One of the worst things you can do is “wing it” when it comes to creating a call to action, yet this is all too common for online businesses.

Today, we will take a look at some great examples of email campaigns that really nail the call to action. Hopefully, they will provide inspiration for your campaigns across the board.

1. Images Can Cost You Sales

With up to 60% of all recipients regularly turning off images, it’s clear that relying on images in your email marketing campaigns is a risky move.

Images can be very useful, but it’s important to have a fallback — and there are lots of things you can do to maximise the look and feel of your campaign for times when images are enabled, along with the times when they are not enabled.

This is particularly true when it comes to your call to action. On a website, having a big orange button is a powerful way to attract your customers’ attention and get them to click. Although this works equally well in email marketing, incorporating a big button can be tricky, as using an image means many customers will never even see it!

However, there is a simple way to combat this: use HTML to create buttons instead! Most email marketing campaigns use images; but, with a few tweaks, you can stand out from the crowd.

Here are two great examples of campaigns using non-image-based buttons.

The first, from Memrise:

The second, from GetResponse:

As you can see, both campaigns have huge buttons that look great… and neither uses an image.

Here is some code you can swipe to create a button just like these:

To go even further, a little trick you can do is to include some shadows or background images for the customers that view your email in their browser. By default, these styles won’t show up in email clients, but will give your buttons a little extra “pop” when viewed via browser. The GetResponse campaign above does this nicely. Below is a screenshot of the campaign when you view it directly in your browser:

If you’re after more tips on how to use HTML effectively in your email campaigns and need some resources to get you going, check out this guide to HTML templates in email marketing.

2. Focus On Value & Direction

All too often, you see emails that have calls to action with copy like “Submit” or “Click here.”

This is never the ideal approach when it comes to marketing optimisation — you should always focus on the next step, including the value the reader will get from taking this step. Rather than focusing on the actual action (i.e., clicking or submitting) you should be focusing on what follows.

This doesn’t mean you need to have a lengthy call to action; it just means things need to flow.

This example from LinkedIn is a good one:

If you are invited to LinkedIn (and are not a LinkedIn member already), they’ll send you an email similar to this. It would be tempting to include a call to action that says “Sign up for LinkedIn” or “Build your profile now,” but both of these CTAs are quite self-centric (i.e., focused on LinkedIn and their own benefits).

In contrast, having the personalised copy — “Confirm that you know [insert friend's name]” — is truly powerful. In most cases, the invitee does know the person who has invited them to LinkedIn, and clicking this button is a rather innocuous next step.

Another, simpler example is this campaign from LinkedIn:

In this instance, the simple “Continue” works well — it makes it sound as though you need to click through and do something in order to recognise the endorsement (the truth is, you’ve already been endorsed). Although the copy isn’t that exciting, it is a great example of focusing on the next step and the value for the recipient in order to create a CTA that converts.

3. Repeat Your CTA

Repeating your primary call to action is a simple and effective way to increase click-throughs. Generally, the primary focus of your email marketing campaigns is to get more customers, and reiterating your CTA is a tactic used by some of the world’s biggest brands to ensure their customers convert. It might seem pretty “base,” but it really does work!

This can be as simple as including links on multiple images, titles and anchor text; or, it can be a little more deliberate.

A common way of repeating the call to action is to use a postscript (the “P.S.”). For some reason, readers are predisposed to read the postscript every time. Perhaps a throw-back to the days of letter-writing, the effectiveness of the postscript is truly there and you should embrace it.

This example from Lars at KISSmetrics is a good one, as Lars reiterates the call to action in the postscript, below his signature.

Even when you’re not explicitly asking customers to click through, this tactic can work. In the following campaign, the team at Tout encourages customers to call them up directly by reiterating that’s what they’re after in the postscript:

Adding a postscript is easy. Consider adding one to your campaigns today, and start by being personal and reiterating your call to action. Measure the increase — I guarantee customers will read this postscript and you should see a lift in click-throughs!

4. Use Urgency

Psychology is behind every human action. This should never be forgotten when optimising your email campaigns.

Urgency is a powerful psychological motivator. As Greg Ciotti points out in his excellent article on customer psychology, when used correctly, urgency can make customers take the next step.

Generally, urgency in emails comes down to timing and tying a deadline to your call to action. Greg explains that the trick is to very clearly outline the steps your customers have to take and hit them with a specific call to action whilst applying a little pressure via a timeframe.

This example comes from Dunked. When you reserved your name as part of the beta, you received a few emails over a six month period. This campaign ultimately followed up to ensure customers re-engaged with Dunked and signed up properly. Using time pressure, the campaign is effective in driving customers toward the desired goal:

Urgency can also be used in more subtle ways. When you book a flight with EasyJet, they send you a series of emails leading up to your departure advertising specials on accommodations. This is implied urgency, as you know you are leaving shortly on your trip and thus have a limited time to book a hotel. Another subtle example of urgency working wonders!

5. Test Unique Formats

Generally, it’s best to have a single call to action. This goes with the old saying, “Keep it simple, stupid.” You don’t want to make your customers think too much — you want to make their choice obvious.

However, there are times when testing multiple calls to action, or unique formats, can be really powerful.

Take this example from CrazyEgg:

Their goal is to get the maximum number of customers contributing feedback. The simple tweak of breaking the primary call to action down into multiple buttons actually makes customers’ lives easier by saving them time. Rather than take them to a webpage where they have to fill out a form and click “Next” (the norm), this approach reduces the number of clicks your customers have to take by at least two.

This reminds me of a saying I heard recently: “You should work to reduce the clicks to wow.” The fewer clicks your customers have to take to get to where they need to be, the more customers you’ll convert.

CrazyEgg isn’t the only one crazy enough to try it. Amazon does something similar in their book recommendation emails (triggered when you purchase a book on your Kindle):

Another great example of making customers’ lives easier with a little thinking outside the box.

Your Turn

What calls to action have worked well for your business? What ideas here can you implement in your own campaigns?

Let us know in the comments!

In the intervening months, whether at conferences, meetings or just industry meet ups, the topic of embedded video invariably seemed to pop up in any conversation about inbox innovations.

So, I’d like to address a few themes that seem to surface consistently and also share some tips that have been shared with me along the way. I’ll even add a few of my own lessons learned.

We’ve Never Done It Before, Is It Worth The Effort?

The bar for a well-crafted customer experience is continually being raised. Users now expect a near frictionless interaction with content. So, bringing video playback even one click closer provides a better brand experience.

And, for email in particular, optimizing those small interactions often makes the difference in overall performance. Being able to deliver the best, easiest, richest experience for your user will be the key to winning the competition for their attention and building brand loyalty.

Will It Really Work?

It’s true that not every email client will support video delivery. So, it’s important to know which email clients support HTML5 and also to know your user base. As email marketers, these should be mission critical details that you think about every day, even when you’re not considering video in email.

