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?

Sometimes the answer to one person’s question can help the next person and so on. Consider this a FAQ of email marketing. We’ll post actual questions from our customers, along with the expert solutions so you can tuck them away in case you run into the same issue later.

Issue: Font changing in email when it’s sent
ESP:  Campaign Monitor

Ok, so apparently for some of the templates in Campaign Monitor they’ve hardcoded fallback fonts to be changed from the settings section. So since the hardcoded fallback was serif for when Merriweather was chosen, changing to Helvetica in the text block wasn’t changing the font-stack except for adding Helvetica to the front of the code.

I fixed it by going to the settings for the template and changed the Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3 and Normal Text to Helvetica and it changed the font stacks accordingly. I’ve also alerted Campaign Monitor to the issue with this template (and potentially others as well).

In the email marketing world, there is nothing greater than when an email campaign hits the sweet spot. As a consumer of Lilly Pulitzer clothing, I am aware that they hold a massive final sale in July. What I wasn’t aware of is they do the same thing in January! Thanks to a perfectly executed email campaign, now I do. Over three days I received eight unifying emails as part of the same “After Party Sale” campaign which caused me to spend a small fortune. Because Lilly only goes on sale twice a year, when you have two teenage girls that love their Lilly…you stock up!

The first email came in the night before the “After Party Sale” (below left). Somehow I missed it but the second email (below right) with the subject line: Just released sale styles have landed! sure caught my attention.  I did just what the email said to do: “Freak Out!” After a brief wait in the online line for my turn to shop –  I was glued to lillypulitzer.com for the next hour (well maybe a little more), but luckily it was toward the end of the day! I sent my oldest daughter a text to call me immediately when she was free. She was in her study hour and wanted to know what was so urgent; My reply was “the Lilly sale is going on now!”  She had the same response I did and headed to the Lilly website, sending me her favorite choices. Needless to say, her friends just rolled their eyes at her when she told them what was going on. By now, my shopping cart was full of beautiful dresses for upcoming formals, spring break and graduation and I had to make a decision fast on what I was going to purchase. I had already lost out on two perfect dresses as they were selling fast!  Now do you understand the havoc?  Back to email marketing.

After feeling success with combing the Lilly website, I made my purchase. My girls were excited and so was I because this time, I was able to purchase a few items for myself. The excitement was contagious, and during a project call, I informed Christina Noll of the sale and she also jumped right on the website and was able to purchase a few items as well. I went to tweet my findings and discovered others were in a frenzy just like myself. An entire community of Lilly aficionados were on a mission to get these great deals! This led to me following @LillyPulitzer now on Twitter and Facebook, so I could be even more a part of this community.  I even found a resale community on Facebook to sell our gently used items now.

But here’s where the story gets juicier. That evening just before nine, I received the email below (on the left) with the subject line: What?! New styles added to SALE, which caused me to go back and make another purchase! Twelve hours later another email came with the subject line: Just dropped: new to SALE with even more sale items added to the website. Then the countdown began two hours later with: Don’t miss out! Sale ends soon.

Lilly had done it right. Each of the emails had animation, rotating photos of the new items that had been added (shown below) to peak my interest even more. The voice and tone used in the copy matched just what I was saying to myself in my head. My attention span was in their hands for two days now. I had emailed, tweeted and posted the sale to my friends and colleagues. I had spread the word and so had others. The campaign was a huge success.

The next morning Lilly sent one last email just in case I wasn’t done shopping. This was sent just before 11 am with the subject line: Don’t miss out! Sale ends soon…And finally the following evening, I received this animated Thank You email with photos of other shoppers showing their excitement.  This had the best subject line yet to sum up the experience: What. A. Wild. Ride.

When my purchases did arrive in the Lilly signature pink palm packages, I opened to find a note saying “You Have the Best Taste. You Ordered….”

I received my final email asking to review one of my purchases. This is a campaign that is all too often missed by companies, but probably one of the most important and easy ways to obtain feedback directly from your customer. Well done Lilly Pulitzer! I’ll see you in July.

If you’ve been following RootedELM on Facebook, Twitter or received our email newsletter, you’ve probably noticed our Email Design Tips each Tuesday, and our Content Marketing Tips each Thursday. After talking to our audience, we discovered the bite-size information is just what they needed to keep them up to speed on the latest best practices, but give them the option to take a deeper dive through a supporting blog post.

