In its simplest form, white labeling involves providing a product or a service while allowing someone else to place their brand name on your product or service. This business model is very popular in the retail business, electronic business and digital marketing. So company A makes the product, company B buys it and brands it as theirs. All these happen with the prior agreement of company A. White label business model is a bit different from the mainstream business model. Therefore, this little difference has to be taken into cognisance when creating an email marketing campaign.
Email marketing involves using emails as a means of convincing someone to make a purchase, or as a way to make a customer take a particular action. The actions vary from subscribing from newsletters to participating in polls.
However, before we delve deeper, we have to learn some e-mail marketing lingo. This is very important so that you don’t go running to Google after every line or two. After this we will take a plunge.
1.1 Getting Started With Email Marketing, Terms and Terminology
Every profession has its esoteric language; the jargons they sometime use to appear ultra smart. These are some of the words you’ll encounter most in email marketing. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it is a good place to start from. At least when next you are conversing with an email marketer you won’t feel like all the words are flying over your head. Below are some of them.
CTR
Click Through Rate, this lets you know how many people clicked on an advert, an image, call to action or in an email. This is very useful for knowing how well your strategies are producing results. Aim for a CTR of at least 20%, anything below that you’d have to go back to the drawing board. Your ESP (Email Service Provider) can help you with such information.
CPM
Cost Per Thousand, a lot of times when e-mail marketers solicit your emails, you see stuff like “we will not sell your e-mails. Apparently, some email marketers buy e-mails from “email ad vendors”. Cost per thousand, refers to how much it will cost to buy a thousand emails addresses.
E-mail Blacklist
When you black list a certain email address or IP number is simply means that their messages will not be delivered to you.
Email White List
The exact opposite of Black list, when you white list an email address, you’ll always get their messages in your inbox. One way to white list an email ad, is just by adding the e-mail to your address book.
Landing Page
This is the page that your visitors are directed to once they click on your call to action; the page usually contains more info about the product or services talked about on the CTA page. It can also be the page where your customers perform the action, which you want them to. Such as fill a form, buy a product and so on.
Clicks Per Open
This is a measurement of the number of e-mails that were opened after the recipient had received them.
CTA
Call to action: when marketing emails are sent, the marketer hopes that the receiver of the email will take an action. Perhaps subscribe for a newsletter, or make a purchase. The words or the means through which email sender tells the prospective customer to take action is the “Call to Action”. For example “subscribe for our newsletter to get more awesome content”, now this is a call to action. They come in various forms, and the purpose is to make the reader take a particular action.
Conversion Rate
This is one way to measure your campaign success. It is a percentage or proportion of those who respond favourably to your CTA.
ROI
Return on Investment. This is the amount of profit in monetary terms or in terms of lead one gets after putting in time and money.
1.2 How to Push and Grow Your Business through Email Marketing
In this age and time when social media has invaded everyone’s privacy, email marketing is now as important as ever. With e-mail marketing you can create personalized and relevant emails for each of your customers. So you can deliver personalized content to them thereby increasing your conversions and ROI. By following the outlined steps below, you can get the most out of your email marketing campaign.
Get Their Email Address
The first step here obviously is to get them to give you there email address. There are many ways to do that, but one way that works for me is to give out incentives. Not just freebies, but something they would perceive to be of value. For example, whenever I get on Copyblogger, they promise an e-book with great content on email marketing and copywriting. Now if you are an email marketer or a writer you’d be interested in their content. You’d consider taking out sometime to fill out their form, just a little sacrifice in exchange for great content. So there, they have my attention. However, when I try to register, I am just unable to, for reasons unknown to me.
Now this brings me to my next point.
Make Subscriptions Very Easy
Make it very easy for people to subscribe to your newsletter. They should be able to find your subscription button very easily and make sure your landing page is working. Copybloggers subscription landing page is not working so no matter how much I want to subscribe, I just can’t; you get the gist right?
Optimize You Site for Mobile
The world is always on the go, and majority of the people access the internet now on their mobile devices. If your site is not mobile friendly, you will be losing at least 60% of your prospective customers. Need I say more on that?
Get Whitelisted
Get your subscribers to white list you. One easy way to do this is to get them to add you to their contacts. Some email marketers go as far as giving instructions on how to do this. Yeah it is that important, you don’t want to be flagged as spam, intentionally or unintentionally. It really is bad for business. If this is done, you have a much better chance of your messages being delivered to their inbox.
