Email Marketing Archives - Cloud Control Media

4 A/B Tests for Email Marketing in Higher Education

Marcy Ansley on March 20, 2024

Just because something works well for another university doesn’t mean it’s going to work for your school’s email campaign. To really get to know what will appeal to your prospects you need to run A/B tests. What can you test? Well, you can test just about anything in an email campaign from the subject line to calls to action, but here are 4 of the top email marketing variables to A/B test:

A/B Test for Email Subject Line

Email subject lines are probably one of the most common variables to test. This is the first thing that a prospect will see when the email is delivered and can have a big impact on an email’s performance. Some components to consider A/B testing are subject line length and action-oriented words that create urgency. Also, if classes are starting soon, test using a start date against not using one and gather data.

However, with recent mail privacy changes, determining a clear subject line test winner can be tricky. Open rates in today’s email world are inflated with many emails only being opened via a proxy server and not always in a contact’s inbox. Subject line tests still offer valuable data, but make sure to not focus solely on Open Rates. When determining results consider overall email engagement and when looking at the Open Rate weigh the impact off suspected mail privacy opens.

Email Deployment Date

If you’ve always deployed all your emails on the same day consider why you chose that day. Did you pick it because some survey noted it as the best day? Try different days and see what works best for your prospective students. Just because a retail giant has seen success deploying email campaigns bright and early on a Monday morning, it doesn’t mean that’s what’s best for your institution.

A/B Test for Email Calls to Action (CTA)

Once your prospects open your email, you now need to get them to take action – click through to your landing page. A/B testing your CTA can be as straight forward as trying different verbiage such as “Enroll Now” versus “Discover More”, button color, or it can also be location of the CTA within the email. Another consideration can be whether to use a text link or a button. Whichever CTA you opt for make sure it’s compelling and persuasive.

Email Personalization

Who doesn’t like to feel like an email was written specifically with them in mind? Try testing out adding a personalized greeting as straightforward as “Hi Jane!” or dig a little more deeply into your data and include details about a specific campus or program. The more relevant the email is to the prospect the more likely they are to take the action you’re looking for in your email campaign.

The variables you can test in an email are practically limitless. Your prospect list is constantly changing and so should your email initiatives. However, make sure to have a purpose in place for each test and don’t forget to analyze your results so you can adjust your email strategy appropriately.

If you’re ready to implement testing into your email marketing strategy, contact the CloudControlMedia experts today.

Marcy Ansley, Director of Email and Social Engagement

All Hail Email Marketing: June 12-18 is National Email Week

Marcy Ansley on June 13, 2023

It’s Email Marketing Week! And at CloudControlMedia we love email – we love to use it to connect our team, communicate with our partners, market on behalf of our clients, and reach new customers. And we especially love the high ROI on our email marketing efforts, both for our clients and ourselves. So, to celebrate this week, we want to take a look at the importance and history of this valuable digital tool.

A Little Email History Lesson

Did you know email marketing is one of the oldest and greatest digital marketing mediums? Email can be traced back to the 1970s. The very first newsletter, Electronic Mail and Message Systems (EMMS), was launched in December of 1977 using Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) – a precursor to the Internet as we know it today. The following year, the first mass marketing email was sent by Gary Thurek; he asserts to have gained $13 million in sales from that email. Thurek was also later crowed, “The Father of Spam.”

While Thurek didn’t exactly use a permission-based email strategy when he messaged hundreds of unsuspecting ARPANET users, we now know he was onto something big. However, it would be more than a decade before the term Digital Marketing would gain wide use and email marketing would rocket to the forefront of business.

During the 1990s, more households gained access to the internet – and their own email accounts – sparking digital marketing’s arrival into our everyday lives. The decade that brought us grunge and hip-hop also gave birth to AOL’s “You’ve Got Mail” and the emergence of webmail services like Hotmail and Yahoo. By 1999 over 400 million people jumped online.

Marketers quickly realized that sending an email to hundreds of thousands of people was exponentially cheaper than paying for printing and postage of direct mail campaigns. Unfortunately, this ease of use quickly led to some marketers abusing the power of digital marketing and the term spam was officially introduced into the New Oxford dictionary in 1998.

In the following 25 years several laws have been established to help keep bad actors in line and allow for the continued growth of email marketing. The most famous American legislation is the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act, or CAN-SPAM Act, that was signed into law in 2003. If you’re a seasoned digital marketer, you know the basics of this law, which sets rules for commercial email including opt-out regulations and transparent identity information like requiring a physical address in emails.

