Email marketing leverages a set of tactics to build a stronger brand, drive traffic to your products, and build a solid funnel for converting leads into loyal customers. While email marketing isn’t new, it’s still one of the most effective marketing strategies to build a valuable business.
Email marketing is an underappreciated digital marketing medium that involves the strategic sending of emails from a company to prospective and existing customers. When correctly done, email marketing converts skeptics and prospects into customers and turns one-time buyers into lifelong loyal customers.
One preposterous take from digital marketers, especially those who work with social media, calls Email marketing outdated because it is an old digital marketing method. As old as Email marketing is, it is still one of the most effective digital marketing methods because it directly reaches the audience. Nearly all internet users have an email address, and virtually all persons check their mails daily in the modern age, especially with the growth of technology, which enables all internet activity on mobile just as much as desktop.
A simple notification at the top of a person’s screen shows a preview of the message, just like every other instant messaging apps. Such a person can just check immediately; even when the person doesn’t have time to actively check through social media, they still have a very high (almost impossible) tendency to check their emails. So calling email marketing “dead” is a rather outlandish conclusion, as it is one of the best ways to communicate with an audience, promote your brand, even with a low budget, and consumers like it.
Email marketing helps you directly connect with your leads, just like texting your friends, keeping up with them, and making them attached to your brand, beating your competition. It is also customizable, as you can create several emails for several segments of your list. Because you own your list, you are sure that you can keep total control of it if you lose your Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram account; however, you can lose communication with your leads.
Like I said earlier, email marketing has been a relatively underappreciated channel, especially with the rise of social media, but you can derive optimal use from it for your business. Generally, for every mail you send, on average, you are likely to get a 20% open rate. It could be more or less, depending on many factors, including your content appeal, your niche, and your cordiality with your audience.
Addressing your potential and existing customers by the first name could make people pay more attention to an email, as it sounds personal (This will be discussed further as we progress).
So if you have 10,000 people on your email list, with a 20% open rate, you should be expecting nothing less than 2,000 website visits, especially when you have a call to response protocol. As I said, it could be more, and it could be less. This guide thoroughly examines the dos and don’ts of email marketing to ensure you get the best value for your marketing.
Building an Email List
An email list typically includes a list of names, email addresses, and perhaps other data (like company name or income level). There is a trendy phrase about email marketing that goes; thus, “the money is in the list,” which means that the better your email list is, the more leads and clicks you are likely to get from it.
Even as a beginner, it is never too early to create an email list; in fact, it is one of the very first things you should consider; your list should grow alongside your website. If you have a brick and mortar store, you can start with the list of people coming around, but if you have an online store, you have to build a list from the very first visits to your website and even from among your offline connections.
One shortcut that many business owners get enticed with is the idea of buying an email list rather than going through the laborious yet rewarding method of organically creating a list. It looks like a way to cut corners and save time, but this is wrong and fallacious; in fact, it is a massive waste of time and money, and you will never get the actual value of email marketing. There are a few reasons I will highlight as to why buying a list is bad, and you should totally avoid it! They include:
Poor Quality Lists
People who sell email lists aren’t obliged to be honest with you, you want a list quickly, and they want money just as quick. Of course, they will make several claims about the authenticity of the list, but you cannot verify it, and it likely has a lot of problems, some of which you may not even discover. For example, inactive email addresses, you definitely do not want to send your mails to ghosts, and these bought lists will give you a high number of “ghosts.” It is also possible that the data is false; the names and other information about people on the list could be wrong, making you address people wrongly. There is no shorter route to abandoning a mail than that. If you receive mail that was wrongly addressed, you will most likely report it as spam for fear of fraudulent activities, and you definitely do not want this to happen to you if you buy Email lists.
Illegal Collection Of Emails
The Email addresses on a bought list are usually illegally gotten from the internet randomly. Obviously, nobody has chosen to be on your list if you bought them, so it’s going to be worthless because nobody has asked to be on them. You could also face legal charges, as much as tens of thousands of dollars per email you send illegally. Like the CAN-SPAM Act of the United States, several countries and regions have their email policy with different charges and penalties for illegal emails.
You’ll Be Spamming
According to Oxford, Spamming is “sending unsolicited messages indiscriminately to a large number of internet users.” If nobody has chosen to be on that list you have, sending emails to them is tantamount to spamming. I’m sure you personally detest receiving unsolicited emails, almost everyone does anyway, and you probably delete those emails, mark as spam, and probably unsubscribe since you never asked for it. You may believe that your email content is well packaged and catchy with credible information. Still, the recipient only sees another company spamming their way into his/her inbox and will most likely not pay attention to the content.
