6 signs-you-need-an-email-upgrade-e book

6

UPGRADE

EMAIL MARKETING

signs you need an

table of contents

Sign 1: You’re not segmenting your list or targeting your email sends. 4Sign 2: Your templates are simple and they don’t support responsive design. 8Sign 3: Your reporting is basic or non-existent, leaving you with little-

to-no insights about subscribers.

12

Sign 4: Testing email subject lines and content is a chore. 16

Sign 5: You’re required to pay for every user who wants to access to your

email marketing platform.

19

Sign 6: When you call or email for help, a robot answers. 22

6 Signs You Need an Email Marketing Upgrade • 2

6

UPGRADE

EMAIL MARKETING

signs you need an

Marketers love

emailWhy? Because email is the world’s preferred communications channel, because email produces the highest ROI of any other channel, and because email is the digital glue for all other marketing channels.

Marketers who are getting the most out of their email programs are using proven strategies and tactics to achieve significant ROI. By deploying time-tested best practices and leveraging innovative technologies, smart marketers are delivering dynamic, personalized messages – and the results are impressive.

But a savvy email program doesn’t just need the right strategy; it also needs the right email platform. Today’s subscribers are intelligent, and they know a generic e-blast when they see one. Email has evolved into a sophisticated tool that lets you send the right message to the right person at the right time. Using an email platform that puts the best technology at your fingertips makes managing and sending ROI-producing campaigns a snap.

How do you know if you’re getting the most from your email program? Here are six signs you need to upgrade to a more sophisticated platform and up your email marketing game.


If you’re not collecting and using data about subscribers in your emails, you’re on the losing team. Today’s subscribers are savvy: They want to see messages about the services and products that fit their genders, ages and lifestyles. They zone out when you send them a generic message meant for an entire list - boring!

But by treating the email experience as a dialogue with subscribers, and using the right data to set up segments of your list, you can send personalized and dynamic content that will blow subscribers away.

You’re not segmenting your list or

targeting your email sends.

SIGN

No. 1


Segmentfor

relevancy

Create conversations with customers, not one-way messages about the stuff

you want them to hear about.

Blah, blah, blah. When you send one message to your entire list, subscribers are often con-

fused, upset, and uninterested. None of those actions leads them to convert to customers.

So what do subscribers respond to? Try timely, relevant, personalized messages – in other

words, marketing campaigns that don’t look or sound like marketing campaigns. They

feel more like a happy relationship. And just like any good relationship, you’ve got to know

who the other person is.

Gather the right data to learn about subscribers so

you can identify and create targeted messages

specifically for them.

If the email platform you’re using now can’t help you insert first-

name personalization into your messages, you’re doomed. This

type of targeting is one of the simplest pieces of information to

ask of your subscribers, and the easiest to use. And guess what?

People open, click, and convert more when they see their names

in the subject lines and content of an email.

You should also be collecting other information about your

subscribers to create segments and customize email campaigns.

For starters, this data might include subscribers’ titles, ages,

genders, industry, locations, and birthday months.

Sending these personalized emails is a snap when you segment.

Don’t create smaller lists out of one big list and then manage

them all separately. Instead, set up a segmentation rule that pulls

from your master list one time.

Not only can you segment by the data you’ve collected, but with

a more sophisticated email service provider, you can segment

by customer behavior. For example, you can send different offers

based on a subscriber opening or clicking a previous email, the

types of offers a subscriber has responded to most in the past, or

how often a subscriber interacts with an email. The possibilities

are nearly endless!


use datafor

personalization

Personalization wins!

Compare this generic marketing email from a

college to the highly relevant email from Ikea.

The first doesn’t have anything personal about

it – it’s just a general message to all students

about a topic they may or may not care about.

The latter talks about what time of year it

is – summer – and promotes that season in its

copy and special offer. Ikea has also gathered,

stored, and used the subscriber’s location

information by linking to his or her preferred

store in Atlanta.

Generic college newsletter

LOOKING TO GET PERSONAL?

See how personalization works in

our platform!

Personalized email by IKEA

http://www.whatcounts.com/schedule-a-demo-form/


More people are opening, clicking, and buying from emails on their mobile devices today. That number is only going to grow as time goes by. If your DIY provider isn’t helping you keep up with this trend, you’re not making as much money as you could through your email marketing.

Your templates are simple and

they don’t support responsive design.

SIGN

No. 2

Dazzle subscribers with beautiful mobile emails. Responsive

design is a method of coding your email campaigns so no

matter what device on which they’re viewed – desktop, mobile,

tablet – the subscriber sees an optimized version.