On the issue of spam, you want to make sure you make it very easy for your recipients to unsubscribe if they so desire. When people find it difficult to unsubscribe from a certain newsletter, they just spam the email address. You don’t want to have more than 1 spam per 1000 emails or your email could be labelled as spam across the web.
Maintain a Schedule and Keep In Touch
Humans are a creature of habit. Therefore, it’s great if your prospective customers receive your emails at scheduled time. So they’d learn to expect it, and if it is something that they are particularly interested in, or you have great content, they’ll make the time for it. It doesn’t feel so good when you just send email to your customers whenever it is time to “milk” the relationship. Many of us email marketers are guilty of this. This is where automation comes in; your ESP can provide you with this.
Keep Your Word
If you promise a 20pg e-book, make sure your deliver a 20pg e-book. If you promise great content make sure you deliver on your promises. Remember you are not the only one competing for their attention, so you always want to be in their good books. If you don’t deliver on your promises, you really look your ability to influence your customers.
Provide Great Content
For me great content is everything! Your content should not only be well written, but they should also contain great information. You want to be an authority on whatever subject you talk to them about. This will also increase your chances for your article to be shared. More shares and referrals mean more subscription.
Clear and Strong Call to Action
We shall use Copyblogger again as a case study. The call to action on their page is; “Get our free, in-depth eBook, Email Marketing: How to Push Send and Grow Your Business, when you register for My.Copyblogger.com below. Discover how to push send and grow your business: it’s free”. This call to action is very precise and strong, and what you’ll also get is clear. Register on our site, in other words give us your email address and we will give you this very valuable e-book.
Personalize Your Emails
Using someone’s first name in a newsletter has been known to increase conversion by as much as twenty percent. So you have to tailor your content to a person’s preferences, gender, style, occupation e.t.c. The more personalized you can get, the better your chances of conversion. This will take some time though, that’s why you need an ESP that will always give you various kinds of metric. Over time you’ll be able to create personalised emails for your subscribers.
1.3. 8 Best Examples of Successful Email Marketing For White Label Business
We dealt with some of the most common words you’ll see in email marketing and also steps to take when starting an email campaign. Here are some of the most important kinds of emails you’ll need for you white label business. In no particular order, they are outlined below.
Case Study Email
If you’re thinking of a tool that can be used in communicating to your clients what value your services or product can add to their business. A case study would be a great tool to use in communicating this to your clients. Your communication here should be clear, whether it is in helping them increase sales or better customer experience or far reaching advert, be very clear. In addition, it would be more relevant if your case study is carried out on a similar company, (similar to your client’s company) that probably faces the same challenges your customer might be likely facing. The results of the case study should be included in the email you’d send to your clients.
Welcome Email
This seems like a no brainer, or rather not very important. However, it is a way of showing your face once again to your customer; and of course appreciating them for taking the time and trusting you enough to give out their email. This in a way shows that you do care about them. Moreover, you can use this opportunity to reiterate what they should be expecting from you.
Curated Content
The popular blogger, Tim Ferris does this very well. Every Friday he delivers a certain post, which he calls Five-Bullet –Friday. It contains the coolest and most helpful things he came across that week. It includes gadgets, quotes, apps, content and many others.
You can do exact same things with your subscriber list. Make a list of the best content or most helpful things you came across during a certain period. It may be industry related or not. The choice is yours. It’s like saying to your subscribers I saw these cool stuffs and I think you should see them too.
Announcements
Customers like to be kept abreast of happenings within a company. Imagine walking into your client’s a certain day only to hear that their company has been acquired by another company. You might feel as though it has negatively affected their ability to deliver optimum services that’s why they kept it to themselves. Of course it doesn’t always have to be about acquisition and mergers. Relocation, Award received anniversaries and all of that. This makes your clients feel closer to you. And this closeness could create loyalty, since they know all that’s happening at the company.
Campaigns
Late 2015 Jermaine Griggs’ of HearandPlay.com sent me an email. It read something along the lines of “52 weeks to a better piano player”. By the New Year, for the whole one year, once a week I was entitled to getting one weekly video on improving my music skills. Now we all love freebies, don’t we? Well your clients are no different. Such campaigns help improve interaction, improve traffic and even generate more leads. When you start planning this let your customers know, so that they can get prepared. Of course when the campaign kicks off they should also be reminded. This is a great way to get new subscribers based especially on referrals.
