Definitive Guide to Engaging Email Marketing

About the Guide

How engaging email marketing can benefit you

It’s no secret that consumers are constantly bombarded with information and advertising. This, along with shortened attention spans and modern buying habits, make it easy for consumers to dodge marketing communications that don’t feel relevant to them. In fact, after reviewing 130 million IP addresses that sent nearly 20 trillion emails, Experian noted that 85% of all messages received by internet service providers (ISPs) were classified as spam.

Stats like this sum up why traditional email marketing is no longer enough. The future is in engagement marketing.

While email is still a direct channel to reach customers, email service providers (ESPs), which cannot deliver the detailed metrics you need to engage and convert subscribers into buyers, may be hurting rather than helping you. As an email marketer, you are focused on growing your list of engaged subscribers, yet with irrelevant or unengaging emails, you will lose up to 30% of subscribers each year due to email attrition.

A strong email marketing strategy does more than maintain a line of contact with your buyers. Email marketing gives you the ability to craft a compelling narrative, allowing you to connect with customers in a personalized and engaging way. Developing this relationship requires care and consistency in order to establish your brand as a familiar and welcome presence in your customers’ inbox.

"It’s one thing to send emails. It’s an entirely other ball game to send email that’s engaging, timely, targeted, and part of an overall integrated campaign. This guide is chock full of actionable tips and suggestions to help get your email marketing message delivered, opened, and acted upon. A MUST read.”—DJ Waldow, Founder & CEO of Waldow Social and Co-Author of The Definitive Guide to Engaging Email Marketing and The Rebel’s Guide to Email Marketing

What's in the guide?

• What is engaging email marketing?
  By examining the profile of the modern customer, you can get a better understanding of what informs their purchasing decisions and how they prefer to interact with brands. “Batch and blast” emails are passé modern best practices for emailmarketing demand that you create emails that are conversational, calculated, and establish trust between business and customer. After mastering what makes an engaging email, use our score sheet to evaluate your current engagement and see where you can improve.
• Build trust
  To be invited into a customer’s inbox, you must establish trust. Discover how to set a precedent for future email communications during the email opt-in process and maintain consistency in your campaigns. You’ll also gain access to several case studies; learn how to avoid spam filters and legal issues, the differences between single and double opt-in, as well as best practices for list building, timing, frequency, and email deliverability.
• Always be relevant
  Impersonal or poorly timed communication can land your emails in the spam folder. Relevance means knowing who your customer is and what they want. Deliver compelling, personalized content through segmentation, behavioral and demographic targeting, and other advanced engagement techniques, like propensity modeling and scoring, to ensure you’re saying the right things to the right people. Gain access to practical strategies to move from “dumb lists” to “smart lists,” write intriguing subject lines, optimize design for desktop and mobile, and craft content to reach your specific business and marketing goals.
• Conversations, not campaigns
  Commercial email marketing evolved out of the traditional direct-mail mindset of big campaigns sent to many on the marketer’s terms—not the buyer’s. Getting your messages to recipients is not enough; you have to give subscribers reasons to engage. Do this by listening, adapting, and using behavior filters to target and trigger messaging that flows from one email to the next.
• Coordinate across channels
  Seamlessly flow throughout every platform that you use to interact with customers and weave a consistent omnichannel approach to coordinated messaging and engagement across touchpoints. See what organizational and technical barriers to use to optimize and automate your efforts, as well as the latest tools and tactics you’ll need to overcome those challenges. Effective email marketing isn’t just about the email anymore. It’s about building the conversation across the website, display/retargeting, direct mail and tores, videos, and other key conversation points.
• New metrics for email
  The more marketing technology evolves, the more robust metrics become. A riveting subject line and persuasive copy is only as good as the revenue it produces. Go beyond click, bounce, sent, and open rate, and dig deep into advanced metrics that will help you develop a lucrative email marketing strategy, like engagement and marketing ROI.
• Graduate from ESP to marketing automation
  Traditional ESPs have important limitations when it comes to email marketing. Master what a modern email marketing strategy should look like and how it can save you time and money with automation, measure and optimize your marketing investments, and compel faster revenue growth through increased subscriber engagement. Finally, develop a list of tools to implement it yourself with our key capabilities checklist.

This comprehensive guide will teach you the basic tenets of email marketing in today’s evolving world, as well as advanced tactics to utilize marketing automation programs to engage with potential buyers and ultimately increase your ROI.