This Concise Webinar is about better ways to use email more successfully in business. Smart Tips, Traps and Tools to increase customer engagement, drive customers back to your website, convert more opportunities, generate more sales and provide better customer service & support.
The webinar is presented by Richard Keeves & Paul Murphy. We cover:
Richard: Good morning everybody and welcome to this Concise Webinar. This webinar is on email marketing and I’m very pleased to say that I’m being joined today by Paul Murphy. Paul is with Concise Digital. Paul is a digital marketing coordinator and one of the things that Paul specializes in within concise is email marketing. I’ve invited Paul to join us today to help to present this session. Gareth, you’ll be you’ll be pleased to know he’s having a little vacation right now and I think right now he’s up in Karijini National Park up in just near Broome or that up that way having a fabulous time.
Paul: Nice.
Richard: Yes that’s nice so welcome Paul.
Paul: Thank you Richard and thank you everybody that’s joined the webinar. This is really a webinar that’s just going to take us through some steps of email marketing, going to look at some sequences, some pros and cons of what to do, what not to do, what software is good for each different industry.
Richard: Yes, thanks Paul. For those people who haven’t been to one of our Concise Webinars before welcome. We do try to keep these concise. We try to keep them focused in on business information you can use. These webinars are being or this webinar is being recorded and we’re very happy to take questions as we go through which you can put into the chat. There is also hopefully going to be some time for live Q and A at the end so that is good.
The webinar recordings are up on YouTube and on our Concise website so if you do find that you need to interrupt yourself during this webinar then you are able to watch the recording later and it’ll be up probably within about 24 hours. There we go so with all of that I’m now going to hand over to Paul and over to you Paul. Help us get better results with email marketing.
Paul: Okay, thanks Richard. I’ll just quickly go through these seven points that we’re going to cover. For number one we’re going to cover the types of emails that work best and when to use them. How to improve your open rates, click rates and conversion rates. Number three key things you must get right for successful email campaigns and four, the pros and cons of some popular email systems platforms etc. five is create powerful emails based on customer behaviour and customer value. Six, why and when automation can be good or bad. Seven, the trend to mobile is now more popular.
The first slide we have here I’m going to start with an email sequence and this one’s interesting because when you have a new customer come through it’s the best time to start building your email sequence, building customer relationships and getting a return on an investment by building email sequences. We start with the welcome email and it’s really the beginning of the customer relationship for customers.
Moving on to this slide and the continuation. Welcome emails are the most, have the highest open rates so at 82.21%. That’s really high and it’s the best time to start building the relationship with your customer because they’re more likely to read this email than most than any of them so you have to provide a hub of information. Provide information on what your company is about, why you started even and make the email friendly and welcoming and personalized.
It’s an opportunity to provide information about customer service or you may have a certain particular way of doing business with your customers and you can provide information about that. It’s also an opportunity to maybe provide a special offer coupon where they can come back at a later time and purchase something from you or call you for an offer that you provided them. It just builds up better customer relationships and better return on investment for your email marketing in the long term.
I’ll just click on this next slide. The next email in this email sequence after the welcome email you can send your customers loyalty emails or customer retention emails. Really what you want to come across to your customers with is something about when they made their first purchase you could say to them well, how do you like that product. What do you think? Can you give us some feedback? Is this something that you want to talk about or is there something that you um wanted to ask? How do they like the product? Would you be happy to write a review or a testimonial?
A lot of people will offer up testimonials that I think there’s about 8% to 10% percent of people write testimonials. If you send a testimonial email out to them the customer loyalty emails help increase customer growth. Loyal customers build positive brand reputation for the business. They’re more likely to share your company and recommend or refer your company with friends and family. Building loyalty is very important and that’s one part of an email sequence that you can introduce into your email marketing.
The next email in the sequence that you could also include is a retail sales promotion email this is mainly for e-commerce. I know there’s a lot of service industries out there can do something similar so you need to have a look at your industry and what your offer is and what your company sort of offers. You can always transform any email marketing template into either a service industry based sales promotion or a product industry based sales promotion. It’s an opportunity for retail companies to promote stock clearance sales for example.
It’s also an opportunity to upsell to other products, upsell other products and you can also provide indoor traffic. Traffic into your bricks and mortar store by asking people come in. A lot of people research first online and then they come into the store it’s just an opportunity to get more people into the store and upsell to them when they’re in the store as well. It’s also an opportunity to have share with friends, links on there, share to Facebook, share on social media so that’s just another strategy that you can use to get more customers.
