In order to help you get organised for the year ahead, we’re highlighting some of our popular time-saving features. These will help free up your schedule so you can focus on more important things.

Here are some of our customers’ favorite features for saving time and doing more.

Features to help you find what you’re looking for

These actions help you move through your campaigns simply and quickly. Less time spent poking around looking for information means more time getting work done.

Campaign categories

Your campaigns are organised into easy to understand categories: draft, sent, and deleted. There’s also an overview page which shows your recent scheduled, draft, and sent campaigns at a glance.

Tagging

You can create and filter by customized tags to organise your campaigns in the way that makes the most sense for your team. You can even use multiple tags for total customization.

Thumbnail and list view

You can choose to view your campaigns either in a list or as a series of thumbnails. List view provides a succinct summary of your campaigns, while thumbnail view shows a handy view of your email design.

Search improvements

If you can’t remember what you named a campaign, you can search by subject line and by category (such as draft, sent, deleted) to help you find campaigns faster.

Date filtering for sent campaigns

No need to scroll through all your sent campaigns to find the one from last January. Use the date filter to view campaigns sent during a date range of particular interest.

Features to help you complete tasks quicker

There never seems to be enough hours in the day, especially when you’re planning for the year ahead. These efficient actions in the Campaign Monitor app will make your life easier and help you move through your email tasks quickly.

Single-click copy

Hover over an existing campaign and click copy to quickly duplicate the campaign in a new draft.

Quick preview

To see a quick view of an existing campaign, click on the three-dot icon for that campaign and select preview.

Quick rename

To rename any sent or draft campaign, click on the three-dot icon for that campaign and select rename. 

Features for smarter campaign management

Better campaign management means you spend your energy creating stellar content and less time dealing with the nuts and bolts of email. Say hello to less frustration for an enjoyable experience with Campaign Monitor.

Restore deleted campaigns

Campaigns are stored in a deleted folder for 30 days after deletion. You can restore campaigns within that time frame or you can permanently delete them from there. Never again worry about losing something you need.

Copy scheduled campaigns

You can copy a scheduled campaign to create a new draft. No more waiting until the campaign has sent to start working on your next one. Simply copy the campaign and get to work.

Bulk delete

Want to clear out all your old campaigns? Hover over an existing campaign and a checkbox will appear. From there you can select multiple campaigns and choose delete. 

Compare sent campaigns

Compare results from multiple campaigns to see which are performing best. Hover over a campaign and use the checkbox to select the campaigns you want to review, then select compare. 

Wrap up

Feedback from our customers shaped these updates and will remain at the heart of how we grow in the future. Because email marketing should be enjoyable, with fewer frustrations and hair-pulling.

The new year is a time for new beginnings, new goals, and new systems. We here at Campaign Monitor know you need to make the most of every second of your workday in order to do more of what you love. 

The post Save Time While Doing More appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

With visual communication being a key component of content marketing strategies, creating impactful newsletters has to be a priority for brands—running out of ideas isn’t an option.

So, where do you go when you can’t think of what to include in your next email newsletter?

Why not try going back to the content you have already created? They’re a goldmine for generating ideas and creating more marketing material.

In this article, we share ten ways you can repurpose existing content for your company’s newsletters.

Generate newsletter campaign ideas from social media

Social media has a wealth of material from which you can generate newsletter ideas.

We share four methods for reusing social media posts and visuals to increase email clicks and engagement.

Use social visuals as newsletter content headers

Visuals created for social media can serve multiple purposes—they can be used as headers for newsletters, or to section off segments of an email.

While emailers can be text-based, images are a great way to increase clicks. They also give recipients an idea of what to expect within the email. 

Which is why headers are so important.

But marketers don’t want to design a new header for every email—so, why not make life easier and repurpose a visual that has already been designed?

An image like the one below can be used on social media to thank donors. It can also be repurposed as a header for your newsletter templates.

Source: Venngage

There’s another advantage to using the same image across multiple platforms. 

You create synchronicity in your marketing by using visuals, which makes your brand instantly recognizable.

Generate newsletter content ideas from top social media posts

When you post on social media, your content doesn’t have to live solely on that platform. What works on social media could translate to clicks to emails.

Analyze your best posts on visual platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and TikTok to mine content for your emails. These will make for engaging stories in your newsletter.

However, don’t ignore the traditional, more text-focused channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

The posts on these channels could make for compelling content in newsletters—and you can link back to the original post to drive views and engagement across platforms.

Another method for repurposing social posts is to curate the top posts of the week and send them as a newsletter of top brand stories.

Social media is a busy arena—there are so many posts populating users’ timelines that it is easy to miss out on updates. 

By compiling the best posts of the week, you ensure that your users don’t miss out on important brand stories while generating newsletter content with ease.

Use social poll results for newsletter content ideas

Most social platforms give users the option to create polls—this is a type of content that has become increasingly more popular among users.

For example, take a look at this poll from Evernote that got 380 votes—it can be repurposed for email campaigns.

Source: Twitter

Marketers can run the same poll via email—micro surveys help you understand your audience better and find ways to generate more relevant newsletter content for them.

Comparing the results from social media vs email would make for good supplementary content—and it will give companies insight into their users.

Brands also have the option of sharing the poll results in an email—for Evernote, this would be a great opportunity to plug their app since it is designed for taking down notes on the go.

Additionally, sharing poll results in emails informs recipients that the brand creates such content. 

