Digital Marketing Archives - Page 11 of 13

Top 5 Email Marketing Trends for 2021

In digital marketing, continuous change is the one thing that will never change. After a tumultuous 2020 that showed us how critical it is to maintain strong customer relationships, it’s more important than ever to stay ahead of the latest email marketing trends. Sure, the tortilla wrap TikTok trend might not prove valuable for our work, but there are plenty other marketing trends that are important for energy utilities.

Let’s review some of the top email marketing trends we see for 2021. With these ideas in mind, your energy utility is sure to keep your brand ahead of the curve and on the path to greater customer engagement and satisfaction.

1. Personalization

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again — customers expect communications that are tailored to their specific needs and interests. Customer segmentation has been proven to increase digital engagement, with research showing that personalized messages improve click-through rates by 14% and conversions by 10%.

Maureen Huss, Questline Digital Group Account Director, has seen exciting growth in customer engagement by using targeted, industry-specific content in solutions such as eNewsletters. “We’ve seen dramatic increases in engagement specifically from business audiences in education, healthcare and manufacturing by segmenting content that speaks directly to their needs,” she says. “When comparing these metrics to communications without targeted content, our clients are seeing the impact that personalization truly makes.”

We suggest:

Segmenting messages and promotions by audience
Recommending programs or products by audience
Sending automated, triggered emails based on user behaviors
Recommending content tailored to individuals

2. Automated campaigns

Automated campaigns, also known as “drip” campaigns,go hand-in-hand with personalization as they are tailored to the actions of an individual. Emails in these campaigns are triggered when a customer performs a certain action, such as sending the customer product recommendations after they purchase a smart thermostat from your energy utility marketplace.

These emails give the customer a better sense of control over their overflowing inbox. When customers receive emails based on topics they’ve been looking for, they connect with the message, instead of feeling fatigued by one-off promotional emails.

We suggest:

An automated Welcome Series campaign to say hello to new or moving customers, triggered when they sign up for service. Our 2021 Energy Utility Benchmarks data shows 2020 had the highest engagement rates in Benchmarks history with a 51.3% open rate and 11.2% click-through rate.
Anniversary emails celebrating a year of service for your customers. These emails let customers know that their energy utility is thinking of them, and that they are more than just another bill payment.
Send recommended products or cart-reminder emails to customers depending on their behavior on your energy utility marketplace.

3. Interactive emails

Interactive elements within an email tend to boost customer engagement as customers can find exactly what they’re looking for within the email itself. They no longer have to go through numerous clicks to reach the right page — interactive elements create a seamless user experience right in the email itself. When you make it easier for customers to complete an action, you increase the likelihood of them actually doing so.

We suggest:

Animated buttons and CTAs
Rollover effects to show products or services
Interactive image carousels that can be controlled by the customer
Quizzes or games within the email

4. Email design trends

As fashion trends change each year, so does email design. In 2021, customers are looking for bold and bright colors that help your message stand out. Color attracts attention and is also a great way to evoke emotion and drive action — you can make a customer feel excited about a new product using a bright yellow or feel calm about a change in billing plans with a light blue.

Customers also want clear and concise copy that makes emails easier to read. As we all know, attention spans are shorter than ever, which means copy needs to be shorter as well. Get to the point quickly using bullet points or icons.

In addition, dark mode has stood out as a major trend this year, allowing customers to adjust the brightness of the content they’re consuming. Many customers use this feature for low-light or nighttime environments, as it is easier on the eyes and can improve content legibility. (Or they simply like the look of it better.)

“Users want to look at their phone or computers the way they choose,” explains Joe Pifher, Questline Digital Creative Director. “If we dictate how they see it, and not allow them to personalize it to their liking, it won’t be the best user experience.” Dark mode needs to be considered in the design of your emails to ensure copy and imagery can still be read easily no matter what mode they choose.

We suggest:

Using your brand colors in bold ways to make your content stand out, evoke emotions and drive action
Adjusting email design to be compatible with dark mode
Un-cluttering your copy with the use of bullet points or short paragraphs

5. Multichannel marketing

Although digital marketing is critical, traditional marketing is still alive and well and should be utilized to expand your promotions beyond smartphones and laptops. Multichannel marketing works because it meets customers where they are, including through email, social media, video, direct mail and more. Through cross-channel engagement, you can feel confident that your energy utility’s message is reaching customers.

“It’s not only about deciding where to share and promote your content,” advises Alexandra Greenberg, Questline Digital Content Strategist, “you need to keep your strategy in mind as you plan and create, too. Consider your target audience as you write to ensure your content is relevant and accessible across multiple channels.”

