Have you felt struggled trying to create an email marketing campaign? Email is a complex aspect of marketing. The landscape always changes. We have listed our top tips on how digital marketing apprentices can improve their email campaigns.
Choose the right email marketing software.
Email marketing is a powerful marketing tool, so it is important to make sure that you are using the right software to improve your marketing campaign. Email marketing software’s include tools that are able to increase your audience, segment your lists and provide reports to grow your business and earn more revenue. Below is a list of 10 free email marketing campaigns to help you save both time and money:
While the ultimate goal of email marketing is to grow your business, you need to realize that promotions are not the core of email marketing. The most important aspect of your email marketing must be to establish and nurture healthy relationships with your customers. It is these healthy relationships that will result in customers providing lifetime value and act as the driving force of your business’ growth.
A/B testing is a must.
Always test important elements in your campaigns to help you constantly improve your campaigns. A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a way of working out which of two campaign options is the most effective in terms of encouraging opens or clicks. In an A/B test you set up two variations of the one campaign and send them to a small percentage of your total recipients. Half of the test group is sent to Version A, while the other half gets Version B. The result, measured by the most opens or clicks, determines the winning version. This is then sent to the remaining subscribers.
Preview your emails before sending.
As every subscriber is important to you, using previews will help you find the optimal format and layout for different platforms. You want to avoid any mistakes in your campaign
Experiment with send times.
Experimenting with send times is a great way to get to know your audience. Try sending email campaigns at different times and see what email receives the most engagement. Over time, you should start to see patterns and be able to pinpoint what works best for your email marketing.
Have a personalised message.
Personalisation is one of the most important elements you need to strive to nail in every campaign. However, many people have misunderstood personalisation to mean addressing a subscriber by name. While that is part of it, there’s more to personalisation such as:
Being relevant
Sending timely emails
Anticipating your subscriber’s needs
Add GIFs to your email campaigns.
Adding GIFs to your email is a great way to grab your subscribers attention, point them toward an action you want them to take, or keep them scrolling to make sure they get your whole message.
Pay attention to subject lines.
Subject lines are one of the most important aspects of email marketing. The subject line of an email is the single line of text people see when they receive your email. This one line of text can often determine whether an email is opened or not, so make sure it’s optimized for your audience.
Keep on doing tests on your emails.
Testing your email campaigns is important because it ensures that your campaign looks the way you want it to. This way, you know how the campaign will display on different browsers or email clients. Furthermore, testing lets you figure out what’s working with your campaigns and what’s not.
Conclusion.
In summary, email marketing is an effective marketing method when it is done correctly. By following these tips, digital marketing apprentices will be ready to create amazing email marketing campaigns.
To subscribe to our mailing list or to see more information on apprenticeships please visit our site ApprenticeTips.com
There are so many different marketing methods out there nowadays, especially with the rise of digital marketing, that it can often be difficult to pinpoint which methods will be most successful in reaching your audience. Luckily, there are a few trustworthy methods that prove their effectiveness time and time again – one of which is email marketing! While it can be daunting starting an email marketing campaign from scratch, especially as a digital marketing apprentice, there are plenty of free tools to help break it down. This blog is one of them, and I’m going to go over some of the major do’s and don’ts of implementing an email marketing campaign to hit as many competencies in your Level 3 Digital Marketing Apprenticeship as possible!
Email Marketing Do’s
Use a Free ESP (Email Service Provider) There are plenty of tools available online for free that can make the process of preparing and distributing an email campaign much easier. Platforms such as MailChimp and SendGrid offer built-in segmentation tools to segment your audiences, as well as drag-and-drop email editing and easy-to-navigate analytics reports. Using a tool like these simplifies the process, reducing the need to manage mailing lists and content in separate applications. If that wasn’t enough, using an ESP properly and effectively to build an email campaign can contribute towards multiple competencies, including but not limited to implementation, technologies, written communication, and analysis.
Segment Your Audience
As mentioned above, it’s important to segment your audience to ensure that you are sending the most relevant content to each group. There are four types of audience segmentation:
Geographic Segmentation Grouping audiences together based on geographical location and borders.
