Buzz Building Series - Issue 8: Email Marketing to amplify your content and build your audience

Hi There,

Welcome to issue 8 of the buzz building series in which we look at Email Marketing, and how it can support your buzz building program.

Email Marketing is a much misunderstood, and sadly much abused, form of online marketing. In the context of your buzz building program, it can be an extremely useful tool in building an engaged audience, and establishing yourself as a thought leader.

Rick says...

In the buzz building program that we've designed for ourselves, we utilise Email Marketing to deliver a monthly "eBriefing", wrapping up all the best content we've produced from the month. There are a number of things that we take into account when planning these campaigns, both strategic and technical...

List Building

First of all, how do you plan to build your list of recipients? We'd recommend a combination of:

> Existing contacts: Your existing contacts and customers are your best prospects for new business. Send them a mail asking if they'd like to receive your monthly ebriefing.

> Organic list building: Create a strategy for building your mailing list organically, but attracting prospects to your blog/website, and offering them an incentive for signing up.

DON'T BUY DATA. It's tempting, but don't do it. In the context of a buzz building program, where you're trying to build trust and engagement with your audience, SPAMing a list of purchased contacts is NOT a good place to start. Focus on the content, and create a strategy for driving people to your list organically.

Design and Coding

Whilst you can get a HTML email template for free, I'd recommend against it. One of the tricks of building an engaged audience, is to create a 'brand' around your email campaigns. So I'd recommend hiring a professional email designer, with experience in the design and coding of HTML email templates. With over 30 different types of email clients, and multiple screen-sizes/devices, it is more important than ever to fully test your email templates - this takes a lot of experience.

Delivery Platform

There are a number of great email marketing platforms out there, and some pretty awful ones.

I'd recommend looking at two of the biggest and best: Campaign Monitor, and MailChimp. Both will enable you to:

> Manage your mailing list

> Store your templates

> Edit and deliver campaigns

> View and analyse detailed reports on how your recipients interact with your campaigns

Here is a further handy check-list (not exhaustive) for your email marketing campaign:

> Write a benefit-based subject line to encourage opens

> Send the email at a time it's most likely to be read. (You know your audience, but my experience has shown mid-morning on either a Thursday or Friday to be good times)

> Include social media share options

> Provide the facility for the reader to share the email with a friend

> Is the email personalised (there are technical ways to do this)

> Does the email contain a call-to-action (e.g. "Download our latest white paper")

> Have you included a link to unsubscribe (this is a legal requirement)

If you've any questions at all about how to get started with your email marketing campaign, please get in touch with us.

Don't forget to tell your friends...

 

Owen says...

So far all your work in blogging, content generation and SEO has been about pulling people towards you and your website, blog and content. It’s a really good idea to complement this with an outbound or “push” approach by using an eMarketing approach to take the content to your audience. 
An email “round-up” of your recent blogs and content is a great way to ensure you stay top of mind with your customers and prospects and a good way to introduce them to more of the products, services, ideas and innovations that they could be buying from you.

Of course there’s little point in just pushing it out into the ether and hoping that someone somewhere will read and respond, so you need to make sure you construct and send your eMail “round-up” using a system or platform that enables you to:

Track opens – so that you can get a view of how much of your audience saw the content at all
Track Clicks- so that you can start to analyse which of your products, services or the topics you were discussing was of most interest and to whom
Track Unsubscribes* - so that you can ensure you remove people who’ve asked from any further eMarketing communication from you.

While the round-up communication will be a great way of gathering some market intelligence, I’d then suggest you plan follow up and highly personalised email approaches to those who have shown (by the number of clicks) particular interest in any specific blog, article or link. 
Make sure you’re quick on the draw here too. People’s interest can quickly move onto something else, so if you are able respond the next day with a personal one to one follow up email if you’ve seen someone take a good deal of interest.

Don’t expect the round up email to make the phone ring (although it does sometimes). Use it as a way to stay in touch and to gain insight into what your audience is most interested in. 
The follow up emails will be more effective, the more personalised you make them.

When following up I suggest you remember that you’re a human, writing to a human and that the last thing anyone is going to want to receive is a “sales email”. You don’t need to impress people with your elegant prose or the number of words you can fit into a single email or indeed with all the wonderful features and benefits of your product or service.

Instead you will get the best results from sending a very short, plain text (i.e. no fancy HTML graphics) one to one, personal email. Be concise and courteous and write with a view to getting them to answer. I could write an entire book on this subject but suffice to say concise is best and ask (politely) for a response which while a commitment on their part, doesn’t really demand very much from them.

Here’s a good example:

Subject: Last week (use a title that’s not too sales centric and could be almost “internal”)

Hey Bob, 
Did you see the article in our round up email last week about cost reduction services?
(Of course you know they did, they clicked on it 25 times!)  
I suspect it would take no more than 20 minutes to get a feel for the kind of savings you could achieve. It’s a no cost, no obligation conversation to find out. 
How are you fixed this week? 
Let me know!
Thanks 
Owen

The main lesson in eMarketing is that etiquette in email communication of this nature is unique. It’s almost reasonable to ignore an email from someone (people accept that there’s so much of it). So make sure yours are well written, technically well-constructed and are short enough to get read!

*You have a legal obligation to provide an obvious unsubscribe option that works and a process you can demonstrate for removing people from your email marketing list.

 

 

3 things to do today to help with your email marketing...

Sign up for an email marketing platform
Import your existing contacts and send them a one-time "invite"
Plan your first campaign

Don't forget, still to come in the buzz building series...

> Analytics and Optimisation; understanding your impact

> Reporting and building a pipeline of interest

> Audience & content. How to write a buzz building strategy

> Buzz building and the resources required to sustain it

To discuss any aspect of the buzz building series, please call us at your convenience on 0203 1372 844.

Rick & Owen