We suggest:

Creating a strategy for each unique campaign that repurposes elements of the campaign to be used on multiple platforms

Email marketing trends get personal

What do personalization, automation, interactivity, design and multichannel marketing all have in common? People.

The main takeaway for this year is that it’s all about your customers. If the coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that people crave human interactions and connection. By focusing on a customer-centric experience and their needs, it will set up your energy utility for digital marketing success.

Download the 2021 Energy Utility Benchmarks Report to see how your email performance metrics compare to industry trends.

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3 Essential Steps to Sending Error Correction Emails

When sending out marketing emails to energy utility customers, errors can happen. Maybe a product name is misspelled or a call-to-action has the wrong link. Depending on the situation, you might need to send a correction to alert customers to the mistake. But how do you know if you need to send one? Read on to learn best practices for sending error correction emails.

A plan of action for error correction emails

No matter how many people are reviewing your marketing campaigns, errors can slip through the cracks. In fact, a recent study finds more than half of marketers made between two to five mistakes in their email promotions last year. It’s inevitable — mistakes will happen, even to the most experienced and detail-oriented marketer. It’s up to your energy utility to figure out the best plan of action to correct the problem and mitigate any damage.

Step 1: Decide if you need to send a correction

The first step is figuring out if the error is big enough to warrant sending a correction email. Some mistakes are more serious than others, so you’ll need to figure out what type of mistake necessitates an “oops” email.

Common mistakes in marketing emails:

A link is wrong or not working
Spelling or grammar errors
Recipient is addressed incorrectly
Secure information was leaked
Email was sent to the wrong recipient

For example, a missing or incorrect link prevents customers from enrolling for a particular program or service — potentially reducing revenue or conversions for your energy utility. In comparison, a minor grammar error does not have these ramifications and is likely to go unnoticed by a majority of customers. In fact, sending a correction email for a minor spelling mistake may only serve to highlight the error for customers who missed it the first time.

Keep in mind, you don’t want to make a habit out of sending correction emails. Customer satisfaction can be negatively impacted if customers keep receiving these type of emails. Sending a correction means sending two emails instead of one. This can be risky considering customers’ inboxes are already filled to the brim with promotions. That’s why your energy utility needs to be selective on what mistakes require a correction.

Step 2: Determine how to address the error

Now that you’ve decided a correction email is the best course of action, your next step is to address the error. It’s important to be prompt and send a correction email quickly. In some cases, your customers might only read the corrected version and skip over the original version. The longer you wait, the greater the chance for negative feedback from customers.

While nobody likes acknowledging an error, it’s important to be clear, straightforward and own up to the mistake. In other words, don’t sugarcoat it. A humble and honest response goes a long way in keeping customers satisfied with your energy utility.

Follow these four steps for writing effective error correction emails:

Explain the error in clear and concise language.
Let customers know what has been fixed and any action they need to take.
Provide a sincere apology.
Offer reassurance the issue will not happen again.

Step 3: Choose the right email subject line

Perhaps the most important part of the error correction email is the subject line. The right subject line increases your chances that customers will read the corrected version, not the original email. Your subject line should be short and sweet, while clearly explaining why your energy utility is sending another email.

When sending the same email with corrected information, consider adding “Correction” or “We Apologize” before the original subject line. Humor can also help to strengthen customer engagement. For example, using the word “Oops!” before the original subject line shows that your energy utility acknowledges the mistake with a touch of humor.

Subject line ideas for your error correction emails:

CORRECTION: [original subject line]
We apologize – link fixed!
Sorry, we fixed the link
Correction: What we meant to say
Oops! We made a mistake
We apologize for the error
Sorry about that! Here’s the correct information

Lessons learned from common marketing mistakes

After sending a correction message, be sure to track email performance to see the impact, including open rate, CTOR, delivery rate and opt-out rate (this one is important to watch). Sending a correction email is a learning experience, allowing you to take steps in the future to prevent a similar situation.

Looking for advice for your email marketing strategy? Learn how Questline Digital can help.

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Digital Customer Relationship: The Key to Lasting Engagement

Does your energy utility have an effective digital relationship with customers? The answer may surprise you. Most energy utilities email program promotions to customers, text them outage alerts and offer electronic billing options — creating the impression of a strong connection. However, these transactional tactics actually fall far short of a true digital customer relationship.

To effectively build engagement, energy utilities need to think beyond the monthly bill and generic notifications. A digital customer relationship requires consistent touchpoints, relevant content and messaging that responds to each customer’s specific interests.

What is a digital customer relationship?

A digital customer relationship means that an energy utility proactively uses two-way communication channels to connect with customers, listen to their needs and interests, and deliver targeted, personalized messages to build long-term engagement.

