Establishing an effective email marketing campaign is a reliable way to quickly drive more people to your site and more dollars to your triple bottom line. In the first of a three part series on email marketing tactics, Katherine Field, The Magician at soulpepper shares her secrets on how she helps clients from all walks of life build an active roster of customers for a lifetime.

Email Marketing

“It ain’t bragging if you can back it up.”

Those immortal words belong to none other than former heavyweight champion of the world, Muhammad Ali. Now we ain’t about to go toe to toe with The Greatest, but step inside the digital ring and it’s a different story.

As a sought-after email marketing company, soulpepper was behind the success of LA-based Alternative Apparel when they doubled their list of email subscribers in less than 30 days and increased sales exclusively from email by 61%. For MASC, a local men’s skin care company, we helped them increase revenues by a whopping 1,200% in the first month alone.

But this post isn’t about our success stories. It’s about yours.

Establishing an effective email marketing campaign is a reliable way to quickly drive more people to your ecommerce site and more dollars to your triple bottom line. The question we’re always asked is: how do we do it?

In the first of a three part series on email marketing tactics, Katherine Field, The Magician at soulpepper shares her secrets on how she helps clients from all walks of life build an active roster of customers for a lifetime.

The Email Marketing Advantage

We often recommend email marketing to clients who are looking to increase revenues because it’s cheap. You’re maybe paying $100 per month for your Email Service Provider (ESP), and though you may be paying the fees of the company helping you out, you’re not paying per click. That’s the great thing about email – the ROI is hard to beat.

For the purpose of this series, Katherine will focus on Configuration, Segmentation & Personalization, and Testing & Optimization; the 3 key areas that are most often overlooked by companies wishing to develop their own email marketing programs.

CONFIGURATION

In terms of configuration, putting the time into setting up your Email Service Provider properly is important. Take into account how many emails are on your list when making your selection. We don’t recommend you cheap out when choosing an ESP as it’s a key criteria for your online success.

There Are Tools That Can Help

For smaller companies, MailChimp is a good option. You’re generally paying for tools by volume, so you want to pick one based on the volume of subscribers that you have. Generally it’s not complicated to export your data over to other more robust tools later on as you grow. Some tools have tiered volume options. Pick one that’s easy to set up and integrates well with your e-commerce solution and your other tools. Seamless integration will make each campaign you set up a lot easier.

Make sure your sign up forms are easy to customize and look pretty on your website. Confirm it’s possible to maintain your branding across to the sign up page and then on to your list. And definitely look at the reporting (and analytics) options. If you can’t export the information for example, it can be really annoying. Look at what your needs for analysis will be over time and make sure the tools you choose can cope with that.

Here are a few that we use:

 – Windsor Circle – Sophisticated customer segmentation with email integration. http://www.windsorcircle.com

– Litmus – Ideal for testing your content and creative. https://litmus.com

– MailChimp – Easy to use email service provider http://mailchimp.com

– ExactTarget – Sophisticated ESP for larger clients (made by Salesforce) http://www.exacttarget.com

Once you have decided on your ESP and have it configured to address your particular needs, it’s time to make some magic. Check back next week when Katherine shows you little known ways to segment and personalize your email campaigns to see your open rates jump and your revenues skyrocket.

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Written by Rik Klingle-Watt

About the author

Rik Klingle-Watt is a soulpepper and the writer of Not Business as Usual, an award-winning documentary about disrupting the business quo.

soulpepper is a digital marketing agency on a mission. We help companies that are up to something good, increase leads, attract more customers and drive more dollars to their bottom line. Check out our newsletter for more great ideas on how to build your ecommerce empire.