2. AGENDA
1
2
3
4
Setting up your account
Building and importing your list
Content and frequency
Setting up your first campaign
5 Measuring results
3. About Nexxtep
We exist to be our clients’ trusted IT advisor, to help them solve business challenges,
operate more efficiently and increase profitability.
nexxtep.com
IT Services
Take IT issues
out of your
growth equation
Software
developme
nt
Line-of-business
and mobile apps
Online
marketing
Website design,
social media,
“Virtual CMO”
Founded in 2002
Awarded “Small Business of
the Year” and “Best Places
to Work in Georgia”
Expanded to Jacksonville
market in 2014
4. About me
Anne
shenton
Marketing Director
Digital Strategist
Experience
I manage our lead generation efforts and help our clients
choose the right marketing tools and materials that can
strengthen their bottom lines.
I have a six-month old daughter, Mara. Follow me on Instagram
@anne_shenton for an endless stream of cuteness.
Fun
fact
MARKETING
STRATEGY
SOCIAL MEDIA
WEB DESIGN
EMAIL MARKETING
DIRECT MARKETING
95%
85%
45%
90%
70%
5. Open rate
The percentage of people on your email list who
open or view your email campaign. A 20% open
rate would mean that of every 10 emails delivered,
2 were opened.
1
2 Click Rate
Percentage of people who clicked at least one link
in your email campaign.
3 Conversion rate
(In this webinar), the number of people who sign up
for your email list. To get your conversion rate,
divide the total number of conversions by the
number of visitors to your site.
Vocabulary
These are a few terms I will be using throughout the
webinar.
18. Subscription incentives
Email series ebooks
Sequence of emails
sent daily as a course or
welcome series
“10 Things You Should
Know About X”
video
How to use your product
CHEaT
SHEETS
Checklist for
implementing a new
program
If you want your email list to stand out, take the time to create a valuable subscription incentive.
19. Frequency and
engagement
Are negatively
correlated How often should you send?
Well, how often do you have something really valuable for your readers?
37. Email kick-starter kit
The fast track to generating
leads and revenue with email
marketing
Account setup
Setup a free (or paid) email account and import
your list for you
One-on-one consultation
Deliverable: 3-month action plan
Customized forms and welcome emails
Branded to your company and embedded in your
website or landing page
$597
Today I’m going to take you into the weeds and really go through some of the tactical ins and outs of setting up and managing your email marketing account. I recommend email marketing as a tool to clients all the time, and I’ve seen a lot of them get started, but they aren’t really sure how to make the most of their email marketing service or take advantage of some of the features that are available to them. This webinar was specifically requested by a couple of clients.
Before we get started, I’m just going to give you some very brief background on my company and myself. Nexxtep is really what I would consider to be a business improvement company. So we do that by offering services in three categories: IT services, things like network management, cloud computing services, data backups. Then we have software development, where we have a team of in-house programmers who develop custom programs for businesses and even mobile apps. And finally, the area where I spend most of my time, is the realm of online marketing. We have launched about 60 websites over the past 3 or 4 years, and in addition to that we also offer social media marketing services, and “Virtual CMO” plans, where we can offer a full suite of marketing services and measurement tools at a fraction of the cost of what you would pay someone to manage it in house.
You can learn more about us on our website, which we are in the process of updating.
And finally, just a quick introduction. I’ve been with Nexxtep for a little over 5 years, where I have ramped up our marketing efforts, been the project manager for almost all of our website projects, and helped our clients implement marketing tools and processes. In terms of email marketing, a lot of you are probably familiar with our monthly newsletter and some of the other messaging we send out periodically. Some of the results we have seen from email marketing are open rates, click rates, and conversion that are well-above industry average. More importantly, we consistently get new clients as a result of our newsletter simply for the fact that we stay top of mind. I’m telling you this not trying to brag, but just that I have been doing this a while, I’ve figured out some things that work and don’t work. I’ve got to say that one of my favorite parts about my job is this right here, where I can teach you about the tools and tactics and see what happens when you run with it.
Let’s get started! We’re going to go right in and start from the beginning- with setting up your account! As you might have read in the description, I’m going to use Mailchimp for all of our examples today, but there are tons of other email marketing services out there that you can check out, like ConstantContact and Aweber, for example. I have been using Mailchimp for years and I love it. I love the beautiful templates, the reporting, and some of the cool automation tools that I’ll tell you about in a little while. By the way, I’m not getting paid to promote Mailchimp by any means; I just really, really like this service.
