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Email Delivers Valuable Messages Better Than Ever to Curious Consumers

Email’s special powers give it an advantage over other channels. Masters can create valuable personal touches at any scale with user-generated content.


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James L Katzaman

2 years ago | 3 min read

Email’s special powers give it a decided advantage over other channels. Masters can create valuable personal touches at any scale. That lets marketing campaigns drive customers to products they most need.

Derrick Mutamba paraphrases Mark Twain: The reports of email’s death are greatly exaggerated.

“Many marketers believe email marketing is on its way out — for good,” said Mutamba, team leader at Bionic Media Limited. “I don’t think so. Email marketing as a whole is alive. It can be effective and work for your brand.”

Mutamba and Chris Byamugisha, director of Fortune Technologies, talked about email’s present and much-alive future during an Africa Tweet Chat.

Knowing when and how often to send email is a matter of feel for the audience.

“There is no magic number to follow,” Mutamba said. “Your email campaigns can work brilliantly when you are sending out emails twice a week. They also can perform poorly at the same frequency. It depends on the specific campaign you’re pushing.

“The motivating and interesting thing about email marketing is getting to the right audiences for your brand,” he said.

The big myth about email marketing is that it’s dying. Yet, ask those in the know, and they’ll say email is where the money is.

Byamugisha counts mortality among email’s biggest misnomers:

  • Google “email marketing is dead,” yet you’ll see how many results show up.
  • Email marketing automation is expensive and time consuming.
  • Unsubscribes are bad news.
  • Subject lines should be short.

Use User Creativity

The truth is that email marketing is doing well.

“Incorporating user-generated content into emails is the latest trend that can help your brand succeed,” Mutamba said.

That is among other best practices to follow, according to Byamugisha:

  • Personalization in Email Marketing
  • Implementing Artificial Intelligence to Optimize Email Strategy
  • Making It More Interactive
  • Creating Privacy-Friendly Emails
  • Optimizing Email Across All Platforms

Collect email addresses at every opportunity. With more people coming back out into the open, they might be more willing to give their information just to make contacts again.

Byamugisha suggests doing this to increase subscriber lists:

  • Productize your newsletter.
  • Give an incentive to sign up.
  • Encourage readers to download your content as a PDF.
  • Add a subscription bar at the top of your blog post.
  • Include opt-in forms within your blog post.

“Don’t forget to create an offer that resonates with your users’ demands,” Mutamba said. “That can play a key role in building your subscribers’ list.”

He cited key performance indicators to track a campaign’s progress:

  • Number of emails delivered
  • Number of emails opened
  • Click-through rate
  • Click-to-open rate
  • Unsubscribe rate
  • Bounce rate both hard and soft
  • Spam complaints
  • Social shares

Data Reveals Effectiveness

“Use data to assess and communicate marketing programs’ value,” Byamugisha said. “Eliminate roadblocks to marketing accountability. Enable the key processes and skill sets to measure data-driven marketing tactics. Incorporate more customer and prospect touchpoints in multi-touch attribution.

“Put technology to work for harnessing fragmented customer engagement data,” he said. “Establish a true data-driven marketing process. Automate marketing accountability reporting and measurement for better, faster decision making and efficiency.”

Among best practices, subject lines are critical to attract attention while avoiding spam filters. That means they should be personal and not sales-like.

Mutamba keys on three major musts for a subject line:

  • Be clear on what your email is about.
  • Align with your business concept as well as customers’ needs.
  • Keep it short and simple. To-the-point subject lines are great.

To those suggestions, Byamugisha adds these keepers:

  • Add personalization. Use merge tags to personalize your subject lines with each recipient’s name or location.
  • Be descriptive. Sometimes it’s better to be direct and descriptive than trendy.
  • Keep it short.
  • Limit punctuation.
  • Use emojis carefully.

Emails that are impersonal are big turn offs, but not as much as those that start, “Dear Mr.” That seems OK at first glance unless you’re a Mrs.

To help avoid that and other embarrassments, Byamugisha relies on these email marketing tools:

  • Sende
  • Omnensed
  • SendPulse
  • Benchmark Email
  • Mailchimp
  • MailerLite
  • Mailjet
  • Moosend

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James L Katzaman

Jim Katzaman is a charter member of the Tealfeed Creators' program, focusing on marketing and its benefits for companies and consumers. Connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as well as subscribing here on Tealfeed.


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