As an marketer, data is critical. For email publishers today, it’s more critical than ever to focus on what this data tells you about the subscribers on the other end of the send button – and understand what “makes them click”. If you’re seeing low or declining click-through rates for your emails, you may need to present your content in a more engaging way or offer more value to your email audience. If you don’t, they will begin to tune out your message or unsubscribe altogether.

To help you better engage your subscribers, here are some simple tips to optimize each and every email you send – keeping more eyes on your email and less clicks on the unsubscribe.

1. First Impressions Count
Ever hear your mother tell you “don’t judge a book by its cover?” Well, email is different. The most important ideas should always appear at the top of your email. Capture your audience’s attention quickly with special offers, or enticing ideas that encourage them to continue reading. Be clear as to what the purpose of the email is and make sure your subject line reflects that as well.

2. Rich Content Experiences
Add images to help make it an engaging read and easy to skim for users on-the-go. And make sure your images render on all devices! More than half of all email sent today is opened on mobile devices – for younger audiences, this percentage is even higher. Ensure your format is compatible for mobile, as well as each device used by your audience. Your email reports should help you determine which devices and operating systems are prominent for your audience.

3. Animation/Video
Create engaging, visual experiences with the content in your email. Increase click-through rates, time spent reading, as well as replies and sharing by targeting your audience with personalized video content. Digital video has been one of the fastest-growing ad formats for the past several years, and is increasingly popular among consumers. It’s unsurprising then to see email marketers getting on board with video.

4. Quality Over Quantity
Break up the text into short, concise paragraphs with bold keywords to call out major ideas. Forget the filler words and get straight to the point so readers click through to read more.

5. Get Social
Successful emails prompt the reader to take action, whether it be a click, reply, forward, or share – you want them to be engaged. Link to your social sites to continue the conversation with your subscribers beyond their inbox.

6. Accessibility
Design for viewing on different platforms. More than just devices, make it accessible for people with disabilities and those that need to be able to navigate easily.

Most Importantly – Test!
Your audience will more than likely respond differently than another so be sure to test subject lines, headers, images, copy, calls to action, colours – the more you test, the more you will learn about what makes your audience respond and create incremental improvement with each and every email campaign you send out.

Taina Suomela is the General Manager of the Toronto office for Inbox Marketer, a data-driven digital marketing services & technology company. For more information on email marketing and ways to engage your audience head to www.inboxmarketer.com for lots of resources  

In recent years media planning has fallen victim to absolutism in the form of micro-targeting via digital media. The data can locate precise prospects in the moment they’re ready to buy, the thinking goes, which makes advertising broadly across media a waste of time and money.

Last year, two news events spat in the face of this “new normal.” First, the largest and most comprehensive study on ROI and media impact ever fielded, the Advertising Research Foundation’s (ARF) How Advertising Works, concluded that abandoning legacy media (where the committed, predictable reach lives) causes sales to drop. Second, Procter & Gamble CMO Marc Pritchard announced that his brands were stagnating due to targeting too narrowly on Facebook.

Other advertisers are coming to similar conclusions. We recently recorded the biggest spike to date in marketer confidence (intention to increase spending) for more traditional, homogeneous media. Specifically, increases of 25 percent for broadcast TV, 26 percent for cable TV and 18 percent for audio/radio—gains of 16, 11 and 19 points, respectively, over a year ago.

Tellingly, the spending optimism gap has narrowed significantly since the beginning of the decade. In 2011, there was nearly a 100-point difference in net “plan to spend” optimism between the highest and lowest media. Last year, this difference compressed to only 42 points.

Why? Advertisers are awakening from the big digital hyper-targeting party to remember three sustaining realities of media.

It takes big reach to make big sales.

The bigger the brand, the more customers, shopping visits and purchases it needs to stay in business, let alone expand. The biggest staple products need to reach tens of millions of real people (read: not bots) every week to set that equation in motion, and they need to do it predictably.

There’s a natural momentum for audiences that have something in common.

The finer you target audiences online, the more places they come from—like a patchwork quilt of the ideal consumer. Beyond the sum of characteristics captured in a data profile, there’s nothing to connect one to the others repeatedly and reliably. With established media like radio and TV programs that air on a schedule, a regular audience builds. And, thanks to social media, builds on itself, using what the characters did or what the DJs and TV hosts said as the rallying point.

Media won’t work in isolation.