Other Companies Use The same List
As mentioned earlier, the individual or organization that sells you a list owe you no loyalty or exclusivity, as they want to make quick money. There is the possibility of selling the list to another company. People typically unsubscribe to emails and even pick the option of “not receiving emails from similar companies,” Your messages will go directly into the spam box. Even if it goes into their inboxes, you have lost the touch of exclusivity and owning your list, and you are now in competition with other companies for the attention of your audience.
It Is Against the Policy Of Email Service providers
Many Email service providers (the companies that send out your emails) have terms of service that considers buying email list spamming, which is against their terms of service. It could lead to your account’s closure, you could get fined, and even some email providers may file legal charges against you.
This will be triggered if too many of your messages get marked as spam, and you will quickly get your account flagged. You’ll quickly get on the wrong side of your email service provider.
Poor Open and Response Rate
Upon several research and data, it has been found that a reasonable open rate is usually not less than 20%, and a response rate of 5-10% is usually considered adequate. Open rate is the number of people that open an email you sent out of everyone who receives it (not everybody will receive the emails you sent), while the response rate judges the number of people that respond to your emails. If you have an email list of 10,000 names and send out an email. An excellent open rate will guarantee you that at least 2,000 people will open your emails, and out of those 2,000 people, 500 to 1,000 people click on your links, you will have about 500 to 1,000 purchases of your new product. A $50 product could fetch you between $25,000 to $50,000, which is an excellent sell rate.
If your list, however, comprises of people who do not want to be there, it’s just as good as shooting yourself in the foot because the majority will not open, not to talk of following the links. You can have an open rate as low as 5% and a click rate even worse; you may as well sell nothing.
It’s Bad For Brand Reputation
A brand pyramid is a representational framework that answers fundamental questions about a brand and market positioning. The framework is particularly useful for new brands to enter a market for the first time. It moves from bottom to bottom with these elements: features and attributes, functional benefits, emotional benefits, brand persona/core values, and brand essence.
Apart from the fact that your email service provider can file serious charges against you, getting you in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons, even worse repercussions can be encountered from buying email lists. People on your email list can interact with one another on Twitter about how your company violates privacy rights and illegally collecting details to send emails.
These can even appear on Google’s first page when the name of your company is searched for. This is a red flag for potential customers and people who aren’t even on your list. You could also be tagged as fraud by an angry online mob who feels that your offers are unsolicited and could be fraudulent. Reputation is crucial online, and you will need to spend a lot of money and effort to fix a destroyed reputation online because “the internet never forgets.”
Now that you understand the importance of building your list yourself and not just buying any list from a random individual or online body, you must learn how to properly build a list. The first thing to achieve this is knowing who you want to sell to.
Understanding your target audience is essential, as you need to know who you are targeting before you start building an email list. Understanding the buyers’ perspective is usually helpful in delivering content to them. If you understand what a person likes, it will be easy to make attractive offers. You should have a marketing persona – a virtual character representing your ideal customer by having data of the primary characters of a group of your potential customers, to design the best content and user experience for them. A market persona, in short, will help you have an idea of who these people are, helping you understand them and hence improving your services and offers to them.
How to start building your email list
Having lists is vital, as you already know by now, but having an engaged list of subscribers is more important. This epitomizes the interest of people in your brand and what you have to offer. To grow your email list while ensuring that you get a list of people interested in your service, you need to consider a few things. They are:
The sign-up form
The sign-up form on your website in the dialog box where your visitors submit their email address to subscribe to your emails and get your offers. The most important information is the email address. Still, these forms usually have other information like location, interests, and other details that allow segmentation of the email list (This will be elaborated as we proceed). Sign-up forms typically appear during a session when a visitor is on your website as a pop-up covering the entire screen or takes part from the side or from the top.
A sign-up form is where you must convince your website visitors that your emails are worth signing up for. An alternative to Sign-up forms are landing pages. However, I recommend using them together with information while offering freebies to entice the visitor to submit details, called lead magnets.
Landing Pages
A landing page is a page where a visitor “lands” following an ad or alternative clicks, containing information about your product and what you want to offer. The important thing on the landing page should focus on what you want to offer, possibly painting it as a one-time offer; a “take it or leave it scenario” that probably boxes the visitor into a corner, making them subscribe as they anticipate some value in return. There are many approaches to go about landing pages; in truth, one isn’t better than the other, but depending on your niche, product type, and prospective customers, some approaches are usually more appropriate than others. The simplicity of design (optimizing fonts, images, texts, and colors) and their overall appearance.