This gives users added incentive to engage with polls on social media in the future.

Improve newsletter copy with user-generated content 

User-generated content is one of the most authentic kinds of content from brands.

Source

User-generated content acts similarly to word-of-mouth marketing but is more visual.

Showcasing real people adds value to brand platforms. It also gives a sense of authenticity and realism to their online presence. 

And that is why user-generated content should be incorporated into email marketing campaigns.

Marketers often associate user-generated content with social media, but it can be used to boost email engagement as well.

User images and videos can be sourced directly from users’ accounts. You should always ask them for permission to use their posts in your emails, of course.

Contests are another source of user-generated content. They can be used to promote email signups on social media or to boost social followings via email campaigns.

When created UGC-powered newsletters, adopt a theme to make the campaign more cohesive—that will help create more interest and engagement for recipients.

Use infographics as newsletter content

Gated content includes anything that requires users to fill out forms, sign up for access, or make a payment.

The reason why gated content works to increase engagement is because of the value it offers users.

This type of lead-generating content is usually longer and very thorough—it offers readers more in-depth knowledge of a subject matter.

While gated content can garner attention on its own, using this material in email marketing can improve views and clicks.

Infographics are a visual resource that cannot be discounted for email marketing. 

Combining imagery, icons, text, and charts, infographics pack a lot of punch for a single piece of content.

While infographics are largely used for brand websites and blogs, they also make for great email content.

Take a look at the below infographic on stocks and shares, for example. 

It distills information into an easy-to-absorb and simple graphic that looks great on a blog. 

And the vertical nature of the graphic also makes it perfect to send out as an email.

When you design infographics for blogs, or to share with partners for link-building purposes, consider how the graphic can be repurposed for emails.

You can also look at existing blog posts to mine content to be converted into infographics. These can be shared with audiences via newsletters.

Use video content to generate newsletter campaign ideas

Video content has steadily been becoming more popular—and marketers are aiming for this market more than ever before.

If your company is creating videos in any form, then they should be a great resource for your newsletter content ideas.

Following are three ways to use videos in your newsletters to boost email clicks.

Use Instagram Stories for newsletters

Let’s start with an unusual option—Instagram Stories. This kind of ephemeral content has become a mainstay of social media—but it can be used in newsletters, as well.

Instagram Stories are available for only 24 hours—while that makes for great short-term engagement, not all your followers can check their social media every day.

For those followers, seeing the highlights from your Stories in their inbox can motivate them to continue associating with your brand.

Followers are invested in a brand’s Instagram Stories—they put a face to the brand name and give people an inside look at a corporation. 

Instagram Stories are also great for covering events, conducting Q&As, influencer marketing, and creating social polls. 

Marketers can take screenshots of the Stories—including the text captions, emojis, and stickers—or create a video of the raw files to incorporate in a newsletter.

Incorporate YouTube videos in newsletters

YouTube content is a great way to mine newsletter content ideas—you can embed videos in the email, like in this example.

Source: Campaign Monitor

Native videos that play directly in inboxes make content more engaging—it keeps users focused on the email content, increasing the chances of them clicking through to your website.

But video embeds can be tricky if HTML coding isn’t something your team is familiar with.

However, there are other ways to add videos to your newsletters:

• Screenshot a frame from your video to add to the email and link it to the video
• Add a GIF of the video and link it to give the user a sense of motion
• Create an animated play button to encourage people to click through to the video
• Use CSS and HTML to create a short video effect on a series of static frames

Videos increase interactivity and engagement but they can be challenging to embed in a newsletter.

But if you have the wherewithal to do include videos, they will make for excellent newsletter content.

Create how-to guides from video tutorials

Explainer videos have become quite popular among the denizens of the internet, primarily because of how many people use YouTube as a search engine.

But while video tutorials are engaging, people don’t always have the time to watch an entire video—they want the highlights in a neat package that they can refer to whenever necessary.

That is where you can tie your YouTube marketing with your newsletter content. Add YouTube tutorials in your newsletter using the aforementioned methods.

But if it’s a long piece of content, you could risk subscribers leaving the video part way, or worse, unsubscribing.

Instead, put together highlights from the video and build content stories for your newsletter. 

You can create a campaign where you regularly share video highlights on specific topics for your audience to keep them engaged with your brand.

Wrap up

Marketing teams design a lot of content—but so much of it is used once or for a short campaign.

Reuse the content you already have to generate newsletter content ideas and increase email views and clicks.

These 10 ideas for creating newsletters from existing content will make marketers’ lives easier and increase subscriber engagement.

Ronita Mohan is a content marketer at Venngage, the online infographic maker and design platform. Ronita regularly writes about marketing, sales, and small businesses.

Twitter: @Venngag

The post 10 Ideas to Repurpose Content for Email Marketing Campaigns appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

At the same time, we’ve seen the emergence of Chatbots, which can be effective when people engage with your website. Forty-five percent (45%) of consumers report they prefer to use chatbots to communicate with brands when it comes to getting a quick response, while a survey by Campaign Monitor revealed email was among their most important channels to customer communications.

Perhaps it’s time for marketers to start bridging the gap. It’s not a matter of one strategy versus the other; combining both email marketing strategies and the use of Chatbots can boost engagement and accelerate results.

Integrating email marketing and chatbots

Email marketing and Chatbots create an inbound marketing strategy and outbound marketing strategy that complement each other. Here are some of the strategies you need to use to make email and Chatbots work together to boost your marketing efforts.

