Melanie Balke is the CEO & Founder of The Email Marketers.
Melanie Balke is the CEO & Founder of The Email Marketers.
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I began my career in consulting in Germany, working with major corporations in the automotive, telecommunications, and healthcare industries. When I moved to the US, I joined one of the pioneering e-commerce companies selling custom-made D2C sofas online. My consulting background made me analyze their entire marketing stack, and I saw a significant opportunity in improving their email marketing. Diving in, I revamped their email program and was thrilled to see the revenue boost. This success hooked me on email marketing. After that company was sold, I transitioned to a marketing agency in LA, quickly becoming the head of the email marketing department due to my strategic growth initiatives.
My advice is to focus not just on email but on customer retention as a whole. Understand the entire customer lifecycle and use data to identify key moments. Know when customers are likely to drop off and how many purchases it takes for someone to become a lifetime customer. It’s about crafting compelling content and segmentation strategies that cater to these insights.
Starting my agency was never my initial plan; it happened organically. While freelancing, I accumulated more clients than I could handle alone, which led to hiring assistance. Realizing I was building an agency, I decided to do it right. We rebranded as The Email Marketers and decided to only focus on email marketing so that we could deliver one service as the best in the space rather than multiple services at a mediocre level.
We added SMS into the mix because we wanted to be at the forefront of innovation and because we saw that SMS worked. Email and SMS go hand-in-hand nowadays, and you should run both.
I think it depends. The right answer will be different for every company. I believe that if you are a growing company, you can hire more senior-level talent by hiring an email marketing agency than you could hire in-house. I also think it helps you keep your payroll lean and adds a lot of flexibility to the business. But what the right answer is for an individual business will always be different.
I think email marketing for e-commerce is just as crucial as for other industries. Email is the equivalent of having a salesperson for your e-commerce brand in-store. The same can be true for other businesses. For example, MedSpas. It is really giving people that personal touch in addition to social media because often there is no actual person that people interact with when they buy from e-commerce.
To be honest, I don’t have a favorite email marketing strategy. The strategies needed are often different based on the different brands. However, if this counts as a strategy, my favorite strategy is looking at the customer lifecycle, establishing data points as baseline metrics, and improving from there with