Jump on the Holiday Bandwagon

Every business ties their advertising into holidays in some fashion. Don’t let this opportunity pass you by! For a successful holiday email marketing campaign, you’ll need to focus on these important contributing factors:

1. A sense of urgency
2. Timing
3. Personalized offers
4. Eye-catching content

1) A Sense of Urgency

Holidays have definite calendar dates that customers can look forward to. Take advantage of this to instill your email advertisements with a sense of urgency. Limited-time offers or reminders of how close Christmas is will get your customers more interested in your products. They don’t have much time to take advantage of these great deals, after all!

2) Timing

This principle is twofold. First, remember to track major holidays and plan appropriate marketing around those dates. Watch your calendar!
Second, consider scheduling your emails ahead of time through an automated system that will send them off at the appropriate time. This ensures you stay on top of your holiday marketing even as the busy season ramps up.

3) Personalized Offers

What do individual customers buy from you? When are they most likely to spend money? With this information in mind from your customer analytics, create personalized offers for your holiday emails. Offer discounts on their favorite products or services. If possible, address them by name in your email! Show customers that you want to provide them with what they want individually, rather than just putting their name on a long list for bulk messaging.

4) Eye-Catching Content

Finally, no marketing campaign at any time of year is complete without some impressive-looking content. Seasonal colors and bold imagery pique customers’ interests and encourage them to stick around a little longer…and maybe notice that personalized discount you included for them. Find designs that are sure to increase sales.

Get Your Customers Ready!

The holiday season is here–don’t let the craziness distract you from your marketing strategy! Take advantage of the rush and get your customers ready for Christmas.
Contact us to learn more about excellent holiday email marketing strategies.

The post 4 Components of Successful Holiday Email Marketing first appeared on ITVibes.

Videos capture attention and create easy to digest information for viewers. Use them in your email marketing campaign for more opens! Here are 4 ways to do so. #ITVibes
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Which Videos Work the Best for Email Marketing Campaigns?

As long as you can insert the video correctly with no playback issues, there’s no right or wrong way to use a video in an email. Use videos to connect with your followers and clients by hosting live videos, creating a dedicated series for them or by giving them a free demo of your product. Here are just a few of the best videos to try adding to your email marketing campaign:

1. Webinars
2. Mini-Series
3. Free Demo
4. Testimonials

1) Webinars

Webinars are a great way to show your audience some human connection through your marketing campaign. Use them to discuss current focus topics and answer questions from loyal followers. Live workshops give your audience the chance to see what your brand can provide them, and builds a relationship between your brand and your clients. 

Pro Tip: Use your video’s call to action in the subject line of your email campaign for a higher click rate.

2) Mini-Series

Creating a video series can be a fun project for your team and your subscribers. By having a mini video series available only through your email subscription, you’re giving your subscribers exclusive access to a behind-the-scenes look at your product. If your email clients enjoy the mini-series video from last week, they’ll be sure to open next week’s email with the newest video.

3) Free Demo

While you won’t embed video into the actual email, in this case, you’ll be presenting the demo as a thumbnail image with a play button that will link them to the landing page with their free gift from your company. Offering a free demo of your product or service will eliminate any objections they might have about it before they buy. Have your subscribers sign up with their email to get access to your free demo. 

4) Testimonials

Insert a video of a past client’s review of your product or service to your emails for credibility, otherwise known as social proof. Viewers will be more likely to convert after seeing your brand’s trustworthiness explained through another user’s testimonial. These are good for content marketing emails like newsletters. 

Conclusion

There are a number of ways to include videos in your emails, and a variety of campaigns to try using them with. Try out some creative new ideas with your team and be sure to do your research on feedback from your audience. Remember, video marketing and email marketing are always growing and changing, so stay up to date with trends and tracking what works. 
To learn more about all things content marketing and creation, join the conversation with ITVibes on social media.

The post 4 Ways to Use Video with Email Marketing first appeared on ITVibes.

Want to see more clicks from your email marketing campaign? Here’s how to write a catchy email subject line. #ITVibes
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What Kind of Email Subject Line Brings Higher Open Rates?

If you’re a content marketer using email marketing as a form of reaching your audience, it’s crucial to have a great subject line. You can see your email open rates soar by applying to time, the right amount of text, and tricks to grab the reader’s attention. 

1. Get to the Point
2. Let Them Know What’s Inside
3. Timing it Right
4. Create a Sense of Urgency
5. Don’t Use ALL CAPS or Exclamation Points!!!

