Comparing how to setup a successful email marketing nurturing strategy to plotting a good night out is admittedly, a bit different. But every aspect of a night out requires a specific set of actions to enhance the success of that night to ensure maximum return on investment. And it’s no different for email marketing…
You typically begin your journey deciding on the nightclub – the host of your evening. You’re basing that on reputation, do people rate it highly? Is it a good place to connect with people? This is just like selecting your data source – you’re looking for an investment in the best, high quality contacts that are receptive to your message.
Now at every nightclub door, you are faced with a bouncer. If you’ve done your research beforehand, you’ll know the dress code. Everyone must present ID to the bouncers and you must prove that you’re worthy of entering their club. This represents email authentication, an often overlooked but essential technical aspect for helping land more emails into the inbox and reduce bounces. Imagine SPF, DKIM and DMARC as your form of ID, your evidence to Google and Microsoft mail clients that you are who you say you are and you’re here to be responsible.
As you’re accepted by the bouncers and they swing the door open for you, you start the realise something exciting is brewing – opportunity. Thousands of people that you can potentially have contact with, to engage with and that will hopefully, ask you to grab your coat. Now at this point, you could get giddy, approaching everyone frantically asking them if they want a drink with a very short, intrusive message that offers no value. You might get some hits but the likelihood is that people may just think you’re being rude, you’re imposing on their night.
You have to be careful too… Trying to rush your message to as many people as possible is a bit like drinking too much in the first hour of your night – you’ll start being so loud you generate a bad reputation or vibe from the people around you. You make the smart choice – you take it slow, steady and respect the recipients around you.
A more sophisticated approach would be to take a step back and evaluate who is there and tailor a message based on something that you think would be valuable to them – this is content segmentation. You see a core part of the audience drinking fruity cocktails and you happen to know the recipe for an excellent fruity cocktail. You approach, informing your recipient that you know of a drink you’re sure they’ll enjoy, you give them the ingredients and you offer to buy it for them to try it out. Success! Your recipient engages back with you and agrees to try the drink.
Now you’re getting confident so you approach another recipient but sadly, this one turns you down. Not to be deterred, you re-evaluate your chances. Even if you tailor a message suited to your audience to perfection, the reality is in the moment, not everyone is going to be receptive. Your recipient may be texting on their phone, ordering a drink at the bar or simply enjoying the drink they already have. At this point, you revise your expectations fairly and you bounce back from the disappointment, play the long game and have a very reasonable amount of responses as the night closes.
You notice your drink suggestion becoming popular and now others are taking your recipe and communicating it around the club – you could consider this to be a bad thing, if you are mis-attributing. But if you attribute this correctly, you’re the influence for this exciting new buzz taking over the club. It all started with your email content and although now it may not seem like it’s the direct pathway to your product, it was absolutely the first message that influenced it.
How does this translate to a successful email campaign:
- Your data source is the MOST important element of this entire campaign. If you go to a night club, with barely any attendance (contacts you can email to) you reduce the chances of generating engagement and leads. Poorly verified email data is a bane on the life of an email marketer – typically up to 30% of your audience could be lost to old, incorrect email addresses. If you’re actively emailing to those emails without proper cleansing rules, you destroy the reputation of your IPs and Domains. Choosing a tele-verified data partner like Market Location ensures a high level of quality – our hard bounce rate is 0.2%, very far away from 30%.
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC are email authentication processes that you can use to demonstrate to Microsoft and Google that you’re a responsible sender who respects recipients and mail clients and that you are who you say you are. Without these 3 key tools, email deliverability suffers significantly. Our technical team applies these email authentication processes to every managed email client we have onboard, ensuring healthy and high 90%+ delivery rates across the board.
- Responsible email sending practices such as consistent steady email volume sends daily, instead of massive blasts of millions of emails in one day is an easy way to keep email deliverability high, stops you from saturating your email base and gives you a better chance of inbox placement.
- Have you ever written an email template that you felt was a masterpiece but sent it out and it fell flat? Well the betting is you had the foundational content spot on, it’s just that you missed an extra consideration to maximise value to your recipient. Here’s where we encourage content segmentation, a proven way to improve engagement significantly. A basic example is sector specific segmentation to say construction businesses. Consider what the pain points and challenges are specifically for the construction sector, demonstrate your empathy and understanding and show them your solution, building trust & reliability in your brand. Our email design team constantly consult clients to adopt this approach and they are more than happy to construct sector specific content on your behalf.
- What happens after you get the initial interest? Well, our favourite method of following up is via automation. By using workflows, we can learn more about the recipients you send to and how they interact with your content. We can also tailor specific content via pathways to recipients based on their level of engagement. The result? Well we helped one of our clients achieve a 555% return on investment utilising workflows as a part of an overall email nurture strategy.
- And finally, supporting you with getting the correct attribution from your email spend. Relying solely on landing page leads is a thing of the past and diminishes your hard work. We will help you get accurate attribution from your campaign by a simple match-back exercise – when we’ve done this for our clients recently, we’ve had up to 5x better perception on campaign performance than relying on landing page leads alone.
So plan your night out email campaign in the best way possible, and pick a nightclub data source that’s got 50 years of data experience and quality under its belt by calling us on 01926 450388 or by dropping us an email to [email protected] and quote “nightclub” to get a free 30 min email marketing consultation call.