Some call it old-school, but email marketing is still among the most effective channels out there. In this week's Whiteboard Friday Rand looks at some fundamental tactics of email marketing, including how to build and engage your list and how these strategies both compare and dovetail nicely with the SEO practices you already know so well.
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Email Marketing and SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
I would put it to you that if you were Amazon.com, wasting 3 emails on massaging your client base would be a waste of time and money.
There are many situation when people sign up and EXPECT to be sold to and to get special rates and offers etc. Taking 3 emails to get to that point would be counter productive.
The key is to understand what you are marketing and think about the most effective way to target customers. I see where you are coming from with this video, but it definitely only applies in certain situations.
First of all, THANK YOU RAND.
Finally - an industry respected SEO validating the power and ability of email. I've been banging this drum since social sedia bubbled up and everyone went gaga over Twitter.
Email is still an extremely powerful and heavy ROI laden vehicle for growing online revenue. I've been in the industry 7 years and have yet to see a "SLUMP" due to it being obsolete or irrelevant. I've also watched internet marketers descredit email as being, 'old-school'; treating it like an ugly step child. Only using it when the rest of their ideas fail or lead gen is down.
To anyone who thinks email is 'old-shool', you're sadly mistaken.
Again, thank you Rand. This will be the topic of my next YOUMOZ!
I totally agree, when you get down to it, far more people use email than they do social media, especially so when it comes to doing business. People tend to forget that.
My question to the social gurus is: when did email become anti-social?
The pillars of revenue online for most of my clients are: email, ppc and seo. We've yet to gain vast amounts of traction in the social realm due to it's infancy and noncommercial tendancies.
Sure, I've seen some revenue with social, but it's mostly hit and miss. Reputation management appears to be the only benefit so far for me. Understanding how the company is percieved and how the company can engage users and potential customers better is our core social focus.
Email rocks the house for $$.
I would go even further and say the parallels between email marketing and SEO are pretty strong. The need for strong technical implementation, an analytical mindset and testing / research while always maintaining a focus on content.
I've been experimenting with more email for Distilled recently and I actually love it. I'm enjoying avoiding (for the most part) a "how can I grow my list" focus and instead making sure everyone who gets my emails really wants them. It's *so* powerful. Permission marketing at its finest.
In some of my previous work I did a great deal of email marketing and everything Rand says in this video rings true. If you deliver content that is relevant (there's that word again!) and timley to a persons interest you will get them hooked.
The 4th point is probably the most important of the video. Keep them interested, deliver real content not just "Buy Now" etc and you will reap the rewards down the line.
If I had to recommend an email marketing provider (having sent hundreds of thousands of mails for and on behalf of clients in a large UK web agency) I'd go for Campaign Monitor. Personal choice but thought I'd share my experience.
In step 4, you're suggesting we don't market to our subscribers in the first few emails we send them. That makes sense, and is good advice, but I'm wondering how to implement that when your subscriber list is always growing, and when you're regularly sending out content (like once a month for example.)
It's a challenge to keep track of how many emails each subscriber has received and make sure your marketing skewed email only goes to people that have already received 3 or more non-marketing emails.
At least, I'm guessing that this is a challenge.
I can imagine how to do it with a custom programmed mailing list package, but can this be done with the mailout services like ConstantContact? Does anyone know of any services that let you manage your mailouts with this level of detail?
Also: nice hair :)
I don't know how ContactContact works, but I do know that there are email packages that allow you to go to this level of detail.
The specific mails are sent to the subscriber at regular intervals from their individual opt-in date. It's all taken care of automatically - you just configure the settings, create the mail content, and promote the opt-in form.
Aweber and Get Response are two entry level services that allow for this. They seem to be pretty good from what I've seen, but I have only had limited experience with them. So if anyone else has info to the contrary please share.
We recently started using mailchimp which is really good for the kinds of list we have built (low thousands).
Yeah, Mailchimp is really a good one, and it's free for websites has low subscribers :D
Whitespark,
I noticed the hair, also. Is Rand using more product these days?
The applicability of the advice definitely varies depending on the size of your business and the resources available to you. I own a small ecommerce business and use Constant Contact, which works quite well from my perspective, but it doesn't offer the level of granularity that Rand is suggesting here.
Since most systems provide an auto-responder feature to any new newsletter signup - perhaps that is a way to send useful, non-sales information as your first contact with your email newsletter subscriber.
