Having well-managed and maintained email list is essential for creating successful marketing campaigns – but it can seem like an overwhelming task if you’re new to the world of digital marketing.
To help, in this guide, we’ll discuss the different ways to build functional and segmented lists, strategies for keeping a clean and engaged data set, utilizing automation tools effectively, using analytics to track your performance, plus smart compliance measures all marketers should bear in mind. So let’s dive right into the fundamentals of email list management.
Defining your target audience and goals is one of the most important steps in building an effective email list. Understanding who your customers are and what they need can help you create email campaigns that will yield high engagement rates.
It’s helpful to research potential subscribers’ demographics, interests, preferences, and behaviors so you can craft content tailored to their needs or desires that align with your ultimate goal.
Your goals might be to boost brand recognition, generate leads, increase traffic to a website or web page, increase sales conversions or consultations or sign-ups for an event—whatever the goal may be ensure clarity when formulating segmentation strategies so that you can optimize time and resource efficiency in appealing towards each type of customer at varying levels when needed.
Building an effective email list for any marketing campaign requires the creation of compelling opt-in forms and landing pages. Opt-in forms should be fast to fill out, simple to understand and spell out the benefits with a clear call to action.
Colors and branding elements can make these more alluring for prospects too. For maximum impact, thoroughly optimize each opt-in form throughout the main customer journey channels such as web search listings, organic traffic from website visitors, social media sharing links, etc.
Implementing lead generation strategies is essential when it comes to building an email list that performs well. Strategies like website engagement, ads, content creation and distribution, SEO optimization, guest blogging, and webinars can be incredibly effective in drawing potential customers’ attention to the offerings a business has.
When starting the journey of filling an email list with highly targeted contacts elaborate methods like referral programs or social media blitzes should also take a role alongside these basic tactics. Commission- or prize-driven incentives are great to drive leads from platforms like Twitter & Instagram upwards (as if it were pointing towards driving Leads towards your signup forms on landing pages).
For a wider reach, Facebook Ads work wonders as the cost is relatively low compared with impressions gained. Furthermore use specific words to capture attention with catchy headlines & descriptions when marketing on this platform, try and keep users curious to ensure that those they garnered aren’t a detriment to your resources.
When constructing an email list, it is essential to ensure compliance with data protection regulations. Especially when working across different countries and jurisdictions, each may have different regulations outlining how customer data must be handled with respect to privacy and security.
Disregarding any of these laws can lead to serious legal ramifications for your organization, making it critical that you’re familiar with the applicable jurisdictions’ laws and get any necessary permissions or consent before using the subscriber’s personal data in emails.
Building trust with your customers builds long-term loyalty so transparency about how their data will be used from opt-in all the way through campaigns is a necessity for your success as a marketer.
Segmentation plays a key role in email list management. By grouping people into different categories, marketers can craft tailored messages to more precisely fit the needs of each individual subscriber or segment. Segmentation requires marketing professionals to understand their target audience as best they can in order to create and adjust meaningful criteria for groupings within their subscribers.
Ultimately, this will reduce the generalization of messaging causing it to perform better across groups over time while likely creating better overall relationships between the consumer and business.
Through segmentation, marketers are able to garner action from and develop deeper engagement with key groups all while achieving desired click/ open rates from one-on-one sounding campaigns quickly driving return on investments upwards due in part to effective email list management caused by timely and contextual messages.
Identifying relevant segmentation criteria is an important component of effective email list management. The criteria you choose to use will depend upon your industry, target customer base, and campaign goal.
For example, some typical options include age/generation, geographic location, purchase history, and interests. You should also consider setting up filter settings based on user interactions such as the number of opens/closes or clicks that determine engagement levels.
One strategy successful email list managers use to ensure that subscribers receive targeted messages is segmentation. It entails organizing people in a specific target audience into various groups according to types of data such as demographics and interests.
Creating and managing subscriber profiles plays a big part in accomplishing this efficiently. To properly accomplish segmenting, each contributor must fit into an individual profile & organized per required criteria, custom email campaigns are created according to these criteria, then sent optimal results can be produced effectively.
