In fact, more people are using email than ever before (close to 3.8 billion worldwide). Fronetics works with supply chain and logistics businesses every day, so we have a first-hand understanding of how email marketing can be successful in these industries.
That being said, it’s true that email is changing. Marketers need to be on top of these latest changes to keep pace and stay relevant. Here are 5 email marketing trends supply chain and logistics marketers should be ready for in 2018.
5 email marketing trends
1) Interactive emails
According to a recent survey by Litmus, more than 27% of marketers believe interactive emails make a big impact in email marketing. Making your emails engaging to read will reduce bounce rates and capture your target audience’s attention span for longer. A few ideas to make your content interactive: image galleries, sliders, buttons, quizzes, search bars, surveys, and, of course, an “Add to Cart” button.
2) List segmentation
If you’re not segmenting your email lists, you’re shortchanging your email marketing campaigns. MailChimp found that businesses who use list segmentation generate more than 14% more email opens and get 100.95% more clicks from email campaigns.
Effective email list segmentation is about collecting adequate data to create and target optimal email content based on audience preferences. A simple way to collect this type of data: email opt-in forms that collect more information than simply name and email.
3) Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence and machine-learning technologies will shape the future of email marketing. For example, Adobe has invested in AI-powered marketing, including features with the ability to suggest the best subject line for an email based on what it has learned about users. Machine learning can make email marketing easier, suggesting ways to segment email lists, send more personalized emails to key individuals, and generate product recommendations.
4) Plain-text emails
This one may seem counter-intuitive. While high-quality email design filled with images used to be a trend, marketers are increasingly finding that plain-text emails are more effective. This is largely because plain-text renders the same across all devices, and it has the added benefit of seeming more personal.
5) The rise of mobile-first
It’s not news that most emails are now opened on mobile devices. This means that it makes sense to start designing emails mobile-first. In addition, email subscription forms will start becoming more mobile-friendly, and content, such as articles and blog posts, should end with an email sign-up form to increase conversions.
What email marketing trends are you paying attention to?
Focus on what you do best — and save time and money — by parceling off these 6 marketing tasks to outsource.
If you’re anything like me, you’re busy — not-enough-hours-in-the-day busy. We find that supply chain and logistics marketers are some of the most overworked professionals in the industry. One person (or a very small team) is often responsible for all marketing and sales efforts for an organization. So I want to let you in on a little secret: Outsourcing is your solution to being too busy.
Outsourcing marketing tasks allows you to focus on insourcing your core competencies. In other words, you can start focusing on what you do best and delegate specified tasks to external experts.
The content marketing landscape is constantly changing. There are more and more marketing tasks to cover: social media, videos, blogs, emails, etc. How can you truly focus your attention on any one area when you have so many balls in the air?
Don’t work harder. Work smarter.
Outsourcing marketing gives you the opportunity to remove some of the time-consuming and laborious tasks from your desk, so you can get back to the core of your marketing efforts.
That doesn’t mean you have to outsource all your marketing tasks, or even half of them. Choosing several areas beyond your staff’s expertise, or tasks that are particularly tedious, can help you improve your marketing efforts and take stress off an overworked internal team.
Here are six areas you should consider outsourcing.
Video: 6 marketing tasks to outsource
Final thoughts
Finding the right partner is key when you choose to outsource marketing tasks. You have to trust the people to whom you are delegating tasks, so that you know the work is getting done the way you want while you focus your attention on other tasks.
The right partner will work with you to develop a strategy that closely aligns with your business goals. Your partner can even execute the strategy for you and provide regular updates on how it’s working. This kind of results-driven approach will ensure you’re stretching your marketing dollars to the fullest extent and getting the kind of results that will grow your bottom line.
Are you using subtitles as part of your YouTube marketing strategy? You should be, as well as these other tips.
I’ve written a lot about YouTube and how the supply chain should be leveraging it as a marketing tool. Of course, I don’t recommend just creating videos at random and throwing them up on your channel. Like any content or platform, you should approach YouTube strategically.
Here are some tips for optimizing your YouTube marketing strategy.
5 tips to improve your YouTube marketing strategy
1) Do the groundwork.
It may seem like a bigger-than-necessary investment of time at the front end, but doing your research is often “one of the most undervalued aspects of content marketing,” according to Forbes contributor AJ Agrawal.
This means getting a grasp of the existing landscape before you publish your content. Look at others in your market, and what works or doesn’t work for them.
2) Create “content buckets.”
“YouTube marketing really comes down to picking a few key areas where you feel you can deliver true thought leadership, entertainment, or some kind of value, and then mass-producing content that falls within those larger buckets,” says Agrawal.
“Buckets” refer to the broader categories your content falls into. For example, if you’re looking to create awareness about the role you play in a larger supply chain structure, one bucket might be education. Once you start organizing your thinking this way, generating quality content that falls within your larger strategy gets much easier.
