We all have heard at one time or another that it’s much more costly to obtain a new customer than it is to retain an existing one; on average, it costs about 6-7 times more. Regardless of what marketing medium you use, this rule of thumb continues to ring true. In a previous blog post we discussed how to prevent your customers from leaving your email list by leveraging a preference center. But this only addressed the backend of the equation. What about your treatment strategy for brand new customers? Beyond the Welcome Email When we talk about nurturing or retention strategies at PostUp, we are referring to strategies that extend beyond the welcome email. We are referring to the way you treat your customers and the types of emails you send to them after the first sale or interaction. Regardless of what industry you are in, or if you sell a product or service, you have a goal of “more”. What steps are you taking to encourage a second sale, continued use of your product or movement from a free trial to a paying customer? We invite you to read the following ideas – don’t skip straight to your industry examples – these ideas may spark new ideas of your own! Companies with free trials use nurturing messages to convert non-paying customers to paying ones. When you accept a free trial customer, your goal is to successfully convert them to a paying customer. You hope they will love your product or service enough to want to move past the free trial period and pay. However, you should not assume that once a customer accepts your free offer, they will immediately take next steps to effectively try or test your product and easily convert to a sale. Leverage email marketing to ensure you are communicating the best ways to get started with your product, cool features and benefits of your product, and how to achieve the best results or be most effective with your product. You may also want to include known roadblocks or challenges the customer may encounter and what steps to take to move past them. Gaming companies use nurturing messages to encourage continued play. The number one goal for gaming companies is to encourage players to continuously return to their games and to play and pay for additional benefits such as coins and accessories. There are numerous nurturing messages that can be leveraged to achieve this goal. One example is to send achievement and award notifications that acknowledge a player who has obtained a specific goal or level. These messages typically include information about opportunities and features in the next level.

• Retain players AND obtain new ones by leveraging the fact that people often like to play games with people they know.

• Send email communications to inform players on how to invite others to play your games with them.

• Reward and acknowledge these invitations with tokens or points within your games.

Publishers use nurturing messages to drive more site visits. For online publishers, driving visits to your website is the number one goal for your email marketing program. In order to leverage email marketing to drive visits, you must first ensure the email content you are sending is relevant to the subscriber’s interests. One way to do so is through your preference center. After sending your welcome email, consider sending a second email that promotes your preference center and explains how readers can select the types of emails they wish to receive from you. Another way to drive increased site visits is to leverage a web analytics program to determine what types of content your reader is viewing and send a targeted email message that offers registration for that content. For instance, if you have a reader that is registered for your weekly finance newsletter, but you see he clicks on sports articles, consider sending him an email inviting him to register for your sports newsletter. This article was originally published on PostUp.

Whatever your reason for using multiple email service providers, we’re sure you’re looking for ways to manage your current situation not only efficiently but effectively. It can be stressful making sure that every component of your email marketing program is running smoothly, especially when you’re juggling more than one email service provider. There could be a number of reasons you’ve ended up here:

1. You’ve amassed an assortment of niche email providers that you use for different purposes.
2. You’ve  been bought and sold a few times meaning you have several ESPs for different branches or divisions.
3. Your homegrown solution is no longer the best fit and now you’re ready to move to a more robust platform.

As a marketer you’re already utilizing this ROI rich channel, but how do you do it better? It’s important to be able to share and communicate your data between platforms. Job number one: you’re going to need to centralize your data. Syncing Providers Shouldn’t be a Headache Maintaining multiple ESPs is not completely unmanageable, but you will need to implement the right tools for the job. It’s time to implement a centralized hub that your data can live in. Creating an environment for all your data to peacefully coexist between ESPs has several benefits:

