THE STATE OF EMAIL 20177 Trends to Kickstart Your

Marketing Results

The State of Email Lead Magnets 2017:7 Trends to Kickstart Your Marketing Results

A lead magnet is just the beginning.

That initial step or download kicks off a brand new process that will be used to interest, nurture, and eventually steer people to what you have to offer.

But the landscape is in perpetual movement.

Consumer behavior adjusts, and marketing strategies need to adapt to keep up (and remain relevant).

Here are 7 trends to kickstart your lead nurturing and sales efforts.

Trend #1. Emoji’s

‘Emoji marketing’ is now a thing.

Those cute and oh so adorable icons your kids end text messages with have exploded onto the social scene, leaving a trail of confused forty somethings in their wake.

The underlying reason isn’t much of a surprise when you analyze the facts, though.

For example, images are processed 60,000 times faster than text. We’re talking just a few miliseconds – or fractions of a single second – is all it takes.

Images also increase user engagement (as much as 94%). (Not to mention, peeps don’t really enjoy reading anymore, anyway.)

Here’s an example of the power of emojis in your marketing.

Undisputed AdWords-star (and WordStream founder) Larry Kim recently ran a simple A/B test with promoted tweets. One featured an emoji, and another did not (same exact text otherwise).

Guess which received the better bang for its buck?

The emoji tweet received 25.4% more engagement.

Why does that matter? Most social advertising platforms (like Twitter and Facebook) give you points for post engagement. Which is a long way of saying more engagement = decrease costs.

Which means they’re more likely to stand out to people. Faster and less expensively (as we’ve seen so far), than an emoji-less, plain text message.

In an era of declining email deliverability, open rates, and click rates, simply adding a rele-vant emjoi or two to your next subject line can also give it a quick boost in results, too.

Which means the emoji tweet also cost 22.2% less as well.

Not bad for adding a few silly faces.

Emojis are reported by one study to also increase the relevance, interest, and impor-tance of a message for people, too.

STATED REASON FOR SELECTING A POSITIVE

Source: Emoji Consumer Science Team

Trend #2. Automation

The vast majority of online shopping carts – 75% to be specific – are “routinely aban-doned” each and every day.

It’s not wonder, then, that average site conversion rates are a depressingly low percent or two.

There are many possible reasons why.

Maybe someone never actually intended to purchase anything in the first place. They were just browsing around. Or maybe they got to the finish line, only for a last second shipping cost to trip them up.

Point is that it happens. Regularly. Consistently.

You don’t want to just sit around idly as a result though. Would other top e-tailers, like Amazon?

Not a chance. Instead, they’d be sending a shopping cart abandonment emails ASAP (like this great one from FiftyThree):

WHY DO ONLINE SHOPPERS LEAVE WITHOUT PAYING?

Source: WorldPay

Shopping cart abandonment emails are nothing new. They’ve been around for awhile.

Because they work, generating a 54% open and 28% click rates – well above the stan-dard or accepted average of most generic email blasts.

It’s a perfect example of automation in motion; a pre-crafted, triggered email that shoots a customized message to an individual on-the-fly at the right moment, the right time.

A plethora of tools, from HubSpot to Infusionsoft to Autopilot and now even MailChimp offer complex, sophisticated “automation workflows” to better craft the right message to the right person, and supercharge your email-based results.

If automation customizes messaging, it’s by default personalizing the content shown to an individual.

‘Personalization’ is seen by at least ⅓ of marketers as the most important future trend be-cause it can help inform 86% of a consumer’s purchase.

The trouble is that less than 10% of marketers think of their efforts as “highly effective”.

So what gives?

Personalization is admittedly tough to pull off in practice. It’s like shooting a moving tar-get, when you consider that people move from device to device seamlessly and interact with a brand almost a dozen times before purchasing.

It’s tough! So many default to the lowest common personalization denominator: stuffing in someone first name (which sounds both unnatural and impersonal).

But look. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Take this next example from Expedia, which doesn’t use a name at all. Instead, it person-alizes what’s most important: the content’s message based on what someone was just looking for on their website.

Trend #3. Personalization

In the upper-left you see the name of the city. In the email content headline. And in the call to action button.

This behavior-based personalization jumps out because, YES!, you were in fact just look-ing for a hotel deal in Minneapolis.

