Every email marketing campaign offers its own challenges for marketers to overcome. During the fast-paced "Elements of Email" session at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015, five seasoned professionals explored the five biggest challenges to email marketing today.
This session was broken down into five subsections with a different speaker explaining a different challenge of email marketing through empirical evidence and their own professional experience. Topics revolved around compliance and risk management, segmentation, content, design and list hygiene.
Compliance
Shaun Brown, Partner, nNovation LLP, covered the rules and regulations that govern email today, primarily focusing on how CASL effected nNovation's and the industry's email marketing.
"This law has really caused a lot of email marketers to rethink legal compliance or, in many cases, think about it for the first time," he said.
Brown's presentation explained how poor risk management can affect the bottom line and provided a helpful graphical representation of risk management in his session slides.
Segmentation
Ryan Phelan, formerly the Vice President of Global Shared Services, Acxiom (and currently Vice President of Marketing Insights at Adestra), gave audience members a crash education on segmentation, from beginning steps to the pinnacle of segmented marketing — what he refers to as Valhalla marketing.
He broke his session down into four parts with appropriately academic titles:
- Segmentation 101: Segment by purchasers
- Segmentation 201: Segment by gender
- Segmentation 301: Transactional emails
- Segmentation 401: Valhalla marketing (using complex models to group customers together)
This session works as a wonderful first step for anyone considering moving away from the world of batch-and-blast to try their hand at segmentation.
"Segmentation and using data in an appropriate way to target an individual with an individual message is where we need to go," Phelan said.
Content
Jessica Best, Digital Marketing Evangelist, emfluence, shared a dirty secret of email marketing: just because you sent the email, doesn't mean it went anywhere. In her session, she attempted to demystify email content and asked audiences to consider what content is may be making them look bad.
"Your content itself could be part of why you look like spam or are being treated like spam," she said.
According to Best, your inbox placement is contingent on the relationship between your reputation and your content. She also provided two key rules to test whether or not your content will make it through the dreaded spam filter.
Design
Justine Jordan, Marketing Director, Litmus, gave some actionable tips for improving email that even non-designers can implement. According to her, design is not art. Design is a method of communication.
Jordan explained how adding negative or white space to designs can increase reading comprehension and drastically change marketing messages. She also explored the concept of hierarchy and how it can be implemented to change customer behavior.
Specifically, she focused on the hierarchy of:
"I'm going to leave you with a thought: Everyone designs, including you," Jordan concluded.
Hygiene
Jeff Anderson, Digital Marketing Manager, A Place For Mom, covered a decisive topic in the email marketing community through his own professional experience: list cleansing.
When Anderson started, A Place for Mom had an emailing list of 1.7 million addresses with roughly 70,000 opens per week. By the end of this in-depth list cleansing campaign, he had reduced the list to 450,000 addresses, which saw roughly 115,000 opens per week.
During his presentation, Anderson covered the warning signs that may indicate a list cleanse is in order and presented a four-step methodology for list-cleansing:
- Identify inactive subscribers
- Ask inactive subscribers to opt-in again
- Remove inactive subscribers who do not opt-in again from your list
- Measure success by quality of opens and ignore open rate
"Don't be afraid to prune aggressively. Don't be afraid to try some things," Anderson concluded.
Related Resources
MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 — At the Bellagio in Las Vegas, February 22-24
Gain access to 14 full sessions from MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015Email Deliverability: 9 lessons about Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (From the MarketingSherpa blog)
Email Marketing Chart: How to improve deliverabilityEmail Marketing 101: How to determine the right email content for your subscribers (From the MarketingSherpa blog)
Email Marketing: Combining design and content for mobile success (From the MarketingSherpa blog)
Email Marketing: Cleansing your list of inactive users (From the MarketingSherpa blog)
