This month PMG had speakers Jenni Brown of Prim’d Marketing and Stephanie Friedman of Seghesio Family Vineyards talk to us at our Lunch Program about the ins and outs of email marketing.
If you missed the event, not to worry because we’ve got you covered with some of the main takeaways, references, and recommendations here.
Design & Content for Email Newsletters
- Email marketing is a great opportunity to be clever. Use this outlet to humanize the brand and develop a relationship with your subscribers. Offer more of your brand experience every step of the way to create a trail for someone to follow.
- People generally don’t read each email in their inbox, so be sure to use powerful imagery to send a clear message and have a least one hero image at the top of the newsletter.
- Don’t forget that email marketing is not a one-way communication tool. When creating each email, put yourself in the customer’s shoes and make sure that you’re writing it with intent and respect. Think things through as the user before clicking send.
How to Create Effective & Strategic Newsletters
- Always refer to your sales goals and use an editorial calendar to plan content in advance.
- You’ll see a lot of different suggestions on the web for the best times to send newsletters, but always test your own times and again, put yourself in your customer’s shoes before sending.
- For accurate metrics, be sure to clean your list annually. Having an outdated list with inactive subscribers will significantly affect your metrics that you’re tracking, leaving you with numbers that aren’t useful. Go through your lists and remove subscribers who haven’t opened any of your emails in a year. With your list scrubbed fresh, you’ll get analytics with helpful numbers so you can make informed decisions.
- If you don’t have the time to do email marketing consistently, strategically, and with intention, then hire someone to do it for you.
What Email Marketing Metrics Should You Track?
- The Open Rate and Click-Through Rates are the basic metrics, but they don’t really tell the whole story. There are two kinds of metrics, Interesting and Actionable.
- Actionable Metrics include Conversion Rate and the Unsubscribes.
- When looking at these actionable metrics, you can figure out how many times it took for a customer to convert or purchase your products. You can even figure out why someone unsubscribed from your newsletter, then use that information to improve it.
Local Examples of Good Newsletters
Stephanie recommends:
- J Vineyards – good use of a short and to-the-point newsletter that leans heavily on solid imagery.
- Jordan Winery – they don’t send their newsletters often, but when they do it’s a great use of content and whitespace. They go for the quality over quantity strategy.
Good Resources for Developing Your Email Marketing Skills
Litmus | Hubspot | Email on Acid
All three of these brands send out regular newsletters with useful design ideas, case studies, and strategies to up your email marketing skills.
We recommend to click on all three and subscribe!
Join us next time?
All throughout the year, we have programs like this one, mixers, and our annual conference in October.
Take a look at our calendar of events here and join us!
Coming Up Next: Our August 15th Summer Mixer at Beer Baron in Santa Rosa. This is a great opportunity to come and meet our members, the board, and have fun mingling in Santa Rosa’s newest (and not even open yet!) downtown beer hub.
See you there!