Most Popular MarketingSherpa Email Articles and Case Studies of 2017

We took a look at some of our own analytics, and here are the articles and case studies that were most popular with subscribers in 2017.

Time to Move On: Three email marketing habits your customers are sick of seeing

When it comes to email marketing, we’ve all got our habits. And the only way to know if these habits are helpful or harmful to our email marketing program is to test.

Bart Thornburg, Senior Manager of Email Marketing at Wedding Wire, learned this the hard way when it came to social media icons in his emails.

“When we first started doing that … it was the best practice. [It was] when social media first came around. But we never looked back at it and never did a reality check to see if it still made sense, and … if that was still working,” he said.

Once the team finally got around to testing the icons, they found out that absolutely no one was clicking on them. Actually, “in the last 24 million sends that we’ve done, we’ve had zero clicks on the Pinterest icon,” he said.

Read this full article to learn other email marketing habits your customers are sick of seeing so you can be sure your particular habits are not detrimental to your email marketing success.

Sherpa Summit 2017 Takeaways: The five best email tactics for customer-first marketing

Email is one channel where the customer journey can really be put on display. You can have a direct conversation with your customers and potential customers, providing them with value rather than directly selling them on your product or service.

MarketingSherpa Summit always brings together some of the greatest minds in customer-first marketing, and this year did not disappoint. The number of email marketing tips and tactics presented was incredible.

We learned how MVMT, a social media-focused startup, used their loyal following to grow their email list and increase revenue by 98%. We also learned from Simple and its approach to a legally mandated regulatory email send that when it comes to emails, there is no such thing as boring content, just boring marketing.

Read the full article to learn some of our favorite email tips from MarketingSherpa Summit 2017.

Email Marketing: Five ideas to increase your email’s perceived value

Value is arguably the single most important thing when it comes to email marketing. If a customer does not understand the value your product or service can bring to them, why would they be interested in it?

As marketers, it is our job to put ourselves in our customer’s shoes and understand the concerns they may have about our product or service. We can then provide messaging and content that may address these concerns. Marketers and customers shouldn’t be opposed after all. Your customers’ issues, concerns and needs should be yours as well.

Read this article for five ways to increase your email’s perceived value.

Email Marketing: How focus on value proposition in testing led to a 66% increase in event registrations from email

Like many of us, the marketing team at The Global Leadership Summit (a two-day leadership training event) was relying on intuition, instincts and best practices when it came to their marketing efforts. That is, until they discovered the importance of testing and having a clear and concise value proposition.

The team decided to focus their initial testing efforts on two levers, optimizing the event landing page and optimizing emails. “[They were] two of the biggest areas within our marketing that we could affect to improve our registration numbers,” said John Jordan, Executive Director of Digital Marketing, The Global Leadership Summit.

By creating more moments of urgency on their event marketing calendar and announcing them via email, the team was able to secure 1,080 additional event registrants.

But the biggest win was the cultural change that testing fostered. “The results are awesome, but the organizational transformation has come from the number of people on the team getting involved — and getting excited about testing,” Jordan said.

Read the full case study to learn how the implementation of a testing culture impacted The Global Leadership Summit.

Customer-First Marketing: The argument for sending your customers non-transactional emails in two case studies

The definition of customer-first marketing is putting your customer’s needs before your own. The best way to do this is to provide your customer with value so that they trust and believe in you and, ultimately, purchase your product or service. That is the argument the two case studies featured in this article make, and they have the results to back it up.

Clark Cummings, Senior Manager of Member Marketing, Marriott International, and his team had a unique idea for their “Year in Review” member email campaign that was non-transactional in nature. “It felt like we had the opportunity to really do something that was much more member-centric, and really use all the data that we’ve got on our members and present it to them in an interesting, fun way that they might not expect from us,” he said.

The email send helped triple the December average revenue per message delivered and contributed to making Marriott’s Q4 of 2014 the most successful fourth quarter in three years.

Mary Abrahamson, Email Marketing Manager, Ferguson, and her team created their own version of a “Year in Review” email after Mary attended MarketingSherpa Summit and heard the great success Clark had with the Marriott campaign.

The team saw a 34% effective rate from the Year in Review send, and because of the results they have seen with this campaign, “We’re trying to think of out-of-the-box ways to expand our email content beyond product-specific promotions. We’re trying to expand our wheelhouse,” she said.

Read the full article to learn the details of each of the campaigns and how you can create your own non-transactional email send.

Related Resources:

How an Online Financial Services Company Uses Email to Reduce Customer Friction, Help Take the Confusion Out of Banking, and Increase Engagement 407%

How the World's Fastest-growing Watch Brand Used Email to Grow Revenue 98%

Customer-First Marketing: How The Global Leadership Summit grew attendance by 16% to 400,000