Student Experience - News #Zoho Campaigns

How digital marketers intend to optimise email marketing in 2021

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 11:51:22 +0000

As digital marketing agencies take on the ever-evolving task of understanding and evaluating their multi-channel marketing strategies, allocating time and resources for every channel becomes crucial. Email marketing has always been a dependable platform for digital marketers to market themselves as a brand and also to meet their clients’ marketing needs. However, it was only reinstated in 2020, as emails were extensively used to disseminate important messages during the lockdown.

This year, digital marketers want to build on the lessons of previous years to further the role of email marketing in planning impactful campaigns. In this post, digital marketers join us to discuss these lessons as well as features they will focus on in 2021.

Making the most of personalisation

Harpreet Munjal, a digital marketer and founder of LoudGrowth, says, “Email marketing is a core part of our marketing strategy as it saves our time and boosts productivity. We depend on email automation for important tasks like lead generation, reporting to our clients, content promotion, payments, and feedback. Also, email reporting data helps to improve our content marketing strategy.”

Personalization, segmentation, follow-up emails, A/B testing, integrations, automation, and analytics are the most common features used by his team at LoudGrowth. However, there is still room to excavate more. “In 2021, we plan to deep-dive in some of these features. We’ll further our focus on deep-segmentation, more integrations, nuanced automation, personalization, and testing,” says Harpreet, whose agency sends more than three million emails per month.

Quality over quantity

Another digital marketer, Siddhant Jain, who is a Growth Manager at DigiDarts, says, “A/B testing is the one feature that we have been using the most and suggest every brand to do the same. In future, we are looking at using workflows to their optimal capacity. It will definitely be the most important feature for any brand in 2021 as it simplifies the process of creating different pipelines to engage with the users at each stage.”

Last year, many email marketers understood that quality supersedes quantity when it comes to sending out campaigns. “Even if it’s their favorite brand, no one wants to receive emails from them every day. It is crucial that we share content on a consistent basis but not spam them. Another important learning is to go hyper-personal. Based on this, we will be designing our future campaigns,” adds Siddhant.

Design is key

While automation and personalization will continue to be the main focus for marketers, email design is something that cannot be ignored. In a survey Zoho Campaigns conducted on LinkedIn, a majority of participants voted minimalistic designs as the future of email designs.

Digital marketer Bhavesh Parmar says, “Interactive design and pre-designed ‘free’ email templates are trends that I am rooting for. You might have a great automation system in place but everything might fall flat if the design is not optimal. According to me, a strong design makes a campaign successful.”

We hope these expert tips help you plan your email marketing calendar. If you want to learn more email marketing strategies to grow in 2021, check out Zoho's recent tip on the subject.

How to send targeted and interactive emails

Fri, 20 Dec 2019 19:10:44 +0000

Part I

Email marketing is seen as an integral element of engagement for most of today’s digital businesses. While sending emails still takes the primary focus for most of us, delivering emails successfully to recipients’ inboxes is catching up the top position too. So it’s not just sending an email campaign that can ensure a place for it in a recipient’s mail folder. There are other methods to make your emails “smart” and “intelligent” in a way that they not only land safely but also don’t get lost in the long trail of other emails in your contacts’ inboxes.

With Zoho Campaigns, you can create and send emails that are personalized in both content and time of delivery, interactive, tested for open rates and clicks, spam-compliant, and extremely relevant and consumable to every contact who receives them.

Let’s look at some ways you can perform smarter email marketing and how Zoho Campaigns can make this process easy.

Testing that’s impact-driven and not imperfectly driven

It’s common wanting to run an experiment to test different versions of your email, but it’s important to list your reasons before you do. Ask yourself the following questions:

Why do you want to run this experiment?
What variables are you comparing?
What is the end goal and which is this the winning version?

A/B testing for emails is the best way to find out which type of email has more impact on your audience. Where people get A/B testing wrong is by not running a test at all before sending an email (when it’s highly required) and running imperfect testing by comparing wrong attributes (when it’s not recommended). Don’t forget that A and B are just versions that need to differ by the same attribute. A meaningful result will only come when you try to compare relevant versions.

With A/B Testing from Zoho Campaigns, you’re able to test emails for different attributes like subject line, sender address, and email content. With the ability to pick your own decision criteria for selecting the winning version of the email, you can have the entire experiment run under your control without being data-blinded.

Sending an email when the recipient is most active

What if every email you send is opened instantly by your recipient? It sounds like magic, but it’s really just metrics! Understanding your recipients’ prime open times will help you deliver emails that get noticed.

Time calibration plays a key role in estimating the time during which a particular email that you send will be opened by a contact who receives it. Your contacts may have subscribed to multiple brands and are likely to receive a sizeable chunk of emails every day. What can differentiate your email from the rest is when you choose to make that email appear in their inboxes.