New Article Email
Charles Chu of MarketMeditations does this very well. Whenever there’s new content I get an email from him telling me my content is ready. Contained in the email is the heading and a few lines of each of the articles. Clicking on any of the articles takes me to his blog where I can read the full article if I desire. So whenever you have new content or info to share with your customers an email can be very helpful. You can either include the links to the content or just paste it in the email. The choice is yours.
Product Update Email
The services you render are supposed to improve with time. Your products will also get better. Or you could add more service to your portfolio. Whatever it is you should make sure your subscribers are aware. Addition of new products to your product line has a way of convincing certain customers to check out your services, especially if it was in a section that was previously uncovered.
Activation
According to some industry research close to half of your subscribers are inactive. This email should be an attempt at getting them to start reading your content again or them taking themselves off your subscriber list. However, the former will be preferable.
Get your subscribers who have not opened your emails in the last 6-12months. Reintroduce yourself to them; let them know what you do. And intimate them, of course on what they’ve been missing since they stopped reading your newsletter. You could add freebies to this email as a way to pull them back in. If you don’t see any changes, resend and then finally take them off your subscriber list. Let them also know before you take them of the list.
2.1 Automating Email Marketing in 6 Steps
One particular ad has the description; “email marketing is dead, try marketing automation”. While I agree that you should try automation, I disagree that email marketing is dead. Otherwise, you won’t be reading this article. Email marketing is a very profitable business model. According to statistics, email marketing typically brings back about $4 for every $1 spent.
Prior to now, about 10, or 15 years ago, automation was a buzzword for those in the manufacturing sector. Remember Henry Ford, he laid ground plans for this kind of manufacturing. Today however automation is a buzzword most associated with email marketing.
Automated email marketing actually makes the job of an email marketer way easier. You know how you send your email, you decide whom, and you type the message and the click the send button. However for automating marketing, you schedule your emails ahead of time. Thus whenever your customer performs a certain action he automatically gets a predefined email or set of emails. For example if someone subscribes for your newsletter. The person gets a welcome email first, and then a series of other email introducing the person to what you do. Automatic emails are personalized and well timed, and can be tailored for a certain customer. Therefore, they help build a good relationship and loyalty between you and your customers.
In this chapter, I’ll be showing you how to automate your email marketing. The biggest email marketers do it. I don’t see why you shouldn’t.
Build a prospective list of subscribers
What you do here is to get the emails of your prospective customers and any other info you’d need from them. Do not ask for information you’ll not be needing. This will help save your time and the time of others. Name, gender, personal email and work designation will be useful at the beginning. We receive all kinds of emails from marketers, everyday. And majority of them are not worth reading, in the end one just feels swarmed with emails. Therefore, people are more wary with giving out their emails now. You might have to use freebies to attract them in, and then a promise of great content. Make sure you fulfil your promises though. Of course, before you decide this, you’ll need to get an ESP (email service provider). As time goes on and you are sure you have gained the loyalty of your subscribers then you can ask for more information. This will further enable you tailor your content to suit your subscribers.
Define your Content and Create your Campaign
Your objective will determine the kind of content you’ll create. Are you looking to create a comic series, so you need popularity. On the other hand, are you looking to turn your subscribers into customers? We know what we are. And as a white label company we are looking to pull other company into hiring us for our services. So this factor will define the kind of content we shall be creating.
I remember reading on a certain site, sometime ago that until your content is so good that you begin to think that you are giving too much away for free, your content is not actually good enough. You want to display a mastery of the field in which you offer services. Therefore, well researched content that answer a lot of general questions and even more will be very fine.
Analyzing Customer Habits
Your ESP should come with analytical tools to help with profiling of customers, knowing their likes, dislikes, and purchasing habits. With these tools, you should be able to tell who is reading your newsletters and who is not. Who is visiting your homepage or clicking on the hyperlinks. This will help your refine your communication with your subscribers. These analysis and tests will help you determine the effectiveness of your emails. You test, you refine and you reschedule.
Divide your subscribers/customers into groups
This segmentation will help your automation more. At this point, you have gathered data, and you have seen to a certain extent the likes and preferences of your prospects. Now segment them into groups based on this knowledge you now have. And create a schedule for each of the groups. As you get more data you keep on segmenting until your marketing becomes pinpoint and accurate.
Grow Your Leads
Now you have content and you have prospects / customers at various points of conversion. Therefore, your job here will be to determine which of your content is suitable for a section of your prospects. After you have done this, your ESP will send the messages accordingly.