If you don’t have an email marketing account, you can take one for a test drive by heading over to mailchimp.com and signing up for a free account.
Once you’ve signed up for an account, you’ll get a verification email, but once you click on the link in that email you’ll be good to go and you can log in and get started. The very first thing you need to do is set up your list. For most companies, you’ll only need one list, because you segment your list into groups and just send to the specific people in a particular group. We have our list segmented tons of different ways, by geographical area, industry, whether or not they are a client or prospect.
If you have a list ready that you want to use, you can import that list as an excel spreadsheet or even just copy and paste your emails in.
But I will give you a word of caution the list you import. Make sure that you have the people’s permission to email them. Sometimes, this is implied, like if they are a long-term client of yours, or a member of your organization. Sometimes, it’s not even a question, because they signed up to receive emails on your website. As a cautionary tale, I will tell you a story. One of the first clients I ever worked with on email marketing asked me to setup his account, import a list and send out a campaign. Well, I asked him if he had permission to send to this list, and he said, yes, that they had signed up to receive emails on their website. He left out the fact that a lot of them had signed up over a year ago and hadn’t received anything from this company before. A lot of these folks who got this campaign were confused because they probably didn’t remember signing up and marked the email as spam. In turn, Mailchimp actually blocked the account and we had to jump through hoops to get it reactivated. If you have a list you want to send to but haven’t communicated with them in a while, I recommend that you send out an introductory email that says, “hey, we are going to start sending out monthly, or weekly promotions, tips, tools, or whatever your offer may be. To make sure you get access to all these awesome things, opt-in to our list.”
Whether or not you have a list ready to go, of course you also probably want to BUILD your email list. Well you can do this a number of ways, and first and foremost you want to get your signup forms setup. So from the lists section, you can click on your list, and then click on “signup forms” and you’ll be directed to this screen. You can select “General Forms” to setup your basic forms and even more importantly, your welcome email.
From here, you can edit the wording and styling of your forms, without any programming knowledge. You can also edit your confirmation email, and this is a good opportunity to add some flair.
Here’s a great example of that from lonely planet. Although the styling of this email is a little outdated, the information in here is great. They make the most of this opportunity with a link to the latest edition of their newsletter, and even throw in a little offer from their online shop.
After you get your signup forms setup, you’ll also want to have forms actually embedded on your website so users can sign up for your list directly on your website. You can do this by clicking on Embedded forms, or if you use Wordpress, you can add your forms using a special plugin.
When you click on embedded forms you can see some code that comes up that you can copy and paste into your website, or have your webmaster copy and paste it in there for you.
Here are just a couple of examples where people are using mailchimp forms that are styled really well on their websites.
As you can see with both of these examples, they use more than just a simple “subscribe to our list” message, and offer something of value to give the visitors a reason to want to subscribe. And I will say that, yes, to get these forms to look and act the way you want them to with your website, you may have to get a professional to get in there and code it out to get it styled to look the way you want it to, but I promise the rest of the things in this webinar will be geek-free. I just wanted to let you know that you have these options.
Incidentally, here is an option that does NOT involve code, other than copying and pasting. It’s a nifty, and even better, free tool called SumoMe that allows you to install a little popup window on your website. Some people have mixed opinions about these popups, but they have about triple the conversion rates of just embedding a form on your website. We have tested it out on some of our blog posts and have gotten tons of signups this way. I have not personally used this tool yet, but I have every intention of implementing it like crazy on our new website. And the reviews for it are fabulous, so I feel confident in recommending it to you.
Email marketing has become so pervasive that you can’t just have a regular old newsletter subscription and expect the signups to come flooding in. You have to get creative and take the time to put something together that would be really valuable to your customers and prospects. Here are some formats and examples of each of those formats.
This is a question I get a lot. How often should you send marketing emails. Well, I wish I could give you a magic answer, but I have to say it depends. Do keep in mind that frequency and engagement are negatively correlated. In other words, the more often you send, the more people are going to ignore your emails or unsubscribe from your list. We used to send out our newsletter every week, but I noticed this very thing. Over time, our open rates and click rates were starting to dwindle. So we moved to a monthly newsletter and monthly promotion. 2 emails a month on average. Since then, our open rates and click rates have shot up about 5%.
Also keep in mind that sending out emails to targeted emails can boost your open rates and click rates. We sent out a newsletter to our accounting clients that got about double the open rate as the rest of our list.