I do think that offering a newsletter or some other free service is a way to engage a customer that isn't ready to purchase immediately.
As always, I look forward to enjoy Whiteboard Friday's. Planning to take the plunge and become a Pro member.
You can segment your list so that you send regular updates to everyone that's subscribed for 1 month or more, and send only auto-responders to newcomers (subscribed for less than 1 month)
Note the "1 month" is just an example.
Hope this helps,
Cosmin.
Wow, that was a painful process to sign up for this site just so I could leave a comment.
Anyway... My question is: Does e-mail marketing work to get *new* customers, rather than just keeping the customers you have?
Why would a person who is not a customer sign up to an e-mail list for a product/service they don't buy? (In my case it's a free service, but there's lots of competition.)
I'm interested in everyone's thoughts.
Yes email marketing definitely works to get new customers.
People sign up for lists if they feel an incentive to do so. Therefore, what you need to do is provide your users with something they see as valuable, in return for providing you with their email address.
Information can be valuable valuable, and it's free to distribute.
Did you not just answer your own question when you signed up to leave your comment on here?
You signed up to a "free" message board to leave a comment and ask a question of someone that you obviously feel has more knowledge than you, based on a free snippet of video content.
You are now in the loop for seomoz's email marketing (as I am sure you expect to be). I would think you may get a few messages from seomoz that will offer you some more freee insight to a topic which you obviously find relevent, SEO.
After the third message, expect to receive offers for becoming a pro member.
Welcome to the fold!
Hm, interesting. Ok, so how would that work for a public school district? We ultimately want people outside our district boundaries to enroll in our schools. But why would they go to another district's website for education/parenting advice?
From the top of my head I immediately think of the type of information a parent would seek.
I would try to highlight the positive aspects of your school district compared to the others in the area. Make available things such as statistics showing your district as being superior in whatever areas your district is suceeding in. (ie. test scores for grade 1 thru grade 6 are on average x% better than the average of the surrounding districts; x% of students go on to post secondary from your district.) Basically, poise your district as the superior choice when it comes to acedemics as well as athletic and extra curricular activities.
Offering this type of information for free and then asking for a signup to your newsletter where you will share additional information throughout the year, will generate the sign-ups. Once the parent is signed up, continue to market to them by providing additional info such as teacher profiles, district awards, callendar of events, etc.
The trick is to get the parents to the site. This is going to be a challenge as there is little need for a parent to seek information about school districts outside of their childs school website.
I would imagine that search for school district information is done rarely by parents or kids. So, your best avenue will definately be social, such as Facebook, myspace, Twitter, etc.
You may also try to generate some interest in competing districts by getting a local newspaper editor to digest the same information and pehaps suggest a storyline to them that would focus on the competing districts. Of course, you would direct said newspaper report person to your information and encourage him to suggest that parents go to your website for further information.
Another thing that pops into my mind is that I didn't even know that you could switch school districts. I would try to get that message out as well because there could be some parents that are frustrated with their kids acedemic performance, interpersonal relationships, etc. Just getting them the message that there is the option to switch districs without the need to move to said district, could be enough to get you a few new enrollments.
Good luck!
My company's main focus is our permission-based ESP platform - so we definitely have a lot of people asking these questions. I constantly have to explain to people that not only do we not rent, buy or share email lists, we won't even let them send lists they have aquired in this fashion. What we do stress is offering ways to help them build up a solid opt-in list with both online and offline strategies. Sure it takes time and effort, but your ROI in the long run will be very evident.
"Some call it old-school" - hah, I like that - but email marketing is on the rise and I would go so far as to say radio and tv advertising are old-school.
Compelling content, effective calls-to-action and a killer esp with deep reporting makes all the difference within email marketing.
I think a lot of advertisers forget to optimize their actual email content as well. I personally value being able to submit my newsletters on our blog, promote (gracefully) via social media so optimizing my content is key.
And you are completely right about the compelling data on your newsletter sign-up page - this is something I'm currently working on...as we are guilty of not putting enough efforts into our own sign-up page and focusing on our clients.
I'm going to keep this whiteboard Friday in my explanation arsenal for those who just do not get it. Thanks Rand.
Nice intro for beginners. Liked it a lot.
Really we found a very usefull stuff regarding the relation in between email marketing and seo it would be the nice combination for generate the leads and the customers and proff to boost web site promotions.