This one’s another one in the email sequence that you could include is the anniversary email. You can send one either six months or 12 months to a new customer after they’ve purchased the product. For example if they purchased a ring or they purchased some jewellery you could send them another relevant anniversary email to them at a certain date. For example you could also if somebody had a tire company or a somebody bought a mag wheel you could send them an anniversary email which could be in six months or 12 months’ time about tyres that suited that mag wheel so there’s lots of different options and lots of different ideas that you can include.
You can have season’s greetings of course, birthday gift offers. You can segment people into a birthday list and it helps build customer retention and brand loyalty. You can always provide an offer in the email, anniversary email that also people appreciate and they can use that anytime. You can put a time limit on the offer as well so they have to buy within a certain time and that helps increase sales.
It’s always important too to remind your customers that you’re thinking of them and you remember them as well. It’s always important to especially in today’s age where a lot of people are now shopping online it’s hard to build customer relationships. Having email marketing and approaching people with messages that yes, we’re thinking of you and here’s a special offer or some sort of a discount perhaps helps build customer loyalty.
One of the other popular emails is the abandoned cart email. If you have an e-commerce store it’s recommended, highly recommended you have abandoned cart email sequence happening because on average 70% of people abandon the shopping cart because a lot of people are looking at shipping costs and they might get side-tracked or they might think I’ll buy that next week or next month.
If you send out a series of abandoned cart emails the recovery rate is between 3% and 11%. I mean like for a lot of e-commerce business that could probably go a long way towards paying for email marketing. The subscription costs and the email costs because it’s a great recovery rate.
Richard: Just on that sometimes ecommerce businesses can double their sales by the use of an abandoned cart email like a cleverly worded and appropriately worded abandoned cart email. Like for example if you’re making 3% conversions and you are able to send, 3% conversions normally in e-commerce and you are able to get let’s say 25% conversions out of it or sorry 11% conversions out of the abandoned cart emails then you can dramatically increase your sales and profitability so it’s major point to consider.
As Paul’s got there the abandoned cart recovery rate typically can be between 3% and 11%. We have people who are getting 20% conversions out of the abandoned cart emails that they send to follow up to people who have abandoned the cart process. Anyway Paul carry on. That’s a really important one though.
Paul: Yes, great. Thanks Richard. Moving on to the next slide um that’s the completion of the email sequence but you can build a sequence that’s it’s just your imagination, up to your imagination how far you want to take it. You can extend them with a lot of email commerce technology and it’s up to the different company and what the different products and services are on offer is going to depend on what sort of sequences are going to be implemented.
We’re moving on to the next subject on how to improve your open rates, click rates and conversion rates. The most important thing is to know who your ideal customers are and building customer personas is really important because you need to have maybe five personas because not every customer is going to be the same. You might have some customers that are females that in the age group of 25 to 45. They might be buying a certain product because they might be buying clothing but some females in between the age of 45 to 65 might buy something different. Knowing who your customers are, your ideal customers and building personas so that you can write content for those specific personas is the best way to write messages and write relevant content that your audience want to read.
Richard: Just on that, just to explain in case you’re not sure what a persona is. A persona is a written description of that particular customer, of a typical customer in that particular customer segment. The more that you can personalize the persona, you may call the person by a name, you can describe what their interests are, what they’re looking for, what their intentions are when they come onto your website, what they like, what they don’t like and the more that you can describe that and get very clear about that person as being an example, a typical example of the person within that customer segment.
The more that you can do that and the clearer you are with it the more that you can make sure that you’re writing to that person. If you’re writing the email to that person and the more that you can personalize that to the persona that is representative of the segment then the more that you can focus in on those results. When you then start targeting emails to that particular segment and you target a different email to another particular segment then you can start really getting results which leads into Paul’s next point about relevant content.
Paul: We’ll go to the next slide because that continues on from what Richard just mentioned there. Improving your open rates, click rates and conversion rates continued. The importance of the relevant content is also includes saving money because you don’t want to write content that’s not providing a solution to a problem for your personas or your customers out there. If you’re not writing relevant content people are going to be, you’re going to be sending emails to the wrong audience because you don’t understand the audience.
Understanding the audience is all about reducing sending unwanted emails that are just going to bounce or they’re going to get unsubscribed and they’re going to cost you extra money. It’s important to have your content really specific. Minimizing unwanted emails also increases your conversion rate because you’re not targeting people that aren’t interested and that reduces your conversion rate and it reduces your return on investment because you want the highest conversion rate you can possibly get.
It’s also important to reduce your unsubscribe rates because you need to verify or authorize your domain with a lot of email marketing software nearly all of them. This process is all about registering your domain so that it doesn’t bounce or it doesn’t go into spam folders. It’s an authorized or verified domain that’s classified as safe. If you have too many bounces and unsubscribes you actually start to get a bad reputation with your domain. They’ll start going into the spam folders too much. That’s just another reason why you don’t want to be targeting people that are not of target audience and getting your content right is critical.
