Creating an email campaign? 5 tools to check out

Sending out an email campaign is a task that can be accomplished easily and quickly by following a few simple steps: creating content, choosing a simple design and clicking the “Send” button. But if you want to make the most out of your campaigns, that won’t be enough for you.

At ActiveTrail we want to help you produce a campaign that is not only easy to create, but also takes your marketing to a more advanced level and gives you an edge over the competition. We accomplish these goals by providing an array of tools, free of charge, via our system which will take any “okay” campaign and turn it into an inspiring one that you can take pride in.

1. Triggers system

Internet marketing doesn’t have to be a passive marketing approach that constantly relies on your input. Our triggers system creates an active campaign that responds automatically to your users’ actions, thereby providing a continuous campaign that doesn’t require your input on a daily basis. Create triggers that react to your clients’ actions by sending them addition content or moving them from one recipient list to another.

For example, use a trigger that reacts to any client making a purchase on your website by sending out a “Thank You” email or by moving that client to a VIP recipient list. Create triggers that acknowledge a user’s interest in a certain product on your site by sending him information about that product to his inbox.

Triggers offer endless possibilities and your imagination is the only limit. Forrester Research discovered that an internet campaign based on triggers will create 4 times as much revenue and up to 18 times as much income.

A good example of an actual use of the triggers system is brought to us by okcupid, an online dating website. They specified that when one user is checking out another, the system automatically sends out a message letting him/her know that someone has shown interest.

Advantages of the trigger system:

• Trust – getting your customers to trust you is the key to successful online marketing. By responding to their actions and sending content that is relevant specifically to them, you are establishing that desired trust with your clients.

• Relevance – if you want to stand out you have to make sure your content is always relevant to your clients or they’ll lose interest in you. Trigger responsive marketing gives your users the feeling that each email was created especially for them.

• Competition – your competition may not have access to a triggers system. use the system to your advantage and give yourself an edge over your competitors.

• Boost your profits – using a triggers system you can follow up on any action your clients make, integrating multiple campaigns, to make sure no selling opportunity goes unexploited.

Think of the triggers system as a dialogue between your clients and your business that happens automatically and doesn’t require any work from you.

Read more about the triggers system

2. AB testing

Few people have the advantage of being born with the ability to always know what will catch their clients’ attention and which designs will have the best success. For the rest of us – there’s AB testing.

AB testing is a tool that allows you to send out similar campaigns that differ only in one or two parameters. By analyzing the results from these campaigns you can tell which design got the job done and go with that one in the future.

For example this website, marketing closets, came up with these two designs:

Experts will tell you that version B is better, but AB testing gets us the facts and the facts are that version A did the job better, increasing the click rate by 115%.

Advantages of AB testing:

• No additional expenses – although you need to create two different campaigns, the modifications are minor so they don’t require much work. To save time, just divide your recipient list into two equal lists and start marketing.

• Easy analysis – our system does the hard work for you and displays the results of your AB testing in an easy to understand presentation. Compare click percentage, unsubscribes and opening percentages to decide which design works best.

• Get to know your clients – AB testing may not actually let you know what your customers are thinking but it will get you pretty close. By carefully analyzing the results, you can get a pretty clear idea of what your recipients find to their liking and contrarily, which designs will increase the unsubscribe rate.

Remember: the most important factor in any campaign is the client’s satisfaction so no matter how much time you spend on your campaign, the customer’s reaction is always what dictates the results.

Read more about AB testing

3. Google Analytics integration

The most important set of tools when creating a new internet campaign is the analytical tools set. Analytical tools help you learn everything you can from your past campaigns so you can study your mistakes and optimize every aspect of your campaign.

There are many analytical tools available on the market, but Google Analytics is without a doubt the leader in the field. The email marketing system allows you to follow up on various statistics such as click rates, unsubscribe rates and the number of new users, but why not use a simple system which gathers all that information together and also provides a thorough analysis?

Advantages of Google Analytics integration:

• Centralization – using Google Analytics means having all your data and statistics in one place. You can easily access any piece of information you need and instantly compare it to any other statistic from any period of time.