Analyse, Analyse and Analyse.
Analyse everything, from those who did not open your emails to those who visited your sites. Get to know how long it took for your prospects to move along in the conversion process. From being newbies, to be marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads. Check how long it took for that process to be completed and think of ways to reduce the time. Know which of your groups were most responsive and least responsive to your newsletters.
There are so many other indicators to mention, but these are good for starters.
So measure, refine and reschedule until you have hit optimum, if that will ever happen though. The idea however is to get more sales leads in as shortest time as possible.
2.2 Essential Tools to Assist Your Marketing Campaign
We all want our email marketing to be easier, faster and more effective at securing leads. These tools below will be of immense help. Some are free, some are paid, you should make your choice based on your marketing needs. These tools perform functions from scheduling, to testing, analytics and a whole many others. Below are some of them
GetResponse
In the previous section, we talked about tracking customers’ behaviour. Well GetResponse is a lord at that, and it does it for a token price of $15/month/1000 emails. It helps monitor purchasing habits of your prospects. It also shows you how much of your emails are being opened.
Rebump
Rebump is an email scheduling and productivity tool. With it you can schedule and send follow-up emails to customers or prospects after they perform a certain activity. It also has a veritable tool that customizes the emails sent out, making them look as though humans and not bots sent them.
Litmus
Did you do chemistry? This name must have come from there. Litmus helps you know what your email design will look like in a certain email client. Yahoomail, Gmail , Aol are all email clients and they have different interfaces. Therefore, your emails may not always look the way you’d expect them to look in your client’s inbox. This could lead to your emails be flagged as spam, with this tool however you can make the necessary tweaks.
TouchStone
Have you ever heard of A/B test? This tool does one of those A/B tests well. Creating attractive, email opening subject lines for your newsletters can be an uphill task. This is where TouchStone comes in. It tests your subject line against over 20billion other options, ultra cool right? It lets you know the likeliness of that email to be opened, rate of delivery and all of that.
Followup
I love this particular tool. It is very useful in knocking out email distractions. This web service knocks out your emails from your inbox, and lets them reappear when you need them. You need to set the schedule yourself though.
SumoMe
This is another cool tool, however you’ll have to get people to visit your site for this tool to work. This is how SumoMe works. At the moment someone is about to leave you site, it opens a pop-up requesting for the person’s email. You can customise this popup with freebies and other customer attractive stuff.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of email marketing tool. The tools are over a hundred, therefore they can’t all be covered be covered in this article. It’s already long enough as it were. However, these are some of the most important tools, voted by some of the best email marketers out there.
3.0 Three Essential Stages in Email Marketing
Email marketing has the potential to improve your marketing, however like everything in life there’s the right way and the wrong way to go about it. Following the three stages below and creating an email, marketing campaign will be easier for you.
3.1 Stage 1: Getting Permission
I once subscribed for “SaaS Weekly Newsletter”, someone had mentioned it to me and I had gotten interested. After subscribing, something caught my attention. I got an email telling me to click on a certain link if I really wanted to be getting their newsletters. Now I thought to myself, these guys want subscribers to their newsletter. So why place another measure or give people an opportunity to rethink their decision. However, after getting into email marketing, I started to understand the reason why. It is called getting permission.
We live in two worlds, the real world and the virtual world or the digital world. In the real world we don’t have much control over what happens in public spaces, like on our commute to and from work. That public space can be chaotic but our homes are a safe haven and we have very good control over those who come in. That’s how our email box is in the world of digital chaos. We are always been bugged on social media, Facebook, Instagram and all the rest of that. The email addresses are people’s safe haven. And a lot of time they are way stricter with whom they give out their email addresses to.
Part of getting permission is getting them to give you their email address. Before doing that, they’d like to know what they stand to gain from giving you their email. And it’s your job to convince them. So your call to action must be convincing and succinct.
People reading stuff online really have a short attention span. This is due to the distractions of the internet. Freebies and a promise of great content is one great way to get them to subscribe to your newsletters. There are many other ways to get people to give out their emails unfortunately; we can’t explore all those options today.
Soliciting for emails is not the only way to get emails though. Some fellows on the internet offer to sell email addresses to email marketers. However, we all know how we feel about unsolicited emails. If it’s something we are not interested in we spam it, if we can’t find the unsubscribe button. So getting permission actually ensures that we are email to the right crowd. Remember that here, we are dealing with other companies. They are even stricter on the case of unsolicited emails than individuals are. You don’t want to lose a potential customer because of issues
Have Them Whitelist You
After getting their permission there’s no way to be sure that your email send will get to your subscribers inbox. So you should have them whitelist you. This is as simple as having them add you to their address book. Some ESP give instructions for that, it is actually important you consider that.
