Deep Diving into a Growth Channel — Review

To explain this week’s blog in detail, I need to do a quick recap of something I mentioned back in week one: This is the fundamental concept of the course I’ve undertaken in growth marketing; The three basic characteristics of a growth marketer:

1. Channel expertise in one or many marketing channels: This essentially means that to be a growth marketer, you have to start with some base level of understanding or expertise in marketing channels. This includes things like email marketing, paid advertising, social media etc.

2. Analytical capabilities: “Data is the lifeblood of growth” and without the ability to understand data, experimentation can’t be accurate. This requires understanding things like excel and SQL, basic data extraction and experimentation which can help you validate your hypotheses and give accurate predictions.

3.Strategic Management and Project Management: This characteristic is something that is required of a growth marketing leader. Like ‘growth’ in the literal sense, when you grow in marketing you need help from all sides from other departments, functions etc. Cross-functional management and strategic thinking are why there are fewer growth marketers because it is not an easy skill to teach.

In today’s blog I will be discussing email marketing as a channel itself and how it can be used as a medium of growth hacking.

The reason I’ve chosen email marketing is twofold: Firstly, it is something that I am very familiar with and something I take care of on a regular basis at my workplace. Secondly, I’ve come to learn that it is an underrated skill which when leveraged can do wonders to aid all aspects of marketing.

Think about it, for demand generation or lead generation, you do require high quality email campaigns. From acquisition to retention, email marketing is inevitable. But here’s the tricky part: what are the emails you create, what do you send at which point and how do you really utilise email marketing to drive conversions?

The Anatomy of an Email

This is step 1 in email marketing: knowing what goes where. Below is a basic representation of what an email looks like. To know more in detail, check out CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing Mini-Degree.

Now in this blog I won’t really be getting in to the specifics of each of these categories because I believe it is very industry dependent. For example, in a B2B company, businesses are looking for short punchy subject lines and shorter emails, vs some B2Cs need to craft emails leaving a sense of curiosity in their audience, almost a clickbait if you will.

So I won’t dive into what content works best for each email, but I will again remind you that you can find all this information in CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing Mini-Degree.

The 5 Do’s and 5 Dont’s of Email Marketing

In this blog, I will cover some important things I’ve learned in my course regarding the best practices of email marketing. So let’s start with what to do right:

Consent and Permission

It is always important to get consent and permission from your audience before you start emailing them. A good audience will be one where subscribers opt-in to email campaigns (not be auto-opted in). While doing this it is paramount to also set expectations on frequency, value, security.

The reason for the later is because inherently, individuals do not like to receive a lot of information without asking for it. It is almost too easy on the other hand for an organisation to continuously dispel information without any regard for their audience and whether it plays an impact or not.

Follow the laws applicable to different countries

Your limit of freedom is only as far as your respect for the freedom of others. Think about it. Yes, governments from around the world have enforced laws and regulations to protect their citizens from privacy and data breaches. And, yes, you should comply with anti-spam laws when sending commercial emails. But sometimes looking at the law from another perspective can help you understand that these rules can also show you how to add value to your email marketing. It’s not only about avoiding costly fines but also about mutual respect between a company and its customers.

Again in this case, laws vary from country to country, but here are some basic steps to follow to make sure you are covered legally: https://www.sugarcrm.com/blog/8-steps-for-legal-email-marketing/

Set your frequency and content around your plan

Creating a content marketing plan is an essential step in charting out all aspects of your content marketing goals and journey.

In the case of email marketing, setting your schedule to line up with your content marketing plan, helps you to target your customers according to their journey within the funnel and reinforce efforts of other marketing channels.

Be in drip campaigns or thought leadership or even new product launches, the theme lines up to your overall content marketing goals.

Have a testing plan

Test & Track to learn Opens < Clicks < Conversions

✔ Subject lines

✔ Day of week

✔ Frequency

✔ Personalisation

✔ Discount/price

Also watch your:

✔ Bounces

✔ Unsubscribes

✔ Complaints

Leverage Data in Email Marketing

The winning combination of good a good email campaign is:

Personalization + Segmentation + Automation + Optimization

While I’d love to get into this entire topic deeper, I think it is best explained through CXL Institute’s Course on Email Marketing

So now that we’ve covered the Do’s, let’s look at the Dont’s which are much more self explanatory:

Don’t Buy an Email List

If you want to grow your list quickly, instead invest in:

➔ Media: digital media, sponsored emails, etc.

➔ SEO/Inbound lead generation

➔ Register-to-Win (and other email signup) promotions

➔ In-store (or in-air) sign up scripts and contests

Don’t use a large image or a bunch of small ones

Needless to say, the user experience instantly reduces when you see this as you open an email:

Don’t Start from Scratch

This is not a hard and fast rule, but is something that is very helpful. Having existing content in your emails, be it a blog, an article, document video etc helps establish some credibility and gives your audience an idea of what to look out for in the content.

Don’t Ignore Mobile Interfaces

While crafting an email, it is very easy for anyone to focus solely on a laptop or desktop experience without optimising it for your mobile. This is a big NO! a majority of your audience will only look at your mobile interface and experience and will make a judgement based on that.

Don’t send out emails without testing

Doing a pre-flight test is essential because there is nothing worse than having an email with errors and conveying the wrong message.

I hope with this information you understand a few best practices, but if you’ve been doing email marketing for any amount of time, you know there are some “quirks” to designing and writing for email. To get insights into 12+ years of trade secrets, plus trends in email design and copy in today’s inboxes that you might wanna try, check out CXL Institute’s Email Marketing Course