No matter what stage you are at in your business, email outreach is important for growth. So what is email outreach? Put simply, it is a means of contacting people who are or might be interested in your business and is used for a variety of purposes. You can use email outreach to network, promote your services and products, gain more clicks to your website, generate leads, find investors or influences or even collaborate with other businesses. And when done correctly, email outreach can provide you with lucrative opportunities and the chance to build relationships and revenue. There are many ways you can approach outreach but in this guide, we’re going to focus on utilizing Mailchimp and the tools Mailchimp offers to maximise your outreach efforts.

Sync up your Contacts

First thing’s first, Mailchimp is great for app integration, so the first thing you want to do is sync up your contacts. You may have already received or sent emails from your people who fit your target audiences. These contacts are valuable as they will be people who have had some kind of interaction with you/your company before. Mailchimp can also integrate with Hootsuite, which will allow you to sync up your contacts and social media followers.

Set out a clear target audience – Segmentation & Tags

Once you have imported your contacts, the next step is to define your target audiences and separate them. You might think this will take time however Mailchimp is one of the best for segmentation and now, you can even give your contacts with specific tags to further personalize their contact profile.

Segmentation

Segmentation ensures that you’re sending the right messages to the right people. According to Mailchimp, “On average, segmented campaigns result in 23% higher open rates and 49% higher click-through rates than unsegmented campaigns.” which is a big difference. You can segment your audiences by up to nine parameters including, subscriber activity, likelihood to purchase again, integrations and predicted demographics.

Tags

Tags are a clever way of organizing your contacts by adding unique insights which can be used for segmentation. Say you are launching a new product and the target audience is parents, you can create an intersection of contacts that all have children and target them with a campaign that promotes your new product. These tags can be applied to your contacts when they fill out a contact/subscribe form on your website via Mailchimp.

Behavioral Targeting

Imagine you want to contact people who have interacted with your company in the past, but you realize that these contacts have interacted with you in different ways. With behavioral targeting, you can target contacts based on their behavior which will allow you to personalize your emails. Sounds great, but what does it mean? For example, you want to target people who are subscribed to your mailing list and open your email campaigns but never click through to your website, Mailchimp will identify these contacts so you can target them with outreach messaging that will hopefully convince them to convert.

Break out the CRM tools

Customer relationship management, or CRM, is all about making stronger connections with your customers and contacts. With CRM you can apply all of the data (segmentation, tags, behavioral targeting) you have leveraged to trace and find all those juicy insights we mentioned before, with this knowledge you can go on to create better outreach campaigns that will get responses. Mailchimp has built-in CRM tools that are designed to encompass all the data you need under one dashboard making management easier and more efficient. Once you’ve got those contacts synced up you’re ready to go and start making long-lasting impressions.

Utilize the content studio

Create highly impactful content every time you reach out to your contacts with Mailchimp’s content studio. In this space, you can store images, videos and more making sure that you keep your outreach campaigns consistently on-brand.

Automated Outreach

Automation can transform how and when you reach your contacts building stronger relationships. You can automate welcome emails for subscribers or send contacts an email on their birthdays or on anniversaries and even send messages based on their behavior (how they interact with your website or app). Automated messaging allows you to reach out to contacts and build stronger links whilst saving you money and time.

Analytics – What’s Working?

Outreach doesn’t always work every time and that’s ok, usually, it’s a case of trial and error and finding out what is work and what isn’t, thankfully, there isn’t any guesswork involved. Analytics is hard and fast data insights that explain what you’ve been doing, how you’ve been doing it, and what the outcome was. So if you run a campaign targeting investors, you’ve used behavioral targeting to optimize impact and sent the campaign on a Monday afternoon. Every contact opens your email but you receive one response, there are varying factors that might be able to help you identify why you only received one response, from the contacts you targeted to the time and day you sent the email. With this data, you can change your approach to create a better campaign next time.

Learning Tools

Ok, so now you have a pretty meaty list of using Mailchimp for your outreach but how exactly do you apply it? What happens if something goes wrong or isn’t working exactly the way you thought it would. That’s ok. These things happen to even the best of us. Fortunately, Mailchimp comes equipped with a wide range of resources (found via their resources tab) to help you when you need it most. Not only can you troubleshoot any arising issues but you can use their resources to learn a new thing or two about marketing. This breadth of knowledge is a really useful tool when it comes to learning how to master your outreach and beyond that, keeping your contacts in your contact list.

Some say that Mailchimp isn’t the best for outreach, however, over the recent years, Mailchimp has extended its tools, allowing users to optimize and build effective outreach campaigns. How will you use Mailchimp to build better campaigns and stronger links with your contacts?

What are email open rates?

It is the percentage of your total subscribers who opened your email. The average email open rate is 15% to 17%.

Email open rates are critical metrics to measure the success of your email campaigns. To optimize email, open rates are of prime importance to drive meaningful conversions.

Reasons for low email open rates?

If your email open rates are below the average, it is high time to re-check your email marketing strategy.

The most common reasons for poor email rates are poor quality of the email list, irrelevant email copies, and boring subject lines.

To optimize all the above-mentioned aspects can sky-rocket your email open rates. However, the first step is to run a health check on your email database.

Effect of a poor email list on email open rates?

The poor quality of an email list costs you in terms of money, subscribers, email deliverability, and a negative image (Typically a spammer) in the eyes of ISPs.

An email list requires to be cleaned on a regular basis as the inactive email accounts are converted as a spam trap by email service providers.

Here is the number of inactive days allowed by major inbox providers. After that, an email account gets converted into recycled traps.

• Outlook – 270 days
• Gmail – 270 days
• Yahoo – 180 days
• AOL – 90 days

Emailing to just one such account will bring down the email deliverability rate drastically. Also, there are catchall, disposable, and role-based email accounts in a mailing list that impacts the email open rates.

