Engagement Through Email Marketing

This is the final session of the day for me, and it’s by Sundeep Kapur (@eMailYogi). He is going to be talking about how to drive 51 percent engagement from email marketing.

He just said it’s proven that chocolate and peanut butter is like crack for women (well, not verbatim), and there’s actually been studies done on this [nudging Virginia]. Now we are doing some yoga. No joke, everyone in the audience is trying a new yoga move. This might be a fun session …

He has three case studies to share with us today, so I’m going to do my best to pull out the nuggets of info that can be beneficial to you.

1. How well do you know your customer? Don’t send the same email to everyone, capitalize on preferences.
2. Can you communicate with empathy? Don’t make it sound like a script, make it natural and conversational.

He runs surveys every year to get insight into types of marketing like mobile. He has some takeaways from the data based on how people use their phones:

• Segment users out from mobile and offer them something unique.
• Do something on social like a survey, make it personal, ask a customized question. A trick on surveys: Make it top heavy. Ask a question upfront so they have an open ended question. The rest becomes easy for the user.

Case Study: Retailer

• A wedding gift registry sends an email after the honeymoon to the couple, showing them what items they did not receive from their registry. This is an example of personalized emails.

Other ideas:

• Instead of word surveys, show pictures and have people click on the images that represent the idea; it’s more interactive this way.
• Predict open rates and click-throughs before you do the campaign.

Case study: Cataloguer

• Have a representative that follows up with the consumer who is a real account-type rep. Attach a name and be ready to have that person talk with the consumer if they call.

Case study: Financial Institution

• ATM machines are mostly repeat transactions. One financial institution decided to integrate offers and opt-in during the transaction. People are more responsive.

What can you do to anticipate the person’s next transaction — what’s next?

More Tips for Emails

• Write actionable subject lines: Insert witty subject line; take your campaigns and narrow down all the subject line ideas.
• Capture data to communicate across channels — segment! Build associations between their interests.
• Optimize and leverage landing pages; we do so little to plan for the landing page. Subject line > campaign > landing page. If you know who the user is, adjust the landing page to personalize to them.
• On deliverability: It’s your responsibility to test your emails.

Security and Deliverability

• SSCAE is the new certification to look at if your ports are tight, if you are protecting consumer interests and things like that.
• When you get phished, you have to quickly educate the top, the front line and let your customer know what they need to do. Create a five-slide presentation on what phishing is and start educating your team members. Then, draft up an email for a rainy day if this happens so you can fire it off quickly. [You can connect with Sundeep for a sample presentation.

Some Final Thoughts

• Know what they want: Ask, observe, imply.
• Do not badger the consumer: Message by channel, put messaging frequency cap.
• Focus on transactional acknowledgements, then turn the receipt into valuable information for the customer.
• Let the consumer choose between offers, they feel empowered that way.
• Speak real language — this is empathy.
• Deliver the deliverable in near real time. In three minutes: 98.5 percent open rate; in 10 minutes: 96 percent open rate; 30 minutes: 87 percent open rate.
• Use intrigue versus incentive.

Move from random acts of messaging across channels to a unified campaign across channels. Then, train your channels.

Check out his site EmailYogi.com for more tips, and specifically check out his latest video on social; he asks to give feedback on it if you have it.

Jessica Lee is the founder and chief creative for bizbuzzcontent Inc., a marketing boutique that focuses on digital content strategy and professional writing services for businesses.

See Jessica's author page for links to connect on social media.