If you don’t know what your customer base is using to view your emails in and on, it’s simple enough find out with a pixel tracking software from a vendor like Litmus or Return Path. Typically, it only takes one or two campaigns to provide enough data to formulate a profile.

Once you have that information, it’s just a matter of overlaying your most popular email use cases with the list of HTML5-supported email clients. Then voilà, you will know the percentage of recipients likely to receive the video playback experience. This will help you understand whether video delivery is likely to work for the majority of your client base or not.

How Do I Know If It’s Working?

The easiest, simplest way is a classic A/B split. Though not as accurate as tracking the number of video playbacks, it will give you feedback on whether sending video content helped or hurt your campaign performance. However, without being able to know if the video was delivered, rather than a fallback animation or static graphic, you’ll have to make some assumptions about the results.

A brave few have worked a little harder on the endeavor and are able to receive reporting on actual playback of the video, which will give insight into whether users are responding to the video and not an animated graphic, or a static spoof of the video.

My advice on this reporting detail is to not let perfect get in the way of good. The cost of coding and delivering video in email often doesn’t demand a detailed ROI, but it’s important to understand the levels of testing and reporting if that is a component of your proof of concept.

Are There Best Practices For Video In Email?

Well, it’s a little early to claim there are gold standard best practices, but there are a few recommendations that I can make.

• Put the word “video” in the subject line. Overall, this increases open rates, and it also sets expectations around content.
• Auto-play should not be an option. When sending video, let the user initiate the action.
• Provide clear calls-to-action close to the video. Because click-throughs cannot be embedded in a video, you’ll need to provide users with something to click on, whether it’s a button or just a hyperlink near the video.
• The chrome surrounding the video player will vary by email client. Some players are elegantly self-contained; others have bars and buttons that extend the dimensions of the video box. Provide enough whitespace around the video to accommodate the variation in player dimensions.
• Shorter is better. Email is a brief medium, and attention is short; so, videos of 30 seconds or fewer are better than longer format video. In the end, it is about asking the user to take an action; so, don’t attempt to tell the whole story in one video.
• Aspirational, experience-based videos tend to do better than how-to’s or overly promotional messages. This is particularly true for luxury brands, travel and hospitality brands, and considered purchases like cars. If you’re bringing video to the table, users tend to respond best when it’s about the richness of the experience, not closing the sale.

The inbox is a busy, cluttered space. With the barrier to delivering video in email lowered, why not take a moment and make it a better experience for your audience?

Image via Shutterstock

Now that email marketing has been around for years, every retailer has an email marketing program. But, each program is at a different level of sophistication.

The Evolution Of An Email Marketing Program

Do you ever wonder where your program ranks compared to others? Need helping mapping out where to go from where you are?

I find the crawl, walk, run metaphor resonates with most marketers; and, I’ve added PR after run. As a runner myself, this is reality. Many times after finishing a race, you will hear a runner say, “I’m never doing that again!” But after just a few days, the runner is already planning her/his next race.

Getting to the finish is hard, and at times may not seem worth it; but in the end, you can recognize your achievements and realize you can push yourself to be better, both as a runner and as an email marketer.

Crawl

If you have just started your email marketing program or haven’t made many innovations to your program since its inception, you may be in the crawl phase. During this iteration of your program, you should at least have a consistent sending schedule and content plan. However, you are sending the same message to everyone on your list, otherwise known as “batch and blast.”

Hopefully, you have tracking reports to view delivered, opens, clicks and conversions. Unfortunately I have seen retailers who still don’t have this information readily available. This data is required to understand the value of your program.

Sometimes, this limitation is created by having your email program sent through a custom in-house tool and servers. If so, it’s time to upgrade to an email service provider (ESP). This can be a chicken and egg scenario where it can be hard to prove the worth of your program without the reports you’d get from an ESP; but, you can’t get an ESP until you can prove the value of the program.

One thing is certain if you are not sending from a reputable ESP: your deliverability is not as good as you think it is.

Walk

At the walk stage, you may not be sending the same email to everyone on your list, but you are creating disparate different emails for different segments. Your segments may be based on profile data you have collected through a subscription center.

In addition to planned promotional emails, you should have several triggers set up, such as a welcome email, a static abandoned shopping cart campaign, and a rating and review request. In addition to a planned content and promotional calendar, you should have an A/B testing plan, which also includes tracking results.

Because acquisition is such a key component of a good email marketing program, at this stage I believe you should be tracking subscriber by source. Through this, you can evaluate your reporting to set benchmarks, determine which subscribers perform better and optimize your existing acquisition points.

Finally, your Web analytics should be integrated with your email program. This means tagging the links in your emails to allow for effective reporting, not only through your ESP, but also through your Web analytics tool, whether that is Google Analytics, Omniture, Core Metrics, or Web Trends, etc.

I’m surprised at how many retailers are still in this stage of the progression of their email program. So, you’re not alone, but it’s time to get serious. Your competition is looking at you in the rear-view mirror.

Run

New runners often start out training with a run-walk method, whereby you run for several minutes for a specified distance and then walk for a shorter period of time, continuing to alternate running with walking. Many marketers find their email programs undergoing this training regimen, as well, exhibiting traits of a program in both the walk and run stages. If you find your program fits these criteria, simply focus on making the full migration to the run stage.

In this stage, ideally, you are leveraging dynamic content in a single email to populate different messages to different subscribers, rather than creating multiple emails. Sometimes, the biggest challenge to achieving this actually lies in the reporting, not the creation of the email. You will need to work with either your ESP or your Web analytics team to gain the insights you need to evaluate the dynamic campaigns.

Segmentation moves beyond profile attributes (gender, state, etc.) to be more behavior-based. For example, this includes messaging differently to subscribers that have just recently signed up, subscribers that have signed up but never purchased, subscribers who have purchased only once, subscribers that have become unengaged, and your best customers.

To know who your best customers are, you will need to perform some analysis, such as RFM scoring. These insights also allow you to refine your acquisition strategies to gain more subscribers that look like your best customers.

Your triggered programs should be expanded. Your welcome program should be a series of emails, your abandoned cart program should dynamically include the products abandoned, and also be multiple emails in a series. You should also have a post-purchase follow up campaign.

Data integrations are critical at this point, both to implement the triggers and to create the behavior-based segmentation. In addition to your Web analytics, your ESP should be integrated with your CRM platform and e-commerce platform, allowing you to deploy all transactional emails from your ESP, including marketing messages alongside the order details.

PR

Once you’ve started running and finished a race, you’ve established a personal record (PR). Beyond running, your goal is to continue to train, to perhaps run a longer distance, or run a faster time (beat your PR). It becomes about optimization, continually challenging yourself and setting new goals, pushing yourself to be better.

