Sean Smith
Sean Smith is the co-founder of SimpleTiger an inbound marketing agency that specializes in SEO and content marketing services.
SimpleTiger strategize the best content to be published for success in organic search, to increase its client’s followers, and to increase their rankings for the keywords that are most critical to their business. It also ensures that its client’s sites are well set up technically in regards to SEO so that crawlers can properly access their site and content.
Sean feels that email can be utilized in variety of means and not just as a marketing tool. He outlines ways in which email can be very powerful for business growth.
Medium of support, which is very often the case – which can be seen as a form of marketing.
Means of re-marketing when you have a sale or other promotions to offer.
Means of communicating with potential partnerships through targeted outreach to publications
Newsletter list building, which is the most commonly utilized and useful form.
Thoughts on Newsletter strategy
I think it is too easily seen as a set-it-and-forget-it strategy, that needs a certain form of unique appeal to become useful or intriguing to the lion’s share of users. I think it can be useful, and even in this day of oversaturation people like Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose get upwards of a 60% open rate on their newsletters. The main focus should be on the unique aspects of your offering and what separates you from the thousands of other newsletters out there.
Overall he feels that email can be really push your revenues. Citing examples he says that business like AppSumo could source their primary source of revenue back to email marketing right from the beginning. There are posts on AppSumo and OkDork by Noah Kagan that explain all of the ins and outs of the effects their email lists had over their bottom line, which are breathtaking considering their current scale.
At SimpleTiger, Sean’s team uses email in various ways. They utilize email primarily as a medium of outreach and promotion for their clients. They do sometimes set up newsletters to be utilized by clients, but that is a lot harder to succeed these days and takes a lot of commitment to do properly.
For clients where the use-case makes sense they highly prioritize email as a form of communication with their customers, as Facebook, Twitter and other social networks of that nature can limit your exposure with the push of a new algorithm.
He highlights the fact that for businesses like eCommerce, email lists can be a massive part of their revenue.
Tips & Tools for list building and email campaigns
Sean’s primary focus is to create high quality content for driving subscription rate. He says “When we have a large amount of content pouring out and the content is good, we notice the largest subscriber rate. When we don’t, we notice the smallest subscriber rate.”
As a 80/20 rule, he would spend 20% of the effort on creating high quality content which will give him 80% of the result. It is too easy to get lost in the other 80% of trying to get the design perfect or using personalized subject lines and things of that nature. Most of those things you can set-and-forget and focus on the real meat which is the content and consistency.
You must focus on finding the things your audience is intrinsically interested in and use that in all of your messaging.
Sean’s favorite tools are BuzzStream for outreach and Mailchimp for mailing list. For newsletter list building, they use SumoMe products which are easy to implement on any site and can immediately start having a major effect over your newsletter sign up rates.
So far Sean’s biggest challenge with email marketing is being consistent with it. You can have incredible quality content but if you don’t stay consistent with it and make a conscious effort that isn’t side-tracked, your newsletter won’t grow and you won’t reap any benefits from it. That’s something that has been really hard for SimpleTiger to do as a fast growing team that has to consistently change focus as they scale.
Design & optimization of campaigns
He advises that for a successful campaign you must define your goals and accordingly create growth tactics. Tactics will differ for various goals like open rate, click rate etc.
While designing emails, his focus is on primarily 3 things
Simplicity
Quality
Consistency
He love the subject lines that are the most human, that simply catch your eye because they are interesting. He further adds, “The Obama campaign email subject line that just said “Hey” really struck a chord with me. It’s so simple, but a potential President just saying “Hey” to you in your email subject line really makes you feel something uniquely human in a digital world. That’s the feeling I try to incite with my email subject lines”.
He shares following tips for selecting best time for sending mails
“Whenever your audience is going to engage the most. Learn by doing it and adjusting as you go. Think about time zones, who your actual market is and when they will be available and ready to read. Things of that nature. It isn’t a one-time catch-all strategy with email”
He loves the email designs of GrooveHQ, Basecamp, Medium and Paul Jarvis’s dispatches. He wants mails which are uniquely human and seek to help him more than just blindly promote products.
