The odds of: inbox placement
I work with a lot of small business owners and it has been my experience that not everyone knows a message isn’t automatically going straight to the recipient’s inbox. If you want to increase the chances that your campaign doesn’t land in the spam folder, start with a list of contacts who have given you their permission to send them marketing emails. After that, it’s about relevancy, good message design and readability.

The odds of: successful metrics
More relevancy = more engagement = more opens and clicks. The formula really is that simple.

The odds of: social media engagement with your campaign
More relevancy + the tools to share your message = more shares within a recipient’s network. By giving someone content that resonates and the means to easily pass it along, the more likely it is that they’ll actually share it on Facebook or tweet about it.

What other odds does an email marketer want to be in their favor? Having a message that’s readable is one, as is a good subject line. Knowing how your recipients like to read their messages and what subject lines generate the most action will come over time. But once that knowledge is obtained, it’s important to remember to use it.

The topic of email deliverability is worth a deeper dive than I’ve given above. Here are a few blog posts in the that are worth a read:
15 best practice tips for improving email deliverability
Five Ways to Improve Email Deliverability with Gmail
Understanding and Improving Email Deliverability

As I mentioned in my last newsletter, I’ve resolved to get back into the swing of things with my writing. I apologize again for the absence, but it has not been for lack of interest on my part. I’ve been head’s down on quite a few projects, a couple of which have inspired me to write about drip email marketing campaigns. This is a lead nurturing technique that can be very effective if done properly. Hopefully, your actions in 2011 yielded a database of prospects that can be converted into customers in 2012.

What is drip marketing?
The premise of a drip email marketing campaign is simple: Subscribers kick off the email series by way of a specific action, such as subscribing to your list, clicking a link in a message, making a purchase, viewing a particular product, or downloading a white paper. Once the campaign is triggered, emails are automatically delivered on a predetermined schedule — a steady “drip,” if you will — until the series ends or the subscriber opts out of the conversation. Drip campaigns allow you to communicate with your subscribers on a one-to-one basis, and because the emails are more relevant, targeted, and timely, they have much higher conversion rates than mass emails.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind when developing your drip marketing campaign:

1. Educate your contacts with relevant information: don’t make them do the legwork to research your product or company. If your prospects have to search independently on the internet for more details, they’ll be susceptible to being lured away by a competitor. Since your prospect is interested in your company or product, but not yet ready to buy, your drip campaign messages should address their needs and pain points. What are their needs or pain points? That’ll depend on how they came to be on the list for this drip campaign. Use that basis to segment your campaign and send them relevant links to your site. By directing them to information on your site, you’re limiting their potential exposure to competitors.

2. Make them timely: The purpose of a drip campaign is to maintain regular, continual contact with subscribers in an effort to keep your brand top of mind, increase engagement and accelerate the sales process. Don’t set the campaigns and forget them. Think of when it would be of most use to your recipients to receive a particular piece of information and work backward when developing a message outline. Keep your deployment timing in synch with where the contact is in the sales pipeline and plan your messages accordingly.

3. Have a clear, actionable call to action: This is an opportunity to solicit involvement with your company or brand. Unlike your general promotional email campaigns, drip campaigns are intended to be one-to-one communications. Each message should have a request for a relevant response, such as an invitation to download more information, give feedback on a recent purchase or visit a relevant product page on your site. Don’t bury the CTA – make it a prominent part of the campaign. At the same time, create a sense of urgency to respond.

Prospects may not take action the first time they’re exposed to your service or brand. A drip campaign can keep your company name top of mind when they’re emotionally ready to pull the trigger on making a purchase. A single mass message may not be enough to move the contact from prospect to customer status.

Here are a couple of other articles about using drip campaigns:
Sample of a drip campaign for real estate agents
Tips from Marketing Sherpa to Drive Revenue

In the spirit of going back to school, a time when students across the country are getting refocused on learning, here is a checklist of items to help your email program come together the way you intended:

1. Start with an objective: what’s the end result you’re aiming to achieve? Students have a degree or certificate in mind when they enroll. Be sure your call to action is going to help you achieve the goal you’ve set out to reach. Don’t bury the action in a big block of text and don’t only include it in an image that’s likely to be turned off.

 

2. Assemble a supply list: what is it you’ll need to get the job done? Whether it’s a relevant landing page for the email campaign or the buy-in from team members to fulfill the email’s call to action, make sure you have your resources in order before activating the campaign. Don’t send an email out with a free giveaway offer if you don’t have the commitment of purchasing and anyone who will have to help fulfill the offer, such as cashiers or your fulfillment house.

 

3. Who else is in your class? If you haven’t already done so, sign up for emails from your competitors.  Check out what they’re doing to keep an eye on the information your customers or clients are potentially reading.

 

4. Remember to put your best foot forward: There are so many ways to address this issue, whether it be testing how your email is rendering across platforms or proofing for typos, be sure your emails are as polished and presentable as they can be.

 

5. Be open to learning: Review metrics after each send and adjust future campaigns accordingly. Hopefully your production lead times allow for flexibility and adapting your plans based on recent past campaign performance.

