CMWorld 2018 was all about creating moments that matter: to live in the moment, to share beautiful stories that are relevant and full of meaning and to enjoy the experiences we have been given. I trekked to Cleveland, Ohio once again to learn first hand from my Content Marketing heroes—the author’s who inspire me as I listen on my drive into work each day and those I read in my spare time.

Once again Ann Handley, Jay Acunzo, Joe Pulizzi, Robert Rose, Andy Crestodina and Jay Baer did not disappoint. This year, however, a few others had my attention tightly. DeWitt Jones specifically. His message on how to find beauty in our surroundings and how to give life a second look gave me peace and hope for a better tomorrow.

Here are a few highlights of my key takeaways in a collection of tweets.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell how we enjoy helping our clients the most— the email content, the design, the development, the audience journey or the metrics and KPI’s of an email campaign. It’s a bonus when you get the tell the story of how it all comes together and even better when you get to share that story as a guest blogger!

Klipfolio, our visual dashboarding software, invited us to tell the intriguing story of how A&W is using a visual dashboard to make realistic and smart decisions about their email marketing program. Although A&W Restaurants will turn 100 in 2019, the history of their email program since 2013 unfolds on a visual dashboard that is shared internally with stakeholders as well as externally with their internal customer—their franchise owners.

via Klipfolio

The internal customer is sometimes overlooked, but in reality should be our most important asset in providing the positive experience our external customer expects. Keeping your employees in the loop, understanding what they need to be successful in their job and listening to their feedback gives you a wealth of insight to build a strong culture, informed employees and happy internal and external customers.

Form an Internal Communications Strategy

Many years ago I worked for Chrysler in Auburn Hills, Michigan. My job was to promote new design technology (IBM CATIA) to the designers and engineers for the Body and White division. The company recognized that by investing in their internal customer they would save time, improve efficiency, reduce errors and build a superior product. Using qualitative and quantitative primary research—mainly listening behind the scenes to evaluate data of current product usage and talking to the internal customer directly—an internal communication strategy was formed. Using traditional marketing mediums and communication channels—unique branding, video, intranet, email, lunch and learns, trinkets and contests—we were able to see the movement of new functionality usage within a short amount of time and even bring a little excitement to the design floor.

Build a Strong Culture

Another opportunity to see the impact of keeping your internal customer informed and engaged was when I worked with the Bluegrass Hospitality Group in Lexington, Kentucky to develop and launch their loyalty program. A huge aspect of our tremendous growth and success was because we spent so much time listening to our internal customer to figure out what they needed to do their job, provide the right training through their internal Culture of Excellence to provide exceptional customer service and meet the requirements to register new BHG Rewards members at the same time. 

Elise Menold, former Marketing Director, recalls “there was a group of team members that would collaborate and write funny/short skits that we would then film and edit and piece together into a little show that resembled the SNL weekend update skits. We introduced loyalty program updates, specials, new rules/protocols, seasonal information, uniform guidelines, everything.” The videos were distributed through their internal email newsletter using Salesforce Marketing Cloud (ExactTarget at the time).

Achieve Long-Term Results

A&W Restaurants will be celebrating their 100th anniversary in 2019. Liz Bazner and Spencer Barrett, their digital marketing team, distribute the NewsBearer bi-weekly, their internal email newsletter, keeping their internal audience, franchise owners and employees informed of upcoming events, operational changes and anything else ‘delicious.’ They publish a blog titled Franchise News directed to their internal audience and they connect in person with franchise owners on a regular basis. Impressively, four days a year each employee at the A&W Restaurant Support Center has to tie on an apron, swap their dress shoes for something slip-resistant and pull a shift in one of our restaurants. We know that as a franchisee-owned brand, it’s vital for everyone in our organization to understand what it’s like to work day-to-day in an A&W.*

A&W is reaching new levels of growth with store openings across the US as well as longevity of franchise ownership. Again – they will be 100 years old!

*source: https://awfranchising.com/research/what-makes-our-restaurant-franchise-different/

Close the Gaps

Lexington Podiatry, a small company with 23 employees, uses an ongoing customer experience survey created in SurveyGizmo and triggered after each patient appointment by their email marketing platform, CampaignMonitor.

