Top of Mind for Email Marketers: 5 Most Popular Blog Posts of 2017

Our weekly blog posts are designed to provide guidance to our clients, who include CMOs, email marketers, and other business leaders at Fortune 2000 firms as well as small businesses, and everything in between. We’ll often base our ideas for these posts on questions we get from these clients, along with prospects in our pipeline. And even though we actively work to maintain a good pulse on what is top of mind with our clients, it’s always a bit of a surprise when we uncover our top blog posts of the year. Having just completed our year-end Google Analytics reports, here are the top 5 OMI email marketing blogs of 2017 in terms of clicks:

 

1. 5 B2B Email Steps for Finding More Customers in the New Year: It’s perhaps no surprise that the top blog post of 2017 focused on a topic of interest for all our OMI customers: how to leverage email data to land more customers and generate more revenue. This post addresses the five basic questions and answers about B2B email acquisition, and how it can fuel greater success for businesses in the coming year: what is customer acquisition data, who should I target as customers, what’s the best approach to selecting acquisition data, how is it best used and what should be done with responders. To see the answers, click here.

 

2. Sight, Sound or Feel: Using Sensory Words to Increase Audience Engagement: According to published reports, people interpret their surroundings primarily through one of three sensory filters: sight, sound or touch. In turn, we use—and respond to—language that reflects our preference. By personalizing email campaign content according to these filters and preferences, B2B marketers can engender greater trust and empathy, and, ultimately, generate higher response rates. Learn how to align sensory words with your target audience here.

 

3. The Role of Email in a Strong B2B Content Marketing Strategy: Having strong, helpful content to share with your prospects is an essential prerequisite to any effective email campaign. However, while most B2B marketers say their organization is extremely committed to content marketing, less than half are clear on what success actually looks like. Strong content can include resources, branding, social media, advocacy and web content that provides real help to your target audiences. To see how email can support and deliver the caliber of content that you need, read the blog post here.

 

4. Using the Power of Persuasion to Generate Email Action: Recent studies have isolated the top emotional triggers that help generate the most email responses: gain, fear, scarcity and logic. How can marketers push these emotional buttons to generate greater responses from their prospects in their upcoming email campaigns? See the blog post here to find out.

 

5. 6 Email Retargeting Ideas for 2017: Retargeting is a way to get your brand back in front of those who are familiar with your products or services. Retargeting can be accomplished via display ads, search, social media and, of course, email. Website visitors who are retargeted with display ads are 70% more likely to convert on your website, and about a third of those who see them have a positive reaction to them. To read how email can be used to enable prospect retargeting, check out the blog post here.

 

The remaining blog posts at the top of our list covered how to reach Millennials or Generation Z, how to leverage artificial intelligence, and today’s essential email marketing terms. The takeaways for marketers is that while email marketing may be simple in concept, it can take years and much trial and error in order to master it as a marketing discipline. Improvement takes constant review of the latest trends and technologies, and ongoing refining of skills. Hopefully, my blog has shortened the learning curve for our readers, and put our clients on the path to faster success.

 

We wish all our readers a Happy New Year… and ongoing success in 2018!

 

 

Outward Media’s accurate, targeted email data can help you achieve better email marketing ROI, and convert more prospects into customers. Ask us how. Also, please take a minute to review our latest case studies to find out about the business-building results we’re generating for our clients.