Demographic Segmentation Grouping audiences together based on demographic, such as age, gender identity, education level etc.
Psychographic Segmentation Grouping customers based on traits such as their personalities and interests.
Behavioural Segmentation Grouping customers based upon their decision making and purchase history.
As an example, if you were to run an email newsletter based on fashion trends and industry news, it may make sense to use demographic or behavioural segmentation. Demographic segmentation could be used to segment audiences based on their gender identity, to ensure they are only receiving information on trends that impact them. Likewise, behavioural segmentation could be used to segment audiences based on their purchasing history, and to break audiences down into those who have purchased different items, i.e. purses, handbags, shoes, clothes etc.
Not only will segmenting your audience lead to higher open and click-through rates, but you will again meet several competencies from the Level 3 Digital Marketing Apprenticeship, including research, implementation, and digital tools.
Utilise A/B Testing A/B testing is a method whereby two almost identical emails are sent to two different test groups, with the aim of finding out which is most effective and produces the best results/analytics. It’s important to note that when conducting A/B testing of an email, the elements that are changed should be kept to a minimal amount. If too many features are different, such as the subject, preheader, imagery and links, then it may be difficult to determine exactly which feature/s impacted the results. In contrast, using only a different subject line and preheader for both emails will enable you to easily track what impacted the results, with whichever one having a higher open rate and generally better metrics being the ‘winner’. Since A/B testing is conducted with just a small sample of your total audience, the ‘winning’ email can then be sent out to the rest of your audience knowing that the more effective and impactful subject and pre-header are being used.
Email Marketing Don’ts
Send Emails for the Sake of it Since there are particular competencies and projects you may need to complete for your Level 3 Digital Marketing Apprenticeship, it could be tempting to put together an email marketing campaign and send the emails out in quick succession to ensure you meet the competencies. This could have the opposite effect though, as it is one of the quickest ways to lose your audience’s interest, and can lead to a dramatic increase in unsubscribes and spam reports. If you’ve taken the time to segment your audiences and curate content that is relevant and engaging to them, you don’t want to overdo the emails and bombard them with too many! It’s important to create and adhere to a campaign schedule for email marketing, which should evenly space out emails and prevent too many being sent close to each other. This could lead to audiences losing interest in your content, and may result in email providers marking your emails as spam/junk, further damaging your campaign’s analytics.
Forget to Check Your GDPR Compliance Since the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) was enshrined in UK law via the Data Protection Act 2018, it is vital that every email you send adheres to these regulations and legislation. Every email marketing campaign must include the sender’s physical address within each email, whether it be an office address, home address, or PO Box. In addition, you must also provide a way for email recipients to easily change their preferences or opt out of all email communications from you. This is usually found at the bottom of an email, with buttons stating ‘Unsubscribe Preferences’ and ‘Unsubscribe Completely’. By including these simple elements, you are ensuring that your emails are GDPR-compliant and mitigate the risk of any legal or financial backlash.
Use Too Many Images Finally, don’t use a lot of images in one email! While it may look nice when you’re designing your campaign, images can have a large impact on email’s loading times, and may not even display due to data limitations on mobile devices. It’s fine to use a couple of images in each email, but using too many images reduces how well your content will display on different devices, and may therefore result in people losing interest in your campaign. If you are including imagery in your email campaign, be sure to test the email before sending, and view the email on multiple devices and platforms to ensure the content and imagery are optimised and fully visible on every one.
Conclusion
While it may seem a daunting task with too many technical aspects to remember, building an effective email marketing campaign can reap sizable rewards for your company. If you stick to best practice and the advice above, you can easily build and schedule an amazing email marketing campaign that takes care of itself, with you only needing to monitor the analytics once each email is sent. In turn, you should have a brilliant campaign to include in your portfolio for your Level 3 Digital Marketing Apprenticeship, and hopefully have ticked off quite a few competencies along the way!