Technology continues to evolve, and more privacy concerns rise, which means email marketing and digital marketing as a whole will continue to advance including laws and regulations. As a digital marketer it’s important to understand the rules that surround running an email marketing campaign so you can fully realize the value.

The Power of Email

A lot has changed in the digital landscape in the last 45 years since Thuerk sent his mass mailing. Thuerk’s simple text only message inviting recipients to participate in a product demo achieved a 10% conversion rate and, as previously mentioned, an approximate $13 million return on his very small investment!

While achieving that level of ROI might be a tall order, research shows that email marketing today boasts an average of $38 earned on every dollar spent. In comparison, SEO efforts report having a 22 to 1 ROI while pay-per-click advertising is 2 to 1. With numbers like that, why wouldn’t you jump into the email world? After all, it’s what people want.

More than half of the world’s population is on email and most – 55% – prefer to receive information in their inboxes. And they engage with it! On average email marketing campaigns have an open rate of more than 21%, with some industries as high as 27%, and a click-through-rate (CTR) of 2.6%. Some industries report average CTRs over 5%. Depending on the type of campaign and the segmentation and personalization implemented, you have the potential to blow these average statistics out of the water.

At CloudControlMedia, with the right messaging, triggered at the right time, we’ve successfully gained open rates of 70% and CTRs as high as 17%. While admittedly these impressive results may not be the norm for every campaign, the potential for gains for any business, school, or organization exist. Email isn’t going away. In fact, projections show a 13% increase in email marketing revenue in the coming years with a forecasted value of $17.9 billion by 2027!

If you’re ready to make the most out of your email marketing campaigns, reach out to the experts at CloudControlMedia for help.

Marcy Ansley, Director of Email and Social Engagement

What is BIMI?

Marcy Ansley on February 8, 2023

All you need to know about Brand Indicators for Message Identification

If you’re deep in the world of email or if you paid close attention to the iOS16 launch last year, you may have heard of BIMI or Brand Indicators for Message Identification. Even if neither of those things apply to you, you’ve met BIMI—even if you don’t realize it.

Have you noticed that some of your emails have logos next to the sender’s name in your inbox? Well then, you’ve noticed BIMI!

Having logos next to your email looks cool and helps you stand out in the inbox. Just look at how TikTok and Just Women’s Sports standout in my inbox with BIMI:

BIMI offers a layer of authentication for brands, email clients, and subscribers; it confirms emails are not being sent by fraudulent senders trying to impersonate a brand. Plus, it supports greater brand recognition and ultimately improves email performance—more emails noticed and recognized in the inbox equals more emails opened. But don’t be fooled by the focus on the pretty logos. Implementing it isn’t as easy as uploading your logo to a server like you would for the logo inside the body of the email.

Since the primary focus of BIMI is to authenticate emails, it requires a bit of IT setup. BIMI is connected to a domain’s DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) record. What you have published in your domain’s DMARC helps email services determine if an email message is coming from the true domain, and should be allowed in the inbox, or if it’s an email spoof.

How BIMI Prevents Email Spoof

So, what is an email spoof? It’s a form of cyberattack where a hacker attempts to trick someone into believing their email is from a trusted sender—a brand or an individual—but it’s actually a tool for a phishing scam. And it has become more and more of a problem; with everyone home and relying on technology, the pandemic only increased chances of receiving a spoofed email. Data shows that email spoofing and phishing soared by 220% last year.

If you already send marketing emails, you should have your DMARC set up—hopefully correctly, and to the specifications BIMI requires. With the correct specs, you should already be protected against email spoofing. However, some organizations have a more relaxed DMARC policy, which won’t work with the BIMI implementation. You must set your policy to either “quarantine” or “reject.”

You can learn more about how to implement BIMI on your own or ask our team of experts! You’ll need to upload a TXT record to the DNS server, so you’ll likely need to call your IT Department for help.

Not All Email Box Providers Support BIMI

It’s important to note that not all email box providers support BIMI, but one of the big players in the game—Apple—just hopped on the bandwagon. With the iOS16 release this fall, Apple’s native email app began supporting BIMI. Apple was preceded by the most used email service provider, Gmail, which started supporting a BIMI pilot program in 2020 (it became widely available last year in Gmail). Yahoo, another major email provider, also supports BIMI.

Get a list of supported email providers here.

Supported email clients will likely increase in the coming years. BIMI is equally as advantageous for them as it is for marketers. It encourages senders to improve their authentication tools and as a result makes it easier for email clients to determine if an email should be blocked, sent to spam, or allowed in the inbox.