• Optimization – using top-notch analytical tools gives you the best idea of which campaigns got the job done, giving you all the information you need to create your next campaign. Each campaign you create will be a little better than the previous one, as you keep gathering more information about your clients.

• Big brother – use the system’s capabilities to your advantage. The system constantly gathers information about your clients which can be used to improve your services and increase your profits. Only by using analytical tools can you process so much information and get the best out of your internet marketing.

Read more about Google Analytics integration

4. Active management of recipient lists

Different clients have different interests, so why should they get the same content from you? Create different recipient lists to make sure each customer gets only the content that is relevant to him/her by analyzing past behavior such as purchases and clicks.

Marketing a family vacation? Send the campaign only to customers who have specified that they have a family. Don’t waste your resources on singles who have no reason to be interested. On the other hand, if you’re trying to advertise an online dating service, make sure to only send it out to your “singles” recipient list.

Each client can appear on a number of different recipient lists so that you can divide your clients up in any method that fits your marketing needs. Use questions on the sign up form to automatically sort your clients as they sign up and waste no time.

Advantages of active management of recipient lists:

• Individual attention – make sure each recipient only gets the content that is relevant to him/her to keep your customers thinking you care about each and every one of them individually and that the services and products that you have to offer are always relevant to them.

• Remove unreactive recipients – many recipients don’t bother to click the unsubscribe button but just stop opening emails that they find irrelevant. Email providers will mark your emails as spam if a recipient hasn’t opened a few of them and this can hurt your reputation.

• Special events – use special dates and events to focus your internet marketing and increase your income. Holidays are best if you know how to use them to your advantage.

Read more about list managing

5. Social network integration

Social networks are great platforms for marketing, especially when used in combination with a good email marketing plan. Direct your clients to your pages in the various social networks to increase their exposure to your products and services.

You can design the links any way you like and don’t have to stick to the designs offered by the social networks themselves.

For example, “New Look” sent out an email campaign inviting users to visit its various social networking channels:

Advantages of social network integration:

• Community – you know your clients and they know you so why shouldn’t they know each other? By directing them to social networks you’re giving your clients a chance to share their experiences with each other.

• Sharing – adding a “Share” button to your content opens up opportunities for new leads. Use your existing clients to acquire new ones.

• Connect with your clients – using social networks is the best way to connect with your clients and give them the feeling that they can reach you if they have an issue.

Almost all the information on the internet is somehow connected to a social network. Using social networks alongside an email marketing system will take your internet marketing to a whole new level.

To sum things up

You can choose to see internet marketing as a job that you just have to get done, or you can make the best out of it and you might find that you also had some fun on the way. These five tools will make your job easier and more effective while taking your internet marketing to a whole new level
.

Experiences: How to Stand Out in a New Age of Marketing

By Michael Stelzner
Published May 15, 2015 

Are you looking for a competitive advantage?

Have you thought about creating experiences for your audience?

To learn how to create experiences and why they are essential to stand out in this noisy world, I interview Robert Rose.

More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Robert Rose, chief strategy officer at the Content Marketing Institute. He’s co-author of Managing Content Marketing and co-host of the This Old Marketing podcast. His latest book is called Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing.

In this episode Robert will explore how creating experiences can help you stand out in a noisy world.

You’ll discover businesses doing experiences right, as well as how to get started creating experiences for your audience.

Listen as Robert Rose shares how to stand out in a new age of marketing.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.

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Here are some of the things you’ll discover in this show:

Experiences

The book’s premise

Robert says he and co-author Carla Johnson believe we’re moving into a new era of marketing.

Marketing school textbooks (which stop around the mid-1990s) teach the five eras of marketing. All eras last about 20 years. According to Robert, we are now in the 6th era, which is relationship marketing. The Relationship Era was kicked off in the early 1990s with The One to One Future by Dr. Martha Rogers and Don Peppers, which gave birth to the CRM movement.

Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing by Robert Rose and Carla Johnson.

As we move into 2015, Robert explains, we are evolving into a new era. “Developing delightful, informative, useful experiences from marketing’s lens is really the new way to formulate a marketing strategy going forward,” he says.

