Email Marketing Strategies for ECommerce

5 Tips for Writing Effective Email Subject Lines (with examples)

12/6/2022

Here are 5 tips on creating effective subject lines that will avoid the spam folder:

Keep it short and to the point: A subject line that is too long or unclear can easily get lost in the clutter of a crowded inbox. Keep your subject line concise and focused on the key message you want to convey to your audience.

Avoid using spammy words or phrases: Spammers often use certain words and phrases in their subject lines to trick recipients into opening their emails. Avoid using words like "free," "earn money," or "click here" in your subject line to avoid being flagged as spam.

Personalize your subject line: Adding the recipient's name or referencing their specific interests or needs can increase the chances of them opening your email. This personalization shows that you have taken the time to tailor your message to their specific needs and makes your email more relevant to them.

Use numbers and symbols wisely: Including numbers or symbols in your subject line can help it stand out in a crowded inbox. However, be careful not to overdo it, as this can make your email look spammy and decrease the chances of it being opened.

Test and optimize: Testing different subject lines on a small sample of your audience can help you determine which ones are most effective in getting more clicks to your site. Use the results of these tests to optimize your subject lines and improve your overall email marketing strategy.

Here are examples of subject lines that could be considered spam - avoid these formats:

"Earn $500 a day with this secret method"
"Click here to claim your free gift"
"Get rich quick with this amazing opportunity"
"Special offer: 50% off all products"
"This is not spam: Important information inside"
"You're a winner! Claim your prize now"
"Your account will be closed unless you respond"
"Amazing breakthrough in weight loss"
"Join our exclusive members-only club"
"Miracle cure for [disease] discovered"

Here are examples of subject lines that would not be considered spam - use these formats to improve your results:

"Join our webinar on [topic] this Wednesday"
"Limited time offer: 20% off your first purchase"
"New blog post: [title]"
"Invitation to our [event] this weekend"
"Check out our latest [product/service] review"
"Get the latest industry insights with our newsletter"
"Thanks for subscribing to our [blog/newsletter/etc.]"
"Join our community and receive exclusive offers"
"Don't miss out on our [event/promotion] this month"
"Customer service update: [important information]"
"Limited time offer: 20% off your first purchase"
"New blog post: [title]"
"Invitation to our [event] this weekend"
"Check out our latest [product/service] review"
"Get the latest industry insights with our newsletter"
"Thanks for subscribing to our [blog/newsletter/etc.]"
"Join our community and receive exclusive offers"
"Don't miss out on our [event/promotion] this month"
"Customer service update: [important information]"
"Get a sneak peek at our new product line"
"Join us for a free webinar on [topic]"
"Limited time offer: 15% off your first order"
"Don't miss out on [event] - register now"
"Your feedback is important to us"
"Thank you for being a valued customer"
"Introducing our new [product/service]"
"Limited seats available for [event]"
"Exclusive discount for [company] employees"
"Join us for a special [event/sale] this weekend"

I hope these tips are helpful and provide useful examples for your own email marketing. Get in touch if you would like to work with me on improving your overall email marketing strategy and results.

Mastering Your Email Marketing Strategy: Nurturing Relationships in the Inbox

6/5/2020

Establishing effective communication and nurturing a relationship with customers requires tact, respect, and a deep understanding of the value of the recipient's digital real estate. Here are 7 key things to keep in mind:

The success of an email campaign significantly depends on how you manage your place in your recipient's inbox, which is a fiercely competitive space filled with numerous messages each day.
The process of managing a digital mailbox is compared to handling a physical one. While a physical mailbox gets cleared daily, digital mailboxes are attended to more frequently, with decisions being influenced by the sender's identity, the email's importance, and the recipient's mental state.
The digital mailbox, unlike the physical one, only allows for a single subject line to grab the recipient's attention. The inbox holder faces the decision-exhaustion similar to that of a physical mailbox owner, with unwanted emails ending up in the trash or being marked as spam.
Building a relationship with customers via email is a consensus-based process. The granting of consent to send emails does not automatically establish a relationship; instead, it signals consent to explore the possibility of a relationship.
Marketers often misuse consent by assuming it as an invitation to inundate the customer's inbox with emails. This mistake often leads to emails being ignored, deleted, or marked as spam, highlighting the fact that a relationship still needs to be built post-consent.
Building a relationship involves managing the frequency of messages and their content. The messages should be aimed at building a relationship, treating the recipient as a more evolved version of the sender, someone they are keen to learn about and understand better.
It's important to respect the recipient's inbox, modulating the frequency of messages to meet shared mutual importance. Treating the potential of a relationship as a test, rather than assuming that consent implies a direct trigger to sale, improves the odds of success.