Implementing BIMI and utilizing all the best practice tools to authenticate your email is an important piece to a successful email marketing campaign. However, it’s not the only piece. If you need help putting the pieces together, reach out to our team of email marketing experts!

By: Marcy Ansley, Director of Email and Social Engagement

Marcy has over a decade of experience working at marketing agencies, managing email and social media campaigns. She is the head of the CCM email marketing, responsible for overseeing everything from strategy to implementation.

Do You Have Pride in Your Email Marketing?

Joseph Colarusso on June 22, 2022

It’s June, which means it’s Pride Month AND it’s Email Month! Not to mention it’s almost summer. What a great time of year! And with summer approaching, depending on your industry, you might be hitting a slower time for your business, which means it’s a perfect time to take a deep dive into how your email marketing efforts are holding up.

Email Metrics

One area you’re going to want to take particular interest in is the impact that Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) has had on your email campaigns and how you should measure results. Since the public launch of iOS15 in the fall of 2021 the adoption rate of the new operating system has hit nearly 90%. So, it’s fairly safe to assume that the vast majority of those iOS15 users have opted-in to MPP – and you’re no longer receiving accurate open data for those subscribers.

At CCM we’ve seen open rates boom in 2022 and while we’d like to say it’s all due to our team’s brilliant approach to email marketing – that’s only part of it. MPP is most certainly behind a big portion of the increase. So as a team, we’ve adjusted how we view success. Have you?

Open Rates are still a useful metric, especially if you have insight into user agent details like we do and can sort out suspected privacy opens from Apple’s MPP feature. However, for many this metric has always been a vanity metric; a showboat number that doesn’t tell a true story. It’s the flair and panache that everyone loves about Pride Parades, but it only scratches the surface.

More substantiative metrics to consider focusing on are Click Through Rate and Conversion Rates. These metrics give you a better idea of the effectiveness of your campaign. Higher rates reflect that your messaging, design, subject line – your email – resonated with your subscriber enough for them to take action, to learn more, to convert.

Automated Email Campaigns

You took a deep dive into your email metrics, and everything looks great. So, now what? It’s time to take a close look at your automations. If you don’t already have a list of all your active automations – make one. It’s important to know that what is running is actually what should be running.

Review your automations and compare it against overall email marketing strategy and goals to see where there may be holes in your efforts. For example, is there a step in your sales funnel that isn’t fully addressed in your email strategy? Perhaps there’s an opportunity for added messaging.

Quality Assurance Check

Changes are constant in the email world regarding supported code and rendering changes and within your own company’s operations or industry. Have you remembered to change your emails to keep up?

Take some time to review your codes, links, and logic. There are a lot of moving parts in automated email marketing campaigns and if just one of those parts breaks it can cause problems in the whole campaign. This is where that list of automated campaigns can be really helpful (try including a logic overview and active links for quick quality assurance checks).

Optimize and Refresh Your Email

Now that you’ve taken stalk of your entire email marketing campaign and you know everything is functioning properly and what’s getting the best results, it’s time to try to improve even more. In the first step of the review process, you should have identified what emails perform the best and which ones lack a little something. Consider refreshing copy or updating the overall design.

Is there a new trend in email marketing design you could test out on your audience? Give it a try! Maybe there’s an opportunity to create a more personalized touch with some new data you’ve started collecting for your subscribers? Give it a try! Do you have new photography you could incorporate in your campaigns? Give it a try!

Sometimes small changes can have a big impact, so don’t be afraid to test anything and everything (but not all at once!). You might surprise yourself with what your audience finds engaging.

No matter what you optimize make sure you can feel proud about what you’ve tried – even if the test doesn’t result in a boost in performance. Having pride in your email marketing campaign doesn’t mean always being successful. It might just mean learning something new.

Nevertheless, if you’re feeling a little uneasy about what the right choice is for your email marketing strategy our team of experts are happy to help!

Happy Pride and Email Month!

Marcy Ansley, Director of Email and Social Engagement

Marcy has over a decade of experience working within marketing agencies and managing email campaigns. She is the head of the CCM email service, responsible for overseeing everything from strategy to implementation.

Hi [Fname], Let’s Get Started on Your Personalized Email

Joseph Colarusso on March 30, 2022

Email personalization. Even if you’re just starting to dip your toes into this high ROI marketing channel, you’ve probably heard of email personalization, and you know it’s important. But do you really know what it means and how to do it?

What is Email Personalization?