Originally the survey was a way to organically and ethically collect Google Reviews; now it is the force that drives their strong internal culture and propels their customer service efforts.

The collected survey data is transformed into a visual dashboard using Klipfolio (below) to monitor the service received while in the waiting room and the treatment room by both physicians and office staff. Elise Hinchman, Marketing Director, uses this dashboard to communicate strengths, weaknesses, growth, trends, and opportunities for the administrative staff every Tuesday during their internal meeting. Being able to monitor patient feedback consistently, over time, validates necessary changes to be executed that are best for the customer. The LexPod squad makes taking care of feet fun for both the internal customer and the external customer!

Email Marketing Makes Things Happen

In all of these examples, email has been the consistent channel used to improve the customer experience. Take advantage of your ESP capabilities and communicate on a regular basis to your internal customer. Send surveys for feedback about what they are seeing and hearing from customers, share company news, employee-related stories, marketing trends, successes and even failures. The content you share will keep them present with your company culture, long-term efforts and lead to independence in answering customer questions and provide exceptional service when you need it most.

Recommended Read

The size of your company should not matter in how you take care of your external customer, but your internal customer—your team member, employee, volunteer, and even freelance vendor, does. An excellent book to read is, “The Mission, the Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander” by Pete Blaber.

Pete is a former Delta Force Commander but also a former corporate director at Amgen. The comparison of his experience in the military searching for known terrorists like Osama Bin Laden, to leading a team of sales managers at Amgen is fascinating. In essence, it does not matter what your task is; To progress, it’s essential to listen to and support those in the trenches every day.

I am an email marketing strategist.

I conceive, build and dissect email marketing programs for our clients to evaluate their health, including our own at RootedElm. Being able to work with a client intimately, look at the resources and data they have available, set a vision and goals, and then turn those goals into a successful reality is motivating and rewarding at the same time. For some of our clients, it’s getting started and finding the appropriate email service provider and for others, it’s moving into advanced customer segments, journeys, integrations and robust email campaigns. For all, it’s educating them on how to facilitate the 1:1 relationship they have built with their subscriber.

Email marketing is not a one-size-fits-all blasting medium. It’s personal, and respect must be shown to build trust and keep that relationship intact.

It takes a team.

When it comes to the specifics on how to design or how to code that email to render correctly, my team member Jason Meeker steps in to provide expertise. One of my favorite parts of a project is when Christina Noll, content developer, and I brainstorm and construct the content together for a customer journey. We all take the information we’ve collected — guidelines and insight from the client, email reports, Litmus analytics, survey results, and a visual dashboard we’ve built to take command of our data and formulate the content. We begin to tell a story.

So much behind the scenes goes into creating a dynamic email program that is unknown or often misunderstood by others that have not experienced the entire process.

Expectations.

As an email marketing strategist it is my job to guide our clients to understand the significant role they play, and that it’s not just sending an email, but the message they send must offer value. Often as email marketers, we are placed in a predicament as the expectations of the client is much different than what is best for the subscriber.

Everyone has expectations — especially the subscribers we are tasked to reach actively. They expect the emails they signed up for will be of benefit and not displeasure.

Email marketing is a practice — much like yoga.

I’m an avid practitioner of yoga. When I started yoga years ago, I could barely touch my toes. It took time to become familiar with the poses, how to move my body correctly, strengthen my core and settle my mind. Yoga is the practice of breath. Everyone can breathe, but not everyone can do a headstand (neither can I, but someday)!

It takes practice, knowledge, experience and time to advance to the next level. We evolve.

The same for email marketing. As the data matures our subscribers tell us more and more through the insight we capture. Our customer journey begins to extend down new paths. We admire the work of our peers and learn from their case studies, presentations, books, and blogs then return the favor by sharing our own. As email marketers, we interpret the need to send the right email — at the right time— to the right person. Blasting an email without all the behind the scenes legwork is like falling on top of your head while you’re trying a headstand without building a strong core first!