The “digital” part indicates how you reach customers — through email, text, web and social platforms. But the “relationship” in this equation is about much more than which channel you use. Customers expect a digital relationship to be responsive and relevant to their interests.

An energy utility can’t simply replace its old snail-mail outreach with email and consider that to be a digital relationship. Likewise, most digital marketing efforts do not constitute a digital relationship. Those are one-way channels — pushing messages or promotions that are only important to your energy utility, not your customers. An effective digital relationship is built on two-way communications: listening to customer needs and delivering messages that are important to them.

The Netflix secret to a successful digital customer relationship

You probably get at least one email from Netflix every week with movie recommendations you might enjoy or gentle reminders to finish watching a series you started. You might get one of these emails every day!

Are these emails simply marketing messages? After all, the objective is to get you to watch more Netflix so that you won’t cancel your subscription. Or, are these recommendations also a type of customer engagement, helping you get more enjoyment out of your free time by guiding you toward entertaining Netflix content?

Of course these messages can be both a type of marketing and effective customer engagement. The key is personalization. Netflix isn’t promoting the same program to all its customers; the streaming service is making a targeted recommendation, promoting specific content that it thinks you will find relevant and useful. That’s not just digital marketing, it’s a digital relationship.

Importantly, Netflix doesn’t just contact customers when a payment is due at the end of the month. Netflix doesn’t wait to reach out when its rates are going up or to provide restoration updates about streaming outages. Netflix connects with customers all the time, sometimes every day, to make sure customers are enjoying its service.

Does this strategy work? Well, Netflix has built a pretty successful business around its 200 million subscribers. Being part of customers’ daily lives, through continuous digital engagement, is a big part of that success. If you are a Netflix customer, you will be regularly reminded that great entertainment is only a click away.

How energy utilities can build an effective digital customer relationship

Energy utilities can borrow a page from the streaming service’s engagement playbook. Like Netflix, energy providers are a big part of customers’ daily lives, offering a service that’s increasingly valued in today’s connected world. But unlike Netflix, utilities too often fail to build meaningful digital relationships with their customers, instead relying on transactional outreach like monthly bills, outage alerts and generic program promotions.

The good news is, energy utilities can build strong customer relationships. It just takes a commitment to move beyond these typical one-way tactics to embrace the relevant messaging that customers now expect. Here are three key steps to building and maintaining digital customer relationships:

Effective digital engagement starts on day one

Companies that succeed at customer engagement don’t wait to get started. The last time you signed up for an online subscription or created a new account with an ecommerce company, how much time elapsed before you received the first welcome email? Minutes — or seconds? These messages make a great first impression and immediately start building a strong digital relationship.

Likewise, energy utilities can use welcome series emails to start their relationship with new customers (or restart a relationship with customers moving within a service territory). These welcome messages are an opportunity to introduce your utility, show customers how to make the most of their service, and get them started on paperless billing, outage alerts, eNewsletters and other digital touchpoints. And it works! Customers who receive welcome series open future emails from their utility at 30% higher rates than other customers.

Stay top-of-mind with regular touchpoints

Consistency is important in any relationship. Customers want to know that you’re there to support them on their schedule, not just when you’re trying to sell them something.

A monthly email newsletter is one way to maintain engagement on a regular cadence, delivering interesting content and helpful resources on a schedule that’s distinct from other transactional messages. This consistency pays dividends: Questline Digital performance metrics show that eNewsletter readers are much more likely to open other emails from their utility customers, clicking on program promotions at a 16% higher rate than other customers.

Speak to customer needs with relevant messages

Customers don’t just prefer to receive personalized messages — it’s a basic expectation, thanks to companies like Netflix that have set the standard for digital engagement. To meet these expectations, your utility needs to identify and deliver relevant messages, and avoid wasting customers’ time with communications they aren’t interested in.

Customer interests can be identified in a variety of ways: content consumption on your website or eNewsletters, program participation, marketplace purchases or customer personas built using all of these characteristics and more. With this information, you can deliver relevant content and promotional messages that speak to their interests and address their motivations. In one example from Questline Digital performance metrics, an energy utility that segmented its business newsletter by industry saw content engagement increase by 84% for some segments!

Consistent outreach builds strong relationships

A digital customer relationship is much more than digital marketing or one-way communication. To be effective, your energy utility should use two-way channels to listen to customers and consistently provide relevant, personalized messages that speak to their interests. The result will be stronger relationships and long-lasting satisfaction to rival companies that truly excel at digital engagement.

Learn how Questline Digital’s approach to digital engagement builds long-term customer relationships for energy utilities.

