If you experience both pain and relief when reading the title of this post, you’re in the right place.
As marketers, there’s a story that we know all too well. It starts with a meticulously planned email campaign, a carefully selected group of recipients, and a beloved email template to deliver your content exactly as you intended.
Every holiday season, it’s like the floodgates burst open: All of a sudden, there are holiday marketing campaigns everywhere. Every business is trying to cash in on the spending frenzy with emails, social media posts, television advertisements, and other related efforts.
While these campaigns can sometimes seem out of control, many brands out there actually do their holiday marketing very, very well.
This post originally appeared on HubSpot’s Sales Blog. To read more content like this, subscribe to Sales.
Business emails: Easy to send, difficult to perfect.
Professionals receive an average of 88 business-related emails a day, according to the Radicati Group’s 2015 Email Statistics Report. So how are you supposed to stand out?
A few weeks ago, we deliberately unsubscribed 250,000 people from HubSpot’s Marketing Blog — people who had opted in to receive emails about new content we published on the blog. This subscriber purge brought our total subscriber count from 550,000 down to 300,000.
We’re crazy, right? We must be crazy. We’re the same people who just recently blogged about how important growing subscribers is to increasing blog traffic. What gives?
For email marketers, the inbox is a battlefield.
Chances are, the folks on your email lists are receiving promotional emails not just from you, but from a lot of different businesses. Whether they open your emails depends on a lot of things, including your subject line, how well they liked your past emails, and so on.
Like a tree falling in the woods, if you launch a product without spreading the word … will anyone use it? Will anyone even want it?
Probably not. Whether you’re launching something huge, something small, or you’re updating a current offering, you’ll want to start your preparation well in advance of the launch date. This includes nailing down your positioning and messaging, sharing that with key teams and stakeholders, listing out all the launch activities, creating assets and content, prepping everyone involved in the launch, and so on.
Most people have a love-hate relationship with their email inbox. On the one hand, email can be exciting — whether you’re making progress with a client, replacing a meeting with a (much more efficient) email thread, or receiving an invitation to a fun social gathering.
On the other hand, though, email can be overwhelming — especially if you lose control.
This post originally appeared on HubSpot’s Sales Blog. To read more content like this, subscribe to Sales.
We’ve finally found an effective email strategy. Our open and clickthrough rates are optimized — or so we thought.
Have you ever seen a particularly genius marketing campaign and thought to yourself, “Wow, why didn’t I think of that?”
When Oreo shipped that timely Super Bowl blackout tweet, you could practically hear the collective sigh of envious marketers everywhere. Other great marketing campaigns — like Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign or Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” — garnered similar reactions.
If you’re anything like most people, you can probably rattle off 100 different things you’d rather do than dig through your inbox.
It starts to feel like a chore, because what’s in there isn’t very interesting. In fact, only 21% of consumers reported that they’ve received a memorable promotional email in the past two months, according to a study by Litmus.
If you had to guess, how many email newsletters do you think you’re subscribed to? Ten? Twenty? Fifty?
To be honest, I’ve lost count … and I know I’m not alone.
Email marketers have a lot to compete with in their subscribers’ inboxes.
As marketers, we typically send and receive hundreds of emails a week. Occasionally, those emails are sent to people we don’t really know that well — or don’t know at all.
This is cold outreach, and, for better or for worse, it has its purpose.
Sometimes, in order to further our marketing campaigns, it’s helpful to send a few cold emails.
This post originally appeared on HubSpot’s Agency Post. To read more content like this, subscribe to Agency Post.
Marketers love email marketing. And marketers love Instagram. But very rarely do they bring these two loves together: Curalate found that only 14% of marketers are using social media images in their email marketing efforts, and marketers leverage Instagram content less than 3% of the time.
When was the last time you received a promotional email that made you smile, laugh, or really think? When was the last time you liked one so much that you forwarded it to a colleague, friend, or family member?
For most of us, this happens very rarely. Most consumers say the promotional emails they receive are forgettable — and definitely not worth passing on to others.
