The kids are back in school, and teacher Erica is here to help you get ALL A’s!
Today we kick start a three-part Back To School Series where you’ll Get Schooled on email marketing foundations, understand the scorecard for A+ email marketing performance, and use your own Academic Planner to win every quarter… or semester…
Keep reading for the A to Z’s of email marketing.
Class is in session!
Email Marketers tend to speak a unique language loaded with technical terminology and acronyms that, unless explained, can mystify even the most stellar student of the game. So today, we’re going to teach you the ABC’s of email marketing terminology.
A is for Authentication
Email authentication is a process used to verify the legitimacy and integrity of an email message. It establishes trust between senders and recipients by ensuring your identity is verified.
Email authentication relies on several methods and standards, including the following: Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) and Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI).
B is for Bounce Rate
An email’s bounce rate is the percentage of email addresses in your subscriber list that didn’t receive your message because it was returned by a recipient mail server. Your goal is to keep your bounce rate under 2% – or only 2 bounces for every 100 emails sent to.
C is for Call To Action
In email marketing, the Call to Action is often displayed as a button and is the one action you want your subscriber to take because they received your email campaign. To make the BEST CTAs, consider these questions:
- What do I want a subscriber to do?
- How will they know what to do?
- Why should they do it?
D is for Dynamic content
Dynamic content in email marketing describes any email content that changes based on the subscribers’ data, preferences, and behaviors. So, you’d send out a marketing email to your entire database, but certain content modules within that email would be dynamic, changing based on a characteristic you determine.
E is for ESP
An ESP (email service provider) is a service that enables marketers to send email marketing campaigns to a list of users (subscribers).
Subscribers join these lists by opting in to receive marketing messages. These are your MailChimps, your Klaviyos, your Constant Contacts and more.
F is for Frequency
As in, how often you send marketing emails to your subscribers. At the Email Mavens, we believe that anything less than a monthly touch is going to hurt overall engagement and performance. You find your ideal frequency based on email marketing program goals, your list engagement in general, and through testing and segmentation!
G is for Global Suppression List
A global suppression list (GSL) is a list of email addresses and domains that you don’t want to send emails to. The list includes known bad email addresses, such as those that don’t exist, are spam traps, or are role addresses. It also includes domains that don’t exist or that you don’t want to receive messages from.
H is for HTML
HTML stands for hyper text markup language, which is a type of email that allows you to customize your design and format more so than you can with a standard plain text email.
I is for IP Warming
IP warming is a process that involves gradually increasing the number of emails sent from a new or unused IP address over a set period of time. The goal is to establish a good reputation with internet service providers (ISPs) as a legitimate email sender and to build trust with users.
J is for Journey
It can also be called a flow or an automation or a workflow. This is a series of emails that are triggered based on a customer’s actions or information and that nurture the subscriber to take a desired action. You can set up journeys that last a few emails or a few months, it’s all up to your creativity, your email marketing goals, and the customer data you have access to!
K is for KPI – Key Performance Indicators!
These are the metrics that matter for your winery when tracking email marketing success, and include things like open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, conversions, bounces, spam complaints, and more.
L is for Lead
The average email list churns at 20-30% every year, so you need to constantly add NEW subscribers, or leads, to your list on a regular basis to at minimum outpace that churn.
M is for Map
A customer Journey Map to be precise. Do you have one?
It’s a visual representation of your customer’s potential engagements with your business on their way from being a LEAD to being an ADVOCATE, and we like to really dig into it from a digital perspective as part of our work with our one-on-one clients.
N is for Nurture
Nurture a communication strategy designed to place content in front of prospective buyers at various points in a customer’s journey. The key to successful nurture marketing is presenting important information that helps a prospective customer take action or helps retain a new customer before they ask for it.
O is for Omni-channel
A customer-centric strategy that combines multiple marketing channels to create a consistent experience across all of the touchpoints. This includes traditional and digital channels, such as websites, apps, social media, and email, as well as physical experiences like your tasting room or on and offsite events.
