Category: Email Marketing

Apple’s iOS 15 Mail Privacy Protection marks a new era for email marketing professionals. It’s a continuation of Apple’s efforts to offer iPhone owners more control over their privacy and data.

It’s also a time to turn a new leaf towards customer-centric, hyper-personalized email marketing. 

What’s the impact on email marketing?

iOS 15 security feature is good news for users who, after the update, will be able to:

• Turn off open tracking
• Block their IP address
• Hide their email address

For marketers, however, it’s a different story. The Mail Privacy Protection will prevent senders from using hidden pixels that gather valuable post-send data. Senders won’t be able to track KPIs like open rates, open times, or location, that are the main performance pillars of email marketing.

Email marketing is not a thing in the past

Fear not marketers! iOS 15 Mail Privacy Protection may sound like the end of email marketing, but every cloud has a silver lining. Yes, updates like this will eliminate marketers whose only goal is to send out mass emails to mass lists. But for others it’s an opportunity to shift focus on creating personalized customer experiences.

How to think beyond open rates and continue running effective email campaigns? Let’s take a look at a few email marketing best practices.

Create content that resonates with your audience

You may be sick of hearing it by now, but personalization is kind of a big thing. It spans across every marketing channel, including email marketing. Generic emails don’t cut it anymore. Think of your audience personas and their needs to create meaningful, useful content that resonates. Some may be driven by promotions and coupons, whereas others need a softer approach through brand stories or how-to guides. 

Whatever your approach is, always ask yourself; “is this email worth sending?” before hitting the send button.

Understand who’s who

List segmentation is the only way to create customized experiences. Segment customer data based on demographics, interests, or previous activity with your brand. Behavioral data is always a good place to start. Hyper focus on subscribers that engage with your emails. Narrow the list to contacts who have purchased your products, or visited your website. 

Consider what information you want to collect during a purchase or a newsletter sign up. Could you add a question or two about their interests? The more segments you can add, the better.

Keep your email marketing list tidy

The number one rule in email marketing is to maintain list hygiene. Regularly remove “dead” email addresses from your mailing list. These are contacts who haven’t opened emails, or clicked content for a period of time. Emailing to unengaged contacts brings down email performance, and damages your sender reputation. Once a month, send a “win-back” email to unengaged subscribers to try to engage them again. 

Email + SMS = the power couple

Like Batman and Robin, email and SMS can do wonders together. SMS is most effective for new product launches and special offers for VIP customers (= SMS subscribers). It can also be used to promote your email channel. Consider sending a special offer via SMS, and ask the recipient to check their email for a promo code.  POW!

Test, test, test!

It may sound obvious, but testing is the best way to find out what works. Dedicate time for A/B testing to find creative elements that work best for your audience. Test subject lines, test long vs. short messages, text-based vs. image-driven messages, sassy vs. serious copy. Then, double down on them.

Takeaways

Whether you like it or not, it’s time for us marketers to go back to our roots. This means shifting our focus from data to customers’ needs and wants. Today’s customers want privacy and customization from brands that they trust. It’s that simple.

Ready to enter the new era of email marketing? Contact Mason’s email marketing specialists to book a consultation.

This article was written with expert advice from Deatrice Lockhart, Mason’s Integrated Communications Manager.

Why Email Marketing?

Email marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing around. Not only is it effective at turning prospects into buyers, but it is a process that can be completely automated to save time and money. 

Surrounding the holidays, email marketing help businesses reach new potential buyers and turn them into repeat customers. Here are our tips for using email marketing services as an effective strategy during the holiday season.

Email Marketing Tips & Tricks for the Holidays

Product

When engaging customers in email marketing, you want to make sure you put the right product in front of your audience. It is best to offer discounts on your lower priced products earlier in the holiday season. This is when customers will be shopping around for many people and many different gifts. They do not want a high-priced product offer sent to them because it is not something they are interested in…yet.

If you have higher priced products you are interested in offering discounts on, WAIT. The second week of December is the best time to discount more expensive items. For people who have neglected to find gifts for others or just waited too long, they are less likely to turn something down from price due to lack of availability.

So, when it comes to products, you want to discount your lower priced items earlier in the season and wait until the second week of December to discount your higher priced items. In addition, make sure to stress shipping deadlines and parameters. Let customers know the last day they will be able to get next day delivery, and make sure they can actually get it before the holiday.

Offer

The offer is the meat and potatoes of your email marketing strategy during the holidays. Hundreds of thousands of companies are sending out offer emails during holiday time; how can you make yours stand out? Well, you need to offer something that cannot be overlooked. 

Rather than going with a cute ‘12 Days of Christmas Deal’ approach and offering small discounts for those twelve days, offer a bigger discount for a shorter time-frame. Providing customers with a bigger discount and less time to use it not only makes them feel a sense of urgency, but helps them feel confident in knowing that they got a good deal.

Timing

The time you send out your holiday emails is extremely important. You want to start early, and earlier than what you may think is early. If you are planning to ramp up the volume of emails you send, you need to do it slowly. Going from sending one email a week to one email a day will most likely send your emails to spam, reducing the amount of people that see them. Starting in September, slowly start to send more emails weekly, and by holiday time you will make sure your emails don’t go to spam. 

Offers emails should be sent out the week before Thanksgiving for best results; whether you are letting customers know what the offer will be or actually starting them. Currently, since in-store shopping has seen a decline, it is best practice to keep your offer valid all month long, so customers can truly take advantage. 

