Last week’s stunning and game-changing updates to Google Analytics with multichannel funnels have raised an entirely new set of questions to most email marketers. Given that we now have a way to measure the impact of email beyond just pushing prospects over the line to an immediate sale, what new tactics, strategies, and ideas should we be examining?

Let’s start with the email marketing funnel. For a quick refresher:

Prior to multichannel funnels, most of our email marketing efforts were focused on one of two areas: sending email to leads to compel them to grow into customers, and monthly newsletter because we felt that we had to. With multichannel funnels, we can now more accurately assess our email marketing efforts at every stage of the funnel.

Given this, what can we be doing to increase email’s effectiveness in a measurable fashion? The answer lies in a specific email methodology known as autoresponse campaigns, in which you send timed or triggered email messages to highly targeted lists.

Acquire

Strategy: The most obvious thing you can and should be doing is encouraging sharing, especially social sharing, of your email content. This necessitates having content worth sharing (people rarely share the mediocre, only the wonderfully good and horrifically bad) as well as an encouragement to share.

Tactics: Have great content. If you don’t have great content, then become known as a curator for great content by subscribing to as many reputable blogs in your industry and then putting together lists of curated content in your email. From there, use behavioral autoresponse campaigns for anyone who does share your content to encourage them and incentivize them to share even more.

Convert

Strategy: The path to converting a prospect into a lead, into someone interested in doing business with you, is through value. Provide them as much value as you can practically and reasonably create. Your goal at the convert stage is to become the authority and the only reasonable choice for your prospects to buy from, effectively warming them up for a sale.

Tactics: Use an automated response campaign to send prospects a series of tips, white papers, and other content to maintain presence of mind. For example, if you were a large food retailer, sending original recipes to your subscribers would provide them additional reasons to consider shopping at your store. Food manufacturers have put together free recipe books for years featuring recipes that require the use of the manufacturer’s products.

Grow

Strategy: To grow someone into a customer, you need to accurately understand their budget, need, timeframe, and if you’re selling something that requires participation of more than an individual, authority. Sometimes these criteria happen in the blink of an eye, like the purchase of a pack of gum at checkout. The need is immediate, the budget is whatever spare change is in your pocket, the timeframe is immediate, and the authority is just you. Sometimes these criteria happen over the period of years as companies consider multibillion dollar contracts.

Tactics: Growing a lead into a customer requires constant reinforcement of a structure that marketer Dan Kennedy promotes: P/A/GS/SS. With your email marketing, in your copy and in your campaigns, remind or elicit the problem that your prospective customers have. Incite agitation about the problem, about the opportunity costs or unrealized benefits. Suggest the general solution that addresses the problem, then conclude with your specific solution. Perform this marketing structure with autoresponse campaigns that are triggered off of behaviors from previous emails; for example, if someone subscribes and downloads all of your white papers and attends your webinars, they are indicating through their behavior that they might be ready for a more substantial conversation and would be ideal candidates for a targeted autoresponse campaign.

Retain

Strategy: Once someone’s become a customer, use value-enhancing email to retain them and turn them into evangelists.

Tactics: Building loyalty through autoresponse campaigns is simple (if not easy). From the moment of purchase, send a series of timed autoresponse campaigns providing tips for getting the most out of a purchase. Offer suggestions, ideas, and recipe-like content (“5 new ways to use your email marketing platform”) so that customers continue to increase the amount of value they get from you. Offer frequent encouragement to share post-conversion content as well, as that can then lead to new audience and prospects to reach.

As you set up each autoresponse campaign, make sure that you track them using distinct labels such as [WC Guests] or [WC Influencers] in the subjects. Not only will these labels help customers identify your mail from everything else in their inboxes, it will also help you carefully track what’s working in your multichannel funnels. If you see, for example, [WC Customers] emails showing up in your early acquisition/first touch reports, you know that your evangelists are sharing your post-conversion messages as intended. If you see surprises like [WC Guests] showing up in lead conversion, you know you’ve got some additional research to do for new marketing opportunities.

As we stated last week, multichannel funnels are nothing new conceptually, but their broad availability to marketers at any company and budget size is what’s the game changer. Start using effective autoresponse campaigns to create a consistent, valuable flow of emails to reinforce assisted conversions all along your funnel, and your email ROI will skyrocket as a result.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Strategy, WhatCounts

Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.	Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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What is the best email frequency? How often is too often?

That is one of those questions that is often asked in the world of email marketing. Frequency. Timing. Do I send once per quarter? What about monthly? Or weekly? Is a daily email too much? What about several times per day?

Ready for the answer? The short answer is one that you are not going to love. You already know what it is, but I’ll say it anyway. It depends.

