How to Get More Value from Your Email Marketing Tech
Technology's essential to content marketing, but the complexity can leave you struggling to keep pace with innovation.
August 28, 2019
By Jodi Harris
Editor’s Note: To learn more about the latest technology solutions that can boost your content marketing success, join us at Content Marketing World Conference and Expo, Sept. 3-6.
Email may be an old dog in digital marketing channels, but it continually delivers new tech-driven tricks to enhance engagement and deliver content and demand-gen campaigns efficiently.
Of course, email marketing’s robust and sophisticated solutions also have led to a lag between marketers’ eagerness to put the tech innovation in play and their effective use of the tools.
I put an email marketing thought leader in the hot seat, asking about what marketers want most from the technology, how they can get it, and trends they should know.
Meet the Expert
CMGroup Global’s Shane Phair
Shane Phair, chief marketing officer, CMGroup Global, which oversees three email marketing platforms – Campaign Monitor, Delivra, and Emma
Background: Experience in marketing, sales, demand generation and enterprise integration
Podcast playlist: Call to Action by Unbounce; Stuff You Should Know by HowStuffWorks; UnPodcast by UnMarketing (sponsored by Emma)
On what every email marketer wants from email marketing
Shane: What we’re hearing about the most is this quest for actionable insights and data. It seems that we all want all the data for all our audience all the time.
Email marketing can be instrumental in this quest, as the data derived from it is incredibly valuable when understanding your audience or augmenting customer profiles. You can see what drives engagement with your audience, what channels are more effective for which group of customers, and then maximize your communication based on those segments, using email to round out their experiences elsewhere.
On Testing for Insights
Shane: It’s imperative to know who your subscribers are and where they’re coming from. Businesses can no longer send one-size-fits-all campaigns. Having a firm grasp on your subscriber and their journey will help set the foundation for all of your email marketing. Furthermore, it sets you up for successfully creating relevant and targeted automated campaigns – such as welcome emails, engagement, or lead nurture campaigns – and aiding with retention, just to name a few important goals.
One way to really home in on understanding your audience is content testing. This tactic, combined with tracking a subscriber’s engagement history, can be instrumental in informing what you send, how you design your content, and how you personalize each email. When your brand tells compelling stories through targeted and relevant content, you’re able to cultivate an active audience in the inbox. Remember, you’ll always want to test and iterate on different approaches in order to truly leverage what you know about your subscribers’ interests to surface the right hierarchy of content.
On Putting Audience Insights to Work
Shane: Personalization in its most basic form is simply adding in a subscriber’s first name to the subject line or within the email copy. While this can be an effective tactic, we strongly believe that it shouldn’t be your only type of personalization. You should look at every aspect of an email.
You can create content, imagery, and even CTAs