Securing email addresses and permissions

At the heart of many of your marketing efforts, especially email marketing, is procuring the email addresses of your customers and potential customers. A qualified list of people who have opted in to receive email from you provides a multitude of opportunities for marketing. Getting that email address and getting people to agree to receive offers and content from you is crucial.

Here’s where Chatbots can help. When visitors are browsing your website, a Chatbot can interact at key moments to request email addresses. For example, if someone is reading your blog, a Chatbot might ask them if they would be interested in subscribing to your email newsletter. If someone is reading about one of your products, a Chatbot can pop up and ask if they’re interested in receiving discount coupons.

An effective strategy is to offer content that provides real value, such as eBooks, guides, demos, and how-to videos. Someone looking at a website for sauces might be willing to exchange their email address for recipes, for example.

The more customized you can make the “ask,” the more success you’re likely to have.

Gathering the data you need for effective segmentation

One of the most effective strategies for email marketing is segmenting. Rather than blanket customers with a generic email, you need to make sure your marketing efforts are relevant and customized. Segmenting your list narrows the target and gives you a much greater likelihood of hitting the target with the right message.

Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to get opened. Personalization requires segmenting. When done right, marketers using email segmenting strategies report an incredible 760% increase in revenue generated from email.

Segmentation takes many forms. Based on your product or service, and your industry, you might segment your audience by:

• Demographics (Age, Gender, Income, Marital Status, Education, etc.)
• Geo-location
• Past purchases
• Purchase Intent
• Buying Frequency
• Stage in the Customer Journey
• Page Views
• and more.

Chatbots are one of the most effective ways to gather the data you need to efficiently segment your list. This is because you can ask your customers specific questions to get the data point you need to craft effective marketing messages.

Some of the data you want to collect may not be supported by the chatbot software or email platform you’re using. For example, you may not be able to directly pass images or larger files from a chatbot to your email engine.

You may need developers to create customer software for these functions. Once you have the data, you’ll be able to better qualify potential customers to tailor Chatbot conversations, sales leads, and develop a segmented email marketing list.

Improve your conversion rates

Someone who has shown an interest in your product or services by visiting your website and then engaging further with you will have a much higher potential for conversion than a casual visitor and sending mass emails.

Chatbots can personalize the conversation by providing relevant information based on page content and visitor queries. This helps move potential customers through the sales funnel. Your email can follow-up on specific topics or questions, or send them back to the website for more information.

Another advantage of Chatbots is that they don’t take breaks or vacations. When someone is ready to engage with your company, Chatbots are there to keep the conversation moving forward. Nearly two-thirds of internet users say the best part about Chatbots is 24-hour service. When they read that marketing email at 2 am, Chatbots will still be there to answer their questions.

Provide diversity in your communication channels

90% of customers say they want a seamless interaction with brands using omnichannel communications. The more ways you can interact with consumers, the better chance you have to convert them. Research shows that companies deploying an omnichannel communication strategy for customer engagement retain nearly 3 times the number of customers versus companies without multiple channels for customer interaction.

Having a website, being available by phone, email, social channels, and Chatbots present multiple ways for people to engage with your brand. It makes sure customers don’t fall through the cracks and provides them a way to get the answers to their questions quickly and in their preferred method of communicating.

Chatbots can personalize the experience, provide on-the-spot answers, and help gather the data you need to personalize your email marketing campaigns.

Wrapping up

Creating effective email campaigns, taking advantage of marketing automation, and integrating Chatbots into your marketing mix can create synergies that build on top of each other for more effective marketing. 

It takes special skills and experience to do it well. If you don’t have the right experience in-house already, you may want to consider turning to a top staffing agency to help with recruiting. It takes the right team with the experience to build and manage the tech, create the marketing, and make it all work together seamlessly.

The post How Chatbot and Email Integration Can Boost Engagement appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

Businesses and nonprofits alike had to adjust to the “new normal” brought about by coronavirus. Everyone had to change strategies to adhere to new social distancing guidelines and safety precautions. It’s likely that your nonprofit’s doors are still closed and your staff members are still working from home. 

Given all the commotion, your organization probably enacted some short-term fundraising goals and marketing objectives to weather the crisis. But, as the year progressed, nonprofits adjusted their strategies to think more long-term. 

Specifically, nonprofits are starting to think beyond immediate fundraising needs to how they’ll develop long-term relationships with their supporters and strengthen big-picture fundraising while following COVID-19 guidelines.

To do this, nonprofits need to think critically about how they’re reaching supporters by leveraging their CRM software and donor data. In this guide, we’ll be covering four top tips to help nonprofits with these donor management concerns.

Now, let’s dive deeper into an ideal donor management strategy. 

1. Build comprehensive donor profiles. 

Before you start compiling donor data and incorporating it into your organization’s relationship-building strategies, you need to ensure you have the right tools to store and organize the information.