A bad landing page will ruin the collection of emails for your list in ways you don’t anticipate. If a visitor lands on your page, and it is poorly designed, there might be hesitation in trying out your lead magnet because the eyes are the most sensitive sense organ, sending signals to the brain more times than any other sense organ. So working on perfect aesthetics is never a waste of time. It should not be overloaded with information as you don’t want to bore out the visitor; you only need to get their details, so use a proper lead magnet and make your landing page have as little information as possible. Some Landing pages work better with specific lead magnet, so you may need to try out different approaches to help you choose the best possible landing to click conversion ratio.
Lead Magnets
Lead magnets are freebies you give away as bait. To get people’s details for your email list, they could be free videos, e-books, coupons, discount offers, and generally things that entice a visitor to make them subscribe. But your lead magnets need to be attractive and offer value to your prospects. Your prospective customers must be able to see that you are giving them something valuable – worth reasonable money for free. In fact, it must be something they will be willing to pay for.Just like a magnet that was built to attract metallic objects in its field, if it is bad, it won’t attract any metal, or metals that even get attracted will not stick. Hence your freebie needs to hold value, otherwise, you risk losing out on potential leads, and even if they have initially subscribed to your email list, poor content can make them stop checking your mails or worse – unsubscribe as they are uninterested in the preview they have gotten.
If your giveaway item, on the other hand, is very attractive, your new subscribers will be on the lookout for more of your mails because they believe in the inherent value. Even paid items will appear to them as a bargain. So you shouldn’t feel you are giving too much as a lead magnet because in the long run, you will definitely make gains from it.
It is possible to integrate a sign-up form into a landing page, Usually signing up isn’t the first thing you’ll see on a website, but with a landing page, you can incorporate sign-up form, especially if your product or service needs more information for email list segmenting. With extra details provided by the sign-up form, you can effectively optimize your email list.
Types of sign-up forms
There are different types of sign-up forms, based on how they appear on a User’s screen. Some of which include:
Static sign-up form
These are static blocks of form that appear when an internet user visits your website. Usually located anywhere on the page. It can also have a specific dedicated page for users who will follow clicks and backlinks to your page.
Pop-up form
Pop-up forms appear on a webpage, especially when reading a blog post, often after the internet user has settled in and absorbing information. Usually, a little less than a minute after landing on the page, the pop-up form will show. Usually, the content in the form and the lead magnet will relate directly to the blog post or piece of information being consumed, further enticing visitors to input their details. Pop-ups usually boast of high conversion because the content is directly linked to the form; Internet users are intrigued and probably want to try it out, especially when the lead magnet is almost irresistible. Although it is worthy to note that if the visitor hasn’t consumed enough information, the pop-up may seem like a distraction, and he will just close immediately, thereby ignoring the form. This is why the timing of the pop-up is very important.
Notification bar form
A notification bar form is less intrusive than a pop-up form; it comes from the top of the page, catching some attention while giving the user permission to keep reading. However, because it offers no form of hindrance to the reading of the article or blog post, the visitor may forget to check out the notification. This can be a very common situation as human beings have low attention spans
Slide-in form
A slide-in form is also less intrusive than a pop-up form and can be more effective than the notification bar form. It is also a good way to incorporate sign-up forms into web pages with a lot of content. Because the visitor would have consumed very little information within the first one minute, it is important to wait until a very sizeable part of the information has been gotten. A slide-in form usually “slides in” from the lower corner of a page. Particularly the bottom right, so Users would have almost exhausted the content before getting the slide-in form. Because they have good information and valuable content, they will sign-up if it suits their demands. However, sometimes users aren’t patient, and they may not even get to the end of the post, probably after gaining the needed information from earlier parts of the web content. Making you miss out on some potential leads.
Your form should give the visitors explicit information on what to expect from you; this is important as it will ensure that the people who are signing up to your list are the exact people you want to make the quality of your list very high. Making your emails stay further away from the spam folder. The form should clearly explain what users stand to gain by signing up for your list and how frequently you’ll be sending (i.e., daily, weekly, twice a week, fortnightly); explicit information on all these will mean that the subscribers are fully aware of what they have signed up, increasing the chances of a very good open rate and avoid being in the “spam” discussion.
Other important things to note about your form are;
The call-to-action command
If you have registered on a website before, you probably would have seen different Call-to-action (CTA) commands. The call-to-action command is usually at the completion or submission stage of the sign-up form. Where after imputing details, you need them to submit. Here, you should get creative rather than using the normal cliché “sign-up” command; you can use more catchy phrases like “Get my free eBook now” or “I want to try out new product offers up to 30% discount”. Get creative and draw your readers in; it’ll really help to get more people to submit their details. It also serves as a reminder of the lead magnet and help the visitor consider the offer.
