6 Vital Ways Hiring an SFMC Email Specialist Can Enhance your Email Marketing

SFMC is one of the world’s most powerful email marketing platforms, helping brands seamlessly manage every aspect of their email marketing lifecycle, from audience segmentation and journey building to content creation, design, automation, and post-campaign analytics.

If used well, SFMC offers amazing bang for the buck. And yet, many organizations don’t get high ROI from it because they are using it less while paying for 100% of its potential!

However, organizations can get more value out of SFMC by hiring an SFMC specialist.

Here are 6 ways SFMC email specialists can boost your email marketing efforts and deliver greater value from your investment.

1. Build connected customer journeys to launch and scale up your campaigns

An SFMC email specialist can design a powerful customer journey strategy using SFMC Journey Builder. And since every email campaign starts with journey mapping, this one skill alone is a great reason to hire an SFMC email specialist!

73% of high-performing marketers believe that journeys positively enhance customer engagement. 

Today’s customer journeys consist of multiple stages and touchpoints, each of which can increase customers’ brand awareness and convert them into advocates. The SFMC email specialist would consider all these touchpoints to visually represent every potential customer-brand interaction. They also:

• Research the audience
• Create customer personas
• Collect data with anecdotal and analytical research
• Create the customer journey map with timelines, touchpoints, etc.

They glean valuable, actionable insights about their customers across every touchpoint, which they use to drive and improve their email marketing, and deliver hyper-personalized experiences.

From onboarding with a welcome email to signing up for a newsletter to re-engaging with an abandoned cart email, an SFMC email specialist can extract the most value from SFMC Email Studio Journey Builder.

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2. Improve segmentation to target the right audience at the right time with the right message

When you segment customers based on relevant criteria, it becomes easier for you to target each group with the right message at the right time. For this, SFMC offers many user-friendly tools, a rich data model, and powerful insights. You have two options – create data filters or SQL queries in Email Studio or create filters across data extensions and develop more precise segments using Audience Studio. Here, an experienced SFMC email specialist is a great resource because they:

• Understand the types of segmentation in SFMC
• Can do data modeling to analyze relationships between data objects (subscribers) with other data objects (orders, visits, support cases)
• Apply data filters to segment data with relevant fields and attributes

They can also run SQL queries for large data sets or multiple data extensions. They can do so even for targeting a particular segment.

They can create different segments and specific email campaigns for each segment such as:

• New customers for welcome campaigns
• Existing customers for upsell campaigns

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• Loyal customers for loyalty campaigns, special offers, or referral emails

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• Difficult-to-convert customers for cart abandonment emails

They can also optimize email send times and frequency to maximize the chances of more opens. With Einstein Send Time Optimization (STO) in Journey Builder, they can predict when each contact is likely to engage with an email in the next 24 hours. And with the Send Throttle feature in Email Studio, they can spread out email sends to ensure that subscribers are not overwhelmed.

3. Provide value and win hearts with high-quality, hyper-personalized content

When compared to generic emails, personalized emails deliver a 6X higher conversion rate.

Personalized content is an essential factor that determines the success of your email marketing. When your audience receives targeted, personalized, and relevant emails based on their individual needs, behaviors, or preferences, the possibility of them remaining loyal to your brand is high. An SFMC email specialist can help by:

• Using Email Studio to engage your ideal audience sophisticated, beautiful messages
• Updating readymade templates and custom content blocks to quickly create and deploy campaigns
• Using Einstein AI to create tailored content based on individual user behaviors
• Leveraging Content Builder, drag-and-drop functions, and personalized scripting language to delight audiences with dynamic, real-time messages

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For maximum impact, they can add personalization at multiple levels: subject lines, greetings, product recommendations, copy, special offers, etc.

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An SFMC email specialist can thus and create email copy that:

• Reinforces the human connection with readers
• Sets the stage for meaningful, long-term relationships
• Does not overwhelm them with brand messaging
• Includes key takeaways to converse, connect and engage

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• Includes the right CTA to increase sales conversions

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4. Create impressive visuals that amaze, engage and convert your audience

To catch the attention of your audience, your email design must be engagement-worthy, visually appealing, and consistent with your brand’s aesthetics and values.

An SFMC email specialist can help you nail your email design with the right template, colors, and brand elements. They can also:

• Choose the right fonts for maximum legibility
• Ensure that ALT text is added to all images and buttons so subscribers can read your message, even if the HTML doesn’t render properly
• Take into account readers with visual difficulties
• Plan template layouts
• Pick the right elements like GIFs, illustrations, etc.

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• Decide which interactive elements (countdown timers, videos, image carousels, etc.) to use

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• Organize the layout to deliver the best possible user experience
• Well-organized text and visual elements
• Easy to navigate
• Create both HTML and plain text emails
• Mobile-friendly

(Email on iPhone X)

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5. Improve email deliverability so more people receive, see and enjoy your messages

On May 1, 2020, email spam celebrated its 42nd birthday.

To ensure that your marketing emails don’t join the spam club, you need to manage your email deliverability, which an SFMC email specialist can help with.

The specialist will leverage SFMC’s powerful Content Detective tool to identify potentially spammy content before sends. This increases the probability that your messages will land in reader’s inboxes, not their spam folders, and potentially increase your open and click-through rates.

They will maintain an optimal number of sends based on what subscribers ask for and help keep spam complaints down, and open and click-through rates up, because they will:

• Never buy email lists since they tend to generate very high unsubscribe and spam rates
• Add your brand’s physical address in the email
• ‘No reply’ in the sender’s email address is a no-no
• Make it easy to unsubscribe by adding a visible link in the copy
• Break down content into easily consumable chunks
• Create compelling subject lines

6. Set up testing and analytics to improve and optimize campaigns

Before sending an email, it’s useful to test it on a small group within your target audience using A/B testing. Based on these results, you can make any necessary changes early, which can prevent the need for costly updates later and also increase the chances of success. An SFMC email specialist knows how to leverage A/B testing to achieve these objectives. They can also decide which elements of the email to test for, such as subject lines, content areas, visuals, etc.

A/B testing is easy to set up in SFMC, but it requires judgment and decision-making skills, which the email specialist will bring to the table. They can also define the right hypothesis, set goals, choose correct sample sizes, and analyze the results to improve the campaign.

After a campaign has been deployed, they can track, review and analyze its performance in terms of key metrics like:

• Open rates
• Click-through rates
• Conversions
• A/B test results
• Bounces
• Spam complaints

Using SFMC’s reporting capabilities, they can find answers to key questions like:

• Which content chunks do readers engage with more?
• Have store purchases increased?
• Which designs perform better?
• Do buttons do well or text links?

 An experienced specialist can also analyze individual emails for a more granular view of performance, and even compare campaign performance with industry standards, information that can help you adjust your brand’s email marketing strategy, design, copy, or layout for future campaigns.

Conclusion

The SFMC email specialist is an expert at planning, building, and executing email campaigns with SFMC. They are aware of email marketing best practices. They are also skilled at segmentation, automation, tracking, and analytics so your brand can make data-driven decisions for campaign optimization.

If SFMC is your ESP of choice, an SFMC email specialist can be one of your brand’s best investments. But if you don’t want to hire an expensive resource in-house, why not outsource to the experts at Email Uplers?! To know more, explore this page.