This comes back to the idea of having a donor database that can build out donor profiles with all the information you need. CharityEngine’s CRM guide explains that nonprofits need to track donor data to build out a complete view of all the engagement metrics that compose the donor journey. For instance, be sure you have access to engagement data such as: 

• Donation history. When you know donation history, you can tailor fundraising appeals to meet their needs. For example,  let’s say one donor has contributed to your online donation page three times in the last few months. You should send them an email that details your recurring gift options and explains how they can sign up if interested. 
• Events attended. Keep track of the nonprofit events (including virtual fundraising events) your supporters attend to support your mission. If a supporter frequently attends your events, you might create specialized invitations for them to the next one you plan. Similarly, if a supporter hasn’t donated in a while but regularly attends events, you’ll know that you haven’t lost their engagement altogether. As we all know, this is a tough time and some people might not be able to stay involved in their usual way.
• Connections with other supporters. Understanding the familial connections within your donor database can go a long way in your communications. You can address entire families at once, particularly when it comes to direct mail. Also, be sure to track business connections to determine if your cause resonates with a specific company’s employees. If so, that business might be a good potential partner for your organization. 
• Contact information. Many people have multiple email addresses, phone numbers, and several other ways to contact them. So, you should be able to save various aspects of contact information to a single profile when applicable. Also, keep track of how each supporter prefers you to contact them so that you reach out using the best channels. Otherwise, they may feel as though you’re overlooking their preferences and only doing what’s convenient for your team.

Collect and save this information to take the first step in developing an effective and engaging marketing strategy. From here, you can use supporters’ preferences to create smart donor segments, which we’ll discuss more in the next section. 

2. Create smart donor segments.

The best way to develop relationships with your donors is by paying personalized attention to each one of them. But, it’s not feasible to send individualized emails to each supporter every time you want to contact them. That would take far too much time. That’s why nonprofits create smart donor segments to reach out to supporters in a more efficient way. 

Donor segments allow your organization to tailor outreach to address groups of supporters who share common characteristics. 

To get a better grasp of this concept, let’s walk through some of the segments that your organization may consider creating: 

• Giving levels. Consider how much and how frequently your donors give to your organization then create segments based on this data. After all, you wouldn’t communicate with your low-level donors in the same way you would with your mid-level supporters. Your mid-level donors have greater potential to become major donors, so your messages should lead them toward this goal. Meanwhile, if you sent those messages to a low-level audience, the difference in giving will be too great of a leap, which might steer them away.
• Major and prospective donors. Use your prospect research and wealth screening tools to identify your major donors or major prospects. These individuals should be held in high regard and stewarded accordingly. Consider giving them their own segment in your donor database. 
• Engagement level. If you have donors with high engagement levels, it’s important to note that in your donor database. This means you’ll have a group of accountable individuals that you can reach out to for volunteering, contributions during tough times, and so on. You can also reach out to prevent a supporter from lapsing altogether if someone from this group suddenly drops in their engagement rate. 

Once you’ve identified and created meaningful donor segments for your organization’s outreach, you can craft the most effective message possible tailored to each group of supporters. You’ll know that the message will be relevant to every person in that group, but you won’t need to spend time crafting individual messages. 

3. Track nonprofit communications.

One of the purposes of your nonprofit donor data is to guide your organization’s marketing strategy. According to this guide, your organization should consider the channels that will interest your audience. Then, use a variety of those channels in your outreach strategy.

By collecting more data and tracking communications with supporters, you’ll add more data for your nonprofit’s donor profiles. Using this data, you can craft more marketing segments that can be used to hyper-personalize outreach and get the most use out of your strategies.

Consider the following personalization strategies that you can use to reach your supporters: 

• Use individuals’ preferred names in direct messages. Using names assures supporters that they’re not just receiving mass communications. Specifically, you should use their preferred names, to further develop your relationships.  
• Use the preferred method of communication with supporters. Send a simple survey to ask supporters their preferred method of communication. Then, make sure you honor their preferences. For those who don’t respond to the survey, you can use data in their donor profile to make inferences about their preferred channel. 
• Send personalized invitations for things they’re interested in. Take note of your supporter’s interests. In another survey (or the same one) ask supporters about their interests, such as their preferred events, programs, and volunteer opportunities. Once you know what their interests are, you can send personalized invitations for those activities that interest them.

Your nonprofit will need a place to store information and data to make all this possible, which leads us back to the importance of your CRM system. 

Within your CRM system, you should track your marketing campaigns to see how successful they are with your intended audience. From here, you can analyze the success rates and make adjustments to your marketing strategy where necessary. 

For instance, keep an eye on metrics such as: 

• Email open rate. This shows how initially appealing your emails are. If it’s low, you may consider adjusting your subject line or further diversifying your content. 
• Bounce rate. If people are bouncing from your emails or your website, you’re probably not meeting their expectations in terms of content. Consider what it is they want and expect from the marketing materials. Then, deliver that material. 
• Click-through rates. High click-through rates for emails, social media, and other marketing sources indicates that your message successfully drives supporters to your targeted action. 

These metrics are key to understanding the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. If it’s not going well, you may need to go back to the drawing board with donor data. Ask yourself: what isn’t meeting expectations or where are interests misaligned? 

4. Craft and track campaign data. 

One of the functions of your donor database is to track your fundraising campaigns as a whole. When you have a software system that’s interconnected with your donor data, your fundraising tools, and marketing solutions, you can track all campaign information in a single location. 

Using your CRM to track and analyze campaigns helps measure the impact of campaign elements. Then, you can make necessary adjustments to your marketing strategy.

