News Round-Up: Why Millennials Love Email, 2018 Email Tips, and Embracing the Live Social Feed

Good morning, marketers! Here’s some recent email-marketing-related news to help get your workday off to an informed start.

**Study find sales and promotions critical to millennial engagement
**

Rose Leadem at Entrepreneur reports on a study that has good news for email marketers regarding millennial engagement – and which claims to have uncovered the keys to email marketing success with this critical demographic. The study was conducted by SendinBlue and was focused specifically on examining millennial email marketing preferences.

“Sixty-three percent of respondents said email was their number one choice of communication with retailers, with only 14% choosing text messaging,” Leadem writes. “Now that it’s established that email is the best route to go, it’s time to start thinking about how to get millennials to actually open your emails and take action. What’s the answer?

Sales and promotions. According to the research, 59% of respondents said they would take action from emails that contain a promotional offer for a website or specific product, and even more (71%) said they would take action if the email contained a wider variety of offers such as discount codes, free shipping and other perks.”

Other notable findings from the study:

• 68% said they check their inbox at least two to five times daily, but receive fewer than five marketing messages a day – which signals an opportunity for marketers;
• The majority of respondents will bring up an email from a retailer while browsing a physical store to access coupons;
• And 55% said email marketers who send spam are more likely to lose their customer loyalty. “Millennials are a unique group of consumers who know exactly what they want from retailers. Having grown up with the explosion of technology and social media, they can spot inauthenticity and spam from a mile away – and once they do, it’s ‘game over,’” according to an infographic accompanying the article.

Use this five-point audit to ensure email marketing success in 2018

Ryan Phelan, writing at Marketing Land, has some ideas for email marketers trying to jumpstart their efforts this year. “I always urge marketers to set aside time, while the year is young, to go off-site for a strategy day and develop a plan for your marketing year — not just campaigns, but what you’re going to do to move your program forward,” he writes.

If an offsite session is out of the question, Phelan has another option, a five-point email audit that he says will help you assess your program’s effectiveness, identify challenges, and map out your course for the year.

Here are questions Phelan suggests asking:

• Are you asking customers and users for their primary email addresses?
• How do your transactional emails make money for your email program?
• What’s the process you need to get an email campaign out the door?
• How do you promote your email successes throughout the company?
• What do you want to accomplish this year?

The answers to these questions to can help get your year off on the right foot and keep you focused throughout 2018, Phelan says. In addition, he urges email marketers to stay focused on performance data throughout the year.

“Keep track of everything you did this year to measure and improve your marketing program,” he advises. “Document your processes. List the new methods you used to promote your successes within your company and what the results were. Don’t be put off by failures or results that weren’t what you expected. Keep trying. This time next year, pull out your list and use it to guide your 2019 planning.”

To-do: Add social to your emails in 2018

If you’re not integrating a live social feed into your your campaigns, you’re missing out on some serious UGC.

According to Kimberly Mercada at ActiveTrail, here’s how you can get started: “Beef up your email marketing tactic by integrating it with your social media assets to increase subscribers and boost engagement. You can start by inviting your social media followers to sign up for your e-newsletters or email updates. If they are really interested in your business, this can give you a decent number of new subscribers.”