How to improve email list hygiene?

The key to a healthy email list is to collect a valid email address and remove the bad emails from the list regularly. The bad emails are the ones that are not active or bounce back.

Follow double opt-in

Double opt-in a process where an email subscriber will have to verify the email account for getting into your mailing list. The double opt-in is a good method that ensures if a subscriber is really interested in getting your email content into their inboxes.

An email list built with a double opt-in process has shown a better email open rate.

Segment an email list

Email list segmentation is a driving force behind exceptional email open rates. Segmenting your email subscribers by their behaviors and interest will keep them interested in your email campaigns.

With a segmented email list, you can send highly targeted email campaigns that drive email open rates.

Real-time email verification APIs (For collecting valid emails)

To collect valid email accounts, during the sign-up or checkouts, keeps your email list free from all the disposable emails that are being used to pass the sign-up process.

Real-time email verification APIs, are helpful in validating the email addresses right at the point of entry.

Email list verification (For maintaining a healthy email list)

Even after following all the steps like double opt-in and real-time verification, your email list can still consist of certain bad elements that require a deep clean.

As said earlier, an email list will have all kinds of emails, including valid, invalid, spam-trap, catchall, disposable, and role-based email accounts. Apart from valid and deliverable email accounts, all the bad emails must get-off from your email database.

Email list verification services like EmailChecker are an easy solution to clean an email list in no time. By verifying your email list before sending out the email campaigns, your hard bounces will be on the lower side and help you hit more inboxes.

You have a valid email list, What’s next?

Once you have a verified email list, the next things to focus on are writing clickable subject lines and compelling email copies.

The subject lines are the first thing seen by your email subscribers. With a short attention span, it is important to write an email subject line that is good enough to win a click from your subscribers.

There are a lot of tools that help you in writing the subject lines. But, keeping it short and informative always wins.

Take time to write a compelling email message with relevant call-to-actions that can drive conversions from the email campaigns. Based on your email list segmentation, you should be able to write targeted email copies for different groups of your subscribers.

To conclude, the key elements to boost email open rates are the quality of your email list, subject lines, and email content. Optimizing them will not only improve your email open rates but also improves overall email deliverability.

Marketing has been one of the top fields for students for as long as we can remember. And the best part is that its popularity is only increasing with each passing day. Even though more and more people are opting for a professional degree in marketing, the demand is rising faster. Every business that exists needs a marketing person or a marketing team.

We all need to ensure that people know about our companies, brands, products, and services, and when the time comes, they buy it. Marketing involves so much more than just merely promoting your products or services. You have to convince your customers that you have the best product for them. You have to convince them to buy it. You have to keep them coming back for more. And that is just an essential part of it.

If you love the idea of interacting with people, learning about products and services, and then coming up with innovative and imaginative ways to get that product or service in the hands of your consumers, then getting a degree in marketing is the right decision for you.

Skills Involved In Marketing

Marketing involves things like learning psychology, market penetration, buyer personas, identifying market segments, estimating the demand for your products, and the price that you want to sell it at. There is also a lot of research involved.

You will have to know your product or service like the back of your hand as well as your competitors’. You will need to understand your consumers and find out what makes them tick. There are a plethora of skills involved, and you will enjoy learning all these new skills and then applying them. One of the critical skills that you will learn with a marketing degree is communication.

You will learn how to effectively send a message and ensure that it is interpreted as you wanted. And the best part is that you can learn them quickly and effectively with a bachelor of marketing online degree that offers immaculate marketing knowledge and exposure.

Best Jobs for Marketing Majors

Now, you must be thinking that learning all these skills is good and well, but can you apply them to ensure that you have a great and satisfactory career.

1. Social Media Manager

Right now, this is one of the highest paying jobs that you can get anywhere. As we all know, traditional media has taken a back seat, and social media is the new driving force of the market. More and more companies are turning their attention to social media to promote their brands, products, and services and allocating enormous budgets for it.

As a social media manager, you will be responsible for your company’s online image on various platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and others. You will need to be creative and use your imagination to solidify your company’s digital presence and instill your message in the hearts of your target audience.

2. Brand/Product Manager

As a brand/product manager, you will oversee all the aspects and different states of marketing that your company needs for its brands, products, and services. You will probably have to start your career as a marketing assistant. But, with vigor, uniqueness, creativity, and research, you can well be on your way to becoming a marketing director.

You will need highly developed skills of communication, research, and analysis so that you can view and predict buying trends of consumers and compare your products to your competitors.

3. Event/Meeting Planner

Another way that you can go with a marketing degree under your belt is an event manager or meeting planner. Throughout the year, we have hundreds of events going around everywhere. They could be conferences, trade shows, training sessions, alumni gatherings, press conferences, or weddings.

All these events have different needs and requirements, but the one common thing is that they need someone to plan and promote the events. You will have to decide the right audience for that event and make sure that they make their way to it.

4. Fundraiser

If you are passionate about a cause, you can easily ensure that your abilities and skills are put to good use by joining a religious organization or a non-profit organization. As their marketing expert, you will have to promote their events like fundraisers, galas, and more to the public and ensure maximum attendance as well as donations. You will have to communicate the essential points to the public and get them to act.

5. Media Planner

As a media planner, it will be your responsibility to find out who your target audience is and what type of media they like to interact with. You will be advising your company based on your analysis of viewing, reading, listening, and surfing various channels. With your power of research, analysis, and quantitative thinking, you can turn your company into an icon.

Conclusion

There are a wide variety of skills that you will pick up on your way to a marketing degree. An online marketing degree can hone your skills and make sure that no matter where you are or which company you work for, you are a definite asset to them.