I've asked Richard, our Manager of Training, to send up some good information from the MarketingSherpa Email Summit so you'll see a bunch of great stuff today and tomorrow.
Richard: Hello from the Marketing Sherpa Email Summit in Miami, where it’s humid and sunny. I personally prefer the fog and 30 mile per hour wind gusts of San Francisco (which is why I live there), but I’m managing to scrape by.
I spent day one of the summit in an eight hour Email Professional Certification course, held by Marketing Experiments. This course covered best practices for creating sign-up forms, emails and landing pages. I didn’t agree with absolutely everything that was said - I’ll spare you from my few disagreements - but found the major themes of the course to be very interesting.
Those themes were:
- To succeed in getting someone to sign-up for your list, open your email, click a link, and take action / make a purchase on your website or email landing page you must ensure that the relevance, offer and incentives of each step outweigh the friction and anxiety generated by each step. That’s fairly obvious, of course, but I’d never heard the process described in just this way.
- When planning your email marketing efforts, you should work backwards in the design process from the website / landing page where you want to see people take action, to the content of your message, to the sign-up form on your site. The reason for working backwards is because you want to make sure your emails properly direct subscribers to what you’re offering them on your site, and you want your emails to properly fit what you’ve promised at the point of sign-up. It’s easier to make sure the beginning of the process properly leads to the end if you know where you want people to end up from the get go.
- You always want to ensure congruence and continuity in your efforts. Congruence means that every element of your content should state or support the value of your proposition. Continuity means that every step of the sales process should state or support the value of your proposition. Basically, keep to your message.
This is just the first of several posts from Miami. I’ll provide more detail on the themes I’ve mentioned above in my next post.
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