3.2 Stage 2: Playing the Numbers Game
This has nothing to do with the amount of subscribers you have. It’s more to do with your content and the frequency at which you’ll be delivering it to your subscribers. There are no hard and fast rules to this, it all depends on business you run. However, you should let your subscribers be aware of a schedule otherwise they could forget you. If you promise to send your subscribers a newsletter once a month, make sure you stick to your schedule.
Having integrity is one way you can build loyalty in your customers. Take for example I subscribed to Charles Chu’s blog, and I expected to get some articles every Sunday. It was like that for a while, and then something happened and I didn’t get the blog posts for a while. The time, which I had created for that mentally, went into something else. I actually forgot about the blog until he came back. But something else had taken his space, I didn’t have time for it anymore. Humans are creatures of habit. This is something you can take advantage of.
Quality of Content
Now on the matter of content, good content is very subjective. The tailoring of your content depends on your niche amongst other things. For instance, a good content for sales update may not be good content for an educational blog. One way to judge good content is if it does exactly what is says it will do. If you promise to deliver timely updates on discounts and promo offers on certain products and your content doesn’t do that. Well then it is not good content.
Put yourself in the shoes of your customers, this is one very good way of tailoring your content. As I said in earlier chapters, it is been said that great content is until your newsletter is so packed that you think your are giving away too much for free. Of course, this is not applicable in every case. However, make sure you really do give out value. This will make them come back for more.
Maintaining a regular schedule will help you keep in touch with your subscribers. So that when you want them to buy something, they won’t feel as though you only care about their money. So having your content in a friendly tone and on a regular base will help with your sales ability. Automating your sales process here will be of great importance. Only you also can decide when and how often to pitch to your customers. Putting yourself in the shoes of your customers will help. This will bring us to the third stage in email marketing
3.3 Stage 3: Segmentation and Analytics
Ever heard the phrase “divide and conquer” well that’s what segmentation means. It means to divide, though the conquering part is not inclusive. You are not conquering anything here.
You should divide your customers into classes for easier management. This segmentation is also useful during automation.
You can segment them based on a host of data. Maybe gender or how long they have come on the sales process. That is, those who are freebies, those who are further along. Perhaps they are beginning to show interest by clicking on those hyperlinks, and customers who have actually bought. You could even differentiate on size of company, primary market they service and so on. This will help you target your newsletters appropriately. You can know those who are ready to buy and those who are not.
While segmenting, you should also have options on the type of content your customers would like to receive. Let’s assume you provide SEO, Web development and Graphic design services. You can segment you content into these three classes. So that your subscribers can choose, based on their choice of content you’ll be able to tell what service they will most likely require.
Analytics
There are a myriad of analytics one can check out for, but we will deal with just three for now.
Conversion Rate
This is the number of your subscribers who clicked on a link in your email, perhaps to fill a form or complete an action. If your conversion rate is low, it might mean your CTA is too weak, or your have too many links in your newsletter.
Open rate
If you don’t have a good open rate, this will mean a good number of people don’t bother to read your newsletter or they delete it on receipt. It could mean that you are talking to the wrong crowd or the quality of content is not as expected.
Click Through Rate (CTR)
A low click through rate means you need to improve quality of your copy.
There a lot of other analytics, they niche will determine exactly what you need. This is just a beginner guide, as you go further along in your email marketing, you’ll learn more and deciding on the tools to use will become easier.
Conclusion
Business to business marketing is all about creating value. And this is exactly what a white label business is. The majority of your clients are other businesses even if you communicate with a certain person within that organisation. Therefore the rules for email marketing here are definitely going to be a bit stricter. There’s lesser room for flouting of rules as businesses are not as forgiving as individuals.
However with the information in the previous pages you’ll not be at a loss on how to run an email marketing campaign within the stringent rules of B2B marketing. As earlier said this is a beginner’s guide there is much more information available on the beauty of email marketing and how to take advantage of it. This guide however will give you a good head start in the world of email marketing for white label businesses. It can also work for email marketing to individuals all you’ll need is a few tweaks here and there.
Email marketing has the ability to transform your business; it can increase your customer base by as much as 30%. You should not joke with it.
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