Moving on to the next subject the key things you must get right for successful email campaigns. Getting back to the content, the subject line in the inbox is the most important heading. It’s got to entice and pick people’s interest because if it doesn’t it’s just going to get deleted or more likely to get deleted. Having a great subject line increases your open rates and once people open the email the next important factor of the content is the heading.
The heading needs to inspire the reader to move down through the email content, the body of the content, the image has to be relevant and grab their attention as well. The call to action throughout the email maybe down the bottom of the template that’s the end result of people reading through, finding something that they like, finding a solution to their problem or a product that they like. They click on the call to action and then we’ve gone to the landing page.
The landing page that has to be relevant to the offer, the email. They all have to be in synchronization. When people go to the landing page, let’s go to the next slide here. The landing page has to be 100% relevant to the offer that you originally provided in your email template and your subject heading and your call to action. If it’s not relevant and I see this happen a bit actually where people they just send the person to a generic landing page and the conversions drop because the reader doesn’t fully understand what’s happened after that. They get a bit confused they can drop off so you need to have good conversion rate optimization tactics on the landing page so that you maximize your return on investment.
A great web form or buttons with call to actions directing people and giving people roadmaps about where to go on the page and what’s the next step. One of the most important key factors is conversion optimization and throughout your whole website you need to have conversion optimization rate tactics so that you’re helping people navigate through the page and you’re increasing your conversion optimization strategy.
Now to the next point. The pros and cons of some popular email systems. I’ve broken this up into two industries really the service industry and selling products online because they’re pretty much two different strategies with content and the way you do your email marketing. With the service industries for example like say, you’re a physiotherapist or you’re an electrician or you’re servicing the community and you’re offering information as a service or something like that, an accountant firm a software like Mailchimp’s probably all you need. Because what it is you’re just offering content. You’re content marketing to people so you don’t really need high-end strategy not strategy, a high end sort of technical expertise with Mailchimp or when you’re doing content marketing. It’s just really a smaller type of technology that you’re just sending information like newsletters or some helpful information to your customers.
The good thing about Mailchimp is that it integrates with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter so if you are sending content out to your customers you can send a synchronized campaign through your email marketing. You send the email marketing template and then it integrates with Facebook so that email marketing message goes into Facebook, into Instagram and into twitter at the same time. You’re opening up new channels and these people can come back to you through those channels so it’s important to have Facebook and Instagram integrations and twitter.
The other good thing about Mailchimp it does have, once you get set up it does have a good do-it-yourself email template builder. If you want to send small messages like if you’re a bricks and mortar and you’ve moved move premises you can just quickly send a template email that only takes like 20 minutes, half an hour to set up and you can send that out to your whole database with just a small message that we have moved. Simple examples like that. They’ve got a good temporary library Mailchimp so there’s a lot of templates to choose from.
The only thing I don’t like about Mailchimp is the segmentation is fairly a manual process. You have to tag a lot of customers and tag them into different segments and that can get a little bit laborious. If you’ve got an e-commerce store and you’re selling hundreds or thousands of products on a monthly basis you don’t want to be tagging people manually because that can become really a lot of hard work and very time-consuming. I find Mailchimp can be a bit difficult to navigate when you first start using it. There is a bit of a learning curve but once you’ve learnt it it’s quite easy. It’s quite worthwhile for service industries to have something like Mailchimp.
The second part of the pros and cons of popular email systems is I’m focusing more on e-commerce sites here because if you’ve got an ecommerce site you really need dedicated email marketing software because you’re getting so many, you’re selling so many products that you really need to have a fair bit of automation. One of the automations that’s really important is dynamic product display blocks which if for example I showed you the abandoned cart email. Now if you send an abandoned cart email to somebody and they’ve got a dynamic product display block in there you can you can show them the product that they were looking at that they left in the cart. You can also show them related products. If they don’t like that product you can push other products to them to say well, you might like this instead and you can change your purchase.
Now a lot of the email commerce, dedicated email commerce platforms have got automated triggers and flows. It’s very easy to create segmentations with triggers. If somebody purchases a product, a trigger can be activated and then they can go into another segment or they can be sent another email later on down the track which you can schedule for another time. It is part of the flow of the triggers and the segmentation so having that is really important for automation. It just frees up a lot of time for the business owner and it makes everything a lot easier to use.
