Email marketing: still the highest ROI marketing tactic
Email marketing: still the highest ROI marketing tactic
Even though many of us receive hundreds of emails a day competing for our attention, email remains one of the most effective and highest ROI marketing tactics. It’s a cost-effective means to communicate with your customers and promote your products and services to achieve your business goals. According to VentureBeat, for every $1 spent, email marketing generates $38 in ROI; but email marketing continues to evolve, and it’s important that you evaluate your email program at least once a year.
Principles of a successful email strategy
1. Better data delivers better results.
List quality is paramount. If you haven’t gone through your database in a while, now is the time for a cleanup. A staggering 25-33 percent of email addresses become outdated every year according to Kissmetrics. And, with more stringent laws around privacy requirements, you can’t afford to email people who have opted out. Non-compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act can cost up to $43,280 for each separate email in violation.
As part of this audit, identify total counts at the start and end of clean up as a means of measuring success. Merge duplicate contacts within your database using their email address and confirm you have express opt-ins for all contacts. Then, contact everyone in your database to record hard and soft bounces as well as opt-outs. Hard bounces should be removed from active contact, while soft bounces should be monitored and archived after a certain number. Once you’ve cleaned up your database, you will likely see immediate improvement in opens and clicks.
2. Slow and steady wins the race.
What information do you need about your customers and prospects? Evaluate your landing pages and form fields to ensure you’re only asking for information that you need and can use to personalize your communication. Limit form fields to increase conversions — forms with just three fields convert at 25 percent whereas forms with six fields convert at an average of 15 percent. Maximize the use of dropdowns for easier list making. Most marketing automation technology includes progressive profiling to capture the right information at the right time. Progressive profiling uses dynamic forms to capture tidbits of info about your leads over time, helping boost conversions while building more valuable lead intel over time.
3. Segmentation leads to greater personalization.
Segmentation is a way to group your customers and prospects into smaller segments based on geographic, demographic, behavioral, or psychographic characteristics so that you can better personalize or target your messages to their interests, needs, or preferences. If you haven’t segmented your email campaigns, start with the most basic segmentation based on the data you already have, then begin collecting more specific information over time. Segmented campaigns perform much higher than non-segmented campaigns with 10.64 percent more unique opens and over 100 percent more clicks according to MailChimp.
4. Content is king when it comes to email marketing ROI.
Create content that helps you build relationships with customers and prospects and delivers maximum value over time. Invite contacts to tell you a little more about their interests and needs, then personalize emails to get stronger conversions. Personalized subject lines are 26 percent more likely to be opened according to Experian. Optimize the preview text, keep the main message and call-to-action close to the top, and be sure to include an email signature. Hubspot analyzed 330,000 CTAs over six months in 2019 and discovered that personalized CTAs brought 202 percent better conversion than default options.
5. Test and optimize.
It’s critical to track meaningful metrics to optimize your email campaigns. The most common stats to measure are unique open and click rates, soft and hard bounce rates, as well as unsubscribe and bounce rates. Compare your metrics to previous emails and against average rates in your industry. Continue to test variables, such as subject lines and timing of sends, to refine your efforts. Create custom URLs for your email campaign so you can monitor effectiveness. At minimum, you should run 24-hour, 7-day, and monthly reports for each email.
Need to rev up your email campaigns?
Recruiting during a pandemic: campaign strategies that work
Recruiting during a pandemic: campaign strategies that work
SITUATION
Recruitment marketing can be challenging. Even before COVID-19 struck, healthcare organizations across the country were competing for talent due to a shortage of healthcare workers; this was especially true for nurses. Then with early exposure to coronavirus, many healthcare workers had to be quarantined—a dire situation had turned desperate. There was a sudden increase in the need for critical care nurses; respiratory therapists shot to the top of the list of roles needed to operate ventilators; echo, MRI, and CT technologists were needed to diagnose cases; and the hospitals that were potential hot beds for infection needed environmental services to ensure every room was sterilized. As the nation faced infection spikes, healthcare organizations had to further staff up to ensure patients are getting the care and treatment they need.
The Swedish Medical Center Talent Acquisition team worked with us to launch a campaign to help with its recruitment efforts around critical talent deficits.
APPROACH
To reach the greatest possible audience during this critical time, GA Creative devised a strategy to employ streaming video and radio, digital display, social, and search advertising to drive candidates to a landing page optimized to capture maximum value—job seekers ready to apply today and those who could be nurtured over time.
CREATIVE
Leveraging the organization’s “Health for good” branding, we pivoted the message for recruitment efforts, focusing on how frontline caregivers can join Swedish to deliver high quality care to the community. Messages reassured candidates that a safe hiring experience and work environment is a top priority.
Working together with the Recruit Rooster development team, we updated the Swedish jobs website and introduced campaign landing pages geared toward three campaign audience segments.
RESULTS
Together with our digital media partner, Goodway Group, we launched the campaign with strong early results including:
- A higher number of job applications
- Many people joining the Talent Network for nurture efforts
- A low cost per action
We will continue to optimize the campaign creative and digital channels to achieve the greatest results.
Need to fill the top of the funnel? We develop campaigns that attract leads.
Contact us today.
Free, print-at-home signs supporting Black Lives Matter
Free, print-at-home signs supporting Black Lives Matter
At GA Creative, we strongly believe that Black Lives Matter. That’s why we created these free, downloadable, print-at-home Black Lives Matter signs. This is one small way we can support the necessary and overdue movement to eradicate racism in our country.
What does innovation look like? Branding a global organization
What does innovation look like? Branding a global organization
Innovation Outreach is a decade-old member organization made up of dozens of global Fortune 500 companies who take a cross-industry approach to catalyzing cutting-edge technological innovations. The group comes together twice a year at innovation summits to discuss new ideas and digitally transform the way business is done. With ambitious plans to increase the collective’s value and give more back to members, Innovation Outreach sought our help to create a more contemporary brand for this brain trust, including messaging and positioning, a logo, and a website featuring public-facing pages as well as pages accessible only to members.
How we launched a new brand and website—in just 4 months!
In a kick-off meeting, we completed the Creative Brief, looking at different websites for inspiration and creating the site map for the public and private pages of the website.
We presented three creative directions to choose from—in the form of logo, color palette, and web page—all mapping back to the Creative Brief.
After a couple rounds of creative refinements, it was time to turn it over to our friends, and development partners, Smooth Fusion, who approach every development challenge with a can-do attitude. The parallaxing technique used on the website turned out just the way we envisioned it, with the background images moving on the screen more slowly than foreground images to creates an illusion of depth in a 2D scene.
Innovation Outreach is an amazing team of professionals who tackle the toughest technical problems both in the cloud and on the edge. Our team is delighted to see their brand come to life and excited to continue helping Innovation Outreach deliver more engaging experiences and opportunities for members to connect, share ideas, and innovate.