P is for Personalization
A strategy that uses data to target and retarget leads with a brand message that speaks directly to specific customers’ interests, demographics, and buying behavior. With a personalized marketing strategy, your customers should feel like the brand message was made just for them.
Q is for Query
A query is a search that pulls in real time customers who match a series of criteria you define. These can then be saved as dynamic segments for constant remarketing and better nurturing, or can give you a snapshot of what currently exists on your database.
R is for Responsive Email
Responsive email’s are those that automatically adjust their layout and design to fit the screen size of a subscriber’s device. This allows the email to look good and be readable on all devices, including desktops, tablets, and mobile phones. Responsive emails eliminate the need for unnecessary scrolling or resizing, and provide a better user experience.
As an FYI – most image-only emails are NOT responsive. Just a heads-up.
S is for Segmentation
Segmentation a technique that involves dividing an email list into smaller groups based on shared traits. This allows marketers to tailor their content to each segment, which can lead to increased engagement rates, better conversion rates, and decreased unsubscribe rates.
T is for Test
As in… send yourself a TEST of every email you create before you send! The Email Mavens have an extensive QC checklist all campaigns need to pass before we’ll schedule a campaign. But at a minimum you’re ensuring the email doesn’t have errors like typos or broken links, that it functions well on multiple devices, and that your customers can easily take any actions your campaign is intended to inspire!
U is for Unsubscribe
The action a user takes to opt-out of getting any more emails is called unsubscribing.
And your unsubscribe rate is an indicator of a disconnect between what your business is sending and what your customer expects or wants to receive. You want to aim to keep your unsubscribe rate under 5%.
V is for Verification
Verification is a process that helps verify if there is an actual user on the receiving end of the email address. Sending an activation link/code to an email address, which the end user should activate from their inbox.
W is for WIIFM
What’s in it for me?
The most important question your email campaigns should answer for your customers so they’re inspired to take action. If your email doesn’t clearly help a customer understand what you want them to do and WIIFM, you’re missing out on a lot of opportunity to delight your subscribers and to grow your email generated revenue as well.
X is for X-amine your performance
Okay, sorry, X is a hard one. But if you don’t have a process to regularly examine your email campaign performance, to implement fixes for anything that is underperforming and to double down on what’s working, then your email marketing performance could languish in mediocrity. Nobody wants to get a B- email campaign. X-amine your performance!
Y is for YTD (year to date)
At Email Mavens, we recommend our students set yearly targets for ecommerce and track performance towards that goal. If you are trending upward YTD, you can ease back on your cadence, aka send fewer emails or send them to more targeted audiences. And if you’re underperformance YTD against your goal, you can pull out some gap-closers or open up a campaign to a new targeted segment in order to get you back on track.
Z is for Zip code
(a handy data point to have if you want to market based on location)
And frankly, we’re becoming increasingly convinced that wineries should make an effort to get this data point for their new subscribers especially via the web, then use it to target email campaigns that are dedicated to drive tasting room traffic vs. drive ecommerce performance.
Too many online sales campaigns from wineries in someone’s backyard and they are likely to get annoyed. Too many ‘come to bingo tonight’ emails from wineries far away and your subscribers are likely to unsubscribe.
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There you have it. WHEW!
Now listen, there’s no test on this later, no need to cram or pull an all-nighter to study. Just be aware of these terms and if anything you learned today was new or inspired you to try a different strategy, be sure to share your insights with us by emailing Erica at erica@emailmavens.com. She loves to read your wins!
We are on a mission to help every winery send marketing emails that sell that don’t suck, so bring a friend to class! Share the Email Mavens YouTube channel / blog with a winery you love (or a winery you don’t, shoot we’ll take ‘em all).
Now that you know these ABC’s of email marketing, next time you’re called on in email marketing class, or you sit in on a webinar and somebody is talking all jargony, you’re going to be able to raise your hand eagerly and shout ‘pick me’ because we just handed you the answer key.
Until next week, keep pressing send on your next best email!