1) Get to the Point

Everyone knows that promotional emails are annoying, which is why you want to send an email with the best intentions. It’s easy to skip over an email on mobile devices after reading the first 3 or 4 words. Sometimes because it’s a repetitive one they’ve been receiving for a while, but usually people are turned away by subject lines starting with “Monthly Newsletter of Your Favorite One-Stop-Shop…”, it’s just too generalized to bring in high conversion rates. 

2) Let Them Know What’s Inside

Personal emails are opened because they’re personal to the reader, whereas marketing emails aren’t likely to be opened unless they apply to the person on the email list. Let your subscribers know what’s inside as they see it in their inbox. If you’re having a sale and want them to follow the link to your website (and hopefully, to shop), an example would be “Here’s a Free Gift for Shopping with Us! 50% Off Online–Get Black Friday Deals Now.”  

Pro Tip: Check the Promotions tab of your Gmail account for an idea of which email subject lines catch your attention, and what you should avoid.

3) Timing it Right

You don’t want your promotional email to be pushed down the list by the time your recipient checks their inbox. Try to schedule your emails to be sent during peak times by using A/B testing. Find out when your target audience typically opens your emails, which days of the week and at what time of day. With this in mind, cater your subject line to the date and time the email will be sent out. 

4) Create a Sense of Urgency

You want your email recipient to know that they need to act on your offer before they don’t have the offer anymore. This is called a call to action–getting the reader to “act now” as the offer is available for a “limited time only”. Try a solid call to action in the subject line to improve click-through rates. An example would be “All Jeans 50%-75% Off! Offer ends Cyber Monday.”

5) Don’t Use ALL CAPS or Exclamation Points!!!

No one likes to be yelled at, even over an email. WHEN YOU USE ALL CAPS in your email subject line, it seems demanding and needy to the viewer. The overuse of exclamation points is too flashy and doesn’t seem very professional. Stick to correct grammar with just the right use of punctuation, as you would in a blog post. 

Best Practices for Writing Email Subject Lines

When in doubt, stick to your SEO keywords for creating a subject line in your next promotional email. Try these practices with your email marketing campaign as a surefire way to get more clicks and higher conversion rates. 

Need more email marketing tips and tricks? Join the conversation to learn more from the ITVibes digital marketing team!

The post How to Write Catchy Email Subject Lines: Tips & Tricks first appeared on ITVibes.

Make a Personal Connection

Cold messaging or cold calling is often a key part of sales. However, you shouldn’t allow this necessary component to feel like an impersonal message. Before you send an email or social media message to anyone, take the time to peruse their “About” page to learn about their interests and/or business goals. Display a genuine interest in those goals and show how your product or service can help.
More importantly, ALWAYS take the time to address your subject by their name! One of the fastest turn-offs (and signs of spam messaging) for potential customers is being addressed as “Sir/Madam”, “Customer”, or a similarly impersonal title. Some phishing emails even pull the first half of the recipient’s email address to use as a name, resulting in such humorous email openings as “Dear pinkdiamond443”. Don’t fall into these traps! Learn your subject’s name and use it.

Avoid Mass, Worthless Messages

For plenty of customers, their most irritating sales experiences come from mass messages where the sender clearly didn’t bother to learn anything about them and probably just pasted their email into a long list. The same goes for social media. If the sender clearly didn’t take a few minutes to learn about what you enjoy and are willing to buy, it’s painfully obvious.
This principle goes hand-in-hand with making a personal connection with your customers. Marketing is as much about building relationships with your client base as it is about selling. Don’t just collect a list of email addresses or social media handles, send out a generic promotional message, and hope you get a return. Choose your audience based on their interest in your brand and their interactions with you.

Pro Tip: Never add people to your subscription list without their permission! This makes it even more likely that they’ll label you as a spammer.

Offer Something of Value

Whether you’re sending an email, posting on social media, or commenting on a forum, offer something of value to your reader. Don’t just fill your message with your brand’s logo and five different links to your website. Offer a valuable contribution to the conversation that’s happening or, if appropriate, offer a discount code. Make your audience feel like they’ve gained something from you.

Find the Right Balance

The ultimate measure of your marketing campaign’s success is not how many ads you post, private messages you send, or phone calls you make. Instead, you should be tracking conversions and customer satisfaction with you and your products or services. As you plan your next marketing campaign, remember to pay attention to customer responses to your ads and find the proper strategy for promoting yourself. Your customers will appreciate the lowered spam rates!
Curious about how to get started producing quality promotions for your brand? Let us help! Join the conversation to see what other marketing experts recommend for a good advertising strategy.