New to Digital Marketing? Read below to find out about Digital Etiquette – how to behave online.
Whether you are just beginning your Digital Marketing journey as an apprentice or have been in the industry for a while and would like more information on Digital Etiquette (also known as Netiquette) and online best practices, you are in the right place! Digital Etiquette is a set of rules that promotes appropriate and considerate online behaviour and is also in the digital marketer occupational standard (Technical knowledge).
How to communicate effectively when using digital channels.
There are so many digital channels out there but how do you which to use?
Websites –
Websites are an essential digital channel; they can be used to produce blog posts and appropriate industry content to help customers solve their pain points. Websites can be used for multi-media purposes and allows content to be distributed easily, whether this be infographic, videos or even social media integration. Websites should use a professional tone and be informative, but not confusing. Always use calls-to-actions to generate sales and avoid a high bounce rate.
Email Marketing –
Email Marketing is a fantastic digital channel (when used effectively), so widespread that it reached 3.9 billion users in 2020. There are 4 main types of marketing emails:
Email newsletters- many businesses send out
monthly newsletters to subscribers, giving them exclusive access to
announcements, offers, and even sending ‘how-to guides’ in relation to their
products.
Acquisition Emails- these emails are sent to
those who have signed up to receive emails, but are yet to make a purchase.
Convert Leads to Customers!
Retention Emails-this keeps the conversation
open and allows the consumer to remember the brand, offer discounts or even ask
for feedback.
Promotional Emails-reward those who have
purchased with exclusive discounts, also give a chance to cross sell products.
So what is the netiquette for Email Marketing?
Do not buy databases, you may not be targeting
the correct people. Build your list organically!
Include a clear, catchy subject line
Always add an unsubscribe link (It’s the law)
Personalise the email, this will make the emails even more tailored
Add social icons at the footer of the email- brand awareness, may
increase followers
Importance of branding and the damage that can be done when it is inconsistent.
Brand consistency is extremely important when we talk about Digital Etiquette, why? Brand consistency (logos, brand colours, tone, values) not only builds awareness but also makes companies memorable. When the target audience sees consistent branding across all channels, they’ll be more likely to remember you when buying and see you as a trustworthy source. If brands are not consistent, consumers may question how trustworthy the company is. Inconsistency creates an uneven character for brands.
Hashtags
Why use hashtags?
Branding- #ApprenticeTips builds brand awareness
Relevance- relevant #’s allow those interested in the content to find
what they are looking for
Track campaigns
Reach more people
Hashtags
are important when working on social media and digital platforms, but there is
still netiquette to follow:
Be specific
Use short words/phrases
Join trends, if relevant
Balance content with copy and #’s- don’t overload your copy with
hashtags
Use a hashtag generator to find top #’s
Copyright (credit to images).
Netiquette links nicely with copyright, it states that individuals should obey copyright laws. Copyright is a form of protection given to those who create original works, including content posted online. When in marketing it is essential to choose captivating images, but you can not take just any image from the internet without seeking permission from the author/owner. Instead use copyright free image website like Unsplash and Pexels.
Conclusion
We have
covered a lot of specific information in this post, tailored to the digital
marketer apprenticeship. We have a lot of posts covering the technical elements
of the standard, which may also be helpful to you.
We would love to hear your thoughts on this post! We want to help has many people as possible so please do share this post with those who may find this useful. If you have any questions, feel free to comment below or alternatively follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter to message us directly and to have access to the latest industry news. Latest news is also sent out via email Sign Up here.
Whether you are a new Digital Marketing Apprentice ready to take on Email Marketing or simply want to know how to develop your content as a starter, here is your guide to ensure the maximum results from your campaigns. By creating email marketing campaigns, you can reach more customers and grow your business heavily by putting your company’s name on the radar. In order to achieve your desired results, here are the Top 10 Email Marketing tips which new email marketers should take into consideration.
