Author: Franz Malten Buemann

We’ve got a lot to learn from our customers. Amid frustrations and challenges that would’ve been incomprehensible before 2020, our customers have found new, creative ways to evolve and pivot to meet their goals—all while doing more with less. 
The grit, the resourcefulness, and the genius exhibited by the brands we get to work with have been inspiring. Cheesy? Maybe, but we tend to get sentimental over customers around here.
So when our customers have ideas about how to improve Campaign Monitor and in turn boost their own success, we listen. Our goal is to continuously innovate in order to meet—and exceed—our customers’ needs.
Kalyn New, our director of product marketing, said it best: “We are always listening to customer feedback and introducing new features that empower our customers to create smart, best-in-class email campaigns.” 
This month, we’ve unveiled a series of new, easy-to-use features to help marketers like you be more productive. These latest updates include the addition of unsubscribe surveys, a smart campaign tagging solution, and new layout templates. 
Campaign Monitor’s newest features
These enhancements are part of Campaign Monitor’s ongoing commitment to provide a modern and intuitive email platform for our customers. We aim to constantly optimize our features and offerings so we can better serve marketers around the world—marketers like you who have a lot on your to-do list and a shrinking amount of time in which to do it.
Unsubscribe survey
The unsubscribe survey is a new tool that gives marketers the option to add a survey when a recipient unsubscribes from their email list. The results provide valuable insights into why subscribers are choosing to opt-out, helping marketers understand how to adjust their email marketing strategy to be more relevant, effective, and targeted with their messaging.
Some amount of list churn is acceptable and even expected. In fact, email marketers see an average of 0.15% of their subscribers opt-out of their lists per month. Even with this normal amount of churn, marketers can still glean important information on how to better serve the subscribers who remain with the insights gained from an unsubscribe survey.

You don’t have to stay in the dark. Instead, our unsubscribe survey tool can quickly reveal the reasons behind the unsubscribes, allowing marketers to adjust their strategy to retain a greater portion of their subscribers.
Campaign tags
A common frustration for marketing teams is the process of organizing, searching, and reporting on all of their email campaigns. With this new tagging feature, teams can create a bespoke organization system, empowering them to work more efficiently and save time when filtering and searching for drafted and sent campaigns.

Tags increase collaboration and decrease limitations by allowing you to add multiple categories to a single campaign, making it a useful collaboration tool for large teams.

For instance, you can tag a campaign by email type, as well as audience segment. You can also create tags around department or team members, empowering every team to operate quickly and efficiently without disrupting the workflow of any other team.
Layout templates
We already offer a wide selection of beautiful, customizable templates via our drag-and-drop builder. To complement these, we added new layout style email templates to the template library. These templates don’t have existing design elements, allowing small business marketers to create an email from scratch without having to go in and change every small design element. 

To make designing an email even simpler, the placeholder text used in these templates outlines best practice guidelines for crafting an effective email. 
What customers say
“The unsubscribe survey is now one of my favorite features,” said an Australian-based industry-leading ticketing provider. “Before we never knew why people were unsubscribing from our emails, so it’s been very helpful to see their answers, especially because people have been very open and honest with their feedback.”
“Campaign Monitor’s new tagging feature allows us to group and categorize emails efficiently — whether by brand, niche, or email purpose,” said Alex Dalland, digital producer at Universal Media Co. “This helps us not only to better view our strategic goals against core metrics, but also easily identify new opportunities.”
Wrap up
Email has come a long way since Campaign Monitor was founded in 2004. What constitutes a beautiful email has changed, but the makings of a sincere, genuine connection have not.
Our mission has always been to provide customers with the tools they need to create meaningful connections with their audiences. Like any good relationship, email is about getting to know your audience and letting them get to know you; it’s a two-way relationship. That’s why we’ve built our tools to help you understand your audience, which in turn allows you to do what you do best: To be yourself and tell your story in your own unique way.
Over 250,000 customers worldwide use our easy-to-use design, personalization, and automation tools to create and deliver stunning emails that drive real business results. 
 