The location
Many websites focus their sign-up forms on only their homepage as they believe that it is the first place that visitors will encounter before going anywhere else, forgetting that some people will visit the website via search engines or other backlinks to the website. The sign-up form should not be limited; it should appear on nearly every page that users will get the tiniest bit of information. The aim is to grab attention, and your blog posts are even more likely to get visitors attracted than your homepage. It is also possible that different locations have different types of forms to ensure optimization and the best possible User Experience. User experience is very important as it is a factor considered by Google in ranking websites. In conjunction with other factors, User experience determines your website rankings on search engines.
The design
Create simple designs that make information easily processed and maybe a color that matches your website or in sync with your brand identity. You can use more than one color to show emphasis on important things, and a very bright, catchy color should be used for the CTA command.
Other Channels to Build Your List
Social Media
Reach out to your social media audience if you have one and encourage them to subscribe to your email list, of course, by using coupons and bonuses or other valuable lead magnets. This will expand your reach and expose you to a potentially higher number of visitors. Share intriguing or even controversial posts from your blog, which will make people get snippets of engaging content, making them interact and follow up on the links. If you have a Facebook business page, you can add a sign-up form to it, and voila! You get email addresses from your own followers. In other social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram you should have your bio link, make promotional posts, and direct them to your bio.
Collect subscribers offline
Interact with people from several events, telling them about your products and services, and if you own a physical store, great! Send a Google forms link to your customers; this approach ensures one-on-one interaction, and you can even convince them better, no matter how small the audience is.
In this day and age, there are about a gazillion ways to make a business thrive, each one promising better results than the next, each one doing things slightly differently than the previous one…
But what is the best way to make a business grow and have a steady income?
Email marketing comes as a close second to SEO, which is more than understandable, seeing as email marketing is one of the most cost-effective strategies. Now, let’s see which are the email marketing and automation strategies that are worth the effort and are bound to boost your CRO.
Welcome the newbies!
Why would you enter a website, if not to check it out? This shows your interest clearly, sure, but does this mean that you’d buy on that very same moment?
I don’t think so… So, the best thing to do is to get your visitors to subscribe to your email list. It saves the visitors the commitment and sounds more appealing. It’s practically a step that not too many feel uncomfortable with, especially if signing up contains something like a discount code.
And once you’ve got your newbie, it’s time to send them a welcome email!
Source: Saucey
This email is simple yet powerful and has got a very contemporary vibe about it. And if you visit the website, the sign-up form looks like that:
So, there’s clear value upfront. Score $10 off, sign up, you’re all over and done with it!
It’s an easy email that doesn’t require too many visuals or too much copy-mind you, going overboard will be confusing to the reader in the end.
One well-placed “Take me to the website” button is enough-or in our example, “Let’s order”. This button can lead to a carefully created landing page or the website itself, whatever helps increase conversion!
You see, you don’t want your customers to have a one-time relationship with you. You actually need them to have something more, something meaningful, something like recurring orders!
But how many people would order from a brand that doesn’t speak to them?
You see, people nowadays don’t buy products, they buy answers. And if your brand’s tone isn’t answering any questions, then you’ve lost the game.
What you could do, would be to send out an email that will be interactive, have beautiful, playful imagery in it and will help users engage. It could be a cart abandonment email, or perhaps a re-activation email.
You could even make a game out of it, by making the email interactive and encouraging users to find the hidden discount!
Their opinion=Your growth
First and foremost, you need to sit down and understand, by checking your data, what kind of people your customers are. What their likes and dislikes are. In general, what makes them tick.
Once you manage to analyze your data, create your buyer personas, ie the depictions of your ideal customer, and you’ll be good to go!
But you can’t just rely on analyzing your theoretical ideal customer. You need to take some much-needed action as well. And how are you going to do that?
But by asking your subscribers what they think of you directly, of course!
By sending out a survey, you can collect plenty of data that will help your company grow in ways you wouldn’t even know. And no question is too weird or too personal. You can ask everything, from what they think of your interface to how they’d rename the brand if needed.
Source: bellroy
And you must definitely not forget the most important question: How likely is it that your customer would recommend your brand to a friend?
This question will give you your Net Promoter Score (NPS) as an answer. And NPS is one of the most important metrics out there.
By asking all the right questions, you can grow quickly, easily and cost-free, seeing as you won’t need any guesswork or advertising experts to tell you what’s what.
You’re turning your own fans into “co-workers”, or better yet, into branding experts and that’s really saying something to them, seeing as you’re making things more personal that way.
Nurture your leads
No matter how hard you may try, not every follower wants to be a loyal customer and not every order has to be a recurring one.