Although these may look like they are crafted by a graphic design expert, believe it or not, they are so easy to make that even the graphically challenged, like myself, can make clean, eye-catching graphic in no time at all! The trick is using an app like Canva to create your masterpieces.

We started using Canva to create the banners for our blog posts, but quickly branched out to using them for social media posts and even proposals. I admit to being slightly intimidated the first time, but I quickly learned how easy and intuitive the process is, and can now make a image for social media posts in less than 15 minutes. No joke!

Here’s how it works:

• Sign up for a Canva account. There are free and paid versions. We chose a modest paid subscription to Canva for Work that allows us to share our designs as a team and upload our own logos for use.

• At the top you can choose to create whatever you need: a poster, blog graphic, presentation, etc. For social media posts choose, “social media.”

• On the left hand side, you have options for changing the layout, background, text and adding additional elements. Start by choosing one of the free or low cost layouts. I almost always find a free layout I like for my project.

• Next, click on the supplied text boxes and simply type in your own message. You can also delete the text boxes you don’t want or add your own new ones. At the top of your project, you’ll see pull down options where you can change the font, size and even line spacing of your text.

• Using the tabs to your left, you can also add elements including shapes, photos and graphics. You can use the toolbar at the top of your project to change the colors of the background and any elements you apply.

• When you are happy with your design, simply save and download as a jpg, png or pdf file. You can also share your design with others via email by clicking the share button at the top. I do this after every creation so I can gather feedback from my team members before I post to social media.

Viola! Just like that you’ve created an eye-catching graphic that you can use on all your social media channels.

Remember, when you post to social media, use this order:
content + link to resource/blog + #hashtag + graphic

Have questions? Give us a call! We consider ourselves old pros at this point (wink, wink) and we’d be happy to walk you through your first design. You can also learn more here.

Some of the best creative comes out during the holidays. In the spirit of the season, our team has pulled together a few emails we’ve admired over the past few weeks.

Below – Nordstrom Rack: The “Love, Nordstrom” campaign theme reminds me of warm feelings of a friendly Christmas Card. Each of their email campaigns have been colorful, eye-catching with clear call to action buttons. The theme is extended throughout the website for a cohesive online shopping experience.

Below – JCrew: When I opened this one morning it immediately drew me in because it made me feel like I was getting an exclusive scoop on a deal. The enticing graphic design featuring the bold bird kept this email simple, yet effective in conveying the message.

Below – Target: As a content writer, I’m drawn to any kind of clever play on words in the subject line.  This one from Target caught my eye, and even though I was not in the market for family pajamas, convinced me to click open. Subject Line: Our 50% off pajama sale ends in one sleep.

Below –  MOO: Moo is one of our favorite brands to follow. The content in this email is oh so original and let’s say spicy! The email design is clean, crisp and functional.

Well….that’s a wrap! Which one was your favorite? Our eyes will stay peeled for even more exceptional campaigns. Please send us any good, or even bad campaigns, that cross your inbox.

Happy Holidays!

A visual image can tell a greater tale than looking at a variety of spreadsheets or paragraphs of text. In the case of email marketing, using a dashboard is a good way to notice trends of key performance indicators (KPI’s) such as subscriber growth, engagement and conversion. Whether it’s growth or decline, pulling your data into a visual can save time in digging for answers or finding a quick solution.

Pulling the data into a dashboard can be automated or done manually.  Klipfolio, like many dashboard software providers, has a multitude of integration capabilities like the two shown below for Campaign Monitor and Google Analytics. Using SFTP, we’re able to import an automated report from the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. However there are times when a manual import of a data source must take place to complete the story. Refreshing the dashboard depends on the integration of the data source. Each dashboard is interactive, allowing you to hover over for greater detail, drill down or access the raw data source for more insight. Sharing with your fellow team members is easy with a link or PDF or image downloads.

The downfall of a dashboard is that you risk becoming complacent. If you get used to the history, then you may not explore the full story. A dashboard is more than a reporting tool to monitor performance. By adding valuable KPI’s from a single data source or multiple sources, you can build the visualization Klips needed to build a stronger and better email marketing program.

To answer questions or explore dashboard capabilities for your email marketing program, please reach out to Lisa@rootedelm.com.