Looking past holiday time, you may see declines in some of your email performance. This can be normal, due to the decrease in emails that go out weekly or monthly, and customers have already gotten what they needed. 

The three most important factors that you need to consider when incorporating email marketing services into your advertising are Product, Offer, and Timing. As long as you remember these, you will surely have a successful holiday season. If you are looking to add email marketing to your business’ advertising services, please contact us or schedule a free marketing analysis with one of our expert marketers.

There are many benefits to email marketing that should be implemented at the beginning of your direct to consumer, e-commerce journey. Engaging with subscribers, loyal customers and providing insight into your company lifestyle, launches and community is something that can be done in a creative and effective way.

We sat down (virtually, of course) with Mason Interactive’s Director of Email Marketing, Brian Poole to gather insight into email best practices, the benefits of using platforms like Klaviyo and what brands can do during this time make the most of their email marketing channel.

Open rates are going up right now

“Right now I feel like it’s a really good time for people to work on their deliverability,” Brian says. We know that open rates are going up. People are opening emails because they’re spending more time in front of their phone or computer. “It’s a good time to see who’s worthwhile – if they’re not opening now, and they haven’t in 6 months, they’re not going to,” Brian adds. Now is a good time to parse down your list and focus on getting the most out of it.

Many brands are laser focused on sending emails to the highest number of people possible. However, we should be focusing less on how big the list is and more on how many people are buying from it. “We can send a million emails, if no one’s buying, what difference does it make?” Brian says. “If you send 5 emails and one person buys, that one person is more valuable than a million. If we email everyone, it doesn’t work as well.”

Best ways to capture new emails

The simple answer is incentive. “Offer something like a first order discount or promo code to get people to sign up – keep it clean – use a pop up or some sort of collection front and center,” Brian suggests. “People might think it’s annoying but realistically, they are there to shop, browse and sign up for more information and promos.”

We also understand that some brands are unable to incentivize anything – they can’t offer discounts – so they need to be more creative. Signing up for updates on certain products, being notified about pre-order opportunities, or joining a community is something that brands can offer through their email marketing strategy.

Whether you’re gathering news emails or engaging with your community, it really comes down to getting better traffic to your site, or getting the right people to find your site. “That is more likely to get the right people to sign up and then convert,” Brian says. “For some brands, it requires a cross channel approach – You need to be spending money across different channels in order to drive the right people to your website.”

Do you ever wonder how emails end up in your spam folder?

Spam tracking specifically relates to brands with large lists who are sending emails on a more consistent basis. If someone in your database receives emails from you, Gmail will flag email addresses that haven’t opened an email in a long time and return that data to you. At the same time, they are assigning you a role as a spam trap. “If you continue to email that name, Gmail will deem your domain and emails as spam,” Brian adds. Inactive names can be randomly assigned as spam, so you need to keep lists smaller, and more tailored.

While many brands are constantly trying to engage with their entire list, the data shows that it doesn’t actually result in more opens. When you send to a carefully segmented group that signed up in the past two months or opened in the last six months, you have a better chance of maintaining a quality list and score. “Because the list of inactive emails is constantly being ping’d by Gmail, you’re likely to get more emails going directly to spam,” Brian adds.

Paid Media and Email working hand in hand

Like the chicken and the egg logic, people see an ad, they come to your site, and most of the time they will leave. This is where you serve them a retargeted ad, which will bring them back to your site, and then they will get emails based off of abandoned carts or products that they viewed, and then more ads. It goes around and around. “People who utilize everything tend to do the best,” Brian says.

The reality is that you can’t just focus solely on Search Engine Optimization, for example. Although we can help improve your organic search results and presence, it won’t be as successful as distributing the content across every channel. “Maybe someone found you via SEO, but what if they don’t buy today? They came to your website and left. What do you do now?” Brian asks.

The benefits of using Klaviyo as you r email platform

One of the main benefits of using Klaviyo as an email marketing platform are the integration components available. “The integrations with Shopify, and other cart platforms like WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, are pretty straightforward and really great,” Brian says.

If you are moving away from a platform like MailChimp, Klaviyo is really good at transitioning you over. “A lot of people upgrade from MailChimp, and Klaviyo has an integration with MailChimp so that you don’t need to export your lists and move anything over,” Brian adds. Klaviyo gives you the ability to see who opened emails six months ago in Mailchimp, and not just the data that you are seeing in the new platform.

Personally, Brian finds that the ease of use of the platform makes it the most user friendly and controllable, especially compared to some of the more complicated tools like Bronto. They offer a lot of features that other platforms don’t or they are just not as easy to use, like the email builder and predictive analytics.

“Instead of predicting by list, Klaviyo predicts by looking at behaviour, and assigns a value based on how likely a list member is likely to purchase, or go dormant, or buy more, based on their actions.”

Additionally, Klaviyo Integrates really well with Facebook and here at Mason Interactive, we use the data in real-time to create high quality Facebook audiences.

3 things you need to do to get set up

Set Up Collection and Welcome

Collection forms that you know are working, followed with a welcome series email

Set up Abandoned Cart

If someone is in the process of checking out and abandons their cart, you can automatically send them an email reminder

Set up Browse Abandonment

Create action items on what you’re sending out from an email standpoint

Need help getting your email marketing strategy set up?