Email marketing should be seen as an opportunity to create and nurture relationships with recipients. Consent is merely the starting point, not an excuse to flood inboxes. By respecting the recipient's space, and approaching them with the intent to understand and value them, businesses can make their emails stand out.

Digital Marketing: Don't Set It and Forget It

2/11/2020

Here are 6 checkpoints you can use to evaluate your current digital marketing strategy and establish whether it is still on track. Most of the time, Digital Strategies require adjustments over time. Messages may need to be refreshed. Images may need to be changed. New challenges may have appeared in the competitive landscape that need to be addressed. There are many changes in your business environment that require adjustments in your digital (and offline) strategy.

Here are 6 important signs you can track that will tell you what kinds of changes are needed:

Your lead numbers and their quality are going down.
Monthly raw leads into your CRM or website acquisition forms are an important marker of the relevance of your messaging to your target audience. If your lead numbers used to be satisfying and now are not, you need to audit the elements on your digital strategy that connect you to your customers. These can include: your customer acquisition experience, messaging, imaging, and your offer. The proper course of action is to make a detailed audit of acquisition channels and set up a clear report showing their performance over time. With this information in hand, plus whatever anecdotal information your staff can provide, it is possible to build a picture of potential changes to your strategy to improve performance in terms of lead numbers and quality. (Numbers to track: Lead Numbers, Conversion Percentage)
The website or social media traffic is low quality. This means that the audience that you are getting through your web presence is not engaging with your content and is not connecting with your product/services offer. An engaged audience usually transforms into a purchasing audience over time (I can't emphasize enough the time factor involved). Proper content, refreshed regularly, and delivered clearly over both desktop and mobile platforms, helps create this engagement and helps deliver quality prospects over time. (Numbers to track: Bounce rates on website pages, low traffic from social media to conversion pages, time spent on the website, number of pages read on the website).
Paid advertising is not delivering results. This means that the click-through rate in the ads has diminshed, and/or that the individuals who do click through your ads are not converting. Taking a look at your spend vs. results when it comes to paid media is an important factor in establishing whether a digital strategy refresh is needed. (Numbers to track: paid ad click-through rate, paid ad click-to-conversion rate).
Email campaign does not exist or has stopped producing results. Email marketing is a test of the ability of your organization to engage with your customers: prospects, existing, returning, and even your ex-customers. If your email campaign hasn't been refreshed in a while, and you are not noticing its impact into your monthly sales, then a refresh is called for. Email, when executed correctly, is a form of 'soft power' for your company. It is able to sway and convince individuals over time without being overly pushy and it lets you deliver the proper 'personality' and customization that allows you to get past the simple transactional relationship with your customers at every stage of their life cycle with your product/service. (Numbers to track: number of new subscribers, ratio of open vs. read percentage, click-backs to your website for further engagement).
Your reviews have stopped arriving.
The common review process applies to B2C organizations, where public reviews are a way to talk to customers using other customer's voices. B2B organizations usually provide case studies to showcase their abiity to solve customer problems or provide specific services successfully. B2C organizations, however, depend on individuals to provide reviews of their own free will. Lack of engagement means that your customers don't feel strong enough to say anything good about their experience with you. Or perhaps you have enforced the 'happiness' measurement, where your staff basically state that unless they get a glowing review they will be demoted, fired, or worse. In any of these cases, lack of customer reviews is a sympton that needs to be addressed by an audit of your digital and/or overall customer experience. (Numbers to track: B2C-number of reviews gathered via multiple channels, number of positive notes willingly provided by customers. B2B-number of case studies on the website, number of pageviews for said case studies on the site).
You have lost sight of the profitability of your digital marketing efforts.
Many organizations, in their zeal for 'trying everything once', embark on multiple-pronged tactics that take on a life of their own without a proper review of their contribution to the profitability of the overall effort. Having a clear understanding of how your digital marketing spend is profitable as a part of your overall budget is important. This does not mean that you would immediately remove any and all parts of the strategy that are 'unprofitable.' That would be short-term transactional thinking. Instead, your understanding of how the digital marketing budget contributes profitably to your overall finances allows you to nuance your decisions and support your efforts as you see how each element interacts with the customer experience. Not all elements of a strategy will be profitable, but it is important to understand the overall picture, and the contribution that each section provides to the whole. (Number to track: easy to follow formula that states how many digital marketing dollars are needed to make a profitable sale).

An important thing to note is that, as you can probably tell from the descriptions above, each tactic of your digital marketing strategy supports the business and all have internal links to one another. Understanding these links, and learning how to manipulate them to improve results over time (via testing and changing tactics and elements within them for optimization), will lead to overall better results for your digital marketing spend. It will also lead you to make reasonable decisions about the future of your spend, and which channels really help you connect to your customers at every stage of your product/service life cycle.

