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

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.

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