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June 12, 2015

Email Marketing-Traction Channel #9

by StartupRunner

Definition- Email Marketing– is directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It usually involves using email to send ads, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. Email marketing can be done to either sold lists or a current customer database. What Companies focus on this Traction Channel?  Many online retailers (Groupon, Fab, Jackthreads, Thrillist, Zappos) use email marketing as their primary traction channel, via sales, discounts, and newsletters. Advantages of Email Marketing

  1. An exact return on investment can be tracked and has proven to be high when done properly. Email marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic.
  2. Email marketing is significantly cheaper and faster than traditional mail, mainly because of high cost and time required in a traditional mail campaign for producing the artwork, printing, addressing and mailing.
  3. Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of email subscribers who have opted in  to receive email communications on subjects of interest to them.  Almost half of American Internet users check or send email on a typical day, with email blasts that are delivered between 1 am and 5 am local time outperforming those sent at other times in open and click rates.
In the article, How Can Email Marketing Work for Startups? Paul Ford says, “According to global management consulting firm McKinnsey & Co, email marketing is 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined as a way to acquire new customers.” Disadvantages of Email Marketing
  1. A report issued by the email services company Return Path, as of mid-2008 email deliverability is still an issue for legitimate marketers. According to the report, legitimate email servers averaged a delivery rate of 56%; twenty percent of the messages were rejected, and eight percent were filtered.
  2. Companies considering the use of an email marketing program must make sure that their program does not violate spam laws.
Do’s and Don’ts of Email Campaigns  More than 122 billion emails are delivered to inboxes every hour.  Here are some DOs and DON’Ts to get your email marketing campaign off on the right start:
  • Do focus on a single topic
  • Do include multiple avenues to contact
  • Do personalize the email for more open rates
  • Don’t ever spam-companies who buy email lists and send people unsolicited email.
  • Don’t send too frequently
  • Don’t send without testing
Great Example of Email Marketing Company  From TechCrunch’s article, CEO Justin Zhu said that he came from Twitter, while his co-founder Andrew Boni came from Google. At both companies, they saw the impact that email marketing can make, but they also saw some of the challenges that marketers can face trying to personalize and test campaigns.  Iterable’s features include A/B testing and personalization, and it can be used for a variety of promotional and marketing messages. Zhu highlighted the company’s “trigger campaigns” — the platform allows marketers to segment customers into different groups and use workflow tools to build “a map for automating consumer engagement.” For example, a company could use your browsing and purchase behavior to promote new, relevant products when they’re added to the inventory. While there are other email marketing and A/B testing tools out there, Zhu described his product as “the orchestrator, the command-and-control center” that can integrate with other services like Mixpanel and Segment.io, delivering “a more holistic view” of your customer data. How To Build an Email Marketing Traction Channel   Traction authors Weinberg and Mares clarify:  “Email can be used at all stages of the customer lifecycle: to acquire customers, build familiarity with prospects, move customers through your funnel, and retain the customers you already have.  There are many legitimate ways to acquire customers using email.”
  • Short, free course related to your area.
  • Advertising on email newsletters
  • User activation is a critical and often-overlooked component of building a successful product.
  • Sequence of emails that slowly exposes your new users to the key features in your product.  Instead of throwing everything at them right away, you can email them five days after they’ve signed up and say, “Hey, did you know we have this feature?”  A great example is the way Apple rolled out their iWatch with emails providing short videos of the various features over the weeks before the iWatch release.
  • Targeted emails to reach specific customers who haven’t activated.  Colin Nederkoorn, the founder and CEO of Customer.io, inputs:
“With lifecycle messaging, you create the ideal experience for your users when they sign up for your trial. You then create all of the paths they can go down when they fail to go through the ideal experience. And you have emails in place to catch them and help them get back on that[ideal] path.” With tools like Vero and Customer.io , you can create email messages like these tailored to specific groups of users.
Ultimate goal of any traction channel is: 1. Add customers and 2. Generate revenue by lifecycle campaigns aimed at upselling customers, email retargeting, referral programs etc. Tactics for Email Marketing from Traction
  1. Deliverability  Most companies use an email-marketing provider like MailChimp or Constant Contact to send their emails. These companies help ensure deliverability, which can be quite complicated.
  2. Effective email campaigns A/ B test every aspect: subjects, formats, images, timing and more.
  3. Timing is especially relevant to get higher open rates: many marketers suggest sending emails between 9 a.m.– 12 p.m. in your customer’s time zone or scheduling emails to reach them at the time they registered for your email list.
  4. Have great email copy.
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