At this point, it may mean data modeling for segmentation and scripting in emails to accommodate hundreds of variations. Email doesn’t function alone. Multi-channel integration is key to identifying the single-view of your customer, to know on a subscriber-level basis when an email should be triggered vs. a text message. It also allows you to calculate the value of a subscriber alone, vs. the value of a subscriber also being a Facebook fan and Twitter follower, or engaged in text messages.

Your attribution reporting becomes more than just last click, taking into account retargeting ads, affiliate programs, PPC, in-store experiences and more. You may have email messages integrated with your loyalty program that rewards customers for all of their experiences, or have a dedicated credit card program with triggered email and SMS alerts for payment due notices or credit line increases.

The sophistication of your email marketing program at this point is only limited by the data you have access to. It also  requires working tightly with others in the organization to create a true omni-channel experience for the customer. This means putting the customer first, and being customer-centric in decisions for the marketing program.

The results (full chart here) show that outside of welcome, thank you and transactional emails (such as receipts), most business are not fully embracing the power of auto-responders.

In fact, based on their data, about 75% of businesses are missing out on the email marketing sweet spot.

Why Use Auto-Responders?

What’s the sweet spot, you might ask?

Per the diagram above, newsletters (i.e., one email distributed to many people) have an open rate of around 20%.

In contrast, transactional emails have an average open rate of around 50%. Simply put, this means that trigger-based transactional emails are over 100% more effective than newsletters on average!

The fact is that emails sent based on customer actions get more opens, clicks and conversions because they are contextual.

Auto-responders are in this sweet spot: they deliver marketing messages just like newsletters but use automated triggers, providing the user with context.

So, if you want to get started with your own trigger-based marketing campaigns and be part of the 25% that send the most effective email campaigns, here are some tips on how you can get started — along with some real-world examples so you can see these tactics in action.

1. Segment Your Customers Based On Their Behavior

Sending personalized offers to customers based on their on-site behavior is an incredibly effective email marketing tactic. For an example, let’s look at Amazon, the world’s largest (and arguably most efficient) online retailer.

Chris Schwarz over at The Search Guys talks about an experience he had where he browsed a series of point-and-shoot digital cameras and received a series of automated follow-up emails from Amazon, all directly referencing products he had browsed.

Here are just two examples:

Not only are these emails extremely targeted, they also use various psychology techniques to encourage customers to click through and, ultimately, purchase. The A-Z sweepstakes is a particularly sneaky example of automated email marketing in action!

The key takeaway from these emails is to use customers’ actions to drive segmentation. Rather than asking customers, “What do you want to buy today?” (which is difficult to do), Amazon infers their customers’ intent is based on their browsing habits.

2. Use Social Triggers To Drive Engagement

Customers love to interact. Companies like Twitter, LinkedIn and OkCupid truly understand this.

Take this email from Twitter. Many of you may recognize this campaign from your own inboxes:

Twitter understands that engagement with their service requires users to “follow” and be “followed” a certain number of times, i.e., they must interact with a certain number of other customers. To help drive customers toward activation, Twitter uses trigger-based emails like these to suggest relevant profiles for its users to follow.

LinkedIn has recently rolled out their “endorsements” feature. This feature allows you to ‘endorse’ a colleague or friend for a particular skill, such as “e-commerce.” Email marketing has been a big part of the roll-out of this feature. For example, you may have received these emails in your inbox of late:

An email like this is sent whenever a user endorses you for a new skill. These emails are great for two reasons:

1. They make you feel special (you’ve just been told you’re awesome at a certain skill!)
2. They encourage you to click through and endorse another user.

Both of these are great outcomes for LinkedIn as they strengthen the community and your investment in the LinkedIn platform. Rather than just telling you, “Hey! You’ve been endorsed,” adding the call to action turns this trigger-based email into a marketing channel to drive an engagement loop that is really powerful.

OkCupid is an online dating app that is particularly data-driven. They’re very savvy email marketers, too. Take this email as an example:

Whenever a new profile matches a certain percentage hit-rate with your own profile, they’ll automatically send you an email like this. Similarly they automatically email customers when new profiles are added that meet your search conditions.

3. Educating New Leads

WPEngine is a WordPress host that offers managed hosting. Despite charging a premium, they’re growing quickly in a market that is generally dominated by price-sensitive customers.

Their email marketing course is an effective lead-generation engine that provides customers with something of value, educates them with a series of automated emails and converts them into trial signups.

WPEngine automates 7 emails over 30 days that give away virtually everything they know about optimizing WordPress sites. This might sound counter-intuitive to making a sale, but by giving away their secrets, WPEngine shows potential customers just how hard it is to optimize a WordPress site. This quickly shows that it’s a no-brainer for you to spend $29 per month on their managed hosting.

A course like this is a tried-and-true method of turning new leads into customers and is a great application of a trigger-based email marketing campaign. Get customers interested with something of value, give them lots of fantastic content sent directly to their inbox and earn a customer for life.

HitTail employs a similar methodology and even goes as far as capturing leads on their homepage. This is a great move, as it gives customers who are not yet ready to start a free trial an alternate option.

4. Automate Yourself Out Of The Equation

Some of the best auto-responders are simply campaigns that are designed to imitate the real-life follow-up emails you, or a member of your team, already send.

HelloFax is a SaaS company that makes it easy to send faxes online. They send out this welcome email from one of their founders, Joseph, to all new signups:

Joseph isn’t actually typing out all of these emails, but the simplicity of the emails certainly lends itself to this impression.

This sort of email always impresses customers and leads to a high response rate with priceless customer feedback. In this example, writing back actually directs your response to HelloFax’s help desk.

This is just one in a series of welcome (or activation) emails sent by HelloFax and is a great example of a campaign that is simple and to the point.

Great… So Where Can YOU Start?

It’s all very well to look at these examples and be impressed, but you might wonder how you can put together some auto-responders that will provide quick wins for your own business.

There are two really well-defined steps you should follow to get started with your first auto-responder campaign. By following these steps, I guarantee you’ll find at least one campaign that will give you a 10 times ROI on your email marketing spend!

1. Find Your Key Trigger

What should you use to actually trigger your auto-responder campaign? The place to start is to focus on your quickest win.

To find your quickest win, you should review your website’s core funnel.

An e-commerce store might review the steps from landing on their homepage, viewing a product, adding a product to the cart, beginning checkout and, finally, to completing checkout.

A software as a service application might review the steps from free trial signup to taking a core action within the application to becoming a paying customer.

When reviewing your funnel, you want to find the step at which you have the highest drop-off. That’s where you’ll find the trigger to provide you with the quickest win.

Flightfox provides a great example of this. They’re a travel search company with a five-step process. Most importantly, step one is providing your itinerary details and step two is providing your credit card details.