Using Zoho Campaigns’ Send Time Optimization, you can make sure to send emails to your mailing list contacts at the exact time each of them will be active. This time will be unique for each contact, so, in simple terms, you’re now able to personalize the time of email delivery!

Safeguarding your domain reputation with email splitting

All of us are aware of this simple science—the more air filling a balloon, the more chances of it bursting. Imagine the same scenario but with your mail server in the place of the balloon. Sending bulk emails is fine, but what matters more is how you’re handling the bulk. The bulkier your email sending gets, the riskier your sender reputation becomes.

Sending too many emails at the same time can strain your server and make your domain look inauthentic. The best way to prevent this is by splitting your huge email numbers into smaller batches and sending each batch at periodic time intervals.

Zoho Campaigns’ Batch Send option helps you conveniently split your mailing list—and your emails—into multiple batches, as well as letting you define the time period between the delivery of each email batch. This also gives you room to study the performance of each set of emails and optimize them further for the next set.

Handling of bounces, unsubscribes, and spam complaints

The health of your mailing list and the overall performance of an email campaign depends on three primary metrics: bounces, unsubscribes, and spam complaints. These terms are as crucial as other performance measuring units like open and click rates.

A high bounce rate clearly indicates the inability to deliver your emails, which in turn shows that your mailing list is unhealthy and doesn’t contain contacts from authentic/trusted sources. Unsubscriptions happen due to a variety of reasons, the most common being a lack of interest in the brand, irrelevant engagement, spam experiences, change in reading preference, and so on.

Similar to unsubscribing from a list, people can also mark emails as spam. When the unsubscribe process is complicated, recipients tend to mark specific emails as spam with the expectation being they won’t receive any further emails from the sender. A holistic maintenance of all these three metrics is essential for smooth email delivery.

Zoho Campaigns provides automatic handling of bounces (soft and hard bounces), unsubscribes, and spam complaints so you don’t have to stress about managing these for every email campaign. Also, when a sender is exceeding their bounce rate or spam complaints, we automatically notify them in order to help them get back on track with some best practices.

Seeing emails the way your recipients would

Today’s online buying process has been revolutionary, but it hasn’t given up on one thing—the catalogue. Buying decisions are still based on product images. Buyers still want a sneak-peek at what they can expect from the product.

It’s the same case with your emails. Previewing emails before sending them to recipients helps you not only proofread the various email elements, but also get an idea about how your email will look in the their inboxes. This will reduce human errors as well as help you seamlessly deliver emails across multiple email clients, devices, and browsing platforms.

Email Preview within Zoho Campaigns lets you send test emails to yourself so you can monitor email functionalities before sending them to your mailing list. Users with Litmus credits can use the credit-based test previews of emails, making sure to deliver the best email engagement possible.

Get Started Now

Author: Aishwarya Ashok (Product Manager, Zoho Campaigns)

Tip of the week: A perfect start for your Welcome Series

Thu, 12 Dec 2019 12:01:29 +0000

Almost every email marketer strives to achieve the best-possible engagement with all their subscribers, the new entrants being even special. Only when you begin the journey on the right note can you take your subscribers forward till the final stage of conversion. What better way to embark on your nurturing process than with a set of welcome messages! A welcome series gives the perfect head start to your email engagement and makes sure that your subscribers are kept informed about your brand. Obviously, you wouldn't want to stop with just a single "welcome" email. At the same time, you need to keep a check on the number of emails that you'd be sending out to your list. What if you keep sending emails one after another, only to lose the recipients who consider you a spammer?

Planning your email sending framework is as essential as churning out quality content. To help you quickly prepare a mental map of how to proceed with your welcome series, here's our tip:

P.S. The Email Limits feature in Zoho Campaigns helps you send the right number of messages to your audience so your engagement turns out to be smooth.

Tip of The Week: The Importance of Mobile CTAs

Thu, 12 Dec 2019 10:36:55 +0000

Marketers of this generation are completely in-the-know of the fact that mobile devices are governing the performances of their email campaigns. A sizeable section of your audience opens your emails on their mobile phones and this trend can’t be ignored. While ‘Responsive Templates’ cater largely to engage the mobile audience, your email call-to-action (CTA) is the one that determines conversions. So definitely, everything from the design to the placement of these CTAs shouldn’t be overlooked.

Owing to the importance of these mobile CTAs, here’s our tip:

P.S. From our experience, we can suggest that a height of 40 pixels and above is the apt touch-target size for a CTA button.

Get Started Now

Webinar Recap: Email as a tool for webinar engagement

Wed, 25 Sep 2019 21:09:50 +0000

Today, marketers are constantly on the lookout for different ways to promote their brand. Conducting webinars is one of the easiest ways to connect and engage with your customers for building better relationships. With umpteen number of webinars conducted by brands in recent times, marketers will have to discover more effective ways to promote these webinars and engage their audience.