A thorough, impartial Digital Marketing audit is a good place to begin so decisions can be based on data, balanced by the knowledge and experience of your staff and your customers.

If you want loyal customers, ask them to do something crazy...

8/6/2018

Understanding Customer Loyalty as Confirmation Bias
A business can understand customer loyalty as a manifestation of the positive side of Confirmation Bias. This bias is inherent in people's mental model, and is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories.

“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects.”
— Francis Bacon

You can think of confirmation bias in a negative manner, as a way to prevent you from understanding the world correctly by blinding you to a proper understanding of the evidence in front of you. And you would be correct to look at it in this way. In the real world of contradictory ideologies,

Confirmation Bias is the mental approach that allows two people with opposing views on a topic to see the same evidence and come away feeling validated by it. Unchecked, it can create a dangerous thought bubble that isolates and destroys your ability to relate to the world.

In the context of this conversation, however, we are looking at the positive side of Confirmation Bias. (The technical term for this use of Confirmation Bias is Apophenia).

Looking at the Shapes of Clouds and Mountains
Confirmation Bias has a positive aspect to it. It has to do with patterns and reassurance. The mind is designed to seek patterns in the world and it will create and sustain them automatically, often from evidence that does not support such patterns. For example, people who see figures in the shapes of clouds are using a form of confirmation bias to ‘trim’ what they see to belong to a category of things they know about (sheep or cows or whatever object is on their minds at the time). The trimming process removes whatever elements in their mind would interfere with the creation and maintenance of this mental image. The ‘mental trimming process’ is reinforced via confirmation bias to make the image become clear in their minds, even though it does not exist in the real world.

In the case of looking at the shape of clouds, this is a very mild process and does not involve confrontation. Someone else may disagree with an individual about the shape they see in a cloud, but this will likely not become cause for a duel to the death. However, It is possible for one person to transfer to another person the ability to see the same object in a cloud by telling them about it in a cooperative manner. By describing the shape of the cloud in terms of the elements of the object desired, one person can ‘make’ the other person see what they believe they see in the clouds.

The same process also happens when viewing the shapes of some mountains. People describe shapes and can transfer this description to another person’s view of the same mountain so they both ‘see’ the same thing, even though it is clear ‘the thing’ they are looking at is not really a part of the mountain (or the cloud) in the least.

Triggering Confirmation Bias To Create Customer Loyalty
To apply Confirmation Bias within a customer centric Digital Investment Plan, a business can add a ‘crazy’ element to their marketing approach. By committing a potential and/or existing customer to perform this ‘crazy’ action, the business triggers Confirmation Bias, as the individual will be naturally driven to justify their action to others.

The elements of the Digital Investment Plan come into play to create and maintain the justification details that a customer can use to confirm their beliefs about the action they have performed.

The trigger for confirmation bias can be a story told about the product and its details, or a story about how the product fits in the customer’s world. In other words, the trigger can be a real thing or a story that organizes the world into a shape that helps explain a little part of the world.

Depending on the type of customers in the business target audience, the elements may be 'crazy' or they can be as simple as a higher price than average to trigger a justification discussion.

By designing the Digital Investment Plan from the start to include these triggering elements, a business can run effective campaigns to create confirmation bias driven discussions between customers and non-customers, establishing a high probability of getting loyal customers to stick with the product while at the same time having them advocate the product (in the same way that people share their description of the shape of a cloud) with others.

Source Highlights:
Confirmation Bias discussion from Science Daily

Pareidolia: Seeing Faces in Unusual Places

Being Amused by Apophenia

What is Digital Customer Investment?

8/3/2018

Principles Behind The Digital Customer Investment Approach to Customer Centricity
The term Digital Customer Investment (DCI) separates its concepts and objectives from more commonly used concepts like Digital Operations, or Digital Marketing, or Digital Solutions. Any of those phrases carries with it a strong direct transactional intention that bleeds into the activities defined for Digital Customers. This pre-defined intention can act as a prison preventing innovative thinking in digital customer investment. To open a perspective to different approaches that are customer-centric in nature, I have defined digital customer investment along the following principles:

That digital customer-centricity can be achieved via fixed information-rich transformation messaging processes.
That the process of creating, maintaining, and evolving this information-rich digital messaging processes can serve as a tool for customer acquisition and retention.
That the process of creating, maintaining, and evolving this information-rich digital messaging processes creates a powerful symbol representing the company at every turn, allows a company to hold a mirror to its own values, objectives, and its purpose.
That by committing to adding the DCI approach to its existing, transactional digital approach, DCI becomes a vital method for the company to express itself to potential and existing customers, as well as any other audience that might happen to view its messaging.
That the success of the DCI process is measured solely by unsolicited customer feedback, properly captured and understood, via company-neutral methods.