They identified a key drop-off between steps one and two and decided to focus on decreasing the drop-off rate with an auto-responder.

Using Vero, they set up an email that goes out 24 hours after a customer completes step one but doesn’t complete step two.

This email lifted their overall funnel conversions by 20%!

The key takeaway here is to find the place you can get the quickest win and implement an email remarketing campaign targeting that particular point in your funnel.

Disclosure: Flightfox is a customer of my company, Vero. You can read the full case study on how they used email remarketing to increase their email conversions.

2. Keep It Simple!

Once you’ve found your key drop-off point, the next question is what to write in your initial auto-responder.

It can be tricky to get started — and often, worrying about the perfect copy, the perfect call-to-action or the perfect formatting can prevent marketers from getting started.

A fool-proof formula for coming up with the copy for your first auto-responder is to put yourself in your customers’ shoes: what are they thinking at this drop-off point? What questions do they usually ask you or your support team at this stage of their life-cycle?

Search your email or your help desk and you’ll quickly be able to come up with some idea of what these questions should be. Pick the top three most frequently asked questions and write out a simple email (no fancy HTML template) that addresses each question one after the other.

Here’s the email Flightfox put together:

Although extremely simple, this email is the perfect example of where to start. It does two things really well:

1. It answers customers’ questions directly. It is a useful email.
2. It has a clear call-to-action.

This format works equally well for customer activation, cart abandonment, engagement and any other automated campaign you intend to set up! If you do these two things well, you’ll nail your first automated campaign.

Auto-Over-And-Out

Now, it’s over to you! What sorts of trigger-based auto-responders are you going to set up first? Let me know in the comments or send me an email if you want to discuss tactics!

Next month, we’re going to look at some examples of great email copy and calls to action… so stay tuned.

This type of highly engaged, loyal customer typically has higher overall lifetime value than the casual consumer. They’re also more likely to be an evangelist, introducing new customers to your brand in a very personal way and building the next layer of loyal customers.

But, how can you help to build a stronger bond with your customer base? In my last article, I outlined ways to stimulate an unengaged audience by increasing the relevancy of your email creative by including more dynamic content. Sharing relevant content demonstrates to customers that we know them as individuals and are dedicated to providing them with useful information, products or services.

Using historical and behavior data is a great way to present content that’s tailored to their individual needs and preferences, but you also need to engage with your audience on an emotional level in order to achieve the goal of creating a true brand-loyal customer.

This means you need to talk to your audience members like they’re real people — and real people are most satisfied when they are making connections. One of the easiest ways to make a connection is to share a story that’s easy to relate to, fun or draws the user deeper into their customer journey.

Let’s explore four creative ways in which email marketers have used data as a platform to build creative that forms a bond between their customers and their brand.

Example #1: JetBlue TrueBlue Summary/Reactivation Email

This could have easily been a straightforward annual summary statement. But instead, JetBlue used some simple data — last flight taken — to remind the customer of their last trip.

The most personalized and relevant information is at the top of the email. Scrolling down the email, the story is still based on data but becomes less personalized and more about all JetBlue travelers. Finally, the email includes stats about the JetBlue loyalty program itself.

Overall, the email creates the impression of a personalized message, and also makes recipients feel as if they’re truly a part of a community of JetBlue travelers.

Example #2: LinkedIn Invitation

As a recipient, I was delighted to see this personalized message come across my inbox. Now, when I later discovered that the top 1% most viewed profiles received their own separate email (which didn’t include me), I was a little less stoked. But, ego-busting moment aside, this is a great application of data-centered story telling that has a very relatable component to it.

Example #3: Microsoft SkyDrive Thank You

SkyDrive, Microsoft’s answer to cloud based media storage recently thanked their user base with this mobile-friendly email. The message kicks off with a thank you and a bold statement that affirms the size of the SkyDrive user base, making the recipient feel like they’re part of a larger movement. While less personalized, the message still pulls upon stats and metrics to frame the story of how SkyDrive has served their community throughout the year.

Example #4: Orbitz Destination Email

While the use of data is less obvious in this example, it is still driving the main message of the email. Subscribers within driving distance of major city centers received a message that was customized for their metro area and other likely drive-in destinations. In the middle is a fun game to draw readers though the email. What this shows is that you don’t necessarily have to use stats to have a data-driven message — you can use data like location, interests and purchase history to help create a compelling and personalized email.

I hope I’ve inspired you to take a little extra time to brainstorm on your next engagement assignment. Why not use data in a creative way to promote the confidence and trust that lead to repeat business for your brand?

A/B testing is the simplest, most straightforward testing method available. Most of you probably understand what A/B testing entails, but for those who don’t: A/B test is a process through which you provide different versions of an email to statistically significant groups of subscribers, and then measure their reactions to those versions in order to understand which is more effective at driving the behavior you prefer.

At minimum, you should be consistently performing A/B testing across your entire program. Each campaign can yield insights from an A/B test that can provide incremental lifts that build on each other to optimize your revenue from email.

What To A/B Test

Almost anything in an email can be A/B tested, but try to focus on the larger aspects to prevent getting caught up on minute details that won’t have a large impact. Try testing around the following aspects:

Timing

Ah, the age-old question, “When is the best time to send an email?” According to a recent Experian study, the answer is 8:00 pm to 12:00 am; however, according to a recent study at DEG (where I work) 8:00 pm was statistically not a great time to send emails. In short, as any marketer will tell you, “It depends.” Each brand’s subscriber list varies, so you should test and see how your subscribers respond.

For testing time of day, I recommend a full 50-50 split test. Send to 50% of your list at your usual time of day, and 50% at a different time. One current theory is that consumers are making more purchases in the evening, when they are engaged with their tablets or mobile devices while watching TV.

Many A/B tests are conducted with a three-way split. For example, 10% for Group A, 10% for Group B, and 80% for the Winning Group. In this scenario, you send to Group A and Group B, determine the winner after a specified period of time, and send the winning version to the remaining Winning Group. With time-of-day however, this is more difficult and becomes influenced by day-of-week, as well, because your test groups would receive the email on one day and the winning deployment would be sent on a different day.

Beyond timing for your promotional emails, A/B testing can be critical for determining when to send a triggered campaign – for example, determining the cadence of the emails in a win-back series, abandoned shopping cart series, or with post-purchase or other lifecycle triggers.

Creative

Creative tests involve more work, because they require the graphic design team to design more than one version and the development team to build more than one version. But, the results of a creative A/B can be very dramatic and impactful.

For example, you can test lifestyle imagery in one version and specific product images in another version. Another popular creative test is to have one one version of an email that is entirely image-based while another includes HTML text that can be viewed before downloading images.

If you are implementing an overall redesign, test the current layout or creative with the new proposed layout. This test, for example, could prove the case for moving to responsive design. But, creative testing can also be as simple as including a button versus text or adjusting the font size of the copy.