Marketing, especially email marketing, is all about creating engagement. Smart emails help you interact with your recipients, drive them to register for your webinars and increase the count of your attendees. This can drive sales and improve brand recognition. In our recent webinar, we discussed how email as a tool helps in webinar engagement. If you missed it, you can watch it below.

Here’s a quick rundown of the webinar email marketing conversations we had during this webinar:

What makes a perfect webinar?

Webinars, as we all know, has become a great platform to educate leads and contacts about products. The more interactive the webinar turns out to be, the more your contacts gain a better understanding of your product/brand. Here are a few preparation methods that can make your webinar a perfect one:

Decide a topic for your webinar — Your webinar topic is key to deciding your audience count. Choose an interesting topic that would engage your contacts. For this, you’ll have to research previously conducted webinars and different forms of content.

Form the agenda for the webinar — Agenda is the second major factor that influences how many registrants and attendees attend your webinar. Giving a glimpse of your webinar before conducting it will help the audience decide if they want to attend.

Confirm the content for the webinar — Once the topic and agenda are fixed for your webinar, you’ll have to prepare content that elaborates on them and ensures your content explains your agenda points.

Choose a platform on which to conduct the webinar — The tool you use also decides if the webinar be successful. Make sure you choose a tool that’s user-friendly. We’re obviously fans of Zoho Meeting, our in-house online meeting tool that helps you create and conduct webinars for teams/organization.

Decide the time and date for the webinar — You’ll have contacts from different parts of the world. This should be kept in mind, and the time and date for your webinar should be scheduled accordingly to ensure maximum attendees.

Schedule the webinar — When the points mentioned above are updated, it’s time for you to schedule the webinar.

Promote the webinar — Once you schedule the webinar, you’ll have to promote the webinar, which will help you get more registrants and thus more attendees. You can promote your webinars via emails, website, blogs, social media, and many more outlets.

Send a thank you— When your webinar is over, don’t forget to thank people who attended. This is a great way to engage your attendees and turn them into your customers. Also, remember to send a “sorry you missed our webinar” emails to registrants with the webinar recording attached so they feel you value them, even though they didn’t attend the live session.

Learn more about how to do webinars using Zoho Meeting

How can we create good follow-up emails for webinars?

Once you schedule a webinar, you’ll be sending out invitation emails to all your contacts. When you get registrants and attendees for your webinars, you can start connecting with them by dividing your email marketing into three stages:

Pre-webinar emails
Post-webinar emails
During-webinar emails

Pre-webinar emails are mainly focused on sending webinar invitation emails to your contact list. Once they register and the time is nearing for the webinar, you can send them reminder emails where the goal remains the same — to get more attendees for the webinar.

Post-webinar emails are important because ending your webinar doesn’t mean your relationship with the attendees is done. It is, in fact, a beginning. You now have a reason to engage them in the future. Once the webinar is over, sending thank you emails can cultivate your relationship with the attendees. Sending a “we missed you” email to registrants who missed the live webinar and attaching a recorded version of the webinar will also help keep registrants engaged.

During-webinar emails simply state that the webinar will begin shortly, which — again — will help you get more attendees.

These are just a few of the follow-up emails that can be used while conducting webinars.

What are the advantages of sending emails in batches?

Sending emails in batches helps you avoid straining your email server with continuous emails. Since most email servers will have a restricted amount of email acceptance at a specific time, sending emails in batches will help to safeguard your domain reputation and avoid your emails reaching spam folder. Batch sending can be easily performed in .

Will it be possible to send thank you emails to webinar attendees through Zoho Campaigns?

Yes, it’s possible. Once you schedule the webinar in your Zoho Meeting account and integrate it with your Zoho Campaigns account, all the registrants and attendees list will be available in your Campaigns account. You can select the list of attendees and send out your thank you emails.

Is it possible to send multiple reminder emails?

As of now, it isn’t possible to send multiple reminders using Zoho Meeting, but it’s in the development phase. You can send multiple reminder emails with the help of automation in Zoho Campaigns.

How do we add an unsubscribe button?

By default, the unsubscribe link will be added at the bottom of all your email campaigns. If you want to use it inside the content, you can use the unsubscribe merge tag $$

Which is the best day for sending an email?

The best day for sending out email campaigns are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. You can schedule your emails for any of these days. Also, when you schedule a campaign in Zoho Campaigns, you’ll have the option to schedule it for the recipients’ optimal open time, allowing your emails to automatically arrive at the time the recipient is most likely to open your email. For example: If a person opens their email regularly between 10 and 11 a.m, the email will be delivered to them during that time.

If you have any other questions, please share them with us in the comment box below.