ABOUT LISA

Lisa Wester is the founder of RootedElm and Chief Engagement Officer that works with our client relationships but most importantly, Lisa has been an email marketing strategist since 2007 and a marketer for a very long time! You can find her on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Plan.

Stop emailing off the cuff and map out what messages would be essential for your subscriber to receive. With email marketing, along with most forms of content, consistency and value are key. There are many ways to keep on schedule but a content calendar that can be shared with your entire team is the perfect place to start. Writing it down puts it into action. Some of our clients utilize a Google spreadsheet. Our team uses Flow, a project management and collaboration system.

Start with your lifecycle campaigns. Pinpoint when it would add value for your subscriber to hear from you. A welcome series is the first place to start but after that would a birthday or anniversary campaign show the subscriber you are thinking of them? What about a reminder of an upcoming appointment or a survey after a purchase, completion of a project or a recent visit? Incorporating a reoccurring re-engagement campaign to your plan will make a huge difference and keep your subscriber list clean.

Tis the season — or is it? Add in seasonal email messages that fit your values and would be pertinent to your audience—not just trends because that’s what you do.

Timing is everything. Be as consistent as promised with your audience when it comes to email newsletters and promotional campaigns. If they expect to receive an email the third Tuesday of the month, don’t disappoint them.

Leave space for ad-hoc campaigns. These messages include latest promotions, company news, local events or an amazing blog post beneficial to your audience.

Conduct an Email Audit.

Audit your own email campaigns and audit others. We flag and share amongst ourselves email campaigns that resonate with us all the time, taking note of something that worked or in many cases something that could be so much better, mainly with email rendering. It’s not critiquing — it’s a learning process — a mental note for us to remember how an email was received and what to do or not to do.

Most likely your inbox is packed full of campaigns as well. Flag what you like then start a google spreadsheet or document with space for notes and a screenshot of the email. Share the link with others to add their input and do the same. Even just hitting print and making notes the old-fashioned way, storing the printed documents in a community folder, works.

Check out our Emails We Love series for ideas and evaluation on email campaigns we’ve received. If you would like feedback on a recent email campaign, please reach out and we will give you honest and validated feedback using our email analytic tool Litmus.

Develop a Remarkably Good Email Template.

Make it easy for yourself and your team to stay on top of your plan. With at least one good email template, your primary task will be writing the relevant content and sourcing supporting images. Almost every email service provider has templates that you can customize to meet your needs.

A template can be a pre-built, drag & drop style template as shown below from the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

A template can be a custom HTML built to fit your ESP guidelines as shown below using Campaign Monitor.

Our final example is our newsletter, “From Your Email Horticulturists” that we adapt each month using Litmus Builder then sync directly to our ESP.

Most of the assets and code remain the same for each issue. We edit the text and images within the HTML to differentiate one newsletter from the next as shown in this holiday email.

Get Cozy With Your Metrics.

There is so much you can learn if you just take the time to dive in and develop an ongoing visual document of your campaign trends, subscriber behavior, and gaps. A visual dashboard can be created using an excel spreadsheet or an online dashboard software like Klipfolio. Simply being able to quickly see in graphic form the health of your email marketing program will pay off greatly in the long run. Think of all the decisive and validated planning you’ll be able to do.

In addition to trends with your click to open rate, your unique open rate an unique click-through rate, a specific metric to pay attention to is the life of your subscriber; the time from subscription to when they unsubscribe and how they unsubscribe.

In the visual dashboard below, it’s easy to validate that we need to build more trust through our welcome series and increase the email campaigns from one to several. By adding these additional emails, the high unsubscribe rate and spam complaints will reduce within the first 90 days. This visual also tells us that a reengagement series should be applied before the subscriber hits their one year anniversary for sure and possibly sooner after the new welcome campaigns come to fruition.

Listen.

Remember you are sending to people, not just an email address. My opinion: this is the essential piece of the puzzle. Whether it be in a group setting or individually, sit down with members of your team, management, frontline staff, and sales and ponder: what is the reason we are creating this content? What action do we want our subscribers to take? What value do we offer our subscribers?