Robert shares more about the evolution of the eras and how they inform this new one.

From the early 1990s and into the Internet era (the late 1990s and early 2000s) the goal was to figure out how to develop a database or a relationship with our consumer and deepen it through the use of data, as well as how to assemble richer data sets around the consumer to be able to deliver a better product or service to that consumer, using that relationship. This is what gave birth to the CRM movement as we know it today.

As this era progressed, and social media within it, relationship development between a brand and its consumers became more complex. These days, digital more broadly disrupts how we relate to consumers, since we now have to establish a relationship from that first meeting and beyond.

That expansion of marketing’s responsibility for the full life cycle of the consumer, and the complexity brought on by all of the different channels, are creating a real evolution of marketing. We need to develop more compelling experiences to be able to delight those customers at various stages of their journey.

Listen to the show to discover more about the book.

What Robert means when he talks about experiences 

When a business creates a website or something with a physical dimension, such as a conference or a print magazine, it’s creating an experience for its audience. The hope is to deliver value that’s separate and discrete from the company’s product or service.

Robert shares a few examples.

Kraft makes macaroni and cheese, as well as other products. However, Kraft’s Food & Family magazine and Kraft’s online recipes are experiences. They are value delivered to a consumer that’s separate from the company’s products.

Kraft’s Food & Family magazine is an experience that offers value for customers.

Another example would be a home cookware shop that teaches cooking classes as a means of providing a physical experience. The shop is trying to align its brand or a need or want, and is doing so by creating an experience for its customers.

An experience is a combination of the physical, the digital, content and everything that creates value for a consumer.

“We are classically trained as marketing people to describe value,” Robert says. “The new muscle is to create value.”

American Express OPEN Forum has nothing to do with credit cards, but has everything to do with giving an experience to small businesses to help them learn how to be better at what they do.

Listen to the show to learn whether an experience needs to include a physical component.

Why businesses should invest in experiences

“As Seth Godin says, experience is the only differentiator we have,” Robert explains. “As we move into the next 5 years, where 3 billion more people are going to come online, our product or service is always at risk of being copied or commoditized. It’s the experience we lay over the top of that product or service that differentiates us.”

Uber and Lyft disrupted what it means to take a car from point A to point B by offering a better experience. Same with Airbnb and the vacation industry. Something as fundamental as changing your business approach or something as small asstarting a blog delivers value to consumers.

Indium is a soldering company that has 27 different blogs on soldering by individual product people. Each blog delights a different customer niche. Brian Clark just launched more than 10 podcasts at the same time, and each one serves a different community.

“It’s the idea of becoming a little bit famous,” Robert adds. “We don’t have to become global to become a successful, going-forward business.”

Listen to the show to discover the power of having a discrete and finite audience.

Businesses doing experiences right

Robert says HubSpot is probably his favorite example of a formerly very small company (now a big company) that used experiences to drive business. Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah started HubSpot at MIT, and created an entire category called inbound marketing. They wrote a book, created a blog and spoke about it at every conference they could find.

They basically created a center of gravity, an experience around the idea of inbound, and then let HubSpot bloom within it. The company started with three or four people and has now gone public.

Also, Robert says, look at what LEGO is doing, not only with an amusement park, but also with movies. Everything they do is creating value aimed at selling bricks.

The LEGO Movie is just one experience from the LEGO brand.

“What I love so much about LEGO is when they did The LEGO Movie, they didn’t say, ‘Here’s our universe of toys. Make a movie with that.’ They said, ‘Hollywood, you make the movie you want to make, and we’ll make the toys to match.’ And that’s the difference.”

They’re changing the business to suit content’s purpose, instead of changing content to suit business’s purpose.

Listen to the show to hear how Coca Cola is a media brand, instead of just a product brand.

How to get started creating experiences

Although it’s easier and less expensive to create experiences digitally, the idea of print is really coming back. It’s an uncluttered space.

Robert shares his process for experience creation, whether it’s for a marketing team of 1 or 100.