Audiences don’t draw the divides that advertisers do. People just attend, listen, read and watch what they like. And today, they’re merging media in the moment more than ever before. The real power is in the intersection, whether that’s the growing connection between TV programs and social media or the awareness lift that ads in multiple media give each other—as evidenced by TV and Twitter increasingly promoting their interdependence and Nielsen studies showing that radio ads lift awareness of a brand’s TV ads substantially. The more roads you drive into the consumer’s mind, the bigger your presence there.

“AM/FM radio’s daytime presence is definitely getting more attention,” says Pierre Bouvard, chief insights officer at Cumulus Media, which operates the Westwood One radio network. “Advertisers now tell us they want to reach the greatest number of in-the-market consumers on the go.”

So what’s a marketer to do? Leave the hyper-targeting party and return to the media mix.

For its part, the ARF, arguably a media-neutral authority, recommends three “smart-spending action steps” for advertisers. First, invest in multiple platforms rather than shifting dollars from platform to platform. Second, spend smart by adding back traditional media to your digital investments to maximize ROI. Third, spend to reach millennials on traditional and new media—not just mobile.

“AM/FM radio's daytime presence is definitely getting more attention. Advertisers now tell us they want to reach the greatest number of in-the-market consumers on the go.”— Pierre Bouvard, chief insights officer at Cumulus Media

ARF took the average of category verticals and recommended an optimized mix for a $15 million advertiser: 78 percent traditional and 22 percent digital for people 18 and older, and 71 percent traditional and 29 percent digital for people 18-34.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should, in data and targeting. However you slice it, there’s a predictable unpredictability in hyper precision. It’s impractical to identify and connect individually with all of the people who are in the market for a product at any given moment in time. The surer route is to reach the most customers possible. That means building the bedrock of a media plan on channels with reliable mass.

Andy Sippel is svp at Advertiser Perceptions, a business intelligence firm serving the global advertising industry.

( This article was originally posted on Adweek and posted with permission from the author)

Marketing automation is on the rise as 55% of B2B companies have adopted the technology into their strategies. Although the most common  use of marketing automation is email marketing, James Morgan, senior VP of global sales at SharpSpring stresses that using marketing automation to its fullest will allow you to do three things very well:

Drive leads by learning about their behaviours and interests

Use this information to create hyper-personalized communications

Learn from your actions and apply these learnings to future campaigns

Here’s how you can get the most of your marketing automation system:

Lead scoring

All leads are not created equally, making lead scoring fundamental to every nurture program. Some prospects need to be fast-tracked to sales, while others may need some nurturing before they are ready to make a purchase. Lead scoring identifies these prospects by ranking their level of interest and sales readiness. Marketo explains that developing a good lead scoring framework will shorten sales cycles and improve win rates because the sales team have the right customer at the right time.

A marketing automation platform can house a number of interactions with your audience: a form on a landing page can capture when they download a white paper or click a call-to-action within an email. Collecting these interactions in one place allows you to paint a more complete picture of a lead’s interest in your company or brand. Working with the sales team, you can create a scoring system that converts more leads and wins more business.

“For instance, when it comes to lead scoring, a CMO would receive more points than someone on the IT team because they are the decision makers,” explains Morgan. “They would also receive more points if they had downloaded a white paper and if they were looking at the pricing page of our website, they would receive an even higher score. When they reach a certain score, the Sales team receive a notification to let them know that this lead is hot.”

Segment

Monetate’s Intelligent Email Marketing that Drives Conversions study found that segmented email campaigns produce 30% more open rates than undifferentiated messages. Unless your prospect list is very small, it is impossible to personalize each marketing email, so having a marketing automation system lets you personalize on a large scale. It helps to segment a large list into smaller groups to better target your communications to these groups.

The email marketing experts at Marketo, suggest two main ways to segment your list:

a) Segment by demographic attributes such as gender, age, job title, industry, geography or interests   

b) Segment by behavioral and past transactional data

Once your list is divided, you can then send personalized and relevant emails to each segment; these are known as dynamic emails. With a marketing automation system, you can make use of the dynamic content feature and create one email template with content that varies based on the recipient’s segment. With no coding necessary, even the most technologically challenged can create a hyper-personalized email to help convert leads to sales.

FitForMe segmented customers using the subscriber’s year of birth, adjusting the tone of the writing and the images to ensure that their messages were relevant to each group. 
 

Create landing pages

Use your marketing automation platform to create customized landing pages; no web design skills required! The technology allows you to create a form on a landing page to capture lead information and support demand generation. Using a dynamic content feature will customize how different segments will see a landing page, for a personal experience. For example, the diagram below illustrates how a handbag store can add blocks of dynamic content to a landing page to show different content to different segments, depending on which lead is viewing it. 

