New to Email Marketing? Hire An Email Marketing Specialist To Handle It For You

With a deluge of new businesses announcing themselves in the market with every passing day, ensuring that your brand reaches the right eyes and ears is a task and a half. However, if you use the right marketing channels, the job becomes significantly more convenient. And how can we bring up effective marketing channels and not mention email marketing in the same breath? Used by nearly 4 billion people across the globe, email is pretty much the go-to marketing channel for every business out there (irrespective of whether they are a small or mid-sized business or a full-blown multinational corporation).

From implementing personalization at scale to carving a unique brand identity to building credibility- the virtues of email marketing are many. But, you can only harness them if you have a thoroughly vetted email marketing specialist running the show. Particularly so if you are new to the field. An email marketing specialist can shoulder multiple crucial responsibilities such as campaign execution, scheduling, copywriting, template building, QA, automation, segmentation, performance measurement, calendar management, and A/B testing. In today’s article, we will highlight the various benefits of onboarding an email marketing specialist. Let’s dive in!

Skillful Segmentation  

Email list segmentation refers to the practice of dividing your contacts into different sections or “segments” on the basis of various parameters like age, gender, occupation, location, interests and preferences, past purchases, position in the sales funnel, and the like. As per HubSpot’s 2021 State of Marketing report, businesses that implemented segmented campaigns witnessed a jaw-dropping 760% spike in their revenue. In comparison to their non-segmented counterparts, segmented campaigns register 14.31% higher open rates and 100.95% clicks. Now, those are some sensational stats, wouldn’t you agree? 

Again, we circle back to the point we made in the very beginning- as mighty impressive as these numbers, they are hard to achieve unless you have a seasoned email marketing specialist at the helm. Remember, you have a diverse range of individuals interacting with your brand, meaning all of them harbour vastly different expectations from your emails and newsletters. The only way you can get through to each, and every one of them is by staying on top of your segmentation game. An adept SFMC email specialist can navigate these complexities, leveraging the platform’s tools to finely segment your audience and deliver tailored messages that resonate with each segment’s unique preferences and needs.

Listed below are some critical segments an email marketing specialist can help sort your contacts into:

• Demographics: The best way to learn the unique traits of your audience is by segmenting them based on their demographic data such as age, gender, language, occupation, and location. Subsequently, this will enable you to send emails with personalized subject lines, product recommendations, and cart abandonment emails. Typically, customers’ demographic data is obtained during the account creation process. An email marketing specialist can help you set up impactful signup forms that will let you mine maximum data points from your visitors. In doing so, they will take stock of the metrics that are central to your business goals.
• Website Activity: Monitoring the activity of visitors on your website can provide you with invaluable insights regarding their behavior. Information about time spent on a particular page, most frequently browsed product categories, and most commonly applied budget filters provides a solid foundation for crafting hyper-personalized emails. An email marketing specialist will help ensure that the methods you employ to collect zero and first-party data on your website are perfectly compliant with data privacy laws.
• Past Purchases: Segmenting your contacts on the basis of past purchases enables you to send out highly targeted communication, thereby inviting greater interaction and engagement. Suppose you own a clothing store. Now, let’s assume one of your customers has a history of purchasing dark-colored polo t-shirts. It is only logical thus that, in the future, you send them recommendations that align directly with this. In essence, email list segmentation based on past purchases increases the relevancy of your emails by leaps and bounds, ushering in more revenue to your coffers in the process.

For instance, take a look at this email by Cole Haan.

Effectively Leveraging Automation

In the current scheme of things, if automation isn’t a core component of your email marketing strategies, you are most likely to succumb to your competitors. With email automation in your kitty, you can send automated or triggered messages to your customers whenever they happen to meet certain pre-set conditions or “triggers.” In this way, email automation lets you send your customers the right message at the right time, allowing you to continuously stay on their radar. This, in turn, does a world of good to your brand reputation and customer retention rate.