If someone requires almost a dozen ‘touches’ across multiple days (or weeks) and devices (as we just learned, that means the days of ‘one-and-done’ (whether we’re talking one ad or one email or one lead magnet) are over.

People need nurturing. Time to marinate. They’ll take their sweet time before pulling the metaphorical trigger.

That means bombarding them with sales or deal-related email offers can get oppressive. A few are fine. But if that’s the extent of your email strategy, good luck.

Online, watch what people do (instead of what they see). A perfect example is Ramit Sethi.

Sure his content is good. But watch the carefully-crafted emails that he sends to see how each slowly builds anticipation for the ultimate pitch (that comes after a few non-sales related messages).

He’s slowly, methodically, building up the value by citing stats, social proof, incorporating examples, and using anecdotes or stories to lower your defenses and emotionally ‘buy in’.

Trend #4. Value-Add Emails

Facebook and Salesforce recently teamed up to perform an experiment across 565,000 email subscribers.

First, they split that huge list into three separate groups.

One received only Facebook ads. Another received only emails. And the third received a combination (of both Facebook and emails).

The results, if you’ve read everything up to this point so far, should be unsurprising.

The group that received both were 22% more likely to purchase at the end of the day.

Trend #5. Platform Integrations

Email reach was also extended 77% when you sent ads to the same people. In other words, 1 + 1 = 3.

Thankfully, most of today’s leading marketing technology companies are making this type of ‘platform integration’ incredibly easy.

For example, you can run Facebook lead ads and automatically send new leads from AdEspresso to your marketing database in HubSpot.

And then from HubSpot, you can integrate with GoToWebinar to begin nurturing these brand new leads in yet another medium.

The fun part is that the sky is literally the limit.

You can set-up all types of integrations and run almost any marketing campaign imagin-able.

Best of all, this type of sophisticated, multi-channel approach is the exact one your pros-pects are already doing to find, shop, and buy (so it naturally lines up with the behavior they’re already exhibiting).

Most of these tactical trends so far revolve around a database of some kind.

A central repository where customer information is stored, updated, and then relied upon to trigger or personalize or automate the very next message they see.

Even your website content, from the homepage to services or products, can pull in cus-tomer data in order to provide a better experience that’s more likely to result in a suc-cessful purchase.

The magic lies in segmentation, or the ability to gather data points (over time) about cus-tomers and place them into different ‘buckets’.

For example, Brennan Dunn is segmenting one large list of customers and contacts into different groups based on what kind of business they’re in (e.g. developer, consultant, etc.) and also their business size (e.g. solo vs. agency). That way he knows exactly what type of content messaging or promotions to send to each of these subgroups (based on their need, ability to spend a certain budget range, etc.).

Then he can even apply a ‘value’ for each lead to determine who’s most likely to purchase in the next few days or weeks (and therefore, whose most ‘ready’ for a sales message).

Trend #6. Segmentation

Another examples comes from the Rock n Roll marathon series, who’s able to leverage a segmented database to perfection in order to determine which event you’re most likely to buy.

My favorite example of segmentation-in-action, though, comes from Inbound.org and Ed Fry, who takes a similar approach that we’ve seen thus far and personalizes it to new lengths based on who you are and what you’re most likely interested in reading.

As you can imagine, this personalized, segmented email approach on steroids out per-formed pretty much every other type of ‘engagement’ email.

But it’s not like the market is growing necessarily. Mobile usage is actually eating away at the time we spend on desktops.

Trend #7. Phone Upgrades

Mobile internet usage outpaced desktop years ago.

We’re searching more on mobile devices, too.

Which poses a few problems for how your email campaigns are created, delivered, and formatted, for small screens with limited processing power.

That means simplified, slimmed-down email designs. Large text in a single column so it’s easy to read.

And it also means, depending on your business, to tap into new developments like a cus-tomer’s location and GPS coordinates.

For example, consider the following stats from Invoca:

70% of phone calls (which deliver 30-50% conversion rates as opposed to only 1-2% for websites) originate from digital channels. Mobile search drives 45% of those, and “61% of mobile searchers say click-to-call is the most valuable in the purchase phase of shop-ping”.

The State of Email Lead Magnets 2017:7 Trends to Kickstart Your Marketing Results