 

6. Make new friends: In email marketing terms, this is also called growing your list. Just as with personal relationships, look for quality not quantity. Are you adding the best possible contacts to your database? There are plenty of co-registration tactics that will yield a large number of subscribers, but they may not be your best customers in the future. I always recommend promoting an email program in such a way that captures people who have willingly sought you out: web visitors, customers who have made online purchases, personal referrals from current list members and even those who orbit in your social media circles. Don’t forget to capture Facebook friends and Twitter followers – even FourSquare check-ins are a good source of emails.

As mentioned in my first post about using Facebook in conjunction with your email marketing program, here are a couple more tactics for bringing the two channels together.

Do it “like” this
We all want to be “liked,” right? In addition to sharing our emails, it’s possible to simply “like” them. Facebook’s “Like” buttons can be incorporated into emails, and in some cases, that “liking” activity can be tracked via the ESP.

Comparing “Like” vs. “Share.” The benefits to an email sender of a recipient hitting the “Like” button in an email are similar to that of sharing, but it’s less of a commitment for the recipient. The recipient simply hits the “Like” button and the link to the web version of the email campaign appears on their profile page and also in their friends’ news feed. The difference is that there isn’t a place for a recipient to add in their personal endorsement when the “Like” button is used. So your recipient is still spreading the word about your content and passing it along to their network, but they aren’t asked to take the step of giving an endorsement.

Send it on Facebook
Just announced on Monday, April 25, 2011, is the “send” button for distributing website content within Facebook to a select group of friends.  To use this functionality, you would need to have a URL for your message (the “view as a web version” of the campaign) or embed this button within the landing page that’s a part of the email campaign.  To entice your recipients to “send it to a subset of their Facebook friends,” it will be imperative that you not only give them a reason to do so, but explain why they should keep the message exclusive to a select group instead of “liking” it and sharing with all of their Facebook friends. It’ll be interesting to see how this functionality evolves. Here’s the link to the Facebook developer’s page with more information.

Convert email subscribers to Facebook fans
Just as you’ve converted Facebook fans to email subscribers by including an email sign-up form on your Facebook page, it’s possible to drive email subscribers to your Facebook page and connect with them on the social networking site as well.

By adding an email subscriber as a fan of your Facebook page you’ve created an additional touch point with one of your more engaged customers. This is an opportunity to have a more immediate dialogue with an engaged customer. It’s also an opportunity to speak directly with them and with a greater frequency than through email campaigns. In the end, it doesn’t matter which came first – the email subscription or Facebook fan connection. A customer who engages with you in both channels is very valuable and should be treated accordingly in both places.

Got another idea (or two) for blending Facebook with your email marketing program? Leave a comment on this blog post or a note on my Facebook wall.

For the sake of discussion, I’m going to assume you’ve heard of Facebook. But just so we’re all clear, it’s a “social networking service and website” (to quote Wikipedia) that connects people to their friends, family members, co-workers, etc. for the purposes of sharing information about their daily lives.

But can it really help your email marketing program? Of course! Here are a couple of tactics for using Facebook to enhance your email marketing program – and vice versa. This post is part 1 of 2. More tactics will be posted this time next week.

Email sign-up forms in your business’s page
This is low-hanging fruit. If you have a Facebook page for your business, incorporate a sign-up form for your email marketing program into the page. Some email software providers (ESPs) have a means for users to build the form directly into your page. Otherwise, link to it from your welcome tab.

By doing this, you’ve converted a Facebook fan into an email subscriber and have an additional channel by which to communicate with them.

Make your email messages shareable
You’ve created a fantastic email campaign and want to enable your recipients to share this message on Facebook. (You’ll first need to create content that your recipients will want to share. What’s considered shareworthy will vary from sender to sender, and even recipient to recipient. That’s an entirely separate posting, but here’s a link with concepts for sharing B-to-B content. Some of the ideas could apply to B-to-C as well.)

To be able to share your content or message on Facebook, you need to use the share URL that Facebook has created. By doing this, it will create a preview of your content, which can then be posted to a Facebook profile or sent as a direct message.
The simplest way to give a subscriber the option to share your link is to add this code into your email:

http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=URL

Just replace URL with the link you want to share. In the case of an email message, it would be the URL to view your message online. Don’t forget to include a call to action to “share this message”, preferably using a Facebook icon or linked text.

For example here is the link for the blog post of this message arranged so you can share it on Facebook.

Share this post on Facebook

When you create a link such as that, a preview window will open with optional image selections from the page URL provided. There will also be a place for your email recipient to include their thoughts as to why this link is worth viewing. Once they hit the “share” button in that window, the link is posted to their Facebook profile profile, their wall is updated and the URL will appear in the news feed of their friends with your recipients’ endorsement. Your message now has a personal referral to your recipient’s Facebook network!

Showing up in multiple news feeds is when you start to leverage your recipients’ entire friend list. This process has the potential to move virally as people leave comments or share the item with their friends and family – and so on and so on.

Got another idea (or two) for blending Facebook with your email marketing program? Leave a comment or post to my Facebook wall. Otherwise, stayed tuned next week for a couple more ways Facebook can enhance your email marketing program.