But what you can do, is maximize the number of leads that would be interested in becoming loyal customers by nurturing them. This will definitely bring you more revenue and keep your resources intact.
Just set up and send out a campaign to valued customers. This could contain a little discount, a free sample-if you’ve got them-or a free consultation session. Anything to show your repeaters how much you appreciate the fact that they’re… Well, you know. There.
Take it one step further by providing a little bit of extra discount for referrals and definitely send follow-up emails in case they don’t take advantage of the offer you’ve got to give them!
You see, you don’t need to spend too much time and effort on the how, you just need to focus on what you’ve already got first, and help it grow.
Lead nurturing will do just that, seeing as you won’t need to find new followers, which equals new ad campaigns and is way more costly.
And over to you!
There are plenty more strategies that you can pick and choose from, such as setting up drip campaigns or sending birthday emails, but I think that the previous four are the basics that you need to use, in order to maximize revenue and see your business grow.
So, what say you? Is there anything else you’re already using or would like to add?
Please tell us in the comments and don’t forget to share the knowledge!
Key Highlights
Email Marketing Effectiveness: Despite claims of being outdated, email marketing remains a powerful digital marketingstrategy due to its direct reach to an audience that checks their emails daily.
Benefits of Email Marketing: Email marketing converts skeptics into customers, turns one-time buyers into loyal ones, and fosters brand loyalty.
Misconceptions About Email Marketing: Some digital marketers consider email marketing outdated, but it’s still effective because it reaches a broad audience that uses email regularly.
Audience Engagement: Nearly all internet users have an email address, and they are likely to check their emails frequently, even more so with mobile devices.
Benefits of Direct Connection: Email marketing allows direct and personalized communication with leads, similar to staying in touch with friends.
Customizability: Email marketing is customizable, allowing the creation of tailored emails for different audience segments.
Importance of Email Lists: Building an email list is essential, and its quality affects the success of email marketing campaigns.
Avoid Buying Lists: Purchasing email lists is discouraged due to poor list quality, potential legal issues, spamming risks, and negative brand reputation.
Effective Sign-Up Forms: Use various types of sign-up forms strategically on your website, such as static, pop-up, notification bar, or slide-in forms.
Value of Lead Magnets: Offer valuable incentives (lead magnets) like free ebooks, coupons, or discounts in exchange for email subscriptions.
Leveraging Social Media: Utilize social media to encourage email subscriptions and promote your brand.
Offline Engagement: Collect email subscribers offline by interacting with people at events or using physical store visits.
Content’s Role: Content is key to successful email marketing, providing answers to customers’ questions and maintaining engagement.
Personalization and Surveys: Personalize content and engage with customers by sending surveys to gather insights and improve customer experiences.
Nurturing Leads: Nurturing leads is crucial for customer loyalty. Send campaigns to valued customers with special offers, discounts, and referral incentives.
Growing Business: Implementing effective email marketing strategies can lead to business growth, increased customer engagement, and improved brand reputation.
Strategy
Description
Implication
Targeted Segmentation
Segmenting your email list based on demographics, behavior, or preferences to send personalized and relevant content to each group of subscribers.
Increases engagement and conversion rates by delivering tailored messages that resonate with recipients, improving overall campaign performance and ROI.
Compelling Subject Lines
Crafting attention-grabbing subject lines that are concise, descriptive, and evoke curiosity or urgency to entice recipients to open the email.
Improves open rates and email deliverability by capturing recipients’ interest and standing out in crowded inboxes, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversions.
Valuable Content
Providing valuable and relevant content that addresses the needs, interests, and pain points of your subscribers, such as informative articles, exclusive offers, or helpful tips.
Builds trust, credibility, and loyalty among subscribers, establishing your brand as a reliable source of information and solutions, leading to higher engagement, retention, and conversion rates.
Clear Call-to-Action (CTA)
Including a clear and compelling call-to-action (CTA) that prompts recipients to take a specific desired action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a webinar, or downloading a resource.
Increases click-through rates and conversions by guiding recipients towards the desired action, reducing friction and making it easier for them to engage with your brand or offerings.
Mobile Optimization
Designing responsive email templates that render well and are easy to read and interact with on various mobile devices, ensuring a seamless experience for mobile users.
Enhances accessibility and engagement among mobile users, who represent a significant portion of email recipients, improving overall campaign performance and effectiveness.
A/B Testing
Conducting A/B tests on different elements of your emails, such as subject lines, content, CTAs, or send times, to determine the most effective strategies for maximizing engagement and conversions.
Provides insights into subscriber preferences and behavior, allowing you to optimize email campaigns for better performance over time, increasing effectiveness and ROI.