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I've just sent out my first marketing email as a new business and I have received good response and an indication for positive ROI. I spent lengths to ensure that the spam score was minimal and that copy was tight to engage the recipient immediately.
i just shared with our email marketing manager. Great ideas on collaboration.
Yep, as proud as I am of the incredible ROI you can get from SEO, you can get even higher rates from email marketing done well.
The biggest crossover between email and SEO that you covered here is "give aweseome stuff away for free" - this is of course also how you get the linkerati to link to you in SEO. I would love for some of the commercial email lists I'm on to think along these lines rather than giving endless offer emails. But there's the opportunity - hardly anyone's doing that (esp in sales based businesses) - so if you're a online hardware store actually emailing out monthly tips on DIY projects rather than "25% off our bestselling rawl plugs this weekend", you're on to a winner IMO. Great email lists build fantastic, loyal communities which also can have amazing impacts on your SEO (links) and Social Media (brand advocates).
You are spot on... many clients want to just send constant offers back to back to back, not even that good of offers. We try to get our clients to focus on a mix of content because the results are amazing... a list that gets 15-20% read rates from offer-only mailings generally increase 10-15% when they start personalizing the emails, providing information about the brand, employees, local events,
Jason
Rand, do you have a cold or something at the moment? You looked / sounded a little peaky!
On a more relevant note, it occurred to me to make email signup CTA's much more prominent / visible on the lower revenue / research based contact types. Thanks for that and see you in October!
the most significant challenge I perceive with this email marketing tactic, from experience on working on email marketing campaigns for the public sector, is to have solid content development support strategy. Like everything, if you have good copywriters enthusiastically writing useful content, it seems like a very decent approach to selling your products/services. thanks for one more WBF, guys, it's great stuff
solid content development support strategy - sorry, i didnt understand this, can you explain it a bit more?
Some good advice in here especially directing people to useful info and building trust. I think this one inspired me to dig a little further into the benefits of email marketing.
Love the shirt, Rand, where did you get it from?
E-mailing Marketing should not be abused, choose your campaigns wisely as over e-mailing could have a detrimental effect of your brand image.
Also when buying a e-mail base, please do your reseach there are companies who sell contacts collected with unethical methods.
Other than the warnings e-mail marketing is a great way to engage your audence.
Good video Rand!
Email marketing is very much a science and I think too many people try and hit a sales home run right off the bat with the first email they send. It is such a turn off as a reader, I am expecting great information and you're telling me to buy now--blah. It's a great tip to hold back on that first sales email until a rapport is established.
One thing that wasn't said but could have been is testing; just like PPC there are important factors that need to be constantly tested with your email campaign. A few are:
You can see large changes between sending Monday the first week of the month at Noon verses that say day at 4pm in terms of Open and CTR rates.
As Rand mentioned the increase in even a small percentage of subscribers or opens as you fine-tune your email campaign can lead to a major increase in revenue.
Really liked this Whiteboard Friday. Now the work: what can I share/impart to those arriving on my site? I generally want my site to be found by those seeking my type of service but perhaps I can add other value. Mmmm, I think I'll have to think it out again!
Thanks Rand.
Very useful information Rand. I look forward every Friday to these.
Useful stuff. One of my clients is just getting ready to launch a massive email campaign and they paid for the distribution list. I should use this information to advise them how they can build there own over time and save money while increasing ROI/Conversion by only delivering to people who are EXPECTING mail from them rather than immediately regarding it as commercial spam. As alway love the white board fridays!
One of our major clients use us to manage their list grown from people 'actually' interested in their products, and they have another company who has an 'industry specific' list which they bought rent.
What I did as soon as I found this out was generate a separate Google Analytics source code (utm_source). This allows us to present comparative data on both lists regarding how many visitors goto the site, what they do, and finally how many convert.
It was a really passive way to point out that buying renting lists is not an option that actually does much (as compared to putting the effort into building your own.
Definately opened the clients eyes ;)
Yap, agree. But, I find it extrmely hard to build up the subscription emali list.
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Agree! Seems like it's getting harder to win people's trust. there's been so many dumb-ass marketers promising the world and then spamming people that it's not easy. I suppose the best way to do it is to focus ONLY only building a relationship before you even start thinking of selling anything.
Hey Rand,
Great video!
Nice hair!
Love the shirt, where'd you pick it up?
Do you have a cold?
How's the family?
Well, gotta go!