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Marketing vs. Advertising: What is Right for Your Energy Utility?

Many people use the terms “marketing” and “advertising” interchangeably when, in fact, they are quite different. To put it simply, marketing promotes a business and its products or services, while identifying customer needs and how best to meet them. Advertising, however, is the act of calling attention to products or services, specifically through paid methods. You can market without advertising, but your energy utility shouldn’t advertise without marketing.

As digital engagement technology continues to evolve, it’s important for your energy utility to understand these differences in order to know which strategies are best to reach customers and achieve program goals. Read on to learn about the specific differences between marketing and advertising and how to use both to your energy utility’s advantage.

What is marketing?

Marketing is the practice of expanding your business by identifying how to best align a product or service to your customers’ needs. Effective marketing helps you understand how best to reach a target audience while increasing revenue at the same time.

In business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, a business is reaching customers directly, such as what your energy utility does to reach your residential or business customers. In business-to-business (B2B) marketing, efforts are directed to reach other businesses. Often, a marketing strategy is broken down into four phases called the four Ps:

Product: A company’s offerings (products or services) that meet customer demands.
Price: A pricing strategy could be built around profit margins, perceived value or opportunity costs.
Place: How and where your products are distributed, such as a physical stores or ecommerce websites.
Promotion: This can include advertising, public relations, content marketing and sales efforts.

Types of marketing

Marketing is not one-size-fits-all. There are several types of marketing available, including:

Content Marketing: A strategic approach based on creating and delivering valuable information, such as blog posts or infographics, to educate your target audience about your business.
Inbound Marketing: A focus on attracting customers to your website. Instead of pushing sales messages on customers who may not be interested, inbound marketing offers solutions that customers are looking for — inspiring them to seek out your business. Tactics often include a combination of content marketing, social media marketing and search engine optimization.
Social Media Marketing: The use of social media channels (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to maintain a conversation with your audience.
Digital Marketing: A “catch-all” for online marketing, leveraging search engines, emails, websites or blogs on both desktop and mobile devices. Digital marketing includes digital advertising as well, such as search engine marketing or paid social promotions.
Traditional Marketing: The opposite of digital marketing, using offline sources, such as print, radio, mail or billboards.
Relationship Marketing: A strategy that relies on both traditional and digital tactics. This strategy focuses on customer retention and satisfaction instead of new sales.
Brand Management: Uses techniques to increase the perceived value of a brand over time. This is achieved through initiatives that manage brand equity, consistent brand messaging and new product pushes that effectively showcases the brand and increases customer loyalty.
Product Development: Filling a gap in the business for a product or service to meet customer needs.

What is advertising?

Advertising is the process of making products or services known to customers, mostly through paid channels. An advertising campaign must be creative, timely and strategic. When executed well, advertising can educate customers, convince them a product or service is superior, improve brand perception, publicize new products, attract new customers and upsell existing customers.

A successful advertising campaign can use a mixture of traditional and digital media to deliver its message and align with the wants or needs of the customer. Advertising is just one component of a marketing strategy; while marketing helps you develop and position products based on customer needs, advertising communicates those products’ existence and influences customers to make a purchase.

Types of advertising

As with marketing, there are numerous types of advertising available. The most successful advertising campaigns uses a mix of these methods:

Digital Advertising: This includes ads paid for on social media, online publications, apps, sponsored content, search engine marketing and programmatic display ads.
Traditional Advertising: This includes advertisements in traditional media, such as newspapers or magazines, billboards or bus stops, direct mail, TV commercials or radio spots.
Retail Advertising: Featured point-of-purchase advertising within stores, such as product placement on displays or carts.
Product Placement: Paid advertisement to have a product emphasized in a TV show or movie.

Marketing or advertising: What should your energy utility focus on?

The short answer to this question is both. You need marketing and advertising efforts aligned to create a well-rounded strategy and connect with your energy utility’s customers. Marketing needs to be the core of what you do — researching customers, understanding their needs, segmenting target audiences to address those needs — but advertising needs to be an aspect of your marketing strategy to fully promote your programs and solutions.

Begin by creating a marketing plan that encompasses your energy utility’s goals. This should be an overarching strategic plan detailing which products, programs or services you want to focus on. In this marketing plan, think about plans for market research, public relations, product development, segmentation, customer support and pricing. Once these items are figured out, add advertising to the mix. While this is often a large part of a budget, it’s necessary to extend your brand’s reach.

Through thoughtful research and implementation, your energy utility’s combined marketing and advertising strategies will help your energy utility achieve its program goals and conversions.

Let Questline Digital’s experts help you craft a marketing and advertising strategy to connect with energy utility customers.