Timing and Frequency
Experimenting with the timing and frequency of your email sends to find the optimal schedule that maximizes engagement without overwhelming subscribers or causing email fatigue.
Helps maintain subscriber interest and engagement by ensuring emails are delivered at times when recipients are most likely to be receptive, leading to improved open rates, click-through rates, and overall campaign success.
Personalization
Incorporating dynamic content, personalized recommendations, or recipient’s name into your emails to create a customized and individualized experience for each subscriber.
Deepens the connection with subscribers and enhances relevance, leading to higher engagement, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction, as recipients feel valued and understood by your brand.
Email Automation
Implementing automated email workflows and triggers based on subscriber actions or events, such as welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, or re-engagement campaigns, to deliver timely and targeted communications throughout the customer journey.
Streamlines communication and improves efficiency by delivering relevant messages at the right time, increasing engagement, conversion rates, and customer retention while reducing manual effort and ensuring consistent follow-up.
Monitoring and Analytics
Tracking key metrics and performance indicators, such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and subscriber engagement, to evaluate the effectiveness of your email campaigns and make data-driven adjustments for continuous improvement.
Provides actionable insights into campaign performance, audience behavior, and areas for optimization, enabling you to refine your email marketing strategies for better results and ROI over time.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy where the marketing and sales departments come together to create personalized buying experiences for high-value accounts. Account-based marketing is a business-to-business (B2B) approach in which marketing and sales teams work together to target high-value accounts and turn them into customers.
Ad Ops – also known as Digital Ad Operations – refers to systems and processes that support digital advertisements’ delivery and management. The concept describes any process that helps a marketing team manage, run, or optimize ad campaigns, making them an integrating part of the business operations.
Venture capitalist, Dave McClure, coined the acronym AARRR which is a simplified model that enables to understand what metrics and channels to look at, at each stage for the users’ path toward becoming customers and referrers of a brand.
Affinity marketing involves a partnership between two or more businesses to sell more products. Note that this is a mutually beneficial arrangement where one brand can extend its reach and enhance its credibility in association with the other.
As the name suggests, ambush marketing raises awareness for brands at events in a covert and unexpected fashion. Ambush marketing takes many forms, one common element, the brand advertising their products or services has not paid for the right to do so. Thus, the business doing the ambushing attempts to capitalize on the efforts made by the business sponsoring the event.
Affiliate marketing describes the process whereby an affiliate earns a commission for selling the products of another person or company. Here, the affiliate is simply an individual who is motivated to promote a particular product through incentivization. The business whose product is being promoted will gain in terms of sales and marketing from affiliates.
The bullseye framework is a simple method that enables you to prioritize the marketing channels that will make your company gain traction. The main logic of the bullseye framework is to find the marketing channels that work and prioritize them.
Brand building is the set of activities that help companies to build an identity that can be recognized by its audience. Thus, it works as a mechanism of identification through core values that signal trust and that help build long-term relationships between the brand and its key stakeholders.
According to inbound marketing platform HubSpot, brand dilution occurs “when a company’s brand equity diminishes due to an unsuccessful brand extension, which is a new product the company develops in an industry that they don’t have any market share in.” Brand dilution, therefore, occurs when a brand decreases in value after the company releases a product that does not align with its vision, mission, or skillset.
The brand essence wheel is a templated approach businesses can use to better understand their brand. The brand essence wheel has obvious implications for external brand strategy. However, it is equally important in simplifying brand strategy for employees without a strong marketing background. Although many variations of the brand essence wheel exist, a comprehensive wheel incorporates information from five categories: attributes, benefits, values, personality, brand essence.
The brand equity is the premium that a customer is willing to pay for a product that has all the objective characteristics of existing alternatives, thus, making it different in terms of perception. The premium on seemingly equal products and quality is attributable to its brand equity.
Brand positioning is about creating a mental real estate in the mind of the target market. If successful, brand positioning allows a business to gain a competitive advantage. And it also works as a switching cost in favor of the brand. Consumers recognizing a brand might be less prone to switch to another brand.
Business storytelling is a critical part of developing a business model. Indeed, the way you frame the story of your organization will influence its brand in the long-term. That’s because your brand story is tied to your brand identity, and it enables people to identify with a company.
Content marketing is one of the most powerful commercial activities which focuses on leveraging content production (text, audio, video, or other formats) to attract a targeted audience. Content marketing focuses on building a strong brand, but also to convert part of that targeted audience into potential customers.
One of the first mentions of customer lifetime value was in the 1988 book Database Marketing: Strategy and Implementation written by Robert Shaw and Merlin Stone. Customer lifetime value (CLV) represents the value of a customer to a company over a period of time. It represents a critical business metric, especially for SaaS or recurring revenue-based businesses.