Cleaning and maintaining an organized email list helps marketers maximize their chances of delivering their campaigns successfully. Regular address verification is one of the most basic hygiene practices to implement and will help make sure recipients can properly receive emails by deleting inactive addresses or automatically updating spelling, domain, or syntax errors.
Additionally, periodically profiling customers with a validation solutions engine can illicit a picture of each individual user by screening reviews they’ve provided about the services as well as how active they remain on campaigns throughout time. Doing this monthly ensures that data is up-to-date before being utilized for any targeted messaging purposes; thus speeding up detailed analysis later on when needed.
In order to maintain a clean and engaged email list, marketers need to have effective strategies in place for reducing unsubscribe rates and spam complaints. To reduce by unsubscribe rate by keeping content engaging by personalizing emails with subscriber data or offering discounts and promotions.
Gmail filters can also be tweaked so your legitimate marketing emails don’t get lost among unessential messages. To combat SPAM there needs consistent monitoring of data protection laws regarding opt-in list opt-outs sent complex passwords multiple factor authentication checks deleted confidential information in line with company protocol.
This coupled with re-engaging customers who are too easily slipping off the hook can help send fewer bad reviews garner better newsletter feedback as well as win back potential brand supporters gone affray.
Reengagement campaigns are used to reenergize your inactive subscribers in an effort to keep them from unsubscribing. An email is sent out offering a signup bonus or special incentive as a thank you for returned subscribers’ business and loyalty.
Alternatively, running A/B tests utilizing subject lines specifically designed to discern their interest and other mindful modifications should be done concurrently to ensure relevance when reaching out. To appear fresh and minimize burnout-addressing triggered emails on a time-based span is also advisable for those frequenters who have lost touch with one’s newsletter.
Handling bouncebacks helps to ensure that emails are delivered successfully to your prior, current, and potential customers. Bouncebacks should trigger the removal of the email address from your list or place it in suppressions so subsequent campaigns won’t attempt delivery again until you specifically add them back.
If possible, verify susceptibility rates ahead for new subscribers for hard and soft bounce purposes as well as make sure to set up at least one automated response when invalid addresses enter your lists helping you reach contacts with valid addresses more quickly.
Personalization and automation are key components in effective email list management. Utilizing rich customer data is essential for creating more targeted messaging that will resonate with customers or prospects.
Some data-driven personalization techniques include customization of the subject line based on individual preferences, recommendations of related products or services based on previous purchase history, tailored content segments considering gender topics, geolocation targeting with messages related to appropriate events, and showing current points & gift card balance info during engagement campaigns.
Automation tools and workflows empower marketers with the ability to automatically deliver personalized campaigns at scale. Automations can be used for everything from sending welcome emails and order confirmations, to automated triggered and drip campaigns.
Marketers must first define their primary objective when creating complex automation tools—then utilize a combination of email segments, user event flow triggers, and other data points that help ensure they are focusing on automating the right processes in view of the
Milestone goals set out. With the proper setup of effective automation systems and workflow triggers, companies can bring targeted conversations straight up to their customers without having to manually create them.
Personalization and Automation are techniques utilized by marketers to send timely, relevant content to address the particular needs of our audience. Triggered email campaigns allow us to identify user behavior and then trigger an appropriate message to these customers based on that criteria.
These highly personalized messages have proven to uplift in saving customers’ time offline as well as online from personal prevention campaigns to follow-up messages post-purchase histories or behaviors.
A/B testing is a key element of personalization and automation that enables marketers to optimize email content for maximum results. A typical A/B test involves creating two versions of an email, each slightly different than the other, and then sending out both variations to a sample group of users.
By tracking how the emails performed in metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, or conversions your monitoring services can identify which version yielded better results suggesting what elements of the original message are ineffective.
This allows you to refine your approach toward creating successful campaigns through optimization. Ultimately this process also gives you invaluable insights into customer behavior that implement positive changes in future marketing strategies traveling beyond just email management.
Key metrics for measuring email marketing success are open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe or opt-out requests.