Talk to your audience individually or through an online survey to find out why they care about your company, your services, the products you offer, and the experience you give them. An A/B split test is a form of listening and so is purchase behavior. Combine your dashboard with the knowledge you’ve received and ask the hard questions, and you’ll be able to plan for a stronger email program in 2019.

Cultivating your email marketing program is ongoing.

Take on one task at a time and perfect it as best as you can, then work on another tomorrow. Be methodical and meticulous. Each day your program will get stronger and you’ll be smarter and your subscribers and your management team will thank you.

Not to mention — we’re also here to help.

In his thought-provoking book,“The Checklist Manifesto,” Atul Gawande walks through vivid examples of how both the airline industry and the medical field radically reduced errors and improved safety issues by using a simple checklist. Since reading his book, every time I board a plane I envision the pilot and co-pilot working their way down that checklist to ensure that everyone on my flight makes it to our destination. Atul Gawande convinced me, and countless others, that every industry, every person, and every project would benefit from a checklist.

COLLABORATE

Typically multiple people are involved with the email planning, design, copywriting, development, testing and approval of an email campaign. Most often, these same people have several emails and supporting landing pages progressing at the same time. Trying to keep everyone aligned can be daunting! It makes sense to work from a centralized list — giving each member the ability to check off their completed task, leading to a streamlined process, stronger collaboration, and most importantly a reduction in errors and improvement in quality overall.

START HERE

To give you a solid foundation to build on, we took our experience and knowledge with email marketing and content marketing to create an Email Marketing Checklist. The first five steps involve organization, collaboration and a lot of listening. All of this is needed to get to know your audience better to send the right message, to the right person, at the right time — the purpose of email marketing. As you build your checklist or tailor the one we’ve drafted for you, allow the members of your team to have a voice in what needs to happen. Obtaining input will break down barriers, find missing tasks and set timing accordingly.

CUSTOMIZE

The second five encompass the action of composing, building and testing each email campaign. Litmus, our partner with email rendering and analytics, has made it easy to check off and approve each of these actions with their Custom Checklist feature. For example, the image below shows the custom checklist we utilize for our monthly newsletter “From your Email Horticulturists.” You’ll notice that a few of the last five tasks from the Email Marketing Checklist are applied here. We’re able to mark each task as complete, as well as see who completed which task.

Because of the checklist process, we’re learning more about our audience as a team. We’ve stayed on track with our email campaigns, content, measurement and ongoing education for continuous improvement. Our clients are benefiting from the expanded communication and collaboration.

You can do the same. Get started on your checklist.

Halloween is the start of the something great — a time to be someone else, the guilt-free indulgence of extra-yummy treats and fun, colorful decor. To honor this devilish day, I’ve updated this post by pulling together some old and a few new seasonal email campaigns that evoked emotion, enticing me to shop, create, bake and most importantly convert.

Hyde Park Jewelers

My absolute favorite campaign of all “Halloween” time was designed by our own Jason Meeker in collaboration with the digital marketing team at Hyde Park Jewelers. In this email campaign, the intricate jewelry of Stephen Webster is stunning and flies right off the page. The creative way Jason intertwined the spooky season with the unique characteristics of these beautiful pieces is perfect. Viewing this campaign, I become a fan of the Stephen Webster instantly, and am intrigued to shop.

PETCO

Being engaged came easily with a subject line of “Boo! Your October bonus offers are HERE!” and preheader of “Plus, a few Halloween safety tips for you & your pet!” Everyone likes a bonus — especially when it involves spoiling their pet. Being that my big baby, Messi, is a huge scaredy-cat when it turns dark outside and LOVES to counter surf to sniff out anything resembling food, the “Fall Do’s and Don’ts” were helpful. This cute and colorful campaign led to an online purchase of two 50 lb bags of premium dog food and enough snacks to fill a trick-or-treat bag for all the pups in the neighborhood!