3) Create a standard for your content, and stick to it.
Agrawal points out that one of the most important keys to building a loyal audience is consistency. This can be a challenge when it comes to posting quality video content, since it requires an investment of time and resources.
But it’s crucial that you “set the tone from the beginning and let your audience know what to expect,” including what kind of content you’ll be posting, and how often your audience can expect to hear from you. Once you’ve done that, stick with the promises you’ve made.
4) Use subtitles.
People are increasingly watching videos on their mobile devices in public, without the sound on. Taking this small step means that, rather than bypassing your content because they can’t hear what’s being said, people are paying attention to your videos no matter where they are.
5) Collaborate.
Content marketing at its very core benefits tremendously from collaboration. “One of the most effective ways to get your content disseminated, shared, and ultimately seen is by collaborating with other people who have audiences as well,” says Agrawal.
Collaborations are beneficial for everyone involved, particularly when you chose your partners strategically. If they share a similar audience, it boosts exposure for both parties, as well as boosting credibility within your industry.
Check out these marketing automation tools for email workflows, social media scheduling, and customer relationship management.
Lately it seems like everyone is talking about marketing automation. As B2B buyers increasingly demand personalized experiences through the buyer’s journey, marketers’ jobs are getting tougher, as they need to provide custom lead-nurturing content to all prospects in their databases.
And that’s where automating marketing tasks can help.
The term “marketing automation” refers to a variety of tools used to automate the process of personalizing leads’ interactions with your business. The sheer variety of these tools can sometimes be overwhelming — so we’ve pulled a few of our favorites in the categories of email workflows, social media scheduling tools, and customer relationship management.
6 marketing automation tools for supply chain and logistics marketers
This tool lets you send targeted messages to your customers, crafting them based on how they interact with your business, and making personalized messages simple. You can also keep track of conversions and create customer profiles. Our favorite part? It integrates with your mobile app or website, letting you see data in real time and trigger actions by adding in predefined rules.
2. Constant Contact
This powerful tool has some features that are unique — and can take your marketing capabilities beyond the basics. Beyond setting up and managing an automated database, Constant Contact offers Facebook fan promotion, coupons and deals, and event management.
This is an extremely effective tool for retargeting customers through re-engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere on the web. It offers cross-device and cross-platform retargeting capabilities, as well as flexible segmentation, letting you provide customized experiences that dramatically improve your marketing efficiency. It also offers customized budgeting and full control over ad spend.
Pardot is an all-inclusive marketing automation suite, but it’s particularly strong for amping up your engagement with CRM integration. It’s a great tool for helping your sales team shorten the sales cycle. And, in addition to CRM integration, it offers email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and ROI reporting.
5. Marketo
This cloud-based marketing software lets you drive revenue with lead management and mobile marketing. It not only helps build customer relationships, but it helps you sustain them as well. Best of all, you can try it out for free until you’re sure it’s right for your business.
Bonus all-in-one tool: HubSpot
HubSpot is an inbound-marketing tool that lets you generate leads, close deals, and manage your sales pipeline from start to finish. It integrates beautifully with a content marketing strategy, with the goal of turning outbound leads into inbound ones. It includes revenue reporting, custom-event reporting, custom-event automation triggers, predictive-lead scoring, contacts and company reporting, and event-based segmentation.
What marketing automation tools does your business use?
Supply chain marketers can use marketing automation to drive efficiency and be more successful in earning and converting leads.
Marketing automation is the process of using software to complete repetitive marketing tasks designed to nurture sales leads, personalize marketing messages and content, and — in the process — save marketers’ time and effort. Supply chain marketers are using marketing automation to streamline processes and increase qualified leads.
Marketers can scale their processes so they can reach more people, with less effort.
Buyers are increasingly demanding a more personalized experience along the buyer’s journey, which means marketers are working overtime to produce more targeted content. That’s where marketing automation comes in. By using automated messaging, marketers are able to nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content that helps convert prospects into customers and customers into loyal customers.
Jumping into marketing automation can be overwhelming. Utilizing the right software and knowing where to implement automation into your marketing processes will help nurture leads and get you back to more pressing tasks.
Here are five ways to get started using marketing automation for the supply chain.
Video: marketing automation for supply chain marketers
Don’t worry about being redundant.
We are all too familiar with the batch-and-blast approach many companies use in their email marketing efforts. And, oftentimes, those emails end up in someone’s spam folder.
We also have so many clients that worry they will become redundant by implementing marketing automation. But that’s not true.
Instead, marketing automation can help you provide a more personalized experience for your leads (no batch-and-blast). This will increase the chances that they’ll buy. But it won’t take up more of your time. In fact, it will give you more time to focus on tasks that can’t be automated, like content creation.
