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!

Anyone can create and send an email marketing campaign but is it the right email to send? Email marketing strategist look beyond that single campaign, we look beyond that single journey. We take into account the entire lifecycle for your audience. We help you find the forest for the trees.

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.

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.

Issue 9
July 20, 2017

With all the emails that end up in your inbox, there are always a few that stand out. Here at RootedELM, we’re email geeks — we admit it. Whether it’s outstanding content, design or development, when we see it, we want to share it. Watch for our insight here, direct from our own inboxes, and use it to inspire your next campaign.

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.