(instrumental pop music)
- So here's the thing, email marketing can be complex.
Are you trying to achieve a measurable return
on your email marketing investment?
Maybe you're trying to grow
or retain your email subscribers
and stay compliant with all these new email regulations.
Hey, everyone, my name is Shauna Carroll,
and I'm a principal channel consultant working at HubSpot.
Working with marketing agencies and direct clients,
trust me, I've seen a lot,
and I'm here to give you to lowdown on email marketing.
I'm going to share with you solutions
to common challenges marketers face,
so you can start reaching your audience effectively
and crush your business goals through email.
And I'm going to do so by getting some ideas
from HubSpot Academy's Email Marketing Certification,
which, by the way, is free.
Now, I see this a lot.
Some of the common challenges when it comes to email
are things like making sure you're hitting
your email open rates, click-through rates,
email deliverability and staying compliant.
It all comes down to having a sharp
and integrated email marketing strategy.
No matter the size of your company or marketing team,
you need to have a clearly defined strategy in place
to be able to reach your goals.
Experts agree that in order to build an effective
email marketing strategy and get your email seen,
you have to adhere to this framework.
Let's check it out.
- [Courtney] The three pillars you need to build
an effective email marketing strategy are
the significance of segmentation,
the power of personalization,
and the impact of data-driven analysis.
- So the first pillar, which is segmentation,
it's basically dividing your email subscribers
into small segments
based on a strategic set of criteria
that you have determined,
things like location, or purchase history,
or even activity on your website can work great.
Let's see what Courtney has to say from the Academy.
- Segmentation is seemingly simple,
but important.
Segmentation is what helps you send the right person
the right message at the right time.
Creating an inbound email experience and conversation
means focusing just as much on the context
of your message as the content you deliver.
The DMA, a Data and Marketing Association,
found that 77% of email marketing ROI
came from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns.
Bringing context and content together
helps you write the greatest emails in the world
and make sure they connect with your audience
and don't waste their time or yours.
- I love that stat, that 77% of email
ROI comes from segmentation.
But now you may be wondering,
how do we actually get started with segmentation?
Let's check this out.
- Segmentation at its core brings
together two key inbound concepts:
buyer personas and the buyer's journey.
Sending the right email at the right time
to the right person means knowing who that person is
and where they are in the buyer's journey.
Buyer personas are semi-fictional
representations of your ideal customer
based on real data and some select
educated speculation about customer demographics,
behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.
And the buyer's journey is the active research process
someone goes through leading up to a purchase.
The buyer's journey is made up of three stages:
the awareness stage, the consideration stage,
and the decision stage.
- The second pillar is personalization.
Customers now kind of expect personalization
in all marketing they get from modern companies.
It's just no longer an option.
In email, personalization is when you can use
your subscriber data to make your email feel
customized for your subscribers,
making it more intimate and relevant.
- Personalization is so much more than adding
the first name of the recipient to your email.
It's about creating a contextualized
and individual experience.
While there are many channels that'll allow you to do this,
and more and more created each day,
email is a channel that continues to offer so much room
for creativity and experimentation,
and developing that highly personalized experience.
- Email personalization is basically like having
a personal concierge for every person
that interacts with your brand
based on actions that they take.
How cool would that be?
There's a word for that, by the way,
which we all should know.
It's behavioral email.
- Behavioral email is defined as the practice of sending
automated, targeted emails to your contacts
based on the historical interactions
they've had with your company across channels.
And when you send behavioral email,
you're creating a highly personal
experience for your contacts.
- One of my favorite examples is OpenTable.
They make it easy to make reservations online,
but they also remember your favorite restaurants
and help you discover new ones based on your
user reviews and your past reservations.
How cool is that?
Another great one comes from Spotify.
They send behavioral email
to fans that love certain artists.
And they surprise them by giving them exclusive access
to presales and other goodies from the artist.
This brings us to our last pillar,
the impact of data-driven analysis.
In a world that is always changing,
where your customers are always
changing the way they live and work,
analysis helps you evolve with them and not be left behind.
By analyzing your emails consistently
and having emails as one of the core
parts of your inbound strategy,
you will give your customers what they need
to continue the conversation with you.
So how do you actually get started with that?
- [Courtney] To implement data-driven analysis
into your email marketing,
you will want to keep in mind this framework.
First, track the metrics that matter.
This will be different for you in your business
than me in my business.
Second, understand what those metrics indicate
about the success of your emails,
what is moving and improving versus what is slowing down.
And then third, apply what you've learned
to optimize and improve each email that you send.
- Email marketing is a powerful tool.
And a lot goes into creating
an impactful email marketing strategy.
Learn more from Courtney in the HubSpot Academy
Email Marketing Certification.
Get certified and start mastering
your email marketing strategy.
I'll see you on the next one.
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