Offer

If you are able to offer discounts, then perhaps the most important testing centers on the offer. For example, do your customers respond most favorably to a percentage off, a dollar amount off, free shipping, a tiered discount, a discount limited to specific products, a time sensitive discount, a flash sale, a mystery offer, or some other kind of deal?

When testing offers, a few additional metrics should be considered in your evaluation. In addition to gross revenue, you should also consider Average Order Value (AOV), Units Per Transaction (UPT), and margin.

Subject Line

The simplest and most common item to A/B test is the subject line. If you hadn’t planned to test any of the aspects above in an email campaign, at minimum you can set up a subject line test.

For example, test including the offer in the subject line versus teasing the offer, or a longer subject line versus a shorter subject line. Subject lines are often given the least amount of thought in regard to an email, but they play a very key role. Even if you do not change anything else about your email program, you can improve your reach simply by focusing on better copywriting and testing for optimization.

Determining Results

Interpreting the results from A/B testing is sometimes the hardest part. If you’re lucky, a clear winner will emerge, and your decision will be easy. Often, however, the results for different key metrics can be conflicting.

First, determine the appropriate tagging to effectively track your campaigns outside of your email service provider. Next, determine your metrics for evaluation in advance. Some tests may only have one metric for evaluation — for example, the key measurement for a subject line test is open rate.

In determining the success of a creative A/B test, on the other hand, you’ll want to evaluate several metrics. My favorite key measurement of a creative test is click-to-open rate, but which metrics you look at will be based on the type of creative test you’re running.

For a creative test of image-only versus image and HTML text, your success metrics could be open rate (to determine if HTML text increased the number of subscribers who downloaded images), click-to-open rate, click-through rate and revenue.

For a creative test of a completely new layout (such as traditional desktop versus responsive design) your success metrics may include additional metrics such as read rate and click-through rate by device (desktop, iPad, iPhone, Android, etc.).

Then it comes to A/B testing around offers, your measurements will focus on both email engagement metrics as well as revenue metrics. Some thought leaders will argue the only true measurement of success is revenue. While I agree that conversion is the ultimate goal of the email, different aspects of A/B testing have clear correlations with specific email engagement metrics. I prefer to consider the engagement and revenue metrics together to make an informed decision.

And frequently, the result of a test forms the basis for a new test.

Control Group

Direct mail has long included control groups, which are excluded from receiving mailings to determine the effectiveness of sending a direct mail piece. Email control groups can be more difficult to identify. For example, on a subject line test, what would your control be?

Creating a control for testing an offer is also difficult because including an offer will generally always outperform no offer. And at that point, you have essentially created two tests: offer versus no offer, and offer A versus offer B.

I once encountered a client who had excluded a portion of email subscribers from receiving any email at all, as part of a long-term study to determine the value of sending email. At the end, the test showed the tremendous value of email marketing as well as the loss in revenue from not sending to these subscribers. While it helped justify investments in the email program, it was determined that this test was more of a loss than a gain.

Statistical Significance

One final point in determining results of your A/B tests is statistical significance. Simply basing your test on quantity may not be accurate. If you do not have an analyst on your team to run the numbers, there are plenty of reliable calculators on the Web that can help you do this by evaluating the number of conversions generated from the control and test groups.

Aim for a confidence level of at least 90%, which means you have only a 10% chance of interpreting the result incorrectly. You should only record a final decision for tests that are deemed to be statistically significant. If in doubt, run the test again to validate the results!

Acting On Results

A/B testing is worthless if you do not implement what you learn. Create a spreadsheet where you record the tests performed, results, and confirmed decisions. I also recommend categorizing your tests to make it easy to search or filter by type. Even if you only send one test per week, at the end of a year, you would have 52 tests. By categorizing, you can easily search later when someone asks “What offers have we tested?” or “How do different thresholds for free shipping affect our total revenue?”

A/B testing isn’t the end of the story, of course. Once you’ve mastered A/B testing or are anxious for more than one key finding per test, we can begin to talk about multivariate testing. But for now, A/B will be more than enough to get your testing program off the ground.

How can you get your emails into that coveted inner circle and — better still — keep them there to increase engagement and deliverability?

Let’s explore three simple ways to do that, with an outstanding email example for each one.

1. Build Momentum From The Welcome Email(s)

The welcome email (or email series) is one of the most undervalued tools in the email marketer’s bat utility belt.

Many brands are still sending a simple “Thank you for signing up!” email without a powerful call to action or great content that makes an immediate, lasting impression. This is a huge missed opportunity.

Let’s look at a welcome email from Social Triggers that starts building a strong relationship right away:

Welcome email from SocialTriggers.com

Why It Works

There’s a reason Derek Halpern has established such a prominent brand for SocialTriggers.com: he pays close attention to his audience and uses email effectively, starting right from the opt-in sequence.

The welcome email above uses a direct, one-to-one tone. There’s no distancing the brand from the person, and it goes even further — specifically asking new readers to connect with him on Twitter and Facebook. This is accomplished not with small icons in the footer, but with light copy and two simple text link calls-to-action.

My favorite idea from this email is the four-question feedback survey. Halpern asks for location, which helps with segmenting email lists for local events; but, the question that has the biggest impact is #4: “Tell me a little about yourself. What type of business do you run? What company do you work for? What’s the one thing you think I should know about you?”

As the SocialTriggers email list has grown dramatically, he’s received thousands of valuable responses to that question. That data not only helps drive the content for the site, but it lets readers know they’re being listened to because they see their responses reflected in the site and in email content.

Think of the impact a small change like that could make to your email and site content!

2. Stand Apart With Value, Personality & WIIFM

There’s a fine line between talking with your readers and talking at them. It’s one of those “know-it-when-I-see-it” factors. But, since we see it all the time, the emails which get the tone just right stick out in our minds.

Much of it comes down to service: are you genuinely trying to help me meet a need or desire, or are you simply trying to pitch me something?

We all have our “what’s in it for me” (WIIFM) threshold, and it’s climbing higher all the time for us as email recipients. However, that’s easy to forget when we’re in the email producer seat, scrambling to hit our conversions, list growth and revenue goals.

One brand that hits the right notes with email, from its welcome series (pictured below) to its personality-driven updates is Raven Tools.

Email 4 of 5-part welcome series by Raven Tools

Why It Works

This email, which is part four of a five-part welcome series, is full of WIIFM and value, starting with the subject line: “Step 4: Build reports in minutes, not hours.” Is that a feature? No, it’s a benefit – you’re saving me time and making my job (and life) easier. Of course, I want to open that email!

The body keeps that approach going throughout, with a personal angle: “Isn’t it exciting? By this fourth lesson in our five-part series, we hope you’re really seeing how Raven can save you time and make you money.”