Campaign data is, essentially, the composite donor data that you collect. For instance, consider the following campaign data: 

• Total money raised. When you set up your fundraising campaign, you created a primary goal that you want to reach. We recommend that you also set benchmarks and checkpoints along the way as well to make sure you’re on track. If you’re not on course to hit the goal, take a look at your marketing strategy. Is your message reaching the right audience? Are they paying attention?
• Donation page abandonment rates. With the right technology, you can track your website’s visitation rates. If you find that potential supporters navigate to your donation page but leave without giving, you may need to optimize that page. Try streamlining the donation process by requiring supporters to fill out fewer fields on the donation page itself.
• Giving platforms used. If you’re employing a multichannel fundraising campaign, you’ll have multiple places to track incoming donations. You may have gifts from your donation page, direct mail, a peer-to-peer fundraiser, or social media fundraising platforms. Use your data to maximize your most effective platform and improve the other ones.

Analyze campaign information within your database to visualize fundraising campaign trends and make adjustments.

These trends can lead you to make smart decisions that will improve your fundraising efforts. However, you need to have the right software in your toolbox. re:Charity’s list of the top fundraising software for nonprofits can guide your organization in the right direction to choose solutions that will make this analysis possible. 

Wrap up

Effective donor management is essential to help nonprofits like yours collect data, enhance fundraising, and better build relationships with supporters. Be sure you have a software system that empowers your nonprofit. It should help you conduct research, collect data, store information, analyze trends, and take appropriate actions. Good luck! 

The post Nonprofit Donor Management: 4 Essential Tips for Success appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

This is also true—and possibly even more so—for your digital communications. Without a brick-and-mortar to sell the experience of interacting with your business, you need your branding to resonate through your online presence as well.

One way to do this is to connect your audience’s physical experiences to the digital experience through branding.

Using colors, fonts, and logos strategically creates a seamless transition from physical experience to digital—or vice versa. If you sell products or services, your packaging should contain the same elements of branding as your storefront. 

Similarly, your emails—from your transactional emails to your newsletters—should also contain your branded elements.

Branding your email program

If you haven’t branded your emails—including your transactional emails, which will have huge open rates during the holiday season—you have missed a chance to reiterate and confirm your brand identity in the minds of your biggest fans. 

A good experience via email will imbue your branding with positive associations, leaving your readers with strong, positive feelings for your company.

How can you brand your emails?

Emails, even transactional ones, should always contain your creative elements, such as your logos, your brand colors, and fonts. Our customers have told us that uploading these elements is one of the hardest parts about getting their email program up and running.

Our new branded templates feature aims to fix that. Now you can get started and get sending in a few minutes. Simply enter your website URL and Campaign Monitor will automatically upload your creative elements into one of our branded templates. You can then tweak whatever you need, add your own copy and content, and get sending. 

With our branded holiday templates, you can start taking advantage of the increased digital traffic this holiday season with minimal up-front effort and time.

Your emails should always use the same fonts and colors as your brick-and-mortar stores, your ads, and even your website. The more places you can utilize your branding elements, the more repetition will solidify your brand reputation in your audience’s mind. 

You can even use the same colors and images on your social feeds to create a seamless, cohesive feel.

Branding with consistency: How to brand your emails, website, and beyond

Your emails aren’t the only place you should utilize branding. Instead, you should carry these elements throughout your digital presence. Consistent branding is a great way to make it seem like you have a dedicated marketing team behind you, even if your entire company only consists of one or two people. 

For example, here is a 2019 holiday email from Alo Yoga. But that fact is obvious at a glance, even without the explanation. Not only is their brand named multiple times throughout the email, the design and aesthetic are also similar throughout. Here’s an example of a branded email:

Your website, social platforms, and even direct mail should all follow the same design and tone guidelines so it’s clear at a glance that they’re all from you. 

Building strong brand recognition will strengthen your relationship with consumers and have them coming back to your organization even when your competitors might be easier or more convenient for them. 

Similarly, if you look at the Alo website, you can see they’ve got the same 70 and 30% off sales, similar graphics near the bottom, and the same inter-galactic design throughout. All readers who click through to the website will find themselves in familiar territory.

If you look at your emails side by side, is it obvious they’re from you? It’s an easy tweak that will improve your email results in the long-term. What about your website? When you follow your links, do you end up someplace that looks familiar?

You might find a few tweaks lead to more conversions and an even higher ROI from your email program.

Wrap up

Consistent branding helps you create seamless, memorable experiences that lead customers to return to your business time and time again. This holiday season will be unlike any other and, while that can be intimidating, it also means there are enormous opportunities for you to connect with your audience. 

Consumers want to do business with brands they care about, with brands they feel a personal connection with. Branding across your platforms and in your physical locations can help you do just that. With Campaign Monitor’s branded templates, creating unique, branded emails is even more simple and effective than ever before. You can send your first email on day one after signing up. 

Sign up today and get started with branded templates to send your first email right away.

The post Branding with Consistency: Email Templates and More appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

You’ve also spent time, energy, and resources building your list, crafting segments, and A/B testing. As if those aren’t stakes enough, you’ve also got a specific goal tied to your campaigns, whether it’s an ROI goal for your email strategy or an individual goal you want your email to accomplish.

And after all that work, something as simple as a broken link can throw all that work out the window. That’s why we’ve launched our new Link Review tool.

A broken or missing link shouldn’t ruin your email—or your day. When you know your links are working as they should, that’s one less thing to worry about.

Despite your best-laid plans, marketers are only human and plans can still go awry. But mistakes don’t mean the end of your career. It just means you have one more thing to add to your email marketing pre-flight checklist and a few extra tasks to make amends.

Below, two email professionals are sharing their stories of an email send that didn’t go as planned and, more importantly, what they did next.