A properly applied Digital Customer Investment Marketing plan will support most of these principles from the start and use them as the basis for the creation of the messaging, measurement and implementation of the plan.

The importance of empty words in the recognition of customer value

8/3/2018

See if this sounds familiar:
Going forward, we need to drill down into the customer priorities and engage a deep dive into our big data storage. This action will attack the issues we have found in customer satisfaction, which have not been addressed by our previous representatives. Our stakeholders are concerned about the lack of action in this matter, and want everyone to have a clear idea of the end of play situation we want to create, as well as the leverage we can bring upon the customer to deliver the new numbers that our growth planning requires. Fortunately, our thought leadership research group has come up with a set of actionable ideas that allows all of us to get in the tent and get a group aha effect going, so we are all clear on the end result we are trying to obtain, as quickly as possible.

Once you catch your breath after reading the paragraph above, you may appreciate the importance of verbal clarity when it comes to creating a plan to improve customer value recognition inside a business.

This is why the Digital Customer Investment Plan is called precisely that. It has a purpose that is easy to understand. It does not take a lot of energy on the part of a team to 'get' the objectives the plan provides and the methodology it uses. It should be self-evident. This accessibility, once the plan is created and agreed upon, allows the team to spend its energy focused on the things that matter, and not in getting into endless meetings to discuss 'what it all means' and 'what we are trying to do.'

Organizations that are small or medium sized may find this transition simpler because their focus on the customer may be more accessible to them, with fewer layers to work with and fewer years of history 'of how things are done around here' to work through.

Recognizing customer value may seem obvious, but it can become fragmented because individual areas of the organization view customer value through their own internal lenses. Accounting may view customer value in one way, while sales views a customer in a different, sales-related way, and of course, marketing views the customer in its own particular way.

Over time, this fragmentation sets in and prevents a clear view of the customer as someone who does not attend all the meetings and does not understand the internal history behind this or that decision. This is one way that organizations lose touch with their customer base.

Once this behavior sets in and is organizationally valid, the interests of the customer become secondary to the interests of the individual departmental groups laying claim to the 'real' value of the customer.

The integrated Digital Customer Investment Plan is designed to avoid these issues before they become chronic.

It's not YOUR money...it's the customer's money

7/31/2018

A few years ago we met a founder during one of our engagements. He had placed, at strategic locations throughout the company, several sayings and perspectives that, he hoped, would blend into a cultural view of where the company's principles stood and what were the overall lines that the company culture would not cross.

One of the lines we read was the title of this post: "It's not our money, it is the customer's money."
The sayings and their positioning made us ask: can you drill a customer culture or do you teach it?

At its most transactional level, Marketing is based on repetition. Most everyone who has been exposed to television commercials can recite a jingle engraved in their minds by sheer repetition from watching their favorite programs on television. Over time, the jingle has stuck, which is great for branding in the most transactional sense: you remember the brand that created the jingle (if it is mentioned in the jingle, which it should be). However, does remembering the brand also mean that you remember the culture associated with the brand? And, if you remember the jingle, does it help you select a product from a shelf, be that a mental shelf or a physical one? Or does the marketing simply becomes part of the mental furniture of the individual and is not brought up as part of the decision-making process for the product at the time of purchase?

Drilling a customer-centric culture and applying it to your marketing needs brings up the same questions. You need a certain level of repetition to make the marketing message stick. However, how do you add the elements of a customer culture to your repetitive message so that these elements will 'activate' at the point of purchase, so the customer, when faced with the decision to purchase a product, will consciously bring up the marketing information as an argument in favor of your product, vs. the competition.

What is the combination of messages that has the best probability of success most of the time in terms of getting to a conversion?

The solution isn't to simply repeat the same phrase over and over again and hope that it sticks in someone's mind. That only leads to the superficial, transactional element of remembering. To go deeper, you have to add a sense of purpose to the activities that your company performs. This demonstrates to the customer that you know what to do with the money that they are about to give you. If they agree with this purpose, and if they see it implemented clearly throughout the organization they can see, then, it is more likely that the repeating message will stick in the mind and is used as a definitive argument for generating a purchase.

The combination of messages we are looking for is precisely that: a purpose-transactional combination that, when added together over time, creates a bridge between the customer's action of paying for a product, and the satisfaction they derive from receiving it from your company. This satisfaction, which includes the satisfaction with the product or service purchased, translates into the kind of loyalty that enables people to advocate for your brand and turns them into something more than just a single transaction on a spreadsheet.

It makes your customers a partner in the purpose that animates your company in the first place.

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