• Guaranteed Exposure

Does your post make it on your fans’ news feed? With Facebook’s algorithm, only the pages deemed most popular or relevant will make it on the “worthy to be seen” list. Even if you do make it, your post will disappear from your fans newsfeed within hours. Email, on the other hand, always makes it to your subscribers’ inboxes (forget about bounces for now), giving you a better chance of grabbing your subscribers attention with a carefully crafted subject line. In addition, even unopened emails can remain in an inbox for days, with each new visit by the subscriber an opportunity to snag his attention.

• More Intimate

Email is an inherently more intimate venue than social media, simply because communications in your inbox are not broadcasted for all the world to see. For this reason, most people guard their email addresses more closely than their Twitter accounts. Once you’ve earned their trust enough to get them to subscribe, you can take advantage of that relationship with special offers and incentives.

• More Opportunities for Creativity

There’s only so much you can do in a tweet or a Facebook post. But with an email, you can combine graphics, copy, animation, and whatever else piques your interest to create a fabulous eye-catching message designed to engage the  subscriber to take action.

• Easier to Track

Email allows you to track such vital information as open rates, bounces, unsubscribes, and click-throughs, helping you make key decisions about what’s working and what isn’t and how you can make your campaign better. It’s much harder to track user engagement on a Twitter feed.

• Ability to segment your audience

It’s tough to create a one-size-fits all message. And if you try, it will rarely perform as well as a message targeted specifically to certain types of people. With a Facebook post, you’ve got to reach as many people as you can with one message, while email allows you to segment and even personalize your messages, making the subscriber feel more valuable and more closely connected with your company.

The reality is that both social media and email have a specific marketing niche to fill, and neither can perform the function of the other. In order to make the most of your email campaigns, take advantage of eConnect Email’s list segmentation feature, tracking options, custom email templates, and dynamic email creation to deliver tantalizing emails that your subscribers can’t wait to open.

Why a Single Call to Action?

Simply put, too many calls to action paralyze the decision process. For instance, one email I received offered me the opportunity to donate, review new merchandise, visit the store website, and make a purchase, all in the same email. Just reading it burned through my allotted attention span for this email campaign; forget about actually deciding which call to action was most enticing. Studies show that you’ll make more sales by offering fewer choices than you will by offering a smorgasbord of options. Why? Ever try to choose between twenty-four different flavors of barbecue sauce? After a while they all start to taste the same.

What Should the Call to Action Accomplish?

Of course, the goal of any call to action is the click. To accomplish that goal, you must persuade the subscriber that clicking is worth his while, and therefore, you must show him how he will benefit by clicking. The single most important question in the mind of your customer is: “What’s in it for me?” Answer this question effectively and you’ll convince him that your product is worth spending money and/or time on.

How Can I Strengthen My Call to Action?

Strong calls to action employ descriptive action words designed to communicate benefit. Some great calls to action include:

• Try It Now (implies low risk)
• Learn More (piques interest)
• Help Me Choose (places focus on reader’s needs)
• Shop Sale Items (implies a great deal)

Above all, avoid the ubiquitous “click here” that asks the subscriber to take an action without communicating any benefit or purpose whatsoever.

The best way to determine which call to action will work best for you is to run some tests. eConnect Email can help you create and test your emails to ensure that the call to action you choose generates the greatest possible response from your target audience. Evaluate your call to action’s effectiveness by measuring click through rates, forwards, unsubscribes, and more.

Subscriber #1: The Newbie

• Profile: This subscriber has just expressed interest in your company by signing up for your email list.
• Email Type: Send the newbie a welcome email that makes him feel appreciated and that encourages him to engage immediately.
• Email Goals: Encourage a first purchase, educate him about your company, promote your website, and let him know you’re glad he’s on board.
• Email Approach: Thank him for signing up and offer him a discount off his first purchase. This is also a great time to let him know what benefits he can expect to receive as a member of your subscriber list.