Now it’s time for the fun part. We’re going to go through setting up and sending a campaign, step by step. From the dashboard, we’ll click on the campaigns tab on the left and then Create campaign.
Then you’ll see a screen with these options. I’ll just give you a little description of each of these campaign types. The first “Regular Ol” campaign is probably going to be your go-to campaign type. These are formatted with HTML, meaning you can include pretty pictures, hyperlinks, and a nice design.
The next option is plain text campaign. These campaigns don’t include pictures or formatting, but the benefit with plain text is that they often have a lower chance of going into your subscribers’ junk mail.
Next up is the A/B split campaign. We use these quite a bit because you can test subject lines, the from name, and the time you send and you can optimize accordingly.
And finally RSS-driven campaign. If you have a blog, you can setup an RSS campaign that will automatically send subscribers your latest blog post without you having to come in and setup a new email campaign every time. It just happens automatically.
Today, we’re going to look at setting up a regular ol campaign.
Once we select that we’ll reach this screen, where we can name our campaign. Choose a subject line and from name. A best practice is to use your actual name, because these tend to get higher open rates than they would if it were just your company name.
You’ll notice that under the subject line there’s a link that says “How do I write a good subject line?” If you click on that, you’ll see that a little box comes up where you can actually search the words that you want to use in your subject line to see how well they are likely to perform.
Once we have our email subject and everything laid out, we can choose a design for our template. And for this portion, I’m going to go off script and actually open up Mailchimp on my computer.
Here we are on the templates screen. Your first set of choices are the basic themes. These are mostly drag and drop templates based on these formats. You can change and edit the fonts, colors and everything else, but you can do that with the predesigned themes as well, so I will often use those and just edit them to fit my needs. Let’s take a look at the pre-designed themes. As you can see there are dozens and dozens of themes to choose from. And you can filter them out by category to find the ones that are best for you.
For my purposes, I chose the Postcard theme, and I have already done some editing as I will show you.
Here we are on the design screen. As you can see I have swapped out all the colors, logos and images to match our branding. And I’ll show you how easy it was to do that. This template is broken down into drag and drop portions.
Drag and drop
Header content
Edit text
Edit image
Add social buttons
Edit button
Edit design
Preview
Now that my campaign is ready to be sent, we’ll go to the confirm page here at the bottom.
We’re going to get back to the slide deck because there is one other thing I wanted to show you that is not in the demo account I setup, because this feature is only available in paid accounts. Paid accounts start at $20 or $30 a month, and it’s a steal for some of these features.
This is called automation. As you can see on this screen, this feature allows you to automatically send an email or a series of emails based on a certain activity. So you can send a series of welcome emails to a new customer. You can send a series of emails to people right after they purchase your products. You can send a birthday message to your subscribers every year. And what’s really cool, is this one that’s kinda grayed out, “Website Activity.” Here you can send an email or a series of emails to subscribers who click on a certain link to your website. So here’s an example. Say you’re hosting an event in a couple of weeks and you send out an email invitation. You don’t want to send out another invitation to everyone on your list, because maybe they aren’t interested in coming, but the people who clicked on that link are at least slightly interested. So you could send out an additional reminder invitation to those people after they click on the link.
Now we have sent out our campaign, it’s time to track those results and see how we can improve for next time!
If we go over to the reports tab in Mailchimp, you can see the open and click rates for all of your campaigns. You can then click on individual campaigns, and see the results for them on an individual basis.
If you run an eCommerce site, you can even track how much money a campaign generates
Here’s an example of data from an individual campaign. Here’s where I like to go to see which links are the most popular to make sure we include more content like that in future newsletters.
So there we have it! That’s all of the information I have for you today, but I do have an offer for those of you who want to kick-start your email marketing.
If you want to get your email marketing in gear, here’s the offer I have for you. We’ll setup your account, import your list, and customize your forms and welcome emails, and embed those forms on your website. But the most value you’ll get from this offer is the one-on-one consultation, because I’ll take the information from that consultation to craft a customized three-month action plan that lists the campaigns you should send and how often, list out their topics and a basic outline of the content, and the subject lines based on best practices.
These are all things you can do, but with this kick-starter kit, I will save you hours of time. And you’ll get the added bonus of my experience- I’ve made the mistakes with email marketing, I’ve learned from them, and now you don’t have to make these mistakes.
If you’re interested in signing up for this, just shoot me an email, and I’ll also be sending more information on this in the next couple of days.
That’s everything I have for you today, and now I’m going to see if we have had any questions come in.