The dedicated e-commerce software is more expensive but if you set it up properly and you work on your return on investment and you build a strategy on how you’re going to build your email campaign and your segments and your flows and your triggers then the return on investment can be much higher than using something like Mailchimp. A lot of planning has to be put in place to make it all work properly.
The other thing about a lot of these ecommerce platforms is that once you get to know how to use it, it can become really easy to use and if you have an email sequence like I showed earlier and then you’ve got that going automatically and all of a sudden you do another email sequence well you can have a lot of emails that start to overlap and you might start sending people the same or similar emails in the same week. You may not want to do that because some people, a lot of people don’t like getting too many emails so you need to be careful you’re not going to send too many emails out but that’s a good example of how easy it is to use in the long run.
The next topic is how to create more powerful emails based on customer behaviour and customer value. What we need to do with our email marketing is segmentation is really important. It’s all about targeting the right audience so once you’ve got your email marketing in place you need to think about building segments so just an example of one segment or one list. They’re either lists or segments. You can call them what you like but a VIP segment’s really important for people that are your best customers so your top 20%. You might sort of want to reward them in a different way to other customers so you can segment those customers and provide them with offers or specials because they’re going to be your most loyal customers and they’re more likely to refer them to friends and family to refer your company to friends and family so having a VIP segment is important.
You can have another segment for example so somebody that purchased item A could be interested in item B like the example I said before. If somebody bought a mag wheel they might be interested in buying a certain type of tyre so you can put these people that have bought the mag wheel into a segment and market to them further on down the track.
Another segment is send a personalized message or personalized offer so birthdays is a good example or like a jewellery shop like I mentioned before that’s a good example of somebody that somebody’s made a purchase and you can say okay I’m going to I’m going to send them an offer in 12 months or yeah tell us what your birthday is and we’ll send you a gift or a complimentary gift or an offer of some sort. All these things build loyalty and help build the brand and customer retention.
This one, this topics how to build create more powerful emails based on custom behaviour and customer value. This topic is machine learning which is fairly new. It’s probably, it’s been out for a couple years but it’s only going to get more refined machine learning and some of the things that you can use with the algorithms is you can predict next purchase dates. You can send a similar or related product to a person that the algorithms thinks that this person has a history of buying and they’re always buying at this time on this date. You could probably send them an email to this customer or this segment of customers and the likelihood of them purchasing is higher. You can also use the data to find out who will buy when and when which is similar to what I just spoke about but you’re reaching them at the most opportune time using machine learning. You can predict the total amount of customer future spending.
You could segment these people that you find that are spending a lot more money than others into your VIP folder and then you can send them offers and invite them to a VIP club or some sort of a membership. You can also find out who your big spenders are so that’s another option for a VIP segmentation. You can also use machine learning because you with features to upsell so with machine learning it categorizes everybody into a certain sort of segment and you can see what products they’ve bought, when they’ve bought them, if they’re male or female and then you can sort of cater your marketing or your email marketing to those audiences.
Okay so the next subject why and when automation can be good or bad. I’ve looked at the pros and the next tile, next slides on the cons. The pros of course is generating sales. Email marketing is still the highest converter for all digital marketing channels. Automation, it increases engagement because you’re targeting on a more granular basis and you’re sending people content that’s really related to them. If you’re building relationships and encouraging new relationships you’re building loyalty and loyal customers spread the message. They’ll more likely to share your company. They’re more likely to refer you to their friends and family.
Automation, one of the one of the beauties of automation and a lot of business owners are looking for is saving time. Because it’s automated it’s not set and forget. You always have to be monitoring your customer service levels, the messages, what people are saying and even on social media. If people are responding to you in a negative way it’s not a set and forget system. You have to be conscious that you need to monitor um how it’s going bounce rates, open rates, that sort of thing but it does save you a lot more time because you’re not doing anything manual anymore.
Automation’s getting more sophisticated, segmentation is better, personalization’s better and the integration now with email marketing and a lot of these the e-commerce software and even Mailchimp it’s integrating with messaging apps and social media. You’re opening up not just email marketing. You opening up to a lot of other channels like social media and chat bots. There’s different ways you can automate all of your marketing and it’s not just through email marketing too. There are a lot of different automations that you can you can add to automating your social media and your messaging apps as well. It’s all becoming a lot more automated and there’s a lot of software companies now thinking about automating.
The last uh slide here. It’s important to remember…
Richard: Paul, you missed this the cons slide.
Paul: Did I? Okay I did just put it on there. Sorry. Okay so the cons. Email marketing the dedicated email marketing platforms for e-commerce they cost a bit more money because there’s a higher implementation cost. It takes longer to implement all the segmentation, the flows, the triggers but once you do have it all set up it’s actually more cost effective because the return on investment’s higher.