Lizzie’s story

Lizze Newbern is the Email Marketing Manager for Asurion with more than five years of experience. (When Lizzie isn’t working, she likes to spend her time illustrating!) 

Even with that much experience behind her, she missed how a subject line would get truncated on mobile for a specific inbox provider. Needless to say, it’s a mistake she won’t make again. 

Cut-off catastrophe

Like many email marketers, the subject line is one of the biggest stressors in hitting the send button. This one line of text is essentially the subscriber’s first impression of your email, and can seriously impact your open rates and sender reputation. You can try your hardest to proof and re-proof, and test and re-test, but at the end of the day, unfortunately we’re not computers. And we all have off days where our child kept us up until 4 a.m. wanting to watch the newest Frozen movie. 

We’re human, and mistakes can happen. Although some mistakes are worse than others…like a perfect, once-in-a-lifetime subject line truncation. 

One of my previous positions was working as the Email Marketing Manager for one of the top senior living companies in the business. We occasionally marketed events for the local communities where we’d send an email invite to the residents, and other interested leads in the area. This event in particular was for a conversation-starting cocktail night, where potential residents could come tour the community and meet some of the residents over some craft cocktails. 

The subject line that was written was “Celebrate the long weekend with cocktails and conversation.” Pretty harmless. The email was tested, proofed, and sent on its way. Throughout the day, I noticed I was getting a few responses to the reply-to inbox. 

I immediately started to sweat when I started seeing responses like “SO inappropriate.” “Wow, so unprofessional.” “Looks like someone didn’t check their subject line cut-off!” 

Panic ensued. 

I finally found a response that included a screenshot of the subject line, and how it displayed in their inbox. There, in all its glory was “Celebrate the long weekend with c***…” 

Oops. 

Immediately all the panicked thoughts came flooding in: “How can I recover from this?” and “Where’s the nearest hole to bury my head into?” 

I had to take a deep breath. The first step was to figure out the damage: How large was our audience? Realistically, how many people had this truncation issue? Luckily—if there was any luck to be found in this situation—our audience was very small for this particular send. We’re talking less than 100. 

I was feeling a little bit better, but not great. Next, I had to figure out how many opened on mobile. It turned out to be over 45%, and at this point I was feeling less better.

We had to decide whether to risk additional exposure by sending a follow-up email addressing the issue. At the end of the day, you have to weigh your mistake, and the impact it had on your message. In this particular instance, we felt that due to the audience size and the small amount of responses, we were going to let this mistake lie. It’s not the most exciting response to the situation, but as an email marketer you have to make those decisions when mistakes inevitably happen. 

I feel like every email marketer I know has some sort of document, or notes page titled “MISTAKES MADE IN PREVIOUS EMAIL SENDS. DON’T DO THIS AGAIN.” At the end of the day, you take your mistakes and you learn from them. You become more aware of the issues to test for, and you move forward. 

Most people in the email field have “send-button shakiness.” (If you don’t, you’re either a robot or have an English degree.) The main challenge comes with how to handle the inevitable mistakes that can sometimes happen and, most importantly, how you move forward.

Justin’s story: 

Justin is the Email Marketing Manager for CM Group and he has over 6 years of experience. But when you work in email, technology is always evolving and the introduction of dark mode led to an email mistake.

Dark mode faux pas

Once you’ve been around email marketing for a little while, you start to notice some quirks with how your sent campaign will look different across email clients. There are tons of different apps and thousands of screen sizes out there. What looks one way in Outlook may show up differently in Gmail. 

And while every email I’ve built gets tested, I recently failed to test one campaign for dark mode compatibility. Parts of my email were unreadable in Gmail’s dark mode.

While none of our subscribers pointed out the issue, several of my team members were on the email list for this campaign and noticed right away.

The first thing I wanted to do was to group together all the stakeholders for this email and inform them of the potential issue customers may have with the email. From there, I truly wanted to identify the source of the readability challenges and make note of what to change for the next send. 

I also made sure to go back into Litmus, where I do all my testing, and make sure all Dark Mode email previews were checked in my test settings.

My confidence did shake a bit after this one send. When you’re an email marketer and you make a mistake, you know that your next several sends are going to get extra attention, but I think there’s also an opportunity in that extra attention. 

Because of this experience, I have more team members willing to help me test future emails. I was able to revisit designs with the rest of the team to double-check other templates we have to ensure the same issue won’t get repeated, and also add in more time to do testing before each scheduled send. 

Having a supportive team around me has helped in regaining confidence.

Wrap up

Whether you’re just starting out in email marketing or you’ve been around the block, mistakes are an inevitable part of any email marketers career. Luckily, no one expects you to be anything other than human.

What matters most is that you learn from your mistakes and take steps to prevent them moving forward. Figure out when you need to send an apology email and when you need to contact stakeholders. Sometimes, as in Lizzie’s case, doing nothing is better than drawing more attention to the problem.

Whatever your next email send is, you can rest easy knowing there’s one less thing you have to test on your plate. The Link Review will monitor your URLs so you can spend your time and energy on other areas of your email.

The post Email Mistakes and How to Prevent Them appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

You innovated ways to connect with subscribers and supported them in a time of need. And as other channels struggled to perform, you drove critical results for your brands and clients.

This was a record-breaking period for Campaign Monitor’s customers, and we couldn’t be more proud of your accomplishments. As we bid 2020 adieu (and for many of us, good riddance!), take a moment with us to reflect on some of your most impressive achievements from the last 12 months.