The post Gain Confidence and Build More Effective Email Campaigns appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

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Any time we look to change the status quo, there will be roadblocks, hurdles, and growing pains. But when it comes to aligning internal organizations in marketing and sales (and customer service), the struggle can pay off hugely. But no organization and no leadership should be looking to make these changes and shift internal processes without looking to how it can be done most effectively and efficiently – that’s a no-brainer. This is why digital transformation is not only critical for successful marketing and sales alignment, but it should in fact be a primary focus – then the alignment will come more easily.
Digital transformation means better customer insights
At last month’s Adobe Experience Maker’s Live virtual event, Chris Parkin, Senior Director at Adobe walked us through “Redefining the Future with Digital Transformation”. In his presentation, he showed us how Adobe is adapting through new digital technologies and approaches, and how other Adobe customers are as well.
In his first point, he showed how digital transformation allows for a “deeper understanding of the customer,” discussing that in doing so, we can identify “specific customers and audience segments, understand behavior, and anticipate actions.” This, in turn, allows us to “use data to generate actionable insights and improve customer outcomes.”
So what does this mean in terms of marketing and sales alignment? Well for starters, we can better track customer journeys from (MQLs) to SQLs to SALs. This allows us to see patterns, and then make predictions which can help us to do more aligned activities from how we build website/digital sales funnels and email marketing campaigns, to how we can more accurately identify the activities that lead to conversions through all stages of the journey. 
This makes the handoff of a prospect between marketing and sales seamless. When we have the tools to measure what our prospects and customers are doing, what they may need, and what their intentions are, we can more accurately service them and allocate resources and time from the appropriate department in ways that aren’t putting our teams into the competition. Instead, real-time digital touchpoints and customer insights can help us to foster a more solid partnership as we work together towards common goals in conversions. 
Digital transformation means accurate content delivery
Another theme throughout the Experience Maker’s Live event was content. Now, more than ever, content is at the center of how you service prospects and customers, showcase your company’s knowledge and insights, and motivate stronger customer relationships and trust.
But it’s not enough to just produce content. You may have a hypothesis about what your customers may want and need, but most importantly, digital transformation allows you to not only know for sure what your customers are looking for, but it helps you deliver that content exactly when they need it. 
In Chris’ second point, he discussed “Agile Communications” for modern businesses, which underscores the need to “increase proactive, personalized and timely communications aligned to customer and employee context” which is based on segment, need, and location, to name a few. The results? “Increase employee engagement and customer retention.” 
Especially in our current economy and with the limitations we are facing, digital delivery of highly relevant and personalized content can make or break your success with a prospect or customer, and this accounts for all stages of the customer journey. It’s not just marketing’s job to create digital assets for lead generation and nurturing for sales, when sales need to increasingly provide accurate content to help customers all the way through the decision making process. 
Digital tools like Marketo Engage help marketing and sales teams track the content that has been shared with prospects and customers. They also help establish clear next steps, answer questions in a timely way, and provide exceptional service even before the purchase has been made. This again allows for alignment internally in ways that see all employees in customer-centric roles supporting each other in enabling the customer through useful, relevant, and timely content. 
Digital transformation means creating new ways of working
You’ve likely heard the term “unprecedented times” so much recently that you’re sick of it. But it is one of the best ways to describe what we’re collectively going through: A widespread fundamental shift in not only how we do business, but how we work. Most of us are learning as we go, adapting on the fly, and finding out through rapid trial and error what works and what doesn’t. And while we’re busy finding the new norm in our own work lives, our customers are experiencing the same. The companies that embrace digital transformation, are the ones who are continuing to succeed.
In another of Chris’ points, he described the “new ways of working” in which we must “leverage remote collaboration, workflows, and meeting platforms.” He also said we need to “use common tools to democratize data, content publishing and leverage AI for scale.”
When it comes to marketing and sales alignment, this becomes blatantly apparent. Collaboration is imperative for success, and gatekeeping, while it may have happened before, cannot stand. Organizations who are able to efficiently move all operations online can see an increase in communication channels when the usual in-person, informal channels are unavailable. But perhaps this is a good thing. We can see how digital transformation of marketing and sales alignment allows for a more tightly run ship: less information slips through the cracks, accountability is more difficult to run from, and unified systems and tools ensures everyone is on the same page. 
While digital transformation is nothing new, our current time has forced many of us to speed up adoption in ways we could have never anticipated. But rather than fear the change, or struggle to adapt, we should look to how it actually enables us to achieve important internal milestones, especially when it comes to marketing and sales alignment. 
The post Why Digital Transformation Is Crucial for Marketing and Sales Alignment appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog – Best Practices and Thought Leadership.