Below that, a video on the reporting engine features the following caption: “Watch What Raven Reports Can Do for You.”

Raven gets bonus points for using real employee names in the “From” field. Plus, those status indicators below the main content block set our expectations throughout the series, making it easy to determine if we’ve missed an email or we want to skip ahead. This reader-first approach to design and usability also renders nicely on mobile devices.

If you’re trying to encourage readers to start using your product or service and connect with your brand, test a short welcome series like this (or tweaks like this if you have a series already).

With compelling content and a tone that underscores the benefits and value readers can expect from that content, you can expect higher response rates and ward off the negative effects of low engagement.

3. Share The Spotlight With Your Audience

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” – Dale Carnegie

You don’t argue with Dale Carnegie. He wrote the book on winning friends and influencing people decades before email came along, but the timeless relationship lessons fit email perfectly.

Yes, email is a channel for generating awareness, leads and sales. But, as social media has shifted the way we interact with brands online, we expect more of an interactive, personal touch from companies in email as well as social. As readers, we want to see ourselves; so, as producers, we need to turn the spotlight on our readers to deliver that.

There are plenty of ways to put your audience first, and you can find many examples in emails from 60 Second Marketer (pictured below).

Email featuring a reader crowdsourced blog post from 60 Second Marketer

Why It Works

This newsletter regularly includes content featuring guest contributors like the post, “25 Top Social Media Tips from Our Community,” that was drawn from a crowdsourced request to email readers. The post and email announcing it also prominently promoted the contributors’ names and links. Guest webinars and podcasts, free ebooks from partners, and other co-marketing content round out this newsletter’s typical mix.

Whether it’s customer success stories, guest contributors, or rewards for readers, this approach is by no means rocket science. Showcasing content from contributors is the lifeblood of countless prominent sites, and can produce massive email list growth (e.g., a 234% gain in one year).

That said, knowing this and applying it consistently isn’t the same thing. When you habitually feature ideas, wins and lessons from your customers, it resonates with other readers because, framed properly, that content tends to reflect their own situation. Plus, it strikes an aspirational chord when readers see that they, too, could be featured.

This customers/community-first approach is a key factor in the 60 Second Marketer newsletter’s solid engagement rates and list growth. What are some ways you could apply this approach with your readership?

Bonus Tip: Check Your Frequency

Even though many webmail clients are getting smarter at handling the inbox assault we all face (hello, Mailbox app), as email marketers, we need to take real steps to do our part. One such step is rethinking frequency.

You’ve probably seen the recent praise for Fab.com’s automatic opt-out for unresponsive customers, which can backfire in a good way and provide an unexpected “wow” moment that gets customers back on board.

Just recently, one of my favorite emails, Crazy Egg’s The Daily Egg, let us readers know they’re scaling back from a daily to a weekly roundup. And, perhaps offering frequency options at sign up could catch on as we marketers explore ways to align our timing with our readers’ preferences.

What all of these ideas have in common is putting our customers’ needs first and trusting that the numbers we want will follow. It’s not always an easy concept to get comfortable with, but time and again, we see proven examples in action. So, what are you waiting for? Let’s get testing!

Are you using some or all of these approaches now? If not, are you ready to test any of them? Share your thoughts in the comments.

With the increased usage of mobile devices, smart phones and multi-channel social streams, your customers (or potential customers) now have a wealth of information available at their fingertips around the clock. In fact, it’s estimated that three out of four Americans under the age of 35 now check their smart phone or mobile device before even getting out of bed.

So if your audience is tuned out, the problem isn’t that they aren’t looking for information. The problem is that the amount of information has become overwhelming, making it hard to get your message noticed.

Turn Them On To Tune Them In

To get your users to tune in, you need to deliver the content they want to see, when they want to see it. To put it plainly, you need to increase the relevance of the message to grab their attention.

Delivering targeted, personalized content requires a different kind of approach to the email creative production process. In order to produce these personalized messages, you’ll need more than a template — you’ll need a flexible framework that will allow your brand to provide an individualized experience for each customer in an efficient and effective way.

The move from a static approach to a dynamic method is, of course, easier said than done. But it’s not impossible, and it’s well worth the effort. Targeted communications, on average, have a 3x conversion rate over a mass communication, while a truly individualized campaign will have around 5x the conversions.

Thus, the question shouldn’t be if you should move towards targeted creative content, but how soon. Let’s look at the essential steps you’ll need to take to get there:

1. Who: Identify and prioritize customer segments.
2. What: Plan the kind of content they’ll receive.
3. How: Pre-plan your layouts to accommodate your content.
4. Repeat: Optimize to ensure maximum performance.

Who

You’ll need to know who your users are before you can provide them with a customized experience. Use data you already have to identify potential segments, and prioritize those segments against your business needs so that you can start to understand your new content needs.

Don’t think you have enough data to begin? Look at what you probably already track. Can you review past click behaviors to spot trends? Are you gathering information about your users’ activity on your website? Do you already have prospect, active, lapsed segments outlined for other channels?

These are all good places to start looking to understand how to group individuals into segments by their common needs and behaviors.

What

Now that you have an overview of your audience and the types of content that they may respond to, it’s time to plan the delivery of the content that will resonate with your segments. Start a simple matrix of your most valued audience segments so that you can start to sort the groups and create new content to meet the needs of these segments.

How

You’ll need a way to display and organize this content in a format that will be effective for your audience. This means you’ll need to use an email framework — a flexible template that is composed of set of modules that allow for a large variety of layout choices.

A well-designed framework will allow you to increase the percentage of relevant information over time without needing to redesign your basic template structure. This will provide you with a creative platform for your email sends, so you won’t need to go through a custom design process for every message.

Creating a customizable email framework will allow you to more easily grow into delivery of relevant, personalized content based on data such as products browsed, local store info, variable offers, etc., without having to revamp each email according to the new requirements.

It can be daunting at first, but if your framework is set up correctly, you can expand into using more personalized dynamic content by simply starting to use one or two dynamic modules at a time. You can also add to the variations within a module as your data matures or your production resources are able to produce more content. The key to a solid framework foundation is setting up a grid:

If you find that you have a high percentage of mobile device users, take the time to include mobile break points in your grid.

Breakpoints are the dimensions of each device screen size that your user base is likely to own. This will help prepare your framework for a responsive layout by establishing mobile display standards for each content region.

If you’re not familiar with the term, responsive design refers to a layout that is crafted in a way that it will respond to the user’s device and display the most relevant format for that experience. Think of it as taking dynamic content to the next level — user experience.

It requires a little more coding know-how, but responsive design for email is quickly evolving into a basic best practice and one of the most effective ways around to provide a customize mobile experience to the widest audience.

As with the modular approach, you don’t have to tackle every device breakpoint at once. It’s fine to start with a desktop and mobile breakpoint and add to it as necessary.