P.S. Ready to share your own 2020 recap? Get started with our latest ready-to-use ‘Year in Review’ email template!

Your subscribers turned to the inbox more than ever. 

Email remains a resilient, reliable way to engage your community even during times of crisis.

• 416,422 marketers sent 30.660 billion emails opened in 192 countries across the world. 
• Open rates increased more than 20% YoY in March and April as shutdowns and restrictions ramped up around the globe. When other channels became inaccessible or unreliable, customers turned to email to find how brands were responding to the crisis.
• More time at home brought the first shift back to desktop opens in years. The proportion of opens on mobile devices dropped from 63% to 54% in 2020.

Explore COVID-19 email marketing benchmarks in depth.

When times got tough, Campaign Monitor customers got smarter.

You rose to the occasion with tenacity and ingenuity.

• Curious subscriber scientists A/B tested 148,450 campaigns, an increase of 63% over last year.
• Customer experience architects designed 47,484 automated email journeys, clearing the path to immediate engagement and lasting loyalty.
• Email artisans crafted 730,468 captivating custom email templates that lit up the inbox and stood out among the noise.

New problems call for new solutions.

You asked, we delivered. Campaign Monitors customers tapped into a suite of new features and resources to handle everything 2020 could throw at them. A few of the highlights:

Jan – Pop-up forms

Feb – In-app deliverability guidance

Mar – Campaigns page update

April – COVID-19 Resource Hub

May – Crisis templates

June – Unsubscribe survey

July – Campaign tagging

Aug – Layout templates

Sept – My branded templates

Oct – New holiday templates

Nov – Link Review Tool

Dec – Coming up: Lists & Subscribers UI update

We’ve got your back.

2020 pushed email marketers to the limit. We were honored to be with you every step of the way.

• 99% delivery rate for all campaigns sent
• Features released: 25
• Product deployments: 820
• Code commits: 13,010
• 99.9% app availability

After all, your success is why we come to work every day.

• 39,263 support cases were responded to within 2 hours (on average)

Just like you, we’re working hard and making the best of the situation.  

• 625 team members around the world made the shift to remote working, resulting in over 241,000 hours of Zoom meetings with very serious, 100% professional virtual backgrounds.
• Separated but not apart: We stayed connected with care packages, virtual yoga and fitness classes, digital master class events and competitions, and more remote happy hours than we care to admit.
• $58,000 raised for the Australian Red Cross BushFire Appeal.
• 1995 hot meals and 1785 sweet treats produced for people in need in the Sydney CBD.

It’s all possible because of our incredible community of customers and contributors! THANK YOU!

What’s next?

Email isn’t going anywhere, and that means neither are we. More than ever, the world needs the connectivity only email makes possible.

Look forward to a long list of new tools, resources, and inspiration coming in 2021, starting with our much-awaited annual Email Marketing Global Benchmarks Report.

Keep an eye out for it early January!

What’s your 2020 story?

Share it with your subscribers today with a Year-in-Review email template.

Not a Campaign Monitor customer? Sign up now.

The post Email Recap: Our 2020 Year in Review appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

Campaign Monitor, a provider of powerful yet intuitive email marketing software, today announced two significant feature releases, Link Review and My Branded Templates.

Link Review notifies customers of any broken or missing links to be updated for all outgoing email campaigns. My Branded Templates provides users an easy way to set up custom designs featuring their logo and colors by simply inputting their organization’s URL. Together, these two releases improve customers’ confidence in their email sending and saves precious time, while also creating a higher quality customer interaction with their audiences.

“Link Review allows me to double-check all links before sending. This is a big help, especially since we send a large number of emails with different links. It has brought a lot of confidence in sending emails,” said Jasmine Thomas, Email Marketing Manager at Lulu Press.

Now, more than ever, when businesses are balancing increased workload during the holiday season, Campaign Monitor sought to solve common challenges relating to email send anxiety. Link Review helps customers identify missing, broken, and incorrect links in an easy-to-edit panel. This powerful tool reduces error and saves time, while also ensuring accurate emails are sent out. 

Many businesses are looking to improve their brand consistency as they rely on email as a vital communication channel with their audiences. My Branded Templates does the work for customers. The feature automatically pulls in logos and colors from a company’s URL allowing businesses to not only get started quickly, but also ensure their brand stays consistent. 

“Our customers have been heroic in 2020, communicating with their audiences during stressful times, adapting quickly, and managing with strained resources. We are thrilled to release the Link Review and My Branded Templates tools to help customers get started quickly and reduce errors, offering a boost of confidence as so many of our customers expand their digital strategy,” said Kalyn New, Director of Product and Customer Marketing at Campaign Monitor.

About Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor, a CM Group brand, is a global technology company providing a powerful yet intuitive email marketing platform. Founded in 2004, Campaign Monitor’s mission is to provide customers with the tools they need to create meaningful connections with their audiences. Over 250,000 customers worldwide use Campaign Monitor’s easy-to-use design, personalization and automation tools to create and deliver stunning emails that drive real business results. For more information about Campaign Monitor, or to try it for free, visit campaignmonitor.com

About CM Group

CM Group is a family of global marketing technology brands including Campaign Monitor, Emma, Vuture, Delivra, Liveclicker, Sailthru, and Selligent. By joining together these leading brands, CM Group offers a variety of world-class solutions that can be used by marketers at any level. Headquartered in Nashville, TN, CM Group has United States offices in Indianapolis, Los Angeles, New York City, Pittsburgh and San Francisco, and global offices in Australia, Belgium, United Kingdom, New Zealand, France, and Uruguay.