So much of what works in email marketing relies on testing. Test different frequencies, ask your subscribers, and then test again. However, there are 6 general guidelines for frequency that may prove to be useful starting points.

1. You should send quarterly if… you really don’t have much to say or don’t have the time/resources available to say it. One thing to keep in mind is if you send quarterly, your chances of having deliverabilty issues increase. Why? First off, folks are less likely to remember who you are and that they subscribed (delete/spam). Also, the email address could no longer be valid resulting in hard bounces and possible spam traps.
2. You should send monthly if… you have a newsletter. I believe that this is the minimum frequency.  The goal with a monthly email is often to inform. At WhatCounts, we send out monthly newsletters (subscribe here!).  Our newsletters is meant to keep our subscribers up-to-date on the latest happenings at WhatCounts. We include recent blog posts, upcoming events, and other tidbits of email knowledge. However, if your goal is to sell a product or service (think: conversions), monthly is too infrequent.
3. You should send bi-monthly (2x per month) if… you want to hit the sweet spot for most subscribers. It’s a nice balance between monthly and weekly. Most organizations and/or individuals can crank out solid content every few weeks. It’s doable. It’s repeatable. That being said, this is where some pause and say, “Do we have enough to say every other week?” If you are worried about not having enough content every other week, think about ways to pull existing content (blog posts, press releases, website copy) and repurpose.
4. You should send weekly if… you are selling a product or service. This would be the minimum. If you have a sale or an updated service offering or new product, let your subscribers know about it every week. Some choose to send on the same day and time every week. We would recommend testing – always. Remember also that you don’t have to pump out a ton of copy in each email. It can be simple – short and to the point as our client and friend Jason Keath does with The Social Fresh 7. Feature a handful of products. Promote a few blog posts.
5. You should send daily if… you are Daily Candy! That was an easy one. Daily emails can work. The key on these are that you must be able to produce quality actionable, valuable, relevant, and timely content every single day. Most email marketers are unable to keep up with this cadence. And that’s okay.  If you can – and have the resources to pull it off – go for it. The only caution on a daily email is be sure to track your metrics carefully and often. If you see a drop in opens, clicks, or conversions – consider pulling back a bit. If you see complaints and unsubscribes increase – test whether every other day changes those numbers.
6. You should send more than once per day if… you are HARO! If you’ve ever subscribed to Help a Reporter Out (Peter Shankman), you’ll see why more than once per day works. I would not recommend this frequency unless you have super-time sensitive emails like HARO does. This is where automation comes into play, unless you have a large team dedicated full-time to content production and sending emails.

Note: This list does not include automated/triggered emails that can be sent multiple times per day based on a user action or time-based event.

So there you have it. The definitive answer on how often to send email marketing campaigns. Still have questions about email frequency?  Feel free to contact us today and we’ll be happy to advise you on your specific needs.

Photo Credit – Flickr (CC): yandle

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Originally posted by DJ Waldow
Revised and Updated by Michelle Wolverton for WhatCounts.com

Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.	Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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What’s the worst button in the world, the one button as an email marketer you don’t ever want your customers to be pressing?

The moment any customer, any subscriber presses this button, it automatically begins to drastically affect your ability to deliver communications to all of your customers. Subscribers who press this button endanger your entire email marketing list. So how do you prevent this behavior? Make unsubscribing easy and obvious.

This is deeply counterintuitive to many marketers. It’s even offensive to some; having worked hard to build up their lists, they’ll ask why they should make it easy for people to diminish the results of their efforts.

Here’s the bottom line: someone who doesn’t want to receive email from you for any reason will take the easiest way out of getting email from you. If your unsubscribe option isn’t obvious, they’ll flag you as spam and put your entire list in jeopardy. Make it easy and obvious to opt-out, and people will press the “report spam” button less frequently.

Here’s an example from a mailing we did to a list of webinar registrants. At the very top of the mailing, we provided a very obvious, very explicit opt-out notice:

There was absolutely no question where the unsubscribe link was. What were the results? (this is the part that shocks the doubting marketers)

• Sent: 1,657
• Opened: 21.8% (355)
• Clicked: 7.8% (127)
• Opted-out: 0.5% – EIGHT PEOPLE
• Complaint/Flagged as Spam: ZERO

Fewer than 1% opted out of the email. No one reported it as spam.

Offering a way to unsubscribe from a list is the law. Making it easy means that while you will lose a little bit of your list, you are guaranteed to retain the people who want to receive email from you and preserve the quality of your reputation. If you continue to provide value in your email communications, you’ll be able to make unsubscribing easy without significantly reducing the size of your list, and you’ll keep your subscribers away from touching the worst button in the world.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Strategy, WhatCounts

Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.	Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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