Marketing automation tools not only allow you to create landing pages, you can track them too. Glean insights from the data collected to better understand your customers and their behaviours.

A/B testing

Never miss an opportunity to test your campaigns. Optimize your strategy by testing features such as the subject line, the email template and the even the day and time that you send emails. Use your marketing automation platform to add A/B testing. This means that a small group will get the test while the rest will get the winning template; that is the template that receives the most opens, clicks or the highest engagement level, as defined by you.

Kissmetrics outline a few things to keep in mind when testing to ensure accurate and reliable results:

Test just one variable at a time for best results

Test early and often - you should always be testing to optimize your email sends

The larger the sample, the more accurate the results

Reporting

Email marketing, with the right system in place, is one of the most measurable marketing tactics. Open rates, call-to-actions, link and attachment opens can all be tracked within a marketing automation platform.

Campaign Monitor explains that it’s important to track these metrics for a number of reasons:

Proves the ROI of your efforts

Improves your results

A marketing automation system allows you to quickly and easily build reports to view key analytics on a dashboard. This data can then be used to optimize and power your future campaigns. “In order to create successful campaigns, you need to concentrate on what is working and get rid of what isn’t,” says Morgan. “That’s how you drive revenue.” 

Amy-Louise Tracey, Communications Manager, CNW

Last week, the Public Policy Forum released it's much anticipated report on the Canadian media industry.  The report echoed several policy amendments for which Newspapers Canada has long supported. In particular, changes to section 19 of the Income Tax Act would be very helpful to helping contribute to a more vibrant Canadian media ecosystem.

Manitobans know that when the snow comes and your car is sliding around corners, you switch to winter tires. You don’t stare at the summer tires and think about how you could design a different system to push the vehicle forward. In short, you don’t try to reinvent the wheel.

It’s a lesson the Public Policy Forum could have learned in its report on the news media, The Shattered Mirror, which was released Thursday.

The report provides lots of detail on how much ad revenues have declined for traditional news media – newspapers, TV and radio – and lots of detail on how this has cut staffing in newsrooms and curtailed the amount of civic function journalism being done in Canada.

It asks: “Do the media, and particularly the civic function of journalism – the coverage of public institutions, public affairs and community – need a lifeline?”

It answers the question with a clear “Yes!” But then its main recommendations are not anything that I recognize as a lifeline.

It recommends a 10 per cent tax on purchases of digital advertising in foreign-owned media. This is primarily a tax on Google and Facebook, the two U.S. giants that gobble up billions that used to be spent in Canadian-owned media.

The rationale is twofold: it would make Canadian companies more likely to advertise in Canadian-owned media and it would address the fact that large U.S. digital companies take a lot of money out of Canada and put little back in the way of creating content for Canadians.

The tax could amount to $300 million to $400 million each year. That money could go a long way to shoring up responsible journalism across the country. It could, for example, underwrite the entire newsroom budgets of dozens of major daily newspapers.

But that’s not where the money would go. Instead, it would go to a Future of Journalism and Democracy Fund that would support digital news innovation with a special emphasis on early-stage local and indigenous news operations, and research into issues relevant to the interaction of news and democracy.

In other words, the money would not go to support what existing news outlets do to ensure ongoing coverage.

There would also be money for a whole new service by the Canadian Press to cover local news that would be shared. For example, a common reporter at the Winnipeg courts would provide stories that all local media could use.

Apart from the fact that local news media are already doing this, you have to ask: Does it serve Winnipeggers well to have a single source of such news, with the exact same story being repeated in every local media outlet? I would answer “No.” A key part of strong civic function journalism is a variety of reporting, with different versions that provide different perspectives that allow people to come to their own conclusions.

As well, this kind of service is only viable in larger centres. Who is going to do this in Steinbach and Beausejour and every other smaller centre across the country that is currently served by local newspapers?

The report has some useful recommendations. It suggests taking sales taxes off subscriptions to Canadian news outlets, in large part because such taxes are not currently applied to subscriptions to foreign news outlets.

It also suggests that the federal government advertise only in Canadian-owned media and that charity laws be changed so that people can make tax-deductible donations to non-profit news organizations. These would help civic function journalism.

But, after devoting 80 or so pages to the state of news media today, the report’s recommendations do not go very far towards helping the news media with measures to strengthen economic sustainability.

Currently, there are newspapers and news outlets across Canada doing their best to cover their communities, build out digital platforms and adapt to the new business realities. This is the bedrock of civic function journalism in Canada. The best bet for ensuring its survival is to find ways of helping it get better traction in changing conditions, and not reinvent the wheel.