Creating a truly personalized email goes way beyond using someone’s name. The idea is to send the right message to the right person at the right time – to create the experience of a 1-to-1 email. The key to creating such a campaign? Data.

The Importance of Data for Email Personalization

The more data you can collect about your subscribers the better. Where are they in the sales cycle? Have they made purchases before? Do they have specific interests? Where do they live? What content are they engaging with the most? These are all critical data points to utilize in personalization.

How to Capture Email Data

Email behavioral data is probably the easiest to capture since it’s right there in your email marketing tool. Every email you send to your subscribers brings in just a little bit more data. Is your subscriber not engaging with your email content? Send them re-engagement emails. Ask them to share their interests or update their preferences. If the subscriber is only engaging with one specific type of content, say blog posts about healthcare careers – send them more about healthcare!

If you have the technology in place to collect behavioral data from your prospect’s activity on your website – put that to use too! Depending on your industry it can be a treasure trove of intelligence. For example, if your industry is ecommerce (you should absolutely be collecting data from your website), knowing what products your customer is browsing can give insight into what products to recommend in an email.

Other ways to collect useful data to help personalize your email campaign is to simply ask. Include an interests section on your subscription form. Or, add a preferences section to your opt-out page. Consumers are getting more and more savvy, and they understand if they want personalized email messages (which studies show they do!), then they need to provide information about what they want.

Putting Email Data to Use

Once you get your head – and your database – around all that data, how will you put it to work?
These days just about any email marketing tool worth a subscription fee will have robust tools at your disposal to help you create a personalized email plan. Your first tool to utilize is segmentations. Map out the different stages of your sales cycle, personas or any general type of contact groupings or audiences. Some easy places to start would be people who place items in their cart and then don’t complete their purchase, or new subscribers to your email listing. Welcome series and abandoned cart automations are often even prebuilt templates in a number of email marketing tools.

Now, it’s time to personalize the content of your email and the easiest place to start is with personalization tokens. This is where you can insert your subscribers name, but don’t stop there! Consider inserting other useful contact fields too. Are you recommending a new purchase to your subscriber? Try referencing past purchases. Has your subscriber been communicating with a sales rep? Drop in the name!

The next tool in your marketing toolbox? Dynamic content. Again, this is a pretty standard feature in nearly every email marketing tool. This feature will allow you to have varying versions of a single email to send to your audience. For example, you could show different coupons based on VIP or new customer statuses or show news articles based on geographic location.

As your marketing efforts get even more advanced there are yet more ways to further personalize email content based on using if/else logic statements, relational data tools, and product recommendation AI. The opportunities to fine tune your messaging toward an individual person is practically endless – if you have the right tools and skill set.

Need a little help with personalizing your email marketing efforts? Talk to our experts at CloudControMedia!

– Marcy Ansley

Apple Takes a Bite out of Email Marketing

Marcy Ansley on July 27, 2021

Over the last few months Apple has been making big waves in the digital marketing world. First with the iOS14 updates and most recently with the announcement of iOS15. While the iOS14 update caused headaches for online advertisers, iOS15 is causing some email marketers’ heads to explode.

What Is the iOS15 Email Update?

The update, slated to launch this fall, will offer a Mail Privacy Protection feature, which will prompt users to either opt-in or opt-out to email protection. Now, based on the results Apple announced with the iOS14 ad tracking opt-in feature, we’re likely to see nearly every Apple Mail app user opt-in to email privacy.

So, why does this feature have email marketers’ brains going boom? This new feature will load all email marketing content—including tracking pixels—via a proxy server before sending the email content to the Apple user. Essentially, each email sent through apple’s proxy servers will render as an open – regardless if the user actually reads the email.

Congratulations. In an iOS15 world, you have a nearly 100% open rate! (Well at least a near 50% based on Apple’s nearly 50% email market share.)

While it sure seems great to be able to boast big numbers for the metric some marketers consider a vanity metric (which, by the way, we don’t) there are some ramifications to consider:

Email List Hygiene

First, and arguably the most impactful, is list hygiene. Effective email campaigns usually utilize engagement, or the lack there off, to kick of re-engagement campaigns to keep their lists clean. Clean lists help improve overall campaign performance by making sure only those who actually want to receive your emails are getting them. It can also help with sender domain reputation and overall deliverability. If you can’t accurately determine who is opening emails and how recently they’ve done so, it’s difficulty to gauge the success of your campaigns.

While re-engagement campaigns are a larger concern, any segments that rely on open rates will be impacted.