1. Pick a suitable email marketing platform
The first and probably most obvious would be to decide on which platform best suits your email marketing requirements. The things to take into account are your budget, recipient size, email design and so much more. HubSpot is an amazing tool that allows you to easily redesign and configure your emails for your audience, however, it is a paid feature. A free version that would be suitable for large email lists and designing opportunities would be MailChimp. So as previously mentioned, research heavily into which platform is the best for your company.
2. Segment your audience
Segmenting your audience is the practice of grouping customers who have certain attributes together. You may ask why this would be beneficial, the first reason being personalizing content becomes much easier for future campaigns. Also, measuring results for particular contacts is more accurate and precise.
3. Designing your content
It is extremely important that your email campaigns reflect a similar style to your brand colors and website design. This as a result creates more brand awareness surrounding your company and makes your content look professional and easily identifiable.
4. Personalisation
Personalizing aspects such as Subject Titles/Lines, Intro Texts and more, causes higher open rates as recipients are more likely to open emails that are addressing them directly. This tip also aligns closely with Segmentation as you can increase the relevancy your emails have to your receivers by making your content more personal for different groups.
5. A/B Testing
Also famously known as split testing, A/B testing allows you to test certain elements of your content to help improve your campaign as a whole. Changing small things like one word in your Subject Line can go a long way in terms of measuring the results and seeing which performs better to adapt your future campaigns and see which best suits your audience.
6. Optimising campaigns for Mobile Users
Considering the percentage of users who are more likely to check their emails on their phones, it is crucial to make sure your content is optimized for their device. 70% of users are more likely to open emails on a mobile device so make sure your links work, your font size is readable and your email loads quickly on mobiles.
7. Make sure you have an unsubscribe button
As soul-crushing as it can be to have a dedicated contact unsubscribe from your content, it is crucial you give them the option to opt-out. This ensures you stay in GDPR regulations and also makes sure you stay on the good side of your target audience.
8. Do not spam
Creating a marketing campaign plan before releasing your batch of emails over the next month is very important. This ensures you are not overloading your recipient’s inboxes whilst also creating excitement for your next campaign release. Weekly campaigns are a great way to dive into the email marketing sector as a beginner.
9. Make your CTA contextual
Recipients should know exactly what action you are pushing them to take with one small message as your CTA. Clearly defining your wording such as ‘Read More’ or ‘Buy Now’ pushes the reader to take those desired actions. Another benefit is, good CTAs will drive traffic to your other platforms if the links work correctly.
10. Measuring Metrics and KPIs
The top 3 email metrics to look out for are: Open Rates, Click-Through Rates, Bounce Rates, and Conversion Rates. By measuring these KPIs over a period of time you can develop reports to see which campaigns settled better with the recipients and what sort of content pushed for the best results. With this information, you can cater your future campaigns for their stronger interests.
To reach customers in the most effective manner, follow these tips so you can ensure you get the maximum results for your company – whether you are an apprentice for a start-up or large organization. New and improved email campaign platforms make it easier for you to personalize your content, so you ensure CTAs are perfect and your content focuses on what your audience wants to hear rather than what you want to tell them. See better results, reach more potential customers around the world, and make a memorable impression with our top email marketing tips.
Keep up to date with our new apprenticeship roles or even blog content that will push you in the right direction as an aspiring apprentice, Sign Up to our mailing list and be the first to be alerted.
Is your website traffic lower than expected? Then you came to
the right place my friend! Here are 7 great tips to increase website traffic.
1. Email Marketing, old but gold
There are so many ways to market your brand in 2021, it important not to forget one of the traditional methods of marketing, Email marketing. Something as simple as an email blast can give your website the kick it needs to gain more traffic. Top tip, it’s imperative that you do not do these emails too frequently. People receive so many emails per day already, people are likely to unsubscribe to your email list if you use this method too much.
Email marketing is incredibly versatile, how you thought of using
targeted email? Using your email database, you can use tools such as Mailchimp
to send emails to a specific audience. It could be based on behaviour, geographical
location and based on their interests. You can even personalise the emails by
adding subscriber names to add a personal aspect you the email.