Designing for mobile devices is a no-brainer, and responsive design

is fast becoming the standard for email experts who send winning

campaigns.

If you’re using a basic email provider, you’re most likely not using respon-

sive design. Even if you’re trying to lay out your emails to be mobile-

friendly, with bigger call-to-action buttons and a larger font, there’s no

guarantee the message will look good on all types of devices. Different

operating systems display images and text at different sizes, and one

email that renders nicely on an iPhone may look wonky on an Android.

Don’t settle for subscribers viewing tiny or distorted versions of your

emails. They’ll more than likely abandon reading them altogether, and we

all know that means lost money. It’s time to graduate to a better email

platform that will help your messages render beautifully where people

read them most.


Design for

all devices

Craft for

clicks


And once they’re created, your templates

are easy to edit and send due to built-in

intuitive functionality. The ease of use

of a more sophisticated platform will be a

sigh of relief compared to the current DIY

emailing you’re doing.

Don’t worry about creating these

templates yourself, either.

Stepping up from a DIY email provider to

the big leagues means you’ll have state-

of-the-art tools and integrations at your

fingertips.

What’s more, you’ll have access to

experienced creative experts who will

help you design templates that not only

look good on mobile, but fit your brand

and marketing goals.

http://www.whatcounts.com/professional-services/creative-services/

Responsive design?

Here’s what it looks like. The

WhatCounts Weekly is accessible on

desktop screens, while a different

version appears on mobile

devices to create readable,

clickable content.

http://www.whatcounts.com/subscribe-to-our-newsletter/

If you can’t measure your email marketing, what’s the point of doing it? Smart marketers must understand what messages resonate most with their subscribers so they can send them more of those messages. Metrics such as clicks and opens are important to measure for each email you send, and an overview of these metrics, as well as what devices and browsers they’re viewed on, is significant to understand for campaigns as a whole. Deep reporting capabilities such as these are a must to be able to send the right message to the right person at the right time, and you just can’t get that with a basic, DIY platform.

Your reporting is basic or non-existent,

leaving you with little-to-no insights

about subscribers.

SIGN

No. 3

measureengagement

View analytics based on information you’ve

gathered about subscribers, as well as their

reactions to emails.

A sophisticated email marketing platform will allow you to

see who your subscribers are at a glance to help you

market smarter to them.

In the email campaign to the right pulled from the

WhatCounts platform, you can see the majority of

subscribers are between the ages of 45-54 or 35-44.

It also reveals that most of the subscribers are men.

See metrics for every email you send. Unlike a simple

email platform, a smarter system will provide you with

key feedback about your campaigns in real time.

This includes clicks, opens, and click-to-open rate, which is

important for measuring engagement. Other numbers to keep

track of are forward, opt out, bounce, unsubscribe, and – of

course – conversion rates.

know your

roi

Pull specific subscriber

reports so you can understand

a subscriber’s history over time.

You can send your most engaged sub-

scribers a thank you email or invite them

back to an event they attended last year.

These are just some of the reports

email service providers give their

customers. Smart email marketers

know their email program is

nothing without insights about

their subscribers.

gain insightsthrough

reporting

You can write stellar emails with catchy subject lines all day long, but if they don’t excite your subscribers, there’s no point. Today, testing is necessary in every email marketing program, and the basics just won’t do anymore. You need an advanced testing feature that allows you to optimize every part of your email and automatically send a winner. If your current email platform doesn’t allow you to A/B test subject lines and content, it’s time to move on.

Testing email subject lines and content

is a chore.

SIGN

No. 4

With a sophisticated A/B testing feature, you can easily choose

what portion of your list you want to test and what part of your

email you want to test. Subject line tests are the simplest to set

up, but you can also test different parts of your email content and

design, such as a call-to-action or image placement. Choose how

the winner of the test will be chosen: Opens, clicks, forwards,

social shares, conversions, and more.

The usability of an A/B testing feature will make your life as a

marketer easier, not to mention more successful as you gather

information about what your subscribers like. However, the best

part of testing is the simplicity of choosing a winner and delivering

it to readers.

test for

success

Build A/B testing campaigns that pit one email

against one or several other emails to decide which ones

receive the most attention from readers.

Automatically launch the

winning campaign to the rest

of the list.

Yes, you can automatically have the A/B

test winner shipped off to the rest of your

list based on the metric you’ve chosen.

So essentially once you’ve set up the

test, you can sit back, relax, and let the

email platform do all the work.

There’s no manual process of going in,

evaluating results, choosing a winner, and

scheduling another email deployment

to those on your list who weren’t a part

of the list.