When you have an email marketing specialist on board, you can establish the following automation workflows for your business:

• Welcome Emails: Given that a welcome email is the very first kind of communication you send to your subscribers, it goes a long way towards shaping their perception of your brand. Typically, these emails are instantly dispatched to visitors when they create a new account on your website or fill out your signup form. Several factors go into crafting the perfect welcome email- the tone shouldn’t be overly promotional, it should contain a special offer or incentive, and an unsubscribe or opt-out link must be present, to name a few. An email marketing specialist with the necessary industry insight and expertise can help you tick these boxes without skipping a beat.

This Welcome email from Faves is one of our absolute favorites.

• Abandoned Cart Emails: Sent to customers who have added items to their shopping cart but have failed to complete the transaction, abandoned cart workflows are central to all e-commerce businesses’ affairs. Compared to other marketing emails, cart abandonment ones register rather lofty opens and conversions. That said, executing them is quite tricky. Since they’re usually sent out in a planned sequence, you have to be mindful of both, the content of your cart abandonment emails as well as the interval between two successive ones. Remember, these are customers who are already interested in your offerings but, for some reason, couldn’t complete the purchase. All they need is a slight nudge from your end.

Here’s what Pulp & Press’ cart abandonment looks like.

• Post-purchase Follow-up Emails: If you want to strengthen your customer relationships, crafting effective post-purchase follow-up emails is the way forward. Post-purchase emails allow your customers to share their feedback and experience with you, effectively telling them that you value their association with your brand. A surefire way of making your post-purchase emails appealing is by integrating minor interactive elements into them- something as simple as a “star” rating scale where users just need to hover upon the scale to submit their rating. This decreases the number of clicks and greatly enhances the user experience.
• Re-engagement Emails: Acquiring a new customer can pinch your wallet five times as hard as retaining an existing one. This is what makes re-engagement email campaigns very critical for businesses. Since retention emails aim at recapturing dormant customers, you need to be spot on with your value proposition and incentives. An email marketing specialist who possesses a deep knowledge of your competitors can help you gain the upper hand in this regard.

Ensuring Accessibility

As the email community strives to foster an inclusive online environment with every passing day, email accessibility has grown to become one of the most defining trends of this landscape over the past few years. With over 1 billion people in the world leading their lives with one form of disability or the other, several international frameworks have made it binding for businesses to make their communications accessible for people with auditory, visual, cognitive, physical, and speech disabilities. 

A huge part of implementing accessibility in your email campaigns involves optimizing them for assistive technologies such as screen readers. Often, such measures are technical in nature and hence should be supervised by an email marketing specialist who is thoroughly familiar with them. 

Below, we’ve listed a few email accessibility best practices for your reference:

• Include semantic HTML markup in your emails. This will provide the screen readers with additional context regarding the various elements present in your email, making the interpretation process significantly smoother.
• Ensure your emails have a skip navigation link. This way, subscribers using screen readers will have the choice of navigating straight to the most critical portion of the email.
• Make your alt texts descriptive. This will make sure that the images attached in your emails are interpreted accurately by the screen readers.

Staying On Top Of Performance

Executing your email marketing strategies is one thing; tracking their performance is a whole different ball game altogether. It takes the skilled eyes and honed senses of an experienced email marketing specialist to identify and monitor the performance metrics that are most vital for your business objectives. Further, with Apple’s MPP now in the picture, email marketers have been forced to reshuffle the goals they had earlier attached with open rates. 

Looking beyond open rates, some other metrics you can track are:

• Click-through Rate
• Conversion Rate
• Revenue Per Email
• Bounce Rate
• Unsubscribe Rate

Wrapping It Up

Email is an immensely powerful marketing channel, but to make the most of it, you need an expert technician by your side, a.k.a an email marketing specialist. Once that is sealed, nothing can get in the way of your business soaring high into unchartered heights of success. Looking to hire an offshore email marketing specialist to up your email game? You can hire certified experts with Email Uplers.