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Best Practices: A/B Testing for Energy Utilities

Performance metrics are the secret sauce of digital marketing, allowing marketers to directly measure the results of their campaigns. But why settle for evaluating performance metrics after a marketing campaign has run? Why not use those metrics to your advantage — to evaluate, adjust and improve performance during a campaign?

That’s the promise of A/B testing: Sending two variants of an email to a portion of your list to determine which performs better. By following these best practices, you can use A/B testing to drive email opens and clicks and improve the results of your energy utility’s marketing campaigns.

What is an A/B test?

An A/B test, also known as a split test, is a digital marketing tactic that involves testing two versions of a campaign asset to determine which performs better. In some cases, the “winning” asset may be immediately deployed; in other cases, the asset may be further tested against another variation in an iterative process to optimize several different campaign elements.

A/B testing can be used to evaluate any type of digital marketing asset, but it is commonly associated with automated email marketing. In an email campaign, the test is sent to a small percentage of the list — say, 10% of the list receives version A and 10% receives version B. After a period of time, the better-performing version is determined and the email platform automatically deploys the “winner” to the remaining 80% of the list.

What elements of an email campaign can be tested?

Nearly any aspect of an email can be tested — but it is critical to test only one element at a time. If there is more than one difference between version A and version B it will be impossible to determine why one performs better than the other.

Email campaigns commonly A/B test one of these elements:

Subject line: What message prompts the higher open rate?
Sender: Should the email come from a company, person or other brand name?
Call-to-action: Which color, button or active verb drives more clicks?
Headline: Which title pulls recipients into the message and results in conversions?
Imagery: Do recipients respond to a photo, illustration or particular design treatment?

What are the benefits of testing a subject line?

The subject line is the most common element tested in an email campaign. It is the single-biggest driver of email opens — and if recipients don’t open your emails, your campaign has no chance of success.

A subject line test allows you to see what message better resonates with your audience so you can optimize results. Questline Digital’s performance metrics show that emails with A/B-tested subject lines achieve 7% higher open rates.

What are the benefits of testing a call-to-action?

While email opens are obviously a critical first step, your campaign’s call-to-action is what drives results. Without clicks on a CTA button or link, your email won’t achieve its conversion goals. A/B testing can optimize those clicks.

Emails with A/B-tested call-to-action placements improved click-through rates by 16%, according to Questline Digital performance metrics. Depending on your message’s design, we recommend testing the size, color or placement of a CTA button and the text used in the call-to-action.

What A/B test sample size works best?

There isn’t a hard-and-fast rule to determine how big your A/B test sample audience should be. The variables to consider include the total size of your list and the expected response rate. Basically, you want to send to enough recipients so the test results are statistically valid and achieved in a timely fashion. Accounting for these factors, sending a test to between 10% and 20% of your list is usually sufficient.

How long should you run an A/B test?

As with list size, there isn’t an easy answer to how long a test should run. For a large list, 24 hours is usually sufficient. If you have a small list (and time to wait), running an A/B test for a full week has the advantage of eliminating fluctuations caused by the time or day you send.

How do you determine the winner of an A/B test?

The variable that a test measures is determined by the element you are testing and your campaign goals — typically open rate, click-through rate or conversion rate. These parameters are defined when setting up an automated A/B test; for example, the “winner” is the subject line with the higher open rate.

When testing the following elements of an email campaign, these are the metrics typically evaluated to determine a winner:

Subject line: Open rate or click-to-open rate
Sender: Open rate or click-to-open rate
Call-to-action: Click-through rate or conversion rate
Headline: Click-through rate or conversion rate
Imagery: Click-through rate or conversion rate

In order to eliminate random chance or errors from results, it’s important to measure the statistical significance of the test. A good rule of thumb is to look for 95% confidence between the variants; depending on the sample size, this translates to a 25% to 35% difference in performance metrics.

For example, if subject line A earns a 20% open rate and subject line B has a 22% open rate, you may not be able to determine with statistical significance that the subject line is the cause of version B’s performance. But if subject line A has an open rate of 20% and subject line B drives an open rate of 26% — an increase of 30% — you can say with statistical significance that subject line B is the winner of your A/B test.

Reach your marketing goals with A/B testing

Don’t just rely on digital performance metrics to analyze marketing campaigns after the fact. Use performance metrics to your advantage to optimize results during a campaign. With A/B testing, your email campaigns will deploy higher-performing subject lines, CTAs, messaging and content, boosting results and helping your energy utility reach its marketing goals.

Learn how to build stronger customer relationships with a digital engagement strategy from Questline Digital.

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