How Can You Uplevel Your Email Marketing?

How Can You Uplevel Your Email Marketing?

I’ve spent the last 20 years as a hands-on, strategic and tactical partner to small and mid-size regional, national and internal brands that want to take their marketing to the next level. As a certified Mailchimp Pro Partner and a frequent speaker on the topic of email marketing and digital strategy at industry events, I get a lot of questions and want to share my answers to the ones I hear most often.

How often should you send an email? Is there a recommended frequency or cadence that you’ve found works best?

For an email program to be effective, your subscribers need to remember who you are and find your information relevant. Whether you have a B2B or B2C audience, the minimum number of campaigns to leverage brand recognition and relevance is once per month. As some of your audience is likely to miss some of those campaigns, anything less will render you irrelevant in just a few months. 

From there, the frequency really depends on the relevance of your messaging and the responsiveness of your list. Journalistic emails and ecommerce coupons are sent daily by industry leaders, industry news and special offers can happen weekly… but some industries and lists will not tolerate more than twice per month before the unsubscribe rate starts to climb. At the end of the day, the frequency and cadence depend on what your audience will tolerate. The best way to know this is to TEST your list, and when possible, allow your subscribers to select their preferences for subscriptions, so you reach them as often as they want to hear from you.
 

Starting from zero, how do you acquire your first 100 subscribers?

Whether your organization is reaching a professional, B2B or a consumer audience, most leaders can reach into their lists of contacts to find at least a few dozen people who would be interested subscribers, even if they aren’t ready or qualified to use any products or services. Those initial subscribers are great seeds, who can help to spread the word of your email program (if you ask). Combined with tactics like integrated website popup forms, social media outreach and general business development work (e.g. professional networking), the first 100 subscribers usually happens quickly. The challenge for most lies in list maintenance and continued growth. List attrition (loss of list members) is normal and natural, but it takes the right program with the right content to continue to grow the subscriber base past that first 100 names.

Lastly…

How can I improve my email marketing? 

CHIMPOSIUM. Chimposium is the very first global Mailchimp conference focused solely on Mailchimp! Created by Mailchimp power users for Mailchimp users, with topics ranging from personalization and segmentation, deliverability, to the future of email marketing, and everything in between, this two day event will be filled with exciting information. And best of all it will be delivered by hands-on experts ready to give you the inside track to dominate with Mailchimp.

I’m so excited to be speaking at this event and sharing my knowledge alongside so many of my Mailchimp Pro colleagues. I know each and every one of these speakers personally and can attest to their skills in both the Mailchimp platform and email marketing in general. Each of them are expert Mailchimp users AND leaders, who know the system inside and out. I can’t wait to hear what they have to share and I hope you’ll join us for what is sure to be a very informative and entertaining event.

You can register for Chimposium here.

MaryAnn Pfeiffer

Principal

108 Degrees Digital Marketing