“I’ll literally put up a picture of the idealized funnel,” he explains, “everything from awareness to customer and beyond to loyalty and evangelism. And I’ll say, ‘Where does it hurt the most? Where right now do you have the biggest problem? Is it an awareness problem? A lead nurturing issue? A loyalty issue? Or are you trying to get customers to evangelize your story and do better word-of-mouth marketing?’ Wherever is the biggest pain will be the least resistance to try something new and interesting.”

Once you identify the biggest pain point, decide what value, separate and discrete from the product you offer, your customers need when they are in that stage of their journey. It could be better education, entertainment, how-to content, an event, networking with other customers, a community or something else. Once you figure out what that is, decide how to develop it as a product (as an experience) for that customer.

Marketers are trained to think medium first (an ad campaign, a TV campaign, a radio campaign, a website, a blog) and then story. Instead, decide what experience to create and then determine how it best expresses itself: a blog, a print magazine, awebinar series or all of the above.

Listen to the show to learn how the Social Media Marketing podcast is an example of creating an experience.

The story map

In this new age you need to go beyond the idea of marketing campaigns and tactics, and instead do something that will deliver and create value long-term. It’s more of a product development process than a campaign management process.

At the heart of content creation management is the idea of story mapping.

Take the experience you want to create and map it against business objectives and a narrative.

“If we’re going out tomorrow, we can’t demand that we own this market,” Robert explains. “We have to earn our way in through influencers, great content and thought leadership, so that narrative arc is going to take some time.”

To figure out how to map the story for the product you’re building, determine what success looks like and what the contribution to the business looks like at various intervals (at 1, 6, 9 and 18 months). Map it against everything you will have to do. Assign resources to it, promote and market it, and have people responsible for managing it over time.

You build a story map for one of two reasons. You have budget to do something and you need to map out execution of it. Or you need to map out some level of the execution of it to get an appropriate budget, so you can take it to market and roll it out.

A story map is a business case for a process or a product that will basically build value, if you invest in it and execute it correctly, for the foreseeable future.

Listen to the show to discover what popular startup methodologies Robert and his co-author Carla borrow from in the book.

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Plan

By Keith Quesenberry
Published May 14, 2015 

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Do you want to make personal connections with your customers on social media?

Interested in better ways to address their wants and needs?

The key to engaging with your audience on a more personal level is to focus on the right customer, at the right time and with the right employees.

In this article you’ll find out how to create a social media marketing plan to put customers first and improve engagement.

Discover how to create a social media marketing plan.

Why Focus on Customers?

In social media many companies take customer-focused brand messages and customize them into content for each channel. This process is good and effective, but it puts channels, content and messages first and assumes the target audience’s needs are always the same.

The reality is that your target audience has different communication needs depending on which stage of the buying cycle they’re in. A customer-centric approach flips content creation from brand first to customer first. Start with the customer’s need and then build the social media process, content and resources around the customer. Customizing content to your audience’s changing needs increases engagement.

Here’s how to take a customer-centric approach with your social media marketing.

#1: Understand the Stages of the Buying Cycle

Marketing consultant Tony Zambito believes the buyer’s journey begins before buyers think of themselves as buyers and extends beyond the purchase. The buyer’s goals and behaviors change throughout the purchase cycle, even among the same target market. Zambito has expressed this thinking in terms of B2B, but it applies to social media as well.

The steps of the purchase cycle. Image: Shutterstock.

Consumers’ needs and behaviors are different when they’re not in the market to buy, when they become engaged in buying and when they become customers. For these reasons, it’s a good idea to make sure your prepurchase, purchase and postpurchase interaction with the consumer are different.

#2: Get the Right Employees Involved

Rosalia Cefalu of HubSpot believes different employees are best suited for communicating with customers in different stages of the buying cycle. These employees can come from various departments throughout your company.

When you include employees outside the marketing department, one-on-one engagement with your customers becomes more scalable. You can distribute social responsibilities across departments to the most relevant people.

Use a tool like HubSpot to customize social feeds for different departments and teams.