Open rate denotes how many users opened your benchmark messaging content while click-through rate highlights how many people clicked on any area contained within the mailing material being removed from the primary server.
Conversion rate tracks customer behavior once engaged which leads them to become buyers remaining on a website longer thereby increasing their value as possible customers.
In order to understand exactly how effective your email lists are, you need to measure the performance of each campaign.
Open and click-through rates provide insights into how subscribers interacted with your emails while tracking conversions can reveal ROI on marketing activities. Annual open rate averages will also give direction for correlation analysis of various alterations over time; as to if improving or worsened after changes are made.
Combining this data leads to a deep understanding regarding what strategies entice people reactions, stay loyal and positively respond towards those particular aids in optimization when creating future campaigns.
Analyzing and tracking email performance is critical to evaluating the success of campaigns. Subscriber engagement and behavior should be closely monitored by measuring open rates, click-throughs, unsubscribe rates, spam complaints, and relayed messages.
This information provides insight into subject appeal, newsletter value ad how frequently an email list should be sent out. Knowing each segment’s core preferences will put your personalization efforts on steroids by targeting the right customers with more refined messaging at just the right time.
Advanced analytics can extend this approach even farther by understanding motivated buying behaviors based on regularly tracked cycles and patterns.
Analyzing and tracking email performance helps marketers make informed decisions that affect future campaigns.
Advanced analytics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions can reveal insights into individual subscriber behavior that can be used to further customize content or create automated workflows for tailored offerings and messages.
Marketers should also take note of undeliverable emails in order to correct issues with hygiene/list cleaning distribution lists for improved deliverability rates. The analysis of campaign metrics can then lead to opportunities to optimize content, schedule adjustments, and improved user segmentation targets.
Email list management is an essential component of digital marketing success. By effectively building, segmenting, maintaining, and personalizing campaigns based on relevant data and insights, companies can dramatically increase their email engagement rates, resulting in higher click-throughs and conversions.
It’s also important to continually monitor performance tracking metrics such as open rate, unsubscribes, and bounce rates in order to reconfigure strategies as needed for continuous improvement. Read the content discussed here and apply these best practices to ensure successful email list management in your next marketing campaign!
Are you looking for a PPC agency to manage your paid media spend? Look no further than PPC.co!
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When you want to use paid search marketing platforms, Google Ads often leads the list. Because of its versatility, simplicity, and popularity, it’s obvious why it’s a popular choice. But when you drop all of your PPC advertising money into one marketing strategy, you could lose some leads.
That’s why some businesses explore paid advertising marketing outside of Google, with many turning to Linkedin Ads.
Google Ads and Linkedin Ads are highly efficient ways to market your products and services to businesses and consumers. But each marketing channel has its advantages and disadvantages. Whatever you choose, make sure you discuss the matter with your web development company.
Below is a closer look at each option.
We think it’s reasonable to conclude that Google reaches a vast audience worldwide – its ad reach is a stunning 4 billion people. Google search handles about 70% of desktop searches, and many companies report that they get about 90% of their organic traffic from the search engines. Also, up to 95% of the mobile search market comes from Google.
People use Google’s search a lot, and having the ability to target search terms with specific search ads is a massive benefit of Adwords. People tend to search for very specific things in Google, so if you can customize your Google advertising for your targeted audience, you’ll receive plenty of leads.
So, we can assume that most people’s targeted audience uses Google to some degree. That’s a massive advantage for companies when they want to target an audience.
However, businesses that want to narrow down their search may have issues getting their Google ads settings right with both Google Ads. And if you blunder when segmenting your audiences, your digital ad campaign could suffer.
LinkedIn features a narrower audience – 500 million users – namely businesses and business professionals. But this more limited audience makes it the perfect place for effective B2B marketing. LinkedIn lets marketers serve online ads to decision-makers and vital audience members in several ways.
Summary: For B2B firms that want to reach decision-makers, Linkedin is a terrific advertising platforms. If your B2C company intends to increase its reach, Google Ads could be the best fit.
When you target your audience with Google Ads, you have a few options: location, affinity, technology, buyer behavior, demographics, and interactions with your app or website.