1. List Hygiene. Removing all hard bounces will help your deliverability stay high. Removing any email addresses that brands share will cut down on the amount of sending that you’re doing (though hopefully not too much). It will also keep your customers feeling good about your campaign and not annoyed that they received multiples emails with the same message.
2. Keeps your brand CAN-SPAM compliant. If a customer decides that they no longer want to receive emails from a company you’re working with and have unsubscribed, you’ll definitely want to be able to remove them from your co-marketing campaign sending list. While this is going a step beyond being compliant it’s important to always maintain a current database of customers who have unsubscribed from your email lists. A customer marking your email as SPAM will not only affect your deliverability it can affect your reputation.
3. Protect your deliverability and ultimately your bottom line. Sending emails that never arrive because of defective addresses can negatively influence your sender reputation. That increases the likelihood that your emails don’t make it to the inbox. Emails that don’t get delivered mean emails that don’t get opened, don’t get clicked, and don’t generate revenue. The bottom line is undelivered emails affect your bottom line. You can never accurately calculate the amount of money you don’t make when emails don’t land where they should.

Investigate using a company that can assist you with list management. Scrubbing email addresses before you send is a vital part of an email program. Using or partnering with a company that can smartly and easily identify and remove invalid or unsubscribed email addresses from your lists will free up your time so that you can focus on the strategy of crafting a superb campaign not the logistics.

Take Away

Clean lists are important, but keeping them that way can get complicated when multiple ESPs are involved. Luckily there are tools available to keep your deliverability on track, your customers happy, and your money in your pocket. While not ideal, having multiple ESP’s does not mean you cannot protect yourself from losing money. This article was originally published on UnsubCenntral.

It’s that time of year again. The time of year when marketing teams are busy preparing and deploying their holiday campaigns. You may have recently noticed an uptick in the number of emails received in your inbox. With the hustle and bustle of the season, here are 5 great tips to help create successful holiday campaigns. 1. Plan in advance According to the National Retail Foundation, over 40% of people plan to start their holiday shopping by October. With consumers starting their holiday shopping early, marketers need to get ahead of the curve with a strategy and plan. Start early by thinking about key send dates, frequency of emails, what your marketing calendar will look like, creative and production. 2. Personalize it As busy marketers, it’s easy to forget that there is an actual person on the receiving end of the email. According to Aberdeen, click through rates are improved by an average of 14% and conversions by 10% when using personalization. Use personalization to connect to your customers. First name is great, but using dynamic content based on data you’ve collected on the customer’s usage, likes and preferences will leave a lasting impression of your brand. 3. Use email validation With all the planning and hard work it takes to create a holiday email campaign, the last thing you want to find out is that your emails didn’t reach your customers inbox. Using an email validation tool, like ZeroBounce ensures a deliverability rate of 98% or higher through:

• Email bounce detection - removes invalid emails from your list to prevent email bounces
• Email abuse and spam trap detection - removes know email complainers and spam traps
• Email data append - appends missing data such as first and last name, gender, location, city, state/region, and country when the registration IP is provided.

This can help increase the 85% average (in all industries) inbox placement rate by managing bounce rates to drive more business and reach your customers. 4. Utilize segmentation We’ve heard the saying that no two people are alike. It’s goes without saying that remembering this saying when planning our campaign, or any campaign in general will go along way. Targeting the right person with the right message is half the battle. Research down by MailChimp shows that segmented campaigns get 14.64% more opens and 59.99% more clicks than non-segmented campaigns. For your holiday campaigns focus on key customer groups like:

• Subscribers who brought last year during the holiday season
• New subscribers
• Inactive subscribers
• Your most loyal customers
• Demographics like age, location, interests

The more you know about your audience, the better you can segment and send targeted messages which will lead to more conversions. 5. Be creative Part of the planning ahead is creating exciting and engaging creative/content to engage your audience. Let the creative juices flow, maybe you draw on the emotion of the season, create an engaging video email, send a silly GIF or a fun interactive email. Whatever type of creative you design, make it stand out from the rest in the sea of holiday emails. Get inspired with these tips to help you create a winning holiday email campaign. What will you be doing for your holiday campaign this year?