Email marketing is the best channel to get new leads and drive conversion, and marketers are working hard to find out the best ways to get consumers clicking and engaged with content. Online marketing and lead gen agency FierceMarkets senior manager of audience development Lindsey Wagner shared some insights on what she and her team are doing to drive email marketing success, here are four tips on how to maximize your email efforts:
Acquisition Tips
FierceMarkets offers twelve core solutions to its customers, ranging from e-newsletters and webinars to eBooks and mobile applications. Getting clients in touch with new customers is one of the team’s main goals, and marketers first look at open reach and click reach (the percentage of subscribers 
who open and click email messages from FierceMarkets clients) over the past three months when targeting prospects.
These customers are the most engaged with the brand and its messages and should be the most responsive.
Other places where Wagner looks for acquisition are organic subscribers (customers who sign up on their own), external lists (email blasts to partner lists), co-registration vendors and pay-per-click solutions Google, Bing and LinkedIn.
When Wagner analyzed all these sources to see which were opening FierceMarkets emails, the organic subscribers and external lists yielded about the same open rate.
“Co-registration opened at a higher rate than pay-per-click. It’s interesting to do this research and see what’s happening out there,” says Wagner, who shared her experience with attendees at B2B LeadsCon 2014 last week.
Convert Web Visitors Into Subscribers
Turning web visitors into subscribers is a big deal for Wagner and team.
“We have at least four areas per webpage for people to sign up for newsletters because we want to give them the opportunity to subscribe at any point on the page. They are not pretty, but we do get 50 to 80 percent of our new subscribers from these ads,” Wagner says. So these sign-up calls to action may be annoying to some readers, but they work.
Wagner has found that 72 percent of people who share their email address with FierceMarkets opt to share additional demographic information.
The team also uses interstitial ads (which pop-up after readers first click on a page), a sign-up at the top of the page, an inline ad on the side of the page and another at the page footer.
Personalize Emails
When emails have a personal touch—even simply calling the recipient by name—the results are noticeably positive.
“Personalizing emails resulted in two times the open rate and eight times the click-through rate,” Wagner says. With those kinds of rates to back it up, the benefits of personalization speak for themselves.
Keep It Simple
Wagner and her team don’t use the fanciest tools to manage, leveraging Google Analytics as a main content experience tool. Excel spreadsheets can be used to keep track of what’s working and what isn’t.
And remember that the smallest changes to an email can yield the biggest results.
“Even increasing font sizes by a small amount can make a difference,” Wagner says.
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