The post Promote Your Content Without Spamming Your Customers first appeared on ITVibes.

#EmailMarketing is a great way to reach your brand’s target audience. Let’s take a look at some best practices for better campaign results.
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Keep Messages Clear & Concise

With human attention spans on a steady decline, it’s best to keep your email content simple and straight to the point. Have a clear call to action, repeated two or three various ways throughout the message, that your readers can acknowledge from the second they open your email. This call to action should be the ONLY message you want to send–you don’t want to be offering multiple products or services in your promotional emails. Stick to one subject per email so that your subscribers are not overwhelmed by the different offers that you are presenting them with.

Pro Tip: Grab the subscriber’s attention from their inbox with eye-catching email subject lines, and keep them scrolling through the end of your message by including attractive and fitting images.

Optimize Emails Through Testing

Any campaign you start for your business will need to go through various tests to be optimized accordingly. Enable tracking on your emails so you can see the click-through rate of your campaign and adjust your emails cadence to see what is working the best for your subscribers and what isn’t getting a high enough conversion rate. Link images for more email clicks–most people are likely to open and click on an image to follow a link.
Running tests on your content, frequency, and timing will allow you to get an in-depth understanding of how your email marketing campaigns should be performing. Try modifying the message incentives slightly to see which changes come with the most clicks. Relate your email designs as closely as possible to your landing pages for a more highly optimized approach.

Engage With Your Audience

Your loyal followers who show your brand the most support deserve a personal greeting for each promotional email they receive. You can use an automatic personalization tool to email clients using their first name–instead of using the standard ‘Dear Member’. Giving incentives to your audience, such as offering 10% off of products for a limited time, increases open rates and the chance for conversion. You can also better connect with your audience by offering a plain text option for your email templates and optimizing the email’s settings for mobile devices. Keep your followers up to date with your email marketing campaign by sending reminders, sparingly, about current promotions they may have missed out on.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, the best practices for email marketing are always going to be updating and improving to see results. Always monitor your campaigns and run tests to see how your followers are reacting and what you should continue doing for your brand. New ideas will come and go, giving you endless options for bettering your email campaigns.
Want to learn more about improving your email campaigns? Join the conversation to speak with our content and SEO experts!

The post How to Get Better Results with Email Marketing first appeared on ITVibes.

Are email campaigns part of your content marketing strategy? Here’s how you can send emails that reap positive results for your business. #emailmarketing
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Organize Your Lists

Most software for email marketing such as MailChimp give you the option to arrange your audience with lists. Use this to your advantage. Organize your lists by industry so that you can spend time writing emails that target each industry.
For instance, if you are a brand management company, split your lists into broad lists such as:

• B2B
• B2C

From there, you can create even more focused lists such as:

• Tech
• Realtors
• Oil & Gas
• Outdoor living
• Automotive
• Contractors
• Etc.

This gives you the opportunity to curate industry-specific emails with email subject lines for each market that you’re targeting.

The Buyer’s Journey Is Your Guide

When making a purchase, customers go through the buyer’s journey. Buyers go through three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. Email campaigns are essential during the awareness stage. At this point, buyers are aware that they have a problem and your email campaigns will represent a solution. This will take buyers to the consideration stage where they will remember your emails when considering their options. Use your email campaign to monitor their buying patterns.

Pro Tip: Keep detailed records of the buyer’s journey in order to create a successful email campaign that produces the results you desire.

Don’t Spam Your Subscribers

There is such a thing as too many emails. If you’re sending emails that don’t have a useful purpose for your contacts, they’re more likely to unsubscribe. Also, if you’re flooding their inbox and they feel overwhelmed with your emails, they’re going to unsubscribe to free some space in their email inbox. Start by sending monthly emails and see how that works, move to bi-weekly, then weekly emails. Track your results and see what works best with your specific email lists.

Conclusion

Email campaigns can prove to be incredibly effective in attracting and retaining customers. Unfortunately, they can have the opposite results if not used correctly. Follow the above email marketing tips to create an email campaign that works!
Interested in learning more about using the best digital marketing strategies? Join the conversation to speak with our team of content & SEO experts!

The post Email Marketing Tips: How to Minimize the Number of Unsubscribes first appeared on ITVibes.