Customer segmentation is a marketing method that divides the customers in sub-groups, that share similar characteristics. Thus, product, marketing and engineering teams can center the strategy from go-to-market to product development and communication around each sub-group. Customer segments can be broken down is several ways, such as demographics, geography, psychographics and more.
Developer marketing encompasses tactics designed to grow awareness and adopt software tools, solutions, and SaaS platforms. Developer marketing has become the standard among software companies with a platform component, where developers can build applications on top of the core software or open software. Therefore, engaging developer communities has become a key element of marketing for many digital businesses.
A digital channel is a marketing channel, part of a distribution strategy, helping an organization to reach its potential customers via electronic means. There are several digital marketing channels, usually divided into organic and paid channels. Some organic channels are SEO, SMO, email marketing. And some paid channels comprise SEM, SMM, and display advertising.
Field marketing is a general term that encompasses face-to-face marketing activities carried out in the field. These activities may include street promotions, conferences, sales, and various forms of experiential marketing. Field marketing, therefore, refers to any marketing activity that is performed in the field.
interaction with a brand until they become a paid customer and beyond.
Funnel marketing is modeled after the marketing funnel, a concept that tells the company how it should market to consumers based on their position in the funnel itself. The notion of a customer embarking on a journey when interacting with a brand was first proposed by Elias St. Elmo Lewis in 1898.
Funnel marketing typically considers three stages of a non-linear marketing funnel. These are top of the funnel (TOFU), middle of the funnel (MOFU), and bottom of the funnel (BOFU). Particular marketing strategies at each stage are adapted to the level of familiarity the consumer has with a brand.
A go-to-market strategy represents how companies market their new products to reach target customers in a scalable and repeatable way. It starts with how new products/services get developed to how these organizations target potential customers (via sales and marketing models) to enable their value proposition to be delivered to create a competitive advantage.
The term “greenwashing” was first coined by environmentalist Jay Westerveld in 1986 at a time when most consumers received their news from television, radio, and print media. Some companies took advantage of limited public access to information by portraying themselves as environmental stewards – even when their actions proved otherwise. Greenwashing is a deceptive marketing practice where a company makes unsubstantiated claims about an environmentally-friendly product or service.
Grassroots marketing involves a brand creating highly targeted content for a particular niche or audience. When an organization engages in grassroots marketing, it focuses on a small group of people with the hope that its marketing message is shared with a progressively larger audience.
Growth marketing is a process of rapid experimentation, which in a way has to be “scientific” by keeping in mind that it is used by startups to grow, quickly. Thus, the “scientific” here is not meant in the academic sense. Growth marketing is expected to unlock growth, quickly and with an often limited budget.
Guerrilla marketing is an advertising strategy that seeks to utilize low-cost and sometimes unconventional tactics that are high impact. First coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book of the same title, guerrilla marketing works best on existing customers who are familiar with a brand or product and its particular characteristics.
Hunger marketing is a marketing strategy focused on manipulating consumer emotions. By bringing products to market with an attractive price point and restricted supply, consumers have a stronger desire to make a purchase.
Integrated marketing communication (IMC) is an approach used by businesses to coordinate and brand their communication strategies. Integrated marketing communication takes separate marketing functions and combines them into one, interconnected approach with a core brand message that is consistent across various channels. These encompass owned, earned, and paid media. Integrated marketing communication has been used to great effect by companies such as Snapchat, Snickers, and Domino’s.
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy designed to attract customers to a brand with content and experiences that they derive value from. Inbound marketing utilizes blogs, events, SEO, and social media to create brand awareness and attract targeted consumers. By attracting or “drawing in” a targeted audience, inbound marketing differs from outbound marketing which actively pushes a brand onto consumers who may have no interest in what is being offered.
Integrated marketing describes the process of delivering consistent and relevant content to a target audience across all marketing channels. It is a cohesive, unified, and immersive marketing strategy that is cost-effective and relies on brand identity and storytelling to amplify the brand to a wider and wider audience.
The marketing mix is a term to describe the multi-faceted approach to a complete and effective marketing plan. Traditionally, this plan included the four Ps of marketing: price, product, promotion, and place. But the exact makeup of a marketing mix has undergone various changes in response to new technologies and ways of thinking. Additions to the four Ps include physical evidence, people, process, and even politics.
Marketing myopia is the nearsighted focus on selling goods and services at the expense of consumer needs. Marketing myopia was coined by Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt in 1960. Originally, Levitt described the concept in the context of organizations in high-growth industries that become complacent in their belief that such industries never fail.