No matter how much you know about your buyer, you may struggle to avoid clicks from worthless leads that cost too much.
In some cases on Google, people may not even know what they’re looking for. You can try to advertise to your desired targeted audience on Google Ads, but it can be challenging to get to the precise people who will most likely buy what you sell.
When people sign up for LinkedIn, they usually provide many details, such as their occupation, title/job title, experience, industry, education, interests, and more. All of this information can be leveraged for great advantage when you start your marketing campaigns.
Also, LinkedIn users can join many groups, start conversations, and obtain followers. The data is priceless when you want to target a specific audience and market to them. LinkedIn also has a Matched Audience that helps advertisers match their email marketing lists and website visitors with users on LinkedIn.
Many marketing experts think that LinkedIn Ads offer more value. LinkedIn has refined targeting, and you can make your product known to them so that you can tell them about something they didn’t know existed.
Summary: For B2B and B2C companies looking for a broad audience, Google Ads has enough targeting features. But for B2B firms that want to target specific groups, LinkedIn Ads has about 100 segmentation methods for micro targeting.
When you want lead generation, Google Ads has a broader reach and is the most effective. First, you can bring in a lot of prospects to your site without breaking the bank. The audience you’re after on Google visits the search giant with the idea to find the best product or service. This makes generating leads easier.
Getting leads from LinkedIn can be more challenging. Users of the platform may sign in to read industry news or talk to group members. No matter how perfect your ad is, viewers may not be in the mood to buy anything.
That said, Linkedin has a way to target ad leads through in-site messaging, which can generate plenty of leads.
When it comes down to dollars and cents, LinkedIn Ads usually are more pricey than Google Ads. As in Google, you can select cost-per-click or cost-per-impression.
LinkedIn also features a cost-per-send for InMail advertising. Typically, you’ll pay about $5 for each click, $6 for 1,000 impressions, and .80 for each send.
With Google Ads, the average CPC is $1. But to leverage that low cost, you need to work on your audience segmentation. If you don’t your ROI may be below what you want.
Summary: Advertising budgets for each platform depends on several factors. On average, Google Ads cost less than LinkedIn Ads. If your B2B company has a tight budget, you may want to focus on a limited variety of LinkedIn ads instead of a broad range of Google Ads.
So should you advertise with Google Ads vs LinkedIn Ads? Yes!
What we mean is, it depends. The correct choice depends on your budget, product or service offered, marketing goals, and target audience. You should not assume that when you need a digital marketing campaign, Google Analytics Adwords is the only choice.
It’s critical to evaluate the market, understand who your buyer is, and make a data-driven decision about the best marketing platform to reach your well-defined goals. One type of company might do better with Google Ads, and another may find LinkedIn Ads preferable.
The great news is you don’t need to choose between the two platforms. Many businesses use both, as well as Facebook, Instagram, and others. If you have the budget, it may pay off to diversify your paid search advertising to get the best ROI.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Digital marketing is a classic marketing strategy that’s commonly used to supplement organic web traffic, but it’s hardly the most straightforward way to increase your site’s audience. In fact, from a technological perspective, it’s a rather fussy practice. That’s why brands that want to include a PPC marketing strategy in their overall strategic decisions need to work with an experienced agency. Agencies facilitate ad distribution, track clicks, and calculate fees – and the best ones can help their clients thrive. Unfortunately, there are a lot of subpar agencies and bad actors out there, and you need to know how to spot them.
So, how do you know if it’s time to fire your PPC agencies? Keep an eye out for these 9 red flags. They could indicate you’re working with the wrong agency and that it’s time to make a move.
Companies leave their PPC agencies behind for all sorts of reasons, but according to a 2015 report by the Society for Digital Agencies (SoDA), the most common reasons include outgrowing the agency’s capabilities, cost overruns, and dissatisfaction with their strategy. These are all valid reasons, and ultimately many of them can be reduced to an agency’s failure to generate any or enough growth. After all, disliking the agency’s strategy isn’t likely to be much of a problem if that strategy is generating major growth. Similarly, a brand is unlikely to view itself as having outgrown the agency is their accounts continue to grow.
