Email Marketing, Messaging Strategy & Facebook Ads (Review)

Week 6 of a 12 Week Series on Growth Marketing

Each week for 12 weeks, I am writing about what I am learning through the Growth Marketing Mini-Degree from the CXL Institute. This week, I worked through three courses in Module 5: Email Marketing, Messaging Strategy in PR, and Facebook Ads.

Email Marketing: From Basics to Best-In-Class

Email marketing for business is still invaluable in 2021. It provides a form of communication that is direct to the customer, delivered at the most relevant time they read, and customizable to what they might be interested in. Compared with reach on social media (around 2%), the open rate for emails can be up to 30%. And email marketing drives $38 for every $1 invested. It makes email marketing a no-brainer for every business.

What is the best way to build a list? Like everything else, organically! Things to avoid when building an email list for your business are: buying or harvesting an email list (they won’t be your core audience), not asking for permission to email in the first place (this ties into point 1), and not setting expectations for how frequently you will be communicating with your list.

A few “best” practices that I found most helpful around email marketing:

1. Be intentional with subject / header line: Whether or not someone opens an email can be influenced by up to 40% by the subject/header line. That’s huge!
2. Watch your analytics: Monitoring things like opens and clicks are valuable but it’s equally as important to monitor unsubscribes, complaints, and bounces (that might be keeping the email from hitting your list’s inbox in the first place).
3. We use data to inform decisions like the design of personalized emails, how we segment audiences, noticing technical glitches that aren’t working (that leads to optimizing your list), and lastly, automating our user’s journey.

Message Strategy In Public Relations

Public Relations is another way to connect with your core audience. This involves networking, usually using social media or traditional media platforms like television and film, to get you and your brand message out there. While PR can sometimes feel like it’s hard to measure, it’s actually much more quantifiable.

There are two mains facets of public relations:

1. Positive PR is a proactive approach to getting your message out into the world.
2. Negative PR (or crisis communication) is more defensive in nature because it focuses on reacting to negative press and having to “clean up” the brand’s image.

Tips on pitching to traditional media (TV, newspapers, publications): Be relevant & straight to the point. Stand out by being a good storyteller. Journalists like to use email and Twitter, so reach out directly on those platforms. Research every opportunity well before you reach out, during, and after.

Tips on pitching to social media influencers: Influencers have audiences that are more connected to their lifestyles, and more often prefer to work with brands that represent not only them, but their audience. They can prefer to work on a more personalized level; avoid sending mass emails to introduce your brand and make sure when you reach out personally, letting them know why you chose them to work with and lastly, (this tip is from personal experience) let the influencer drive the creative storytelling decisions and you’ll have a better partnership. Influencers know what’s best for their audience.

Facebook Ads

Facebook tells us to manage our audiences by adopting a funnel strategy, using different campaign objectives to reach segments of audiences based on their unique profiles. So, by being able to automatically have Facebook retarget viewers who recently saw a video of ours or clicked on a link on our site, we reinforce the Rule of Seven.

The Rule of Seven: A new customer must have at least 7 different contact points with a brand before making a decision.

Utilizing this funnel strategy, we start at the top of the funnel. The coldest audience is at the top of the funnel. Most of the time have no brand awareness, and may not even be problem aware at this point, meaning they haven’t consciously noticed that they have a problem that you’re going to help solve, yet. How do we engage this cold audience and start to warm them up? Begin building trust with them through storytelling, interesting visuals, or video.

The bottom of the funnel, or the warmest market, are people who have considered all their options and they are deciding between our product and competitors.

B.E.L.T. Method

The BELT Method helps us implement the funnel strategy, bringing new customers from cold to warm market, top to bottom of the funnel.

Belief — The audience needs to believe there is a problem and need to solve in their lives, help them tune in to the problem. This is focused around driving awareness.

Engage — Help the new customer evaluate why you are the best option. Nurture and engage them. Creating content at this stage that “edutains” (educates and entertains) like a newspaper would. Engaging content should nurture the prospect with the ultimate goal of establishing trust. This is true “influence” stage where you establish why are you are the best option. If you can produce great content, this will go a long way. Being mindful of the semiotics of your brand, and putting your personality and lifestyle into the content you create will strengthen this belief of authority.

Lead — Help lead the customer to the solution by offering them something helpful in exchange for some information, supporting them in the journey of purchasing from you. A helpful tip: this could be not necessarily meant to convert right away. For example, with targeted ads, you could measure things like “clicks to website” or “video views” in addition to conversions. Only optimizing for transactions leaves out a lot of other ways to target warm leads.

Transact — Help the audience do business with you through sales and retargeting. The goal is to get your prospect “off the fence” and to align them with our brand fully, leading to a transaction and long-term repeat customer. When we get to the transact stage, we have been “indoctrinated” into the brand and why it provides the best solution.

Where to Get Good Ideas for Ad Content?
- Buzzsumo.com
- Set up Google Alerts for your industry, and see what people are writing each day.
- Look at Insights in Facebook to look at competitors’ ads, and add certain pages to your Watch page that are relevant to you and your business.

Top Tips for Posting Strategies and Content Creation:

• Post to your business page a minimum of 4 times per day.
• For content creation, try the 10x4x1 Method:
  10 interesting/fun posts, 4 informative ones (office tour, lifestyle tour, day in the life), and 1 CTA (call to action).
• If the other methods don’t appeal, try the 10x10x4 Method:
  10 FAQs (really just top asked questions, or objections turning into questions), 10 SAQs (Questions I Should Ask), & 4 WAN (Why Act Now)

That’s all for this week! Next week we’ll cover Google Ads, Content Strategy, and Retention.