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

Yummly #1

After viewing the email with the subject line “Easy spooky snacks 👻,” I’m tempted to throw a Halloween party even though my children are a wee-bit old and would refuse to attend. In all of their email campaigns, Yummly captures their audience with beautiful photography and creative real text vs text as an image, leading to the click through to get the recipe or search for something similar. You can get the recipes by accessing the email scope for either of the two campaigns below.

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

Yummly #2

The subject line “Pumpkin spice up your life 🍁” put me in the spirit to eat and bake. Like most, I enjoy everything pumpkin flavored, and these colorful photos make me think most of these recipes are healthy. Using Litmus, we’re able to capture the rendering of the desktop version (above) and the mobile version (below) for this clean email template used by Yummly.

VIEW THE EMAIL SCOPE

Happy Halloween. Enjoy the season and have fun! Try not to overeat candy, or if you’re like our team — drink too much pumpkin beer. Cheers!

Recently RootedELM sent a survey to our subscribers asking them a few questions. Each respondent received a $10 gift card for their time and sharing their information. The scenario walks through how to identify the subscribers that did not complete the survey to be able to follow up with a second email invitation to participate.

SCENARIO 2: UNENGAGED FOR MULTIPLE SENDS

Inactive subscribers skew your tracking results and cause harm to your deliverability relationship with inbox providers. If over a period and multiple sends, your subscriber has not opened or clicked within an email (or based on your defined criteria), it’s best for you to take action, by asking your subscriber to take action, with some form of a reengagement campaign series. For example, A&W Restaurants uses an annual survey and incentive to re-engage.

“Subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails in a long time represent a shrinking revenue opportunity and growing risk to your deliverability.”

– Chad White, Email Marketing Rules – Third Edition

When to send a re-engagement campaign depends on how frequent you send and your customer purchase lifecycle. Investing in a re-engagement program however, leads to answers. Whether you send an inquiry to ask questions about interest or an email campaign to test a new idea out on — you receive insight to improve upon. You learn more about what type of content is working, where you can enhance and where you’re missing the boat.

How close do you monitor your subscriber lists? Are you trying to re-engage your disengaged? RootedELM has developed multiple campaigns of this type and available to explore and discuss ideas with you for your program.

RESOURCES TO HELP YOU FLOURISH:

Campaign Monitor: Send More Relevant Emails with Additional Rules for Segments

Litmus: 3 Steps to Successful Subscriber Reengagement 

Content Marketing World is an educational event attended by the leading content marketers in the world. The keynote speakers are the best of the best and have the resumes to show for it, too. This year, I was most looking forward to hearing three speakers in particular because of what I’ve learned through their podcasts, online training and personal experience as a co-op member. Jay Acunzo, Robert Rose and Eric Hess with REI did not disappoint!

Attending conferences can be overwhelming and even daunting, but when you’re with 4,000 Content Marketers, everyone has an interesting story to tell, and there is an open, honest and friendly vibe. Because the information shared is vast, I took the advice of Joe Pulizzi, founder of CMI, and made a takeaway list from each specific session I attended, along with a to-do list of what I can accomplish quickly.  It also helped to tweet my thoughts on the sessions in real time. In case you weren’t able to follow along, I’ve captured some of my favorites below. I welcome and look forward to any questions you may have to explore.

A 3-minute read:

This week is Content Marketing World, and I am ecstatic! Why?

It started about 24 months ago. Dealing with changes to our relationship with Salesforce Marketing Cloud and client needs, I was frustrated. In talking with our audience, reading industry insight and just my own experience in the emails I was receiving, I became intrigued with Content Marketing.

I attended CMWorld 2016 and it made a lasting impact.

Since then I have (and recommend you access these resources too):

• Read or listened to nearly every book recommended and written by Content Marketing thought leaders Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose
• Completed — and am in the process of implementing — the CMI University Content Marketing Course with Robert Rose
• Read Content Chemistry and blog post by Andy Crestodina and have applied many of his recommendations to RootedELM
• Read The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
• Applied Email Marketing Rules by Chad White — a must for all email marketers
• Listened to about every podcast by Jay Acunzo with the Unthinkable podcast and Joel Book and Heike Young with the Marketing Cloudcast
• Completed a zillion Trailhead trails through Salesforce

Thanks to a long drive home from Colorado, I learned all about the jobs theory in the book Competing Against Luck by Clayton M. Christensen, and now I’m listening to how to be more transparent and authentic with my writing through Top of Mind by John Hall (LOVE Audible). And I have so much more to do!