Ultimately, what these different reasons for firing PPC agencies demonstrate is that, any way you slice it, no one wants to work with an agency that isn’t making them money. So, while it might take a little while for your PPC ads to gain traction, if you’re not seeing growth based on the launch of or changes to your PPC campaign, it’s time to move on to a different agency.
While most brands work with a PPC advertising agency to run their campaigns, it’s not only possible but advisable for you to set up your own accounts with the major PPC advertising platforms, which include sites like Google AdWords, Yahoo, and Facebook. Still, if you’re not the most technologically savvy, it can be tempting to let your agency do it for you. Don’t give in to the impulse. Instead, ask them to guide you through it so that you can ensure that you’re the one with owner access rights.
Unless you have the owner access rights to your company’s PPC accounts, you can’t be sure you have unmediated access to your campaign metrics or feel good/ confident that you’ll be able to transfer your accounts to another agency or bring them in-house if needed. In other words, your agency could be misrepresenting best results to you or could refuse to relinquish control if you end your contract. You need to retain those rights and then give your PPC agent the appropriate permissions to manage your campaigns. If they balk at this arrangement, show them the door.
Typically, when you look at your company’s profile on a site like Google AdWords, you’ll see that your PPC agency has set up specific goals to help your business grow. These commonly include such metrics as Cost Per Acquisition, Return On Advertising Spend, and Cost Per Lead, though there are plenty of other valuable metrics that are worth tracking. Such measurements assure you that you’re spending your Digital marketing money in the right place, help you budget for ad spending, and offer insights into what’s working and what isn’t.
Unfortunately, you’ll occasionally encounter PPC advertising agencies that fail to set up these metric reports, and they’re not to be trusted. Even if they claim to be using an in-house system, it’s your right to demand they use the standard reporting system for each PPC platform and to fire them if they refuse to. Dashboard-based metrics exist to provide consistent measurements regarding the success of PPC campaigns ad those are the numbers you want to reference.
In a similar vein, some PPC advertising agencies skip the core metrics noted above in favor of less valuable but more appealing “vanity metrics.” Vanity metrics don’t help your business make money and they offer limited insight into your operations. Examples of vanity metrics include any campaign value based on impressions, engagement metrics that don’t drive conversions, and even many of the behavior-based metrics that used to be considered the gold standard in website evaluation, such as bounce rate or time on site.
Ultimately, vanity metrics don’t serve your company because they can be created artificially. An untrustworthy PPC agency might drive up engagement numbers by sharing a great meme on your brand’s landing pages, which will drive likes and other reactions, but won’t actually funnel clients to your site or create sales. Similarly, you can get a huge number of impressions by getting your PPC new ads onto a very popular site, but if no one is clicking on it, all you’ve got is a tally of how many people visited/ web traffic to someone else’s website.
Having the right metrics is important, but if you’re going to meet your goals then your Good PPC agency needs to be adjusting your account settings regularly to refine your campaigns. At a minimum, that means accessing your account to regularly monitoring and fine-tune the settings at least once a week. Such regular check-ins allow your agency to quickly adjust your social media campaigns based on updates to the search engines algorithm, catch any conversion mistakes that could cost your company money, and even react to competitors campaigns.
Be sure that you not only ask your PPC agency how often they access and update your accounts, but that you’re also checking your accounts regularly for updates. The reality is that, although many companies run PPC campaigns, only 10% of AdWords accounts are updated weekly. If your PPC agency can’t meet that standard, ditch them for one that will stay on top of your campaigns.
Just as your PPC agency needs to be fine tuning your accounts regularly, they should also be reporting back on your campaigns at least monthly. While seeing week-to-week progress would be great, as with many kinds of growth, this can be hard to evaluate. Comprehensive, monthly reports, on the other hand, can help you see what your agency has been doing on your behalf, how your accounts are growing, and allow you to be an active participant in your Digital marketing strategy.
