsubscribes and work on keeping those numbers as low as possible. Here are four tips on how you can do that:
Keep Subject Lines Simple and Free from Spam-Related Terms
Overuse of caps, emojis, exclamation points and keywords such as “free”, ”give away”, “sex”, “deposit”, and the like, can identify your email as spam and move it to your junk folder or cause your reader to hit the unsubscribe button.
Think Your Message Through and Write Short and Sweet Content
Your content should have a clear and concise purpose, which starts with the subject line, is carried through in the following paragraph and continues to be elaborated on throughout the email body. Finally, your message or point should be brought to a strong conclusion in your CTA.
Give Them What They Came For
Your reader opens the email, intrigued by what is offered and clicks on the CTA link in the hopes of finding that something amazing – which was promised to them. At this point, if they are unhappy with what they find, they will hit the unsubscribe button without a doubt. Your subscriber needs you to deliver on what you promised – each and every time!
Don’t Overemphasise Your Unsubscribe Option
Legally, an unsubscribe option is required in your content marketing, but this can be done in less obvious ways. You don’t want to make unsubscribing too easy. Try writing it in a smaller text next to other options such as “please provide feedback” and don’t allow too much white space around it.
Email marketing can be a highly effective method of communicating with your audience, as long as your strategy is sound and your content is useful to your readers. Minimise the unsubscribe rates by using our email marketing guide to get the most out of your content marketing.
Need help with your email marketing? Then contact WSI OMS today.
