Using tables and flow charts to visualize and plan automated email communications

Research shows that behavioral email communication is a powerful technique. Planning and optimizing an automated email campaign strategy empowers marketers and managers to follow-up online customer actions to help increase conversion to sale at a low cost. Here are some common examples of event-triggered email sequences: Welcome sequence for a new subscriber or lead to an email list Welcome sequence for new customer (onboarding) Reactivation of customers or subscribers who lose engagement Abandoned shopping cart follow-up emails Shoppers browse or search on a site but don't buy follow-up Time to repurchase or replenishment emails However, the technique is still used by relatively few companies. One barrier to setting up these event-triggered email sequences is the time it takes to specify the sequences if it's a new approach to the company or agency. A great benefit of event-triggered e-mails is that once set…

Predictive analytics can help ensure you're sending the right kind of email messages to the right customers at the right time in order to improve results.

Using predictive analytics to power up email marketing is nothing new, but it is becoming increasingly popular these days - particularly for e-commerce businesses. The reason for this is that predictive analytics help companies make smarter and faster decisions. Check out the below graph of how predictive analytics, along with AI, help companies in different ways: It's no surprise that email marketing features in this list as it is 40% more effective in acquiring new customers than Twitter and Facebook combined. If you want to market smarter, predictive analysis is the way. Here's how it can power up your email marketing strategy:

Activation or acquisition

Whether you want to send a welcome email, discount…

Chart of the day: Email marketing tips to innovate your strategy

When it comes to email marketing, there’s always some discussion about its relevance as a digital marketing channel, in the fast-paced world of instant messaging and social media. However, each time it comes out as a winner in the debate. Email platforms can be used to deliver specific, personalised and prolonged marketing communications to your user-base, making it vital for marketers to use this channel to its full potential and innovate their email marketing strategy. A recent chart on MarketingCharts shows the various different ways in which companies want to innovate their email marketing strategy in 2018, as compared to 2017. Creative use of behavioural triggers, use of dynamic content and automation to trigger one-to-one communication are right up there, as more than 50% of  to try these creative…

Why you need an email strategy for 2018 - the best behavioural email marketing predictions for the coming year

It’s that time of the year when you’ll see a wave of marketing predictions for the forthcoming year. While they may seem ubiquitous, predictions do play an important role. They act as a reset button in the mind of the marketer. They allow us to reflect on the year that’s passed and contemplate whether we managed to achieve what we set out to do at the beginning of the year.

Join Komal Helyer, Marketing Director of Pure360, one of eight speakers, for a practical webinar on Behavioural Email Marketing predictions for 2018. Learn the strategies brands will execute to recover lost revenue and increase sales uplift online, using behavioral email marketing.

They also - importantly -give us a rare chance to look further into the future than we normally afford…

Chart of the Day: However, email attention spans are increasing

Concentrate, my little email geeks First of all, let's give goldfish a bit of credit. It has been proved that Goldfish do not have a 9-second attention span, it's a complete myth. And yes, they do in fact have a larger attention span than humans. Slightly Awkward. We are all guilty of it. We have so many distractions in this digital world. In fact, even while writing this, I have got distracted twice already. I'm currently listening to "white noise meditation" music and currently very focused... ooh something shiny!

What about email?

You will be pleased to learn that email is an entirely different kettle of fish (so to speak). The average time spent reading an email has increased to nearly 7% in the past 6 years. In 2016 the average time spent reading…

Chart of the Day: How Length and Personalization Impact Email Performance

The Email Urban Legend

I'm not talking about those awful email chain letters from the 1990s. I'm talking about "keep your subject line length short". We all have heard this, right? I call this an email urban legend because it had never been correctly tested but it has always been accepted. But is this correct? Should we just accept these email legends?

Always question

It's hard to know what is an email urban legend and what is researched advise. The answer is to always look for research statistics. 10 years ago, short subject lines probably were true, but with a number of different devices available is that still true?

Chart

If we look at some authentic research like the chart below, we can see that only 5% of the emails in the research had a…

A case study in how to reduce the time spent preparing and deploying brand emails.

Most ecommerce retailers run a permutation of some or all of the following platforms and systems; ecommerce software, CMS, CRM and each of them store valuable data about their customers or products. This data can and should be leveraged in your marketing endeavors. Today, we’ll let you know how fashion retailer Brandshop did just that using the ExpertSender platform. Brandshop is a Russian multi-channel (online and offline) fashion retailer that sells a wide range of products from over 100 world famous brands, including clothing, accessories, footwear, and beauty products. Problem: Brandshop wanted to save their marketing team some serious time in the email creative creation process. They wanted to find a way to make use of their extensive website content library within their email campaigns to drive sales…

Chart of the Day: How to not get lost in your customer's inbox

Subject lines are important to email marketing, but they are a complete pain in the arse. (And don't get me started on pre-headers!) I spend a good portion of my time toiling with subject lines. Testing how they look in email clients, making sure I don't include any spam words and working on the actual copy. A common practise email marketers use, is to include a promotion in the subject line, but does it have any effect? That's what the below chart discusses. If we look at the average for all the offers compared to no offer at all, it's clear to see that the subject lines with no offer work better with the Click-to-Open (CTO) of 9.4% compared to 7%! This disproves what email marketers have done for years. But if we think about it, it's not surprising.…

1 to 1 dynamic content personalisation is the future of email marketing

I am a big fan of automation, a very big fan. Whenever you can, automate part of your email marketing process. While delivering timely, personalized and relevant content, automation is a big step forward in email marketing maturity of any program. So, the next big thing is Email Content Automation. Few email marketers are currently using it but it’s about to be the hottest trend – and a trend that’s here to stay. Realistically a lot of production time goes into curating, copy-pasting and sorting content. Then there’s compliance and the multiple people who have to give their stamp of approval, checking details they shouldn’t be worrying about. It can take all your time just to manage and get “business as usual” email out of the door. Often that is a huge waste of creative power, time and resources. Wouldn’t…

Chart of the Day: What challenges you when it comes to email marketing? Part 3 of 4.

For email marketers, there will always be aspects of email marketing that are a challenge. This is the third of my four part series pertaining to issues faced in email marketing. We will be looking at the following during the course of the series: Targeting & Segmenting Subscriber list growth Tracking results Main email marketing goal. The third challenge in the series is "Tracking results". Tracking results isn't necessarily the issue, but knowing what to track is. Having the correct Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is extremely important because you need to know if your campaign has performed well. But metrics vary from business to business. In the chart, we see that the Subscriber list growth is the highest metric tracked at 25% and on the other end of the spectrum is the open rates…