2. Be active on socials
Using social media to increase website traffic is one of the best and cost efficient ways to create awareness for a campaign as it’s easy and completely free! For short and snappy content with a good image/video/gift, Twitter is your best bet. In contrast, using Linkedin (predominantly used for connecting professionals) you would aim to use a more formal tone and engage the reader with a story or blog post.
3. Optimise your page using SEO (Search engine optimisation)
Another cost-efficient way to increase traffic for a brand is using SEO. Ensuring that the page has healthy keyword density, image alt text, fast page loading time and having secure backlinks to the page can boots organic traffic and build more awareness for your brand.
4. Invite a guest to your blog
Guest Blogging is a great way to gain exposure to a new audience.
Identifying known bloggers and social media influencers that fit with your
target audience and getting them to guest blog on your brand website is a great
way to expose your brand to a new audience as they are likely to share it on their
socials and which should bring more traffic to your website.
5. Display banner advertising
Having great imagery and engaging text on a web banner will attract people into clicking the link and finding out more about your brand and website. Ensure that the banners are on websites that the target audience is likely to visit.
6. Take a deep dive into your website analytics
Using specialist tools like Google Analytics can be a game-changing source of information on everything about your website. It can tell you what is the most popular page, bounce rates, demographics and even who is on your page at this very moment. You can leverage this information by analysing and using this to optimise your strategy. If a particular post is popular, why not make more content about a similar topic and see how it performs? See how, where and when you get visitors on your website and where exactly are they coming from?
7. Grab user’s attention with Video marketing
Studies suggest that retention is remarkably higher for visual material over text. Text on websites and blogs are a very important aspect of gaining more traffic on your website. However, videos can both attract new visitors and make your website a lot more entertaining, it grabs your audience’s attention and has the ability to drive your website traffic up at the same time – it’s a win-win!
I hope these tips help you on your mission for more website
traffic. Even if you get one of these right, you should be a boost in traffic.
Thanks for reading!
Want to learn top tips for email marketing in 2020? From audience segmentation to dynamic content, email marketing is the strategy of sending emails and cultivating relationships with your customers and prospects to ultimately drive engagement, revenue and retention. Email marketing is one of the many digital standards and technical skills I have learnt on my path to become a digital marketer through the level 3 Digital marketing apprenticeship. As a result here are some of my key takeaways for email marketing best practices to make your campaigns stand out from the crowd!
1. Segment your email marketing target audience
Firstly, don’t just send a generic uninspiring email to a mass audience and hope for the best. In email marketing, segmenting your target audience is key to brand loyalty by providing the customer with relevant content based on their wants, needs, values and interactions with your brand or service. As a result there are typically, are 4 market segments which are commonly used to define the consumer:
Demographic segmentation
This has several variables such as age, gender, family size, income, occupation, religion, race and nationality. Demographic segmentation is the best place to start planning your email segmentation strategy. Segmenting your audience by one demographic identifier, can open several opportunities to massively increase email personalisation, so you can target your customers with the products or services they want.
Behavioural segmentation
This style of segmentation is based on the consumers behavior such as their decision making pattern and what actions your prospect takes at each touch point in the customer journey. What pages are your customer looking at on your site? What journey did they take on your website? A simple way to analyse behavioural segmentation is to add tracking codes across your customer touch points. As a result this will give you a wealth of knowledge in understanding how your consumers are interacting with your email campaigns, website and where the rest of the customer journey takes them.
Geographical Segmentation
Is a great way to divide your customer segments by geography. You can implement geographical segmentation to target your audience by their location based on the products or services you offer.
Psychographic segmentation
This focused around the lifestyle of people such as their activities, social beliefs, social status, values and attitudes. It is similar to behavioral segmentation but considers the psychology of the consumer in line with their buying behavior.
2. How to use different types of email marketing campaigns to target audiences
Once you have analysed you audience and segmented them effectively, you can start sending your email campaigns. Email campaigns can be broken down into the following list:
Welcome emails or a welcome series campaign
This is the first type of campaign you should send to all new subscribers. It’s normally the campaigns that generates the highest engagement and open rates. It’s a balance of providing the consumer with educational, promotional and incentive driven campaigns as well as offering them the opportunity to shop.