Once you identify departments and employees, establish goals for them and customize social feeds or open new social accounts to connect the right employees to the right customers. Setting up a social care team enables you to generate customer engagement throughout the buying cycle to gain new customers, repeat purchases, loyalty and brand advocates.

#3: Tailor Your Social Messages to Buyer Personas

You can customize your social messages and divide social responses with these three consumer personas.

Prepurchase Persona

In this stage of the buying cycle, you want to find consumers who are in the market to buy, but haven’t purchased from you. The goal is to find and attract prospects.

Here you’re looking for people using the right keywords, such as mentions of your company, competitors, industry or specific products and services. Create social media campaigns to grow fans and followers and monitor conversations to engage with those responding.

If your company has a public relations or corporate communications department, they may play a role looking for larger industry or corporate issues and identifying journalists or bloggers for media outreach.

Know how to engage each type of consumer persona. Image: Shutterstock.

Purchase Persona

For this stage, find consumers actively seeking purchase information. Here your marketing team can help these people along with their purchases. However, sales representatives are best suited for more relevant engagement.

If you have a retail business, you might empower the sales team to interact with customers on social media similarly to what Zappos.com has done. Or if you’re a B2B company, you could activate sales representatives to address the needs of leads. Connecting the sales team’s contacts list or CRM makes this easier. The goal here is conversion.

Postpurchase Persona

This stage is where you focus on keeping customers happy, resolving any issues they may have and further assisting them.

Care for your customers. Image: Shutterstock.

Customer service representatives are ideal for providing what they may already do via the phone, email or online chat. The goal is to delight customers, minimize negative comments and promote the positive.

This stage is where customers can become brand advocates. Automation could also play a role such as for scheduling follow-ups in a week or two to find out if customers are still happy.

Five Guys: Customer-Centric Social Media in Action

The gourmet burger chain Five Guys knows customer-centric social media. They’ve been able to boost engagement by connecting directly with individual customers instead of simply talking at their target audience with general brand messages.

The company has over 1 million loyal followers on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And they plan and monitor their social media efforts with Hootsuite.

Five Guys Facebook Page has over 900k Fans. Image: Placeit.

Here are a few ways Five Guys uses social media to connect with customers.

Empower Employees to Get Involved

Five Guys’ approach to social media begins with service and is driven by a process that empowers employees to connect with the right customers at the right time. Connecting individual customers with front-line employees via social media has enabled Five Guys to be a more customer-centric company, which is a challenge with over 1,200 locations across the globe.

Employee involvement in social media has also made Five Guys’ content more personal, sincere and local.

Communicate Locally With Franchise Accounts

Individual Five Guys locations in the United States and around the world have their own social media accounts to communicate locally on promotions, new flavors or products and events that resonate with the community.

Five Guys’ employees interact on social locally through franchise location accounts.

Five Guys consumer-centric approach enables individual locations to uncover customer feedback, respond directly and make changes that improve the customer experience. Monitoring this type of feedback on a local level is much more efficient, making one-on-one engagement more scalable.

Generate Consumer Content With Social Campaigns

Customer-centric social media produces satisfied customers who often become brand ambassadors, generating buzz and sharable content. With Five Guys’ #SayCheeseSweeps campaign, customers hashtagged photos of themselves with Five Guys cheeseburgers for a chance to win prizes. It resulted in more than 1,000 mentions on Twitter and Instagram. The consumer-generated content was shared across all of Five Guys’ social networks.

This campaign was such a success that they launched a second campaign using the hashtag #ShareYourShake.

Five Guys’ consumer-centric approach pays off with plenty of user-generated brand content.

Conclusion

If your social media marketing is using a customer-focused (but still brand-first) model, it may be time to consider a customer-centric approach.

Before you do anything, start by listening. Identify which buying cycle categories your target audience goes through and which people in your organization are best suited to engage with each consumer persona. Then set up a process and training to connect the right customers with the right people at the right time to scale your engagement and improve your social media marketing results.

What do you think? Have you tried a customer-centric approach in your social media marketing? What tactics do you use to make personal connections with your customers? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Sales cycle photo, Persona photo and Customer service photo from Shutterstock.

Five Guys Facebook Page image created with Placeit.

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