Are you on a mission to create a more efficient email marketing program at your organization? Here are our favorite tools to keep in your back pocket to save time and money and elevate your efficiency and effectiveness.
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Integrated Email Marketing
We are clearly big fans of integrated email marketing at Informz. If you want to do efficient email marketing, our go-to tip is to integrate as much as possible, primarily your email platform with your member database. The time savings you’ll discover when you are no longer pulling queries, uploading and downloading queries, and monitoring data integrity will open up your schedule and allow you to accomplish more on your to-do list than ever before. One organization, the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, saved over 300 staff hours when they integrated Informz with their AMS. (They also saved $38,000. Wow!)
The Mailing Summary Report
In an effort to reduce the amount of time spent scratching your head and/or pulling out your hair trying to analyze reporting data (okay, maybe that’s a bit dramatic), the Informz Mailing Summary Report quickly compiles stats from multiple emails and provides an easy-to-read analysis of results. Best day and time to send? No problem. Are you sending too much email? It’ll tell you. How engaged are your mobile readers? It can pull that too. This report houses a lot of valuable information based on past campaigns so you can strategically plan for future campaigns and increase results.
Dynamic Segmentation
Benchmark data has shown that emails sent to smaller lists, when tend to be targeted and contain relevant information, have higher open and click rates than emails sent to larger lists. In a perfect world, every email you send would have custom content that’s been personalized to subscribers interests, but when your database contains thousands and thousands of members, breaking a big list down into smaller segments and sending dozens of smaller emails is going to be very time consuming. That’s where dynamic segmentation comes in. With dynamic segmentation, you can create one core newsletter and then make customized stories that only certain segments see. The Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association uses this feature and has cut their email creation time in half.
Communications Calendars
As a marketer myself, I can honestly say that without our team’s communications calendar, we’d be lost! A communications calendar is the number one way to keep your team on track and ensure everyone is aware of all activities — past, present, and upcoming — to avoid miscommunication, which leads to inefficiency. The communications calendar right within Informz is a great tool to help you keep track of your email campaign schedule. You can even add non-Informz activities, like events, advertising, and social media posts, to keep all facets of your department covered.
Automated Welcome Campaigns
Automated welcome emails tend to see higher levels of engagement than promotional emails because they are sent at the start of the subscription period, when subscribers are most interested in hearing from you. High levels of engagement at the start of a subscription period will lead to ongoing deliverability — keeping you at the top of the inbox. And let’s face it; an automated email is about as efficient as you could possibly be! Set it up once, and forget it. ASM International implemented an automated membership welcome campaign in lieu of printed materials. This campaign outperformed their average email open rates by 257% and cut $30,000 from their budget.
The Reviewer
One of the newest Informz features, The Reviewer, has already created efficiencies for users. The American Academy of Neurology has saved at least 30 minutes per mailing with this tool! If the email review process has ever held you up from getting an email out on time, you might want to try using the Reviewer. The collaboration and feedback process has never been easier. The Reviewer will send a snapshot of your mailing to editors at your organization and collect comments, edits, and approval, notify you — the editor — and you can quickly make edits and updates. No more sifting through your inbox for feedback, fearing you’ll miss something. Get your emails out the door faster!
Professional Services
You may or may not know about our awesome team of email experts that are assisting clients with consulting and marketing strategy to increase revenue and email performance, but did you know that they will do the work for you, too? Allow our Professional Services team to step in and manage campaigns when your in-house email marketers are out on leave, switch jobs, or are busy with other things. Rest easy knowing that your email campaigns are in good hands.
RSS Feeds
Do you include articles from your website in your daily, weekly, or monthly newsletters? Try using RSS feeds to easily collect and feed stories into a newsletter. RSS feeds (which stands for RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) are a standardized method that allows for the automatic update of content. Michigan Farm Bureau uses RSS feeds and has seen a time savings of 15 minutes per story, which adds up to a lot over an entire newsletter or a couple of newsletters each week. If you are already planning to load articles to your website, be more efficient by setting up an RSS template and pull in the teaser and headline that are already hyperlinked.
Social Posting
If you have an active presence on social media and you share your email communications with your social audience, cut one step out of your process and use social posting. During the email setup process, select the accounts you want to post to and craft the message you want to appear before the link to your mailing. Don’t worry about counting the characters; we’ve taken care of that based on the type of account you’ve selected and reserved enough space for your shortened URL. Then, after your mailing is created and before you send, preview your social posts and modify them if you’d like. You can even view how many people have clicked on the link in the social posts, and when they’ve clicked in the Mailing Activity Report. Now you can have true insight into your social media followers and eliminate the need to manually post to Twitter or Facebook.
What email marketing tools have you used to save time in your day?
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