Marketing personas give businesses a general overview of key segments of their target audience and how these segments interact with their brand. Marketing personas are based on the data of an ideal, fictional customer whose characteristics, needs, and motivations are representative of a broader market segment.
Meme marketing is any marketing strategy that uses memes to promote a brand. The term “meme” itself was popularized by author Richard Dawkins over 50 years later in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In the book, Dawkins described how ideas evolved and were shared across different cultures. The internet has enabled this exchange to occur at an exponential rate, with the first modern memes emerging in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Microtargeting is a marketing strategy that utilizes consumer demographic data to identify the interests of a very specific group of individuals. Like most marketing strategies, the goal of microtargeting is to positively influence consumer behavior.
Multichannel marketing executes a marketing strategy across multiple platforms to reach as many consumers as possible. Here, a platform may refer to product packaging, word-of-mouth advertising, mobile apps, email, websites, or promotional events, and all the other channels that can help amplify the brand to reach as many consumers as possible.
Multi-level marketing (MLM), otherwise known as network or referral marketing, is a strategy in which businesses sell their products through person-to-person sales. When consumers join MLM programs, they act as distributors. Distributors make money by selling the product directly to other consumers. They earn a small percentage of sales from those that they recruit to do the same – often referred to as their “downline”.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measure of the ability of a product or service to attract word-of-mouth advertising. NPS is a crucial part of any marketing strategy since attracting and then retaining customers means they are more likely to recommend a business to others.
Neuromarketing information is collected by measuring brain activity related to specific brain functions using sophisticated and expensive technology such as MRI machines. Some businesses also choose to make inferences of neurological responses by analyzing biometric and heart-rate data.
Neuromarketing is the domain of large companies with similarly large budgets or subsidies. These include Frito-Lay, Google, and The Weather Channel.
Newsjacking as a marketing strategy was popularised by David Meerman Scott in his book Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage. Newsjacking describes the practice of aligning a brand with a current event to generate media attention and increase brand exposure.
A microniche is a subset of potential customers within a niche. In the era of dominating digital super-platforms, identifying a microniche can kick off the strategy of digital businesses to prevent competition against large platforms. As the microniche becomes a niche, then a market, scale becomes an option.
We can define pull and push marketing from the perspective of the target audience or customers. In push marketing, as the name suggests, you’re promoting a product so that consumers can see it. In a pull strategy, consumers might look for your product or service drawn by its brand.
Real-time marketing is as exactly as it sounds. It involves in-the-moment marketing to customers across any channel based on how that customer is interacting with the brand.
Relationship marketing involves businesses and their brands forming long-term relationships with customers. The focus of relationship marketing is to increase customer loyalty and engagement through high-quality products and services. It differs from short-term processes focused solely on customer acquisition and individual sales.
Reverse marketing describes any marketing strategy that encourages consumers to seek out a product or company on their own. This approach differs from a traditional marketing strategy where marketers seek out the consumer.
Remarketing involves the creation of personalized and targeted ads for consumers who have already visited a company’s website. The process works in this way: as users visit a brand’s website, they are tagged with cookies that follow the users, and as they land on advertising platforms where retargeting is an option (like social media platforms) they get served ads based on their navigation.
Sensory marketing describes any marketing campaign designed to appeal to the five human senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are enabling marketers to design fun, interactive, and immersive sensory marketing brand experiences. Long term, businesses must develop sensory marketing campaigns that are relevant and effective in eCommerce.
Services marketing originated as a separate field of study during the 1980s. Researchers realized that the unique characteristics of services required different marketing strategies to those used in the promotion of physical goods. Services marketing is a specialized branch of marketing that promotes the intangible benefits delivered by a company to create customer value.
Sustainable marketing describes how a business will invest in social and environmental initiatives as part of its marketing strategy. Also known as green marketing, it is often used to counteract public criticism around wastage, misleading advertising, and poor quality or unsafe products.
Word-of-mouth marketing is a marketing strategy skewed toward offering a great experience to existing customers and incentivizing them to share it with other potential customers. That is one of the most effective forms of marketing as it enables a company to gain traction based on existing customers’ referrals. When repeat customers become a key enabler for the brand this is one of the best organic and sustainable growth marketing strategies.
360 marketing is a marketing campaign that utilizes all available mediums, channels, and consumer touchpoints. 360 marketing requires the business to maintain a consistent presence across multiple online and offline channels. This ensures it does not miss potentially lucrative customer segments. By its very nature, 360 marketing describes any number of different marketing strategies. However, a broad and holistic marketing strategy should incorporate a website, SEO, PPC, email marketing, social media, public relations, in-store relations, and traditional forms of advertising such as television.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