A photo of the session I’m sitting in right now with @Robert_Rose

So why do I tell you this?

It’s because I’m ready! We’re ready. This post just recounts what I’ve done, but if I included what the rest of the team has been doing as well, this post would go on forever. My point is WE ARE READY! We are anxiously anticipating our next project; we are itching to help. To prove it, here’s an example of how we’ve taken all our resources and combined them to give you a practical email marketing checklist to implement in 120 days.

To get a few highlights from the conference, make sure you read my follow up post on Content Marketing World 2017.

RootedELM is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites

So you’re ready to expand your email marketing program, but not sure how to create all the content? Below, we offer four steps and five sources to get you thinking.

STEP 1

Segment your subscribers into your audience and your customers to draft at least one persona for each. Their needs for content are different.  A customer has had an experience with you. They have self-identified their needs. Therefore, you have knowledge of what products they would have an interest in to sell to. An audience, on the other hand, needs content other than the product or service. You need to build trust, nurture them. An audience anticipates an experience with you. Most likely you’ll have more than one persona for each, but designating at least one for your audience and one for your customer will be a good starting point in defining goals and curating content.

STEP 2

In addition to your overarching email marketing program goals, you need to set goals for each of your email campaigns. What do you want to happen for each email? For example, the central goal for our monthly newsletter called “From Your Email Horticulturists” is to have our audience click-through to the content we offer guiding them on email marketing best practices, how to’s and lessons with specific functionality within their email marketing tool.

STEP 3

Begin to compose your content for your email campaign(s) using the knowledge obtained and data collected through the five sources below. Keep in mind; it’s essential to test your email content and email design before you launch to your segmented audience.

STEP 4

Draw. Whether it’s in a notebook, on a program like Omnigraffle or even a scrap piece of paper, I find that drawing helps me visualize a subscribers journey. It guides me from where I am today to where I want to be. Best of all, it creates an original task list on where I need to focus.

5 Sources to Curate Content:

1. Their lifecycle – birthday, anniversaries, account renewal, changes to account detail. The goal is to recognize a personal event or behavior.

2. Your staff – on a continual basis, schedule time with all client-facing staff, including customer service and call-center departments. Listen and document questions, concerns, pain points and positive feedback that is presented by your customers for each product offered. Record timing as well – when did the question/concern, etc. arise? Was it at the beginning of the relationship with the product or service or after several years because of changes, etc. This will help you pinpoint what and when a gap in content should be addressed.

3. Feedback – send an ongoing customer questionnaire to look for trends in opinion, concerns and intent to move to a new product or the next step in their relationship with you. Ask for a customer testimony to use in future email campaigns or on your website while you’re at it! We use Survey Gizmo if you would like to test out an online service.

5. Industry trends – spy on your competition. What are they writing about?  Do you see this happening with your clients?

Personally, if I write to an individual, the content comes together much easier. It may take time, but building your email marketing program using content curated from such sources as mentioned above will not only increase the value of content leading to greater subscriber engagement but offer deeper insight into their minds for use with other channels.

If you are looking for examples of outstanding content, visit our Emails We Love category on this blog. Every other week, we feature the best content we’ve received in our very own inboxes to inspire others.

Let us know, what are you doing to curate content?

Welcome your subscribers again and again.

As marketers, we strive to meet our goals as well as achieve the highest engagement and conversion rates we can. On average, a welcome campaign produces 10% greater results than another type of email campaign.

Newly opted in subscribers are excited to hear from us and it’s our job to provide the information they are seeking. Extending that hospitality across multiple email campaigns bestows good customer experience and opens up two-way communication.

Why not reap the rewards a little longer? Use this infographic as a guide for your onboarding email campaigns to boost engagement even more. Our skilled team is available to answer questions, provide feedback and assist along the way.