Whatever aspect you need to test in

order to send smarter, more personalized

emails, an advanced A/B testing feature

is a must.

You still have the option of manually

choosing a winner, but you can choose to

let the platform do the hard work for you.

Once the A/B test is launched, and the

winner is chosen and sent, you can then

evaluate the results of the campaign as a

whole.

If the winning email’s metrics didn’t

exceed the losing email’s metrics by a

significant amount, it’s easy to set up

another A/B test to experiment with

the emails in a different way.


Even if you have a small marketing team, it’s nice to have a username available on your email marketing platform for each person. That way, everyone can have a look around and contribute to the goals of your program. It stinks that many DIY email platforms insist you only get one seat to ride their platform, and you’re made to pay exorbitant amounts if you want additional seats. This isn’t the case with a better, more sophisticated email platform.

You’re required to pay for every user

who wants to access your email

marketing platform.

SIGN

No. 5

it’s aboutvalue & price

Access one or many logins – for free!

Not only will you get progressive, easy-to-use features

with a smarter email marketing platform, you’ll get as

many logins as you need included in the price.

Now everyone on your team can access your email mar-

keting campaigns, A/B tests, lists, segmentations, and

everything else you have stored in the platform. Whether

you have one or 10 people who need access to your email

marketing, you won’t have to spend a penny more

when you graduate to a better email service provider.

What’s more, if you have several departments or smaller

entities within your company who need to use email

marketing, an advanced email provider supplies the

perfect solution.


Employ parent/child relationships to build out

sub-platforms and stay organized within your

company.

Everyone’s email campaigns stay within their particular

departments, so no one accidentally edits the wrong email

template or – oops! – sends out someone else’s campaign.

With an advanced email platform, a chamber of commerce

could have a child account for its economic development

initiative. These two entities are a part of the same

organization, but because they have different goals for their

marketing, it would be beneficial if they each had their own

account for sending emails. Enter a sophisticated email

marketing provider.

The best part? Establishing these sub-categories costs

nothing extra. Keeping your sanity doesn’t have to be

another line item on your budget. Parent-child accounts


Imagine it’s late Friday afternoon. You’re trying to get one last email campaign out the door before heading home for the weekend. Suddenly, you run into a glitch in the system. If you’re using a traditional, do-it-yourself provider, you can forget about leaving the office anytime soon; a cry for aid will only answered by an automated voice or a suggestion to proffer your question to a community forum. But when you’re sending with a smart email marketing provider, your experience is the polar opposite.

When you call or email for help,

a robot answers.

SIGN

No. 6

A better email marketing service sees

your problems as its problems, which

is why it will have a human being ready to

answer your questions 24/7.

If you want a platform that gives you

the power and freedom to run with your

email campaigns on your own, but is

there to support you when times get

tough, graduating to a better email

service provider is the way to go.

we love email...

Let us help!

Rely on a team of experts to

help you 24/7. When you opt for

a smart email marketing

platform, you get exceptional service

as a part of the package.


Every account is covered by a dedicated

account manager who’s been where

you’ve been and dealt with the problems

you’re dealing with.

And for the times when you’re typing

HTML late at night or deploying a cam-

paign from your couch on the weekend,

someone will be on the other end of the

phone to help you work through that

glitch so you can get on with life.

Did that hit home?

If those six signs resonated with you, it may be time to ditch your

current email platform and move on to something better.

You need a smart email platform with innovative tools to

make your job easier. With a sophisticated email platform, you’re

able to send the right message to the right person at the right

time through better testing and insight-based reporting.

Wave bye-bye to generic e-blasts and say hello to smart, sexy

messages that make the money pour in. It’s no wonder smart

marketers love email.

Ready to up your email marketing game?

We’ll walk you through the process step by step.

Just ask us!


ready to

upgrade?


WhatCounts loves email. That’s because it’s the only marketing channel providing a substantial ROI

when marketing professionals deliver smart, personalized messages to their target audiences.

Each day our team partners with over 800 customers to leverage email, social media, mobile design,

and the web to drive revenue. We provide enhanced data, flexible deployment options, content

automation and professional services.

We’re headquartered in Atlanta, GA, with offices in Seattle, Sydney, Baltimore, and other regional

locations. Find out more about why we love email at www.whatcounts.com.

A3630 Peachtree Rd.

Suite 900

Atlanta, GA 30326

www.whatcounts.com

404.995.8600

866.804.0076 (toll free)

404.995.8611

[email protected]

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http://www.whatcounts.com

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