Promotional email campaigns
This campaign style has the ultimate goal of increasing revenue. As a result, it should be focused around selling your product or service with a bold CTA (call to action) button. Do be sure to include the promotion as the main focus at the top of your email and also include further value with free content. This could be educational or anticipates what other products the customer may like to view.
Loyalty and reward Campaigns
This type of campaign can offer a wealth of value to the consumer and nurture your brand relationship with them. For example you could send your customer rewards or a discount as part of a VIP scheme.
Behavioural email campaigns
Are types of campaigns based on the consumers interaction with your brand as well as the action they have taken on your website or app. As a result, these are broken down into triggered, transactional, behavioural and automated emails. For example, if your customer has abandoned their basket on your website you could send an email to tell them they still have items in their basket.
Surveys, testimonial or asking for reviews
This campaign style is a great way to gain insights into your product or services and how you can evolve your business or service, as well as your digital strategy based on direct reviews from the consumer.
Newsletters, company announcement
These types of emails are key to keeping the consumer engaged with your brand, as a result of announcing new products or services and building brand advocacy. These types of campaigns should be a consistent touch points in your email marketing strategy.
3. Boost your email marketing engagement with relevant content
Email marketing has moved on since its infancy of sending simple static emails to consumers with a hard sell. As a result, it’s more about nurturing that relationship and building brand advocacy to drive their attention to valuable content with your business goals in mind.
This is where the content creation comes in, ensuring there is a relevant message for every customer at every open. There are some top email marketing platforms and software out there, proven to improve your email campaign engagement, such as recent trends in:
Kinetics
Gamification tactics
Countdown timers / time targeting
Device targeting
Image personalisation
Store locators
Weather forecasts
Scratch to reveal elements
Real time data content through API
Real time UGC
Video
4. Optimize your email marketing campaigns for mobile
Did you know that the main device used for viewing email campaigns is mobile? The practice of optimizing your email campaigns for mobile is essential to drive consumer engagement, open rates and clicks. A good starting for mobile ready campaigns is to:
Use email marketing tools to create mobile-ready templates
Create a shortened compelling subject line which will read well on a smaller screen with a maximum of 30 characters
Check your pre-header is no longer than a maximum of 50 characters
Optimize your image and video assets for mobile view
Test your email using tools such as the litmus platform so you can see how your campaign is displayed on different mobile devices
Link the customer to a mobile ready landing page and website
Track your campaign metrics by device
5. Test, analyse and review your email marketing campaigns
One of the most important practices you can do in any digital marketing strategy is to analyse your success and this same approach is applied to your email marketing campaigns. Below I have listed some of the key metrics for email marketing statistics to track success:
Open rate
Unique open rate
Click through rates
Unsubscribe rate
Conversion rate
Bounce rate
6. Always be GDRP compliant
Since May 2018 it became a legal requirement to include a privacy policy and unsubscribe link in all email campaigns, because the consumer needs to be able to access how their personal data is being used and stored by a business. Without these links you are in breach of being GDPR compliant and therefore breaking the law. You are also in dangerous territory of damaging your brand image and relationship with your consumers. As a result the links need to be clearly visible in your email content, normally found in the footer elements of an email.
So there you have it, the email marketing best practices I have learned as part of the level 3 digital marketing apprenticeship. If you apply these tips to your email marketing strategy it can only lead to success in your digital marketing plan, along with keeping up to date with the latest email campaign trends and tools to become an email marketing specialist.
Want to learn more?
Has this inspired you to learn more? Do you want to expand your skill set and find out more about what a digital marketer does? Then why not embark on the exciting journey of a level 3 digital marketing apprenticeship and a career in digital marketing. Click here to find out more.
Follow the apprenticeship conversation
Join the apprenticeship community to stay up to date with our top tips, best practices and latest Apprenticeship information by following us on social media Twitter or LinkedIn.
