Lead Consultant - EMEA & APAC
31/3/2021
Email marketing can be a stressful business. There’s lots to remember and lots to make sure you’re getting right – good content, responsive layout, clean data etc. But when done well, email marketing can be an exceptionally valuable tool for businesses.
One of the reasons marketers find email marketing stressful is because they’re not confident in using Marketo, or aren’t making use of all the clever tools which help to improve campaigns and make life easier.
We want to help all Marketo users get the very most from the software and feel confident in doing so. Here are eight tips on how to improve your campaigns in Marketo to make email marketing less stressful and more effective…
1.Tighten your templates
We’re the first to admit that while marketing automation platforms are fantastic, the email campaign templates they offer are usually no good (and that’s being very polite!).
Your email campaign won’t have the impact you want if it looks cluttered, dated or inconsistent with your branding, even if the actual content and subject line are top notch.
90% of the Marketo templates we review are flawed – you and your team could be wasting lots of time hacking at code and be missing out on conversions due to rubbish templates.
By investing in some properly built, custom email templates which are designed to meet your objectives and use cases, you can ensure your campaigns look right every time.
Custom Marketo email templates is something we can help with. We make sure all of your emails are on brand and look great across all devices with our easy-to-format and bug-free templates.
Investing in bespoke templates is cost effective too, as you can use them as many times as you like. The cost-per-email campaign will be minimal.
2.Prioritise personalisation
Research has found that calls to action that are personalised convert 202% better than default calls to action, so making use of Marketo tokens to personalise your emails should be a priority.
Personalisation does what the name implies – it makes emails more personal and more relevant. This can go a long way with nurturing your leads and can help your emails feel more genuine.
Marketo tokens make it quick and easy to add personalised fields to your email marketing campaigns – once you’ve created them, it’s a case of a few clicks.
And it doesn’t just have to just mean inserting the personalised name field, referencing the specific products or services your customers last purchased or a piece of content they interacted with, can make your email feel like it was written just for them.
3.Solidify your segments
Segments make creating and sending targeted email campaigns simple and straightforward.
Hubspot found that “Marketers who use segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue” – we think this is because segmented campaigns make sending relevant email campaigns far easier.
Segments are simply groups of contacts who share demographic or behavioural factors. It’s better to have one master email list with segments rather than to create separate lists for groups of contacts who share factors, as you risk data duplication with multiple lists.
Plus, if you’re sending the same email to your entire list of contacts, this suggests that your campaigns are not relevant enough.
Having organised segments makes using dynamic content to customise your email campaigns easy – more on this later!
4.Spruce up your subject lines
Having an effective and persuasive subject line is paramount – if you fail at this first hurdle, the chances are that the email campaign that you spent valuable time on will go straight in the trash.
As a rule of thumb, subject lines should be short, snappy, and stick to one theme. For example, a subject line can encourage urgency, be funny or mysterious – but it can’t be all three!
Try experimenting with different styles of subject lines – you could also try adding emojis and see if it has an effect on open rates.
Personalisation can come in very useful here too, as many find that it increases open rates.
5.Make time for A/B testing
This is how you’ll test your different subject lines, and other aspects of your emails for that matter, such as the content and time of sending.
Testing and analysing results is crucial if you want to create more effective campaigns and get clarity on what works – all this will lessen email marketing stress levels!
Without testing, you could be sending ineffective, poorly performing emails and be literally throwing away your time. And remember, if your contacts don’t like your emails, they may well mark them as spam.
A/B testing in Marketo is simple to do and can be set up in a few easy steps – simply create email A and email B, decide on which segments to send to, and how you will decide the winner of the test.
Once your test is completed, you’ll automatically receive a report which compares the results of each email. Metrics such as deliverability, clicks and unsubscribers will be available – and you can then use this data to improve your email marketing campaigns.
6.Deploy some dynamic content
Dynamic content makes your email campaigns more relevant and tailored to each recipient, without having to create multiple emails.
In a nutshell – it’s a block of content that changes depending on which segment is viewing the email. Once you’ve set up your segments, adding in dynamic content is very easy.
Earlier we said you shouldn’t be sending emails to your whole list, but dynamic content is the exception to this, as it allows you to send relevant and tailored emails to all of your contacts in one go.
7.Take advantage of triggered emails
Triggered emails are emails which are sent to a lead when their behaviour triggers them – for example, when someone signs up to an email list, they will be automatically sent a welcome email.
Setting up triggered emails can be a big time saver in the long run, and also help your lead nurturing process. Triggered emails ensure that your leads are being sent relevant, timely email campaigns.
In Marketo, you can create smart campaigns which will trigger certain emails to be sent – it’s all about mapping out the customer’s journey to ensure they receive the right emails at the right times.
You can go back and view the activity log to analyse the steps a customer went on within a smart campaign – which is a great tool for understanding the journey of your customers. This knowledge is invaluable for effective lead nurturing and creating email campaigns with good ROI.
8.Lift your landing pages
So your lead has opened your email campaign, and clicked on the link – great! But the journey doesn’t end there.
You want the prospect to be taking action when they arrive at their next destination – which is probably to a landing page. Well designed landing pages with persuasive language and clear calls to action are vital for making conversions happen – without these elements you are risking lost revenue.
But it’s not only bad design and lacklustre calls to action that cause leads to lose interest – broken links and glitchy landing pages do too. These mistakes happen when marketers hack away at code without the right knowledge.
If spending time and money on a coding course isn’t for you (and we imagine that most busy marketers don’t have the capacity for that!), this can be solved by custom Marketo templates that allow you to create slick pages with zero mistakes in a matter of minutes.
We hope these tips have been useful!
Marketo has lots of tools which can drastically improve your email marketing efforts, and have a positive impact on other aspects of your marketing too, such as lead nurturing.
Before you start thinking about that however, it’s vital that you crack your email campaign and landing page templates if you haven’t already. Poorly designed or broken templates will turn off your customers, and trying to sort them yourself can be a huge drain on time.
Custom Marketo email and landing page templates are a smart investment that will save you stress and time, and increase the effectiveness of your campaigns.
