As our American friends are sitting down to their Thanksgiving turkey dinners today, I started thinking about the past and present of email marketing and what email marketers should be thankful for this year…. 

  • CMS
    Using a content management system in your email software will drastically reduce your campaign production time – as well as reducing the reliance on technical skills with no HTML expertise needed. There’s no need to replicate content from your website as it can be pulled automatically from a number of external sources.
  • Automation
    You can make your subscriber data work harder with minimal effort, using triggered messages sent out automatically based on your recipients information. You can use your email software to trigger a specific message to welcome a new customer, cross/up sell to an existing customer, reactivate dormant customers, target those who’ve abandoned their shopping cart – or simply wish them a happy birthday….or Thanksgiving.
  • Social media
    Integrating social media sharing into your email campaigns allows email and social to work hand in hand. Email marketers can leverage the benefit of their recipients social media networks by adding social sharing links into their emails – then track the extended reach of their content and identify their influencers and brand advocates. Using social sign up forms within your Facebook pages gives you another shop front for growing your subscriber database, with seamless integration into your email database for future engagement.
  • Inbox monitoring tools
    Seeing into the future before you launch a campaign using the deliverability tools at your disposal. You’re able to see how an email renders in the inbox before you click send – plus ensure that your emails aren’t blocked as spam across a multitude of ISPs.
  • Behavioral targeting
    Send less email in a more targeted way. Rather than just using the basic segmentation methods of gender or geography, go one step further using link category functionality. You’re able to see which recipients have responded to specific content types to target with more precision. Automating your content based on these behavioural categories means your recipients are receiving the most relevant content, whilst you’re sending less of the ‘one size fits all’ campaigns. Much more bang for your buck!