Happy Monday morning, marketers! Ready to get back to it? Here are few email marketing-related news items from around the web to help get your week off to an informed start.
The ‘genius of easy-click’ emails
Jason Warnock was so impressed by the simplicity of an email he received from Expedia following a flight this summer that he wrote a piece for Marketing Land extolling the virtues of what he terms “easy-click” emails. He encourages marketers to emulate the approach Expedia took in the message he received shortly after his flight, which asked him to express the level of his satisfaction with it by simply clicking on either a smiley-face or frowny-face icon. “At the end of a long day, the Expedia email was a breath of fresh air because it showed me something I hadn’t seen before: the genius of easy-click emails.”
“An easy-click email is an email marketing device that drives conversions by simplifying the user response,” Warnock explains. “Instead of overwhelming users with copy and a complex menu of options, easy-click emails plainly and clearly present a single question and two or three visual responses.” He adds that easy-click emails are particularly convenient for mobile users and also provide improved business outcomes by simplifying back-end segmentation. “Easy-click emails themselves offer a lot by way of engagement — and most importantly, closer and more meaningful relationships with customers,” he concludes.
Autumn email marketing opportunities
Writing on the Vertical Response blog, Tori Tsu sees numerous opportunities for marketers to grow their businesses in autumn. “Unless you run a pumpkin farm, chances are autumn brings a dip in business along with the drop in temperature,” she writes. “Many consumers take a spending breather after the expenses of summer vacations and back-to-school season, and before the traditional holiday cash hemorrhage begins. The good news is that many of your competitors will likely take a bit of a marketing break, too.”
Tsu provides ten suggestions for email marketers to take advantage of the break that their competitors might take this fall, including: holding a “rake in savings” contest that invites your customers to send photos of them raking leaves; personalizing Thanksgiving with a thank-you message to your customers; developing contests related to the many TV shows that premiere during the fall, and creating football-related promos. “Autumn promotions can be just as hot for business as spring and summer email marketing efforts,” Tsu writes. “All you need is some creativity and a great email list.”
And since there are still a couple of weeks left in September, you still have time to check out our post September 2016 Email Campaign Ideas and put some of the great ideas in it to work in your email marketing efforts.
Myths and misconceptions about email automation
“Nowadays the demand for email marketing automation is bigger than ever,” writes Kevin Hopkinson at Business 2 Community. “The days of rudimentary batch email blasts are quickly fading away. Be that as it may, there is still a large population of marketers that refuse to step into the world of email automation and triggered emails. Part of that refusal is a misunderstanding of cost vs. benefit, and the other part is simply an inability or unwillingness to invest in the necessary infrastructure.”
Hopkinson identifies and examines three “myths and misconceptions” about email automation that could be affecting email marketers’ perception of it: that automation is primarily about saving time, that ESP platforms can easily manage every automation solution, and that automation will fix bad data. “The point of automating emails isn’t to improve on the balance of your workload, but rather to build on the quality in which your workload is balanced,” he writes. “Effectively navigating this concept will allow your campaigns to have more meaning and your relationships with your recipients to become more meaningful.”