Repeat

Once you have your framework in place and you’ve road-tested your content, take a moment to look back and analyze the results.

Review what’s working and what’s not, and change your approach accordingly. Plan a quarterly review of performance in order to keep pace with your audience’s technology needs. Is your mobile experience still relevant? If not, it might be time to dive into optimizing for those needs.

The important thing is to continue to grow and look for opportunities to provide a better and more customized experienced for your user base. They’ll thank you for it with increased engagement and conversions.

So whether you’re dipping your toe into dynamic content or ready for a full-scale, one-to-one communication strategy, these basic steps can help guide you through the process of building your creative platform to get you from A to B or A to Z.

Setting The Promotional Calendar

The promotional calendar should be developed with the E-Commerce Manager, Email Marketing Manager, and Product Merchandisers. Any additional, relevant associates should be included, as well. For example, the Mobile Marketing Manager might be a different individual; or, you may have a Brand or Loyalty Manager to include for in-store promotions.

• Events & Offers

Begin by creating a promotional calendar that includes any e-commerce, in-store, or recurring events that email will need to support. For example, it could be a “Friends and Family” event that also has a supporting direct mail piece. From here, plan a mix of emails in support of those efforts, some that include offers and others that don’t.

The next easiest emails to plan are those that support promotions, since a sale will generally increase top line revenue. You may consider sending an email announcing the sale, and then follow it up with additional emails creating a sense of urgency as the end of the sale approaches.

• No Offers

Because of the downturn in the economy over the last several years, many retailers turned to more discounts and promotions to increase sales. However, not every email needs a discount. In fact, some of the emails with the highest open rates are emails that don’t include any offer at all.

Now that discounts and promotions are not a necessity, retailers are finding it hard to break the habit. You might be uncertain of what will happen to sales if a discount isn’t included, but there is only one way to find out – test. Select at least one email per month that promotes your product but doesn’t include an offer. You might find that you don’t have to take money off the table in order to achieve the conversions you’re after.

Consult with your Product Merchandisers to identify any new products that will be available in store or online. New content is great for an email audience. For example, you can pique their interest with smart subject lines like “Introducing the [product name]” or “Shop new styles just added.” Schedule these emails as appropriate throughout the month, when there is not a sale. You’ll be surprised how effective curiosity is as a driving force for conversion.

• Social Media

Consider at least one email per month dedicated entirely to supporting social marketing. After all, it’s good to return the love for all those email subscribers they have sent your way. If they are hosting a contest, send an email to drive traffic and engagement.

• Something Different

Still have holes left in your email schedule? Fill them by hosting ongoing brainstorming sessions with the entire team to gather new ideas for email content. Include individuals on the front line who are closest to the day-to-day operations, associates from other teams, and customer service representatives. We even include our receptionist sometimes!

Take a cue from Barnett Helzberg, Jr., and ask the group a variation of his “Three Magic Questions:” “What (emails) are we doing right? What (emails) are we doing wrong? What (emails) are we not doing that we should be?” This is where you need to get creative, break the mold, and don’t discard any ideas.

• Email Specific

Review the schedule for any email exclusive content and offers. Remember, your subscribers opted in for extra content, so be sure you are capitalizing on the opportunity by giving it to them. Give some thought to what the benefit of being on your email list might be, and then work to provide that value.

Finally, identify a test for nearly every email. It could be one of many options including images, copy, offers, personalization, etc. It could be as simple as a subject line, or as complicated as multivariate; but, nearly every email should have a test of some sort.

Merchandising For Email

Once you have your calendar drafted, it’s time to select the products to feature. Who picks your products for email? Is it someone who doesn’t know much about email? I sometimes find the products are selected by the buyers, and they consistently choose products that have excess inventory.

Inventory closeout promotions are ok on occasion; but often, there are reasons these products didn’t already sell. Repeatedly promoting undesirable products is not a sustainable long-term strategy; and, it’s not one that is likely to yield a lot of revenue. Unless your brand strategy is flash sales (like steepandcheap.com), save this tactic for items that were recently moved to the clearance section.

• Focus On The WHY

For emails that are showcasing new products or popular products without any supporting offer, focus on education and the product’s benefits. Email can highlight features that a consumer might not be aware of. Call-out the “why” of the product. Why would a consumer want to purchase this particular product?

Write the text and select the images while keeping in mind the simple fact that customers don’t read. No matter how compelling your creative might be, they just don’t. Keep it short and sweet. Use easily digested content — bullet points, highlighted text, images, and simple phrases. Get creative to present the content visually, like in this example from J.Crew Factory showcasing “3 Ways to Wear It.”

• Top Products

Determine the best-selling products on your website. Inquire about the most-searched products on your site. Obtain the top-rated products from your ratings and reviews engine. These would are all be great products for an email. Paired with a compelling subject line, these products are likely to generate click-throughs and revenue. Add an offer, and you have the makings of a high grossing campaign.

• Versions & Segments

You have more than one kind of subscriber, so select different products for different segments. If you are segmenting by gender, for example, select one set of products for women and one set for men. If you are segmenting by size (or in addition to gender), select an additional set of products for petite and big/tall. If you are segmenting by purchase history, dynamically populate a product previously purchased in an additional color, or the next most purchased product based on the last product purchased; then select a set of products for those subscribers that have never purchased.

Dynamically populated products can be pulled from an existing data source (the website) to limit the level of effort required to build the email. If you are segmenting based on loyalty, you may have different products at different price points, based on total lifetime spend or the subscriber’s average order value.

Measurement

How do you determine the success of your product and promotion selection? Specifically, a few key metrics to track include average order value, profit margin, and gross revenue. These metrics allow you to evaluate the result and effectiveness of any promotions.

For example, does a “buy more, save more” campaign result in a higher average order value and overall gross sales? Does a deep percentage off create a lower profit margin but high gross sales? Most email programs strongly support website goals. For this reason you may also include units per transaction (UPT) as another key metric in your weekly and monthly email evaluations.

Increased Email Engagement

By sending a mix of emails with and without offers, you are able to establish revenue benchmarks at the low and high end. Over time, this allows you to create the right cadence of offers and more accurately project email revenue. If you had previously trained your subscribers to expect an offer, you may experience an adjustment period of non-offer emails with low revenue overall, until they identify and take advantage of fewer promotions, generating higher revenue (and appreciation) for those emails.

Through a collaborative effort, you can improve the product and promotion selections of your email marketing campaigns, resulting in increased email engagement metrics and revenue.

