Bite-sized Branding Episode 72 - Getting Creative With Content

Episode 72 is graced by Emma Reeves, director of Excelerate Marketing, an innovator, connector and Marketing Professional.

She lives to discover creative ways to problem-solve for clients. She comes with an extensive network of contractors and experts in their respective fields and links businesses to individuals who provide the best skills and knowledge to execute and drive effective marketing campaigns.

Email Marketing: Go or no go?

Email marketing has been one of many brands' and businesses' longest-ongoing go-to marketing techniques. The set-up and success of your email marketing campaign largely depend on how you set it up and whom you send it out to, among other factors. 

Although email marketing isn’t the best way to sell a product or service, it’s an excellent way to keep your customers updated on what’s new with you. In this case, you could use email marketing to send updates after a webinar, post an in-person event, a follow up on any effort or engagement you had finished. 

Given how diverse marketing has branched into so many different trends, does email marketing still hit the spot? At some point, we say that email marketing has become overly saturated, which could be true at some point but could also be effective when used correctly. 

Most marketing professionals suggest segmentation on an extensive contact database for a more targeted approach. The way to do that is to do a test campaign by sending an email to your contacts list, checking the data for open rates, click-through rates and response rates, and then you can segment it off that.

You can’t gauge your marketing effectiveness unless you know the quality of your data. These questions are a good starting point for email marketing. When done correctly, email marketing can be a great platform to catch up with your audience.

Some things to consider in email marketing:

• Example: An email sent to current subscribers had the following headline: NO TO…or DON’T CANCEL in it; the email ended up having a very high open rate because the recipients were worried that something might be cancelled or their subscription must have been cut off because of a delayed bill, etc. Although it wasn’t a very pleasing headline, we got to accomplish the goal of catching attention.
• Always personalise the email. To avoid your email from going to spam, always use the recipient’s name. The worst experience you can ever give to your audience is when you give them a generic template saying, “ Hi, Mr Customer” That is Terrible!

2. Long or short content? Both types of content work best for different purposes and industries. Are you looking to educate or inform? Long-form content is better. If you’re looking to entertain or amuse, then go for short-form content.

3. Options: People like to digest content at the time they please, and that’s something you can't change. In that case, give your viewers or readers options. For example, provide them with a download button, add a bookmark option, and a save option so that they can go back to your content anytime they wish to go back to your content.

4. Segmentation
It's never a good idea to send a generic email to a list of a thousand. You hsve to segment your data and content. Here are the questions you could start from:

• How many email types do I want to send?
• How many groups do I want to make?
  • Startup
  • Scale up
• What is the goal for each email?
• How could I group those emails?
• How much potential income does each group bring in?

5.  Give each group a different lead journey: Don’t make all your CTAs all go to the “Contact Us” Page. Direct each group to somewhere more specific

• Services pages
• Pricing
• FAQs