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5 Keys for Driving Growth & Engagement via Email

We probably don’t have to tell you that email is still a really effective marketing channel. According to Campaign Monitor, for every $1 spent, email marketing generates $38 in ROI.

There’s a catch, though. That huge ROI is assuming that you’re doing everything perfectly with email. 

Today’s Listen will help you get on the right track to getting that sweet, sweet ROI. It’s with Scott Heimes, CMO of SendGrid, which is an email marketing platform. Basically, Scott knows email.

Here are Scott’s 5 tips for email growth & engagement:

• (11:35) Design is often overlooked in email, but it matters so much. You need to have a really crisp CTA in your email. Pay attention to typography, images, and the colors that support your brand. Oh, and A/B test everything. EVERYTHING.
• (13:43) Content also matters (duh). 3-word subject lines win out over just about any other combination. Pay attention to the preview text. This is the sentence that appears right after the subject line. It really matters, according to Scott.
• (15:19) Contextualization. Using what you know about your subscribers will increase your open rates. SendGrid found that using someone’s name in subject lines increases the open rates by over 40%.
• (18:50) Globalization is really important to understand. If your audience is in other countries, ensure that you’re following cultural norms and other countries’ laws.
• (20:41) Deliverability. This is a really complex topic, but important if you want your emails to land in inboxes. Understand SPF authentication, DKIM digital signatures, DMARC MX records…come again? Also, make sure you’re continually pruning off the worst 1% of subscribers. Inactive subscribers kill your deliverability.

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7 Digital Marketing Strategies That Work

Depending on the scale of your biz, your digital marketing strategy might be a forever-moving machine with multiple goals and new dreams. Maybe you’re just starting out on your digital journey, the one that boosts your online presence. Maybe you’re looking to refresh your tactics or want to see a bigger payoff in your campaigns.

Today’s Read will hook you up, serving up 7 building blocks to help create an effective digital strategy. Below are all seven, but this article is really more of a guide so, to get the most out of it, we suggest fully diving in. 

1. Build your persona, like Marketing Molly! This is your ideal customer represented by demographics (location, age, income, job title) and psychographics (goals, challenges, hobbies/interests, priorities).
2. Identify your goals and the digital marketing tools you’ll need.
3. Evaluate your existing digital marketing channels and assets. This is an owned, earned, and paid media framework that will help to categorize the digital ‘vehicles’, assets, or channels that you’re already using.
4. Audit and plan your owned media (website, blog, social media) by auditing your existing content, identifying gaps in your content, and creating a content creation plan.
5. Audit and plan your earned media by building up an idea of what earned media will help you reach your goals. Look where your traffic and leads are coming from (if that’s your goal) and rank each earned media source from most effective to least effective.
6. Audit and plan your paid media. Say you’ve been spending a lot of money on AdWords and haven’t seen the results you want. It’s probably time to refine your approach, or ditch it and focus on another platform that seems to be yielding better results. Not sure how to use AdWords? HubSpot’s got you with a freebie.
7. Bring it all together and what d’ya got? A path to digital marketing success! Here’s what your path will look like:

Clear profile(s) of your buyer persona(s)
One or more marketing-specific goals
An inventory of your existing owned, earned, and paid media
An audit of your existing owned, earned, and paid media
An owned content creation plan or wish list

One more thing: Plan your strategy over a longer period of time — say 12 months — and create a scheduled timeline for your activity. It will help you communicate your plans to your colleagues. And keep you from looking like this.

If you’re still unsure where to even start or need more help hammering out your digital strategy for optimum success, we can help with that too. Not to toot our own horn anything…but we’re like ~digital marketing experts~. Toot toot. Beep beep.

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Peter Dinklage Contemplates Our Hyperconnected World

Peter Dinklage, known to most as Tyrion Lannister on GoT (is this the last time we’ll mention Game of Thrones? IDK) trades in his Hand of the King Pin for a dashing leather jacket in today’s Watch. Chosen for his ability to speak in a “bold, intelligent, and captivating way,” Peter Dinklage and Ogilvy come together in a new, dramatic ad for Cisco.

“To help businesses understand what Cisco’s network makes possible, they need to hear about these innovations in a simple and relatable way.” And what better way than with a relatable, highly recognizable actor, who addresses how monumental and intuitive the new network is. Perfect timing in this climate of cyber attacks. Hide yo’ Bitcoin, Hide yo’ Ethereum.

This is also great example of a company strategically using popular culture to grab the audience’s attention, airing the ad just in time for the GoT season finale. 

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