Answering the “Now what?” question can be tricky. Just because someone downloaded your ebook or subscribed to your blog doesn’t mean they are ready for your sales team — in fact, Gleanster Research (pdf download) found that 50% of leads are qualified, but not ready to buy just yet. Effective lead nurturing campaigns can help you move your leads through the buying cycle, thus preparing them for the sales team. Below, we will cover:

1. What Emails to Send At Each Stage of Your Next Lead Nurturing Campaign
2. How to Nurture Leads at Each Stage of the Buying Cycle Effectively
3. Real-world Examples of Lead Nurturing Emails to Accelerate Your Sales Cycle

What Is Lead Nurturing?

Before we jump into what types of emails you should be sending and when, let’s do a quick primer on what lead nurturing is. Lead nurturing is a series of emails that you send to your leads in order to qualify them and move them down the sales funnel. Sometimes, you might hear lead nurturing referred to as a marketing automation campaign.

Unlike one-off email blasts, lead nurturing focuses on sending prospects the right content at the right time based on characteristics such as buyer personas and what stage they are at in the sales cycle.

Providing leads with the right content based on their stage in the buying cycle is essential for a successful lead nurturing campaign. After all, the content that resonates best with a new blog subscriber isn’t the same as what speaks to a lead close to a sale. Luckily, we’ve made it easy for you. Here are the types of emails you should be sending at each stage of your next lead nurturing campaign.

Educate & Inform To Convert Subscribers To Leads

Within your marketing database, you likely have prospects at all stages of your sales funnel. At the very top of the funnel, you have subscribers. These are people who have opted in to hear from you periodically. You likely have limited contact information for them, perhaps just an email address. A subscriber may have entered your database by subscribing to your blog or opting in to a company newsletter.

At this stage, the goal is to convert these subscribers to leads by getting them to convert on a landing page. While it’s great that you have a database of people who have voluntarily signed up to hear from you, subscribers have not invested heavily in your company yet, and it’s very easy for them to opt out.

Show subscribers you’re worth sticking around for by providing them with quality, educational content. Your focus on education will build trust between the subscriber and your company that will make them more willing to share information with you. Here are two emails to send in this stage:

1. Educational Content

Let’s face it, with just an email address, you really have no idea what particular issues a subscriber wants to learn more about. However, I bet as a marketer, you can think of a few common challenges that are keeping your customers up at night.

Send educational content that focuses on a broad issue the majority of your audience faces with the option to dive into a specific subject with blog links or offers. By tracking what links or offers subscribers are clicking on, you can then segment your subscriber list to further refine your content offers. For example, the email below includes data relevant to marketers along with an ebook offer to entice subscribers to convert to a lead

Go the extra mile here by using progressive profiling to make filling out forms easy as pie.

2. Industry News and Trends

One of the reasons people subscribe to industry blogs or newsletters is to stay abreast of the latest news. Help your subscribers have their finger on the pulse by sending out updates on industry news and trends. This will help engage your audience, and build yourself as a trustworthy knowledge source. When Pinterest announced its new analytics feature, we made sure to share the news with our subscribers with this email.

To strengthen this authority and encourage subscribers to become leads, create content that suggests how to strategize in light of changes. In this case, we revamped a Pinterest ebook to reflect the new changes. This strategy puts your company in the role of both informer and advisor.

Become A Problem Solver To Convert Leads To Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

Leads are prospects in your database that have given more information about themselves than just an email address. Most people become leads after converting on a landing page, usually in exchange for a content-based offer. The goal for marketers in this stage is to get the lead to further qualify themselves for sales by acting on a specific call-to-action. Here are the types of emails you should be sending your leads.

1. Targeted Educational Content

Unlike the generalized educational email you would send a subscriber, now’s your opportunity to send targeted emails to your lead based on the information you know about them. This segmentation can either be by your company’s buyer persona or by the content they previously converted on.

For example, if someone filled out a landing page to register for a lead nurturing webinar we’re hosting, I would send an email like this, offering more content on the subject that the lead expressed interest in.

To make this offer extra juicy, don’t forget to tell your leads what to do next to learn more. Include call-to-action buttons and links to other relevant content within the offer to increase engagement and conversion rates.

2. Problem Solvers

Want to know the best way to convince me to invest in your company’s product or service? Show me you can solve my problem. If you can solve a lead’s pain points before they even become a customer, imagine how much more likely she is to listen to your sales pitch.

Not only will leads view your company as a solutions provider, but the leads who click through on this email are more likely to be qualified for your sales team. Problem-solvers can include HTML tools, a checklist, or an infographic of a process they have to do frequently — anything that you imagine they would print out and hang by their desks.

To help our marketing leads, we created a blogging calendar that assists them in doing their job better. Here’s an email we sent them:

Set up your sales team for success by having the email come from the prospect’s sales rep’s email address rather than a generic marketing alias. This builds trust on an individual level and can open the door to future conversation. Also, if the prospect responds to the email, it will go right to the sales rep’s inbox.

3. Social Proof

Motivate your leads to pursue becoming a customer with social proof. Social proof is the idea that if other people are doing something, and I trust those other people, then I should be doing it to.

Show leads that there are plenty of people just like them that trust your company by inviting them to become a part of the conversation. Invite them to social media chats (like tweetups), webinars, or other interactive community-based offers. Here’s an invitation we sent to leads in the ecommerce space for an upcoming webinar:

To further emphasize your company’s role in the ecosystem, feature co-marketing offers you create with other companies in the space. For example, this webinar was paired with BigCommerce.

4. Product Introduction: Features and Benefits

In addition to providing your leads with quality information and content, make sure to introduce them to your product or service. Since you now have more information about their background and content interests, introduce them to your product features and benefits in a way that will resonate with them.

For example, leads who downloaded our “101 Companies Rocking Social Media” ebook received the email below with a demo that specifically emphasizes our social media tools.

The most successful product-centric lead nurturing emails make it about the recipient, not the sender. Position your product messaging in a way that emphasizes the lead’s stated priorities and encourages them to a sales-specific call to action.

Support The Decision-Making Process To Convert MQLs to Sales

Marketing Qualified Leads, or MQLs, are people who have identified themselves as deeply-engaged, sales-ready leads. Leads usually become MQLs by following product-centric calls to action, such as requesting a trial, product demo or request to contact sales.

The goal for marketers here is to assist the sales team and make the MQL’s decision-making process as easy as possible. Here are the emails marketers should send at this stage of the game.

1. Proof of Product

Help an MQL see that your product or service gets results by sending proof of product. This type of email can be anything from results-oriented data, case studies, or testimonials. Give the MQL results he could use to make the case to his boss or teammates about your product or service.

This case study email includes both a quote from a satisfied customer and numbers to support exactly how he found success with our product.

Take this step the extra mile by giving the MQL the option to talk to a current customer who loves the results they’re getting from your service.

Other ways to assist sales in this stage of the lead nurturing process are to write updates on product features, create customer-facing content that analyzes your offerings vs. competitors, and continue to send targeted, educational content.

What are some of your go-to emails to send to subscribers and leads? Let us know in the comments!