The post Campaign Monitor Releases Email Link Review Tool and My Branded Templates appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

Messed up links can cost you more than just time and embarrassment. If you’re in publishing, your newsletter is your product and any missing or broken URL hurts your brand reputation.

According to Verizon Media Australia Pty Ltd, “We usually triple check each link and then send tests to at least two people in the team to make sure it’s all correct—we work in publishing and it’s incredibly important for each story to link out to the correct URL.”

You’ve gone to all this effort to craft engaging copy that compels your reader and you’ve designed a call to action that’s bolding and enticing. But when your readers click, there’s nothing. Or they end up at the wrong place on your site. Now you’ve missed an opportunity to convert subscribers and you can’t be sure you’ll be able to recapture their attention.

We aim to make marketers feel confident in every send, regardless of their experience level. Because of the amount of time and anxiety that goes into checking, double-checking, and even triple-checking your links, we’re introducing a new tool so our customers can send emails with confidence and efficiency.

Frontier Touring says: “The Link Review tool has quickly become a natural part of my proofing process.”

Introducing the new Link Review tool

Now, Campaign Monitor has a Review links button in our email builder. Here, you will be notified of any missing or broken links in your current email. You’ll also get an alert if a link has not been updated if the email was copied from a previous campaign.

Lulu Press says: “[The Link Review tool] brought a lot of confidence in sending emails. It cut back the time I spent checking links which involved me sending test emails to myself and clicking through all of the links to double-check that they were working correctly.”

If your email includes a broken or missing link, you’ll be prompted to review and update the link while still in the email builder.

Campaign Monitor comparison

Here’s a quick glance at other ESPs that offer—or do not offer—link checking capabilities:

Send with confidence

Universal Magazines told us, “I think everyone who has ever sent a campaign email has had concerns about sending bad links. A bad link can cause a range of problems and, in the very worst cases, can negate the whole intention of sending a campaign email in the first place.”

We know how much time and effort you spend creating your emails, not to mention the time you spend double-checking to make sure everything in your email is pixel perfect. The copy, design, lists, and personalization all have to be confirmed before hitting send and it’s easy for something as innocuous as a misspelled URL to slip through your checks to disastrous results. 

At Campaign Monitor, we know that a missing or broken URL link in your email is a common mistake that can be a headache to fix. 

Not only is a broken link a pain for you, it harms your brand’s reputation, prevents your email from delivering the results you expect, and often means additional time and resources spent trying to remedy the error. 

After all the time you’ve spent crafting every detail into an effective email, don’t let a broken link steal your results.

Wrap up

Our Link Review tool means you can have confidence that a simple mistake won’t ruin your results. You have more important things to worry about, such as how you’re serving your customers and running your business. Now your pre-flight checklist has one less task on it.

The post Introducing the Link Review Tool appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

Incorporating your branding into every aspect of your business model can be a daunting task, especially these days when most of your customers or prospects are interacting with your business digitally. 

Utilizing certain colors, fonts, and styles consistently across your products and in-store sparks immediate recognition with your customers. That recognition is good for your relationships which is, in turn, good for your bottom line.

This is where email comes in. Our customers rely on email for one-to-one communication, regardless of their industry or size, and that’s why we’ve made it easier than ever to design and send emails that are tailored to your brand.

Introducing branded templates

We’re introducing branded templates so that getting started with or refreshing your email program is a whole lot easier. Simply input your website URL, and Campaign Monitor will find your logos and key brand colors, importing them directly into a set of popular email templates: 

Once your templates are created, add additional text and content to your email and get to sending. We’ve even included best practices as the placeholder text so you have friendly advice right where and when you need it most.

Email is a tried-and-true method to connect with your biggest fans. You can include personalized content, calls to action that lead directly to your site, and relevant articles for helpful information. 

Hunting down all your brand colors, logos, and fonts shouldn’t be time-consuming, slowing down how long it takes you to send your first email. Time is not something that anyone has in excess under the best circumstances, and this holiday season, more than any other in recent history, nothing should get between you and end-of-year revenue.

This process gets even more complicated when you’re working across a team and need to keep your elements consistent. That’s where Campaign Monitor branded templates come into play.

How to use branded templates

With a Campaign Monitor account, you can create branded templates with a few simple steps:

1. Log into your account
2. Select My Templates on the overview page 
3. Choose Create a new template
4. Choose Add your brand
5. Enter your website URL

At this point in the process, you’ll be able to confirm your brand elements and they’ll be automatically uploaded into a series of templates. Pick the one that best fits your purpose and from there, you’ll be able to add your content just like you would with our other templates.

Whether you’re just getting started or a current Campaign Monitor customer looking for a refresh, branded templates are a simple way to get sending unique emails that are true to your brand. 

Wrap up

Whether you’re a small business or you have a dedicated marketing team, you rely on personal interactions and people experiencing your brand in order to convert prospects to customers and customers to brand loyalists—something that’s starkly different in a world where in-person interactions are limited. 

Our branded templates make it easier than ever to get started quickly with your email marketing program. With consistent brand elements, you’ll be able to focus on creating connections and get back to doing what you love.

The post Introducing Branded Templates appeared first on Campaign Monitor.