I mean like that’s just the entry level cost for the implementation. Once it’s all implemented a lot of people find it easier to use than the older style of email marketing platforms. One of the cons of this type of email marketing, the automation it’s so easy that you can send too many email messages like I said in the previous slide. Over messaging has become a problem and you need to be careful you’re not sending too many messages to your customers because if you are sending too many messages it can depersonalize the brand so there’s a risk of people dropping off because you’re not really connecting with them. Your brand is affected if you’re not managing it properly.
We’re moving on to mobile. The importance of the trend to mobile is now really popular. One of our clients has 80% mobile traffic and 20% desktop. A lot of their customers are they like their mobile phones and they do most of their shopping and all their interaction on the mobile phone. One of the things about mobile phones now is it’s really easy for people to make a purchase on a mobile phone. If you want to go and buy a jacket from a store and you’ve got Zip Pay all you need to do is bring up a barcode on your mobile phone and you can even go in and show them the product on your mobile phone that you’re looking at, you’re researching at home.
Show them the product, go to Zip Pay, get the barcode out. It’s all done right over the phone and it’s such a seamless way for people to purchase now. All the buy now pay later apps have made it easier for people to purchase products online. Pay online with the mobile and it’s just a seamless link. All products and easy payment options can be done in minutes and away you go. It’s really going to grow because there’s more pay as you go or pay now buy later apps coming onto the market.
Just the bottom point about your email templates when you’re designing content and templates you need to design them for both desktop, mobile and for tablets because if you just do it on desktop it might look great on desktop but when you have a look at it on your mobile phone it looks terrible. You need to take into consideration the font size, the images, are they going to work on the mobile? Just the layout, is it going to be portrait, landscape? You need to be careful how you design your templates and that’s it everybody. We’ve gone through a lot of information there.
Richard: Yes, there’s a lot there. We’ve got some questions that have come through Paul. We probably have overshot our time limit a little bit as well so hopefully that’s okay. One of the questions is about marketing Kindle books via Amazon. The writer Kim says, I understand that Amazon keeps customer data for its own use and doesn’t allow the seller to access customer data. Is there any way around this obstacle? Personally, what do you think Paul? I, personally don’t have a lot of experience with Amazon. I know that’s something that another guy within our organization John actually has more. What do you think?
Paul: I don’t think you’ve got any chance of getting anything out of Amazon in that regard. Lucky to for them to return an email really. I don’t think there’s any chance that you could access any data from them.
Richard: It’s a bit a bit similar to eBay in a way where the platform likes to manage the relationship and doesn’t actually want people to be dealing directly outside of it. One of the things that you can try to do is to encourage the customers to send you a review or to come onto your website or to do something that interacts directly with you not through Amazon but then you also risk the wrath of the platform in this case Amazon. That’s an interesting question Kim and we’d love to help you with that but probably needs a bit of specialist information.
Another question is where is machine learning accessible? Is it an app for your website? It’s not an app for your website but apps with machine learning can be connected into your website. Some email software has that capability for machine learning. Simpler systems like Mailchimp for example, as far as I know has hasn’t got machine learning capability. Has it Paul?
Paul: No.
Richard: No, whereas something yes so which of these email platforms would you consider do have that at the moment?
Paul: Klaviyo, the major, the bigger e-commerce platforms. Klaviyo, campaign monitor, active campaign. All the ones that are basically integrated to an e-commerce store like Shopify or BitCommerce or WooCommerce. They’re pulling data from the actual um customer behaviour on the website that is fully integrated.
Richard: Yes as a result of that then the system can start to learn based on what has happened previously.
Paul: Yes and the more customers and the more people navigate and buy on your site the more the machine learning can collect data and target your ideal customer.
Richard: Okay. If there are any other questions please feel free to ask us directly after the session or now if you would like. I’ll just quickly mention the next webinar that’s coming up in two weeks’ time and that is about planning a new website. Some very well, I’d like to think important tips to help turn vision into reality without drama. That’s the session that’s coming up in two weeks’ time October the 11th.
Thanks very much for coming along to this session. If you want any more help or info then please give us a call and thanks very much Paul. That was a lot to go through. You did a good job. Thank you very much for that. Do you have anything you want to say and wrap up?
Paul: Look, just thanks everybody for staying through the duration. It ended up a bit longer than what I expected but hope people found the information useful.
Richard: Yes and if you would like to follow anything up please get in touch but hopefully that’s been of a lot of help. Thanks very much everybody. Have a great day and all the best. Thank you.
Paul: Okay, thank you. Bye.
Richard: Bye.
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