Subscriber #2: The Supporter

• Profile: This is the loyal gal who loves to shop at your store and opens every email you send.
• Email Type: Respond to the loyalty of this customer by giving her the VIP treatment. Make her feel like a valued customer and she’ll reward you with return visits and recommendations.
• Email Goals: Encourage increased purchasing, offer excellent customer service, and increasing loyalty
• Email Approach: Offer sneak previews for upcoming sales, give special valued-customer discounts, target email creation based on viewing history, send abandoned cart reminders, and provide immediate customer service interactions when appropriate.

Subscriber #3: The Bystander

• Profile: This person has been a member of your email list for a while but has no recent purchases and may fail to open or click on any of your email campaigns.
• Email Type: Seek to win back the loyalty of this subscriber with special offers and “we miss you” messages.
• Email Goals: Jump start re-engagement, understand her concerns, and keep her from transferring loyalty elsewhere.
• Email Approach: Solicit comments by asking for social media involvement or survey responses, offer incentives for purchases or website visits, and seek to make her feel like a valued member of your list.

The goal of lifecycle marketing is to segment your subscriber list based on their customer behavior and then to create targeted emails that encourage greater levels of participation. eConnect Email can help you reach these goals by managing subscriber data, analyzing list metrics, and building segments based on custom criteria.

• Make an educated guess.

You know your customers better than anyone and you’ve had the chance to observe their habits over time. Take advantage of eConnect Email’s analytics tools to monitor open rates and click rates and then make an educated guess as to which day will be best for your email campaign based on what you learn.

• Test.

Don’t rely strictly on guesswork, however. Test your theories by sending emails on various days and observing how customers interact with them (again spend some time reviewing campaign stats from previously sent emails).

• Consider weekends vs. weekdays.

Aggregated benchmarks often point to weekends as good days to send email. If you engage primarily in business-to-business marketing, however, weekends probably won’t perform well for you.  On the other hand, many people can now check email from the comfort of their easy chairs via smartphones, making weekend email checking easier than ever before. Again, we recommend testing, reviewing results and testing again.

• Consider the email content.

Does your email discuss a weekend sale? Is it a newsletter that talks about best practices for business? How about a weekend gardening project? The day you send each email will be affected by what the email contains, so be willing to alter the content within your campaign if you’re sending a time-specific message.

• Be flexible.

Even if you’ve found the perfect day to send, it’s still important to remain flexible. You might usually send on Mondays, but you’ll want to alter your strategy for Labor Day weekend, for example.

The bottom line is that there is no perfect day to send email that will work for every business. The analytics and stats tools available from eConnect Email can help you determine what the best practice will be for your company in order to maximize the actions (opens, clicks, purchases) taken by your subscribers.

So here’s the million-dollar question for legitimate email marketers – how do you turn a newsletter subscriber from your regular site-surfing reader into an Otaku?  Godin says it’s about getting the right target audience, and not about getting 10,000 new sign-ups per week for your newsletter.

Unfortunately, the latter seems to be the obsession with many email marketers nowadays.  What Godin is proposing, is for marketers to sit back and study your audience – the genuine subscribers, not the ones who are just in it for the free whitepapers and perks.  If you start focusing on those who are listening, on those who want to listen to you, you would have found yourself an Otaku base, who will read what you write and help you spread your message.

Now, that’s the very reason we’ve integrated Tagging into our email marketing system.  When we started to redesign our email marketing system to reach the masses, we asked ourselves: What do marketers want?  What do marketers need?  What’s missing in all the email marketing systems out there?  Is it about the ability to send 1 million emails in five seconds?  Is it about the ability to have unlimited lists and subscribers?  Is it about making sure all your emails get to your subscribers and not their spam boxes?

Then one day, Johnny said, “Let’s tag,” and we realized we’d just found the missing link.  Imagine a simple tool that could give you the ability to really understand your subscribers.  You could then target the right people in your mailing lists, ensuring that everyone always receives information that’s relevant to them.  Once that happens, your readers will spread the word.  And here’s how you do that on eConnect Email – by tagging all your links with carefully chosen tags, so that in time, you will know exactly what your subscribers want.

So take some time, watch the video and see how you can relate it to your own email marketing campaign. Again, it’s all about getting the right people to read what you have to say, not about getting as many sign ups as possible for your newsletter.