Real-Time Email Content

Another area of concern is the use of real-time content. With this new feature a more accurate term might be somewhat-recent content because the content will be called for and cached at time of send when the proxy server renders the content. So, for example, if you use a countdown clock in your email, that content will be pulled by the proxy server around the time of deployment. If the email recipient opens the email a day after deployment, the clock will show the countdown as if it was the day prior – making all the content a day off. A slight hiccup in the attended messaging.

Subject Line Testing for Emails

Do you like doing A/B subject line tests? Kiss those goodbye. With Apple Mail accounting for such a large portion of email usage, the results from any tests that rely on open rates would be irrelevant.

However, don’t completely discount the value of the open rate metric; it can still be useful, just a bit noisier than ever before. (With image caching and image blocking, open rates have never been exact performance indicators.) Open rates can just no longer be used as the sole KPI.

An additional downside of the new iOS is IP and location blocking, which further complicates personalization by putting an end to location-based features like showing content based on local weather or displaying the closest store location.

The irony is that this new Apple feature which is intended to protect and improve the user’s email experience could ultimately lead to added, unwanted emails with less personalization. Research shows that consumers want personalized email messages, yet the push for data privacy, while understandable, does make it harder for marketers to give consumers what they want.

These changes are certainly going to be a headache, yet there’s no cause for outright panic. It simply means it’s time to reevaluate.

As long as you produce quality content and adhere to best practices, your messages will still get to your recipients and produce results. iOS15 is still a couple months away which gives you some time to fine tune your email marketing efforts. Or, maybe these upcoming changes are just the catalyst you need for a complete overall? Either way – we’re here to help! Give our email experts a call 888.706.6286.

Why Bother with an Email Re-Engagement Campaign?

Marcy Ansley on December 11, 2020

No matter how great you think your marketing campaign is, it’s not worth much unless your prospects do what you want them to do—read, click, respond, or show some kind of engagement. When it comes to email campaigns, this is particularly true. That’s because inactive or unengaged subscribers could hurt your whole campaign, damage your sender reputation, and set your efforts back to start.

What’s Wrong with an Unengaged Email List?

Those unengaged subscribers make your results look terrible (low open and click through rates, etc.) and they could pull your numbers down even farther as your unengaged subscribers grow. Email service providers like Gmail and Yahoo pay attention to how your subscribers interact with your emails. If users don’t interact, the email service provider will start to assume your emails are irrelevant, or even worse – SPAM! Once that happens your sender reputation starts to drop and your whole email list could suffer as a result.

How to Reengage with Your Email Subscribers

Now, that all sounds a bit doom-and-gloom so it’s best to avoid it at all costs. But how? You could just cut out a big part of your list and wash your hands of all those seemingly uninterested recipients. Does the idea of such a broad scale dump of possible prospects sound a little terrifying? It should. After all, a couple of those prospects may still be interested.

The solution? Don’t just abruptly remove a huge chunk of your list. Instead move them into a new campaign: a re-engagement campaign. Give those prospects another chance to engage and give them due warning that they’ll be removed from your list if they don’t take action.

These subscribers may have gone deaf to your usual email messaging or maybe they forgot what made them sign up for your email in the first place. Remind them. With a re-engagement campaign, you can reintroduce yourself, get heard in a new way, and remind your subscribers how great your products and services are.

Steps to an Email Reengagement Campaign

The first step in a re-engagement campaign is to determine whom you’ll target. This will be largely determined by your sales cycle. If your successful sales happen a month or two after initial contact then perhaps a subscriber would be deemed inactive or unengaged after 4 or 5 months. At the very least, anyone who has not engaged in a year should be lumped into the unengaged category.

Now for the fun part!

The second step allows you to try something different, think out of the box. Consider this re-engagement campaign as an opportunity to do something new and exciting. Create a whole new messaging from your usual emails and use a fresh new design that still speaks to your brand. The campaign should consist of two to three emails with the final email acting as a goodbye note, telling users if they don’t take action they will be unsubscribed.  And don’t be afraid to be funny or tongue-in-cheek. Take a chance and turn some heads and bring in some new customers.

In all likelihood the re-engagement campaign will not immediately draw in droves of sales. However, that is not the ultimate goal (although on occasion it can be a great byproduct!); the goal is to add to your active subscribers and clean your list. A clean and active list equals better deliverability and better deliverability means your emails will reach the inbox of more of your prospects who could then convert into sales, brand loyalists, and lifelong advocates.

If you’re ready to improve your email deliverability and launch a re-engagement campaign contact the email experts at CloudControlMedia today.

~Marcy Ansley