Never settle for a company that doesn’t offer substantive reporting. While great reports may offer added insights from your account manager or more labor intensive explanatory work, the majority of PPC reporting is automated – any company that doesn’t provide it is just lazy.
It’s unrealistic to expect that you’ll speak to the same person every time you contact your PPC agency; that doesn’t even happen at your bank or your doctor’s office. That being said, there should be one person who acts as the lead on your account because that allows them to master your brand’s voice, develop a big picture strategy, and generally build up a knowledge base around your brand’s needs and preferences. They might be busy or out of the office occasionally, but anyone whose experienced both approaches – a core account manager and a rotating cast of agents – can tell you that having a point person makes a difference.
If your PPC agency doesn’t have you working with a single, core agent, you may want to ask a few questions to get a better sense of what’s happening. Do they have an unusual in-house strategy, or are they having trouble with employee retention? Do they think it doesn’t make a difference? You can also request that they place you with a single representative, but if that’s not their standard practice already, you’re probably better off going elsewhere. It just doesn’t bode well.
Google AdWords isn’t a new program and there are plenty of other PPC programs out there, but if an agency is committed to this work, then they should have complete Google’s AdWords certification program. You can check on this by asking them to show you their Premier Partner page – it really is that simple. Not having one isn’t necessarily the worst offense a company can commit, but it’s a good indicator that you can do better and should commit your ads spend elsewhere.
Did you pick your PPC agency based on their portfolio of appealing PPC ads/ads or optimized images? That’s a great starting point – it certainly indicates that they can do high-quality work – but it’s not enough if they’re not actually showing you your brand’s own ads before they launch them. Obvious, right? It should be, but many entrepreneurs have been duped by PPC agencies who tell them that their ad is similar to another ad product, which is called ad copy; the client, not wanting to be pushy, walks away with their own notion of their brand’s ad, and meanwhile the agency may not have done any work at all.
Your PPC agency should be giving you the final say on all your paid ads, so if you’ve supposedly got a campaign running and you haven’t seen your ads, ask to see them right away. Odds are good that if your agency isn’t showing you your PPC ads before launching them that they either don’t exist or they’re extremely low quality for online visibility. Great PPC agencies are proud of their work and they want you to see it. Anything less should raise concerns.
Hiring an agency to manage your PPC campaigns will obviously cost more than just the fees for the campaign itself, but the costs involved in running ads with your agency shouldn’t be confusing. That’s because, ultimately, your money should only be going two different places – to the agency and to the ad platform – and everyone at the company should be clear on the split. So, when we say you should be wary about confusing fees, we’re not talking about total cost (that’s a matter for you and your budget), but rather about how the money is split up. For any payment there should be the fee to the agency and the ads spend and it should always be obvious what the division is there.
As popular as PPC marketing is with businesses today, many of the agencies that execute these campaigns don’t do a very good job. They’re wasting your ad spend and your time, and you deserve better. That’s why you should switch to PPC.co’s PPC Management Service.
At PPC.co, we’re committed to ensuring that your ads are reaching the right audience and we know that most agencies just don’t deliver that. Starting from our understanding that website conversions often top out at 2%, we emphasize PPC marketing that pairs first contacts with retargeting efforts to ensure that your brand remains a top-of-mind solution for past visitors. A non-converting visitor is often just someone who hasn’t seen the right content yet, and we want to help you make those connections.
What else makes our PPC Management program stand out? With dual Google Ads and Google Analytics certifications, we have a deep understanding of the systems & AdWords account that get your ads seen and can use tracking data to its fullest potential of web traffic. In fact, that’s why we start every client engagement with a full PPC audit, because even when we’re not leading the campaigns, our skilled professionals can quickly see what’s working and what’s falling short in your current campaigns. From the start, we put our expertise to work for you.
If your PPC agency has exhibited any of the above warning signs, you can’t afford to wait around for progress. It’s time for the protection of business and moves on – to PPC.co. Contact us today to learn more about our PPC Management Services and say goodbye to wasted ad spend and rock bottom conversions. Once you’ve seen the difference a top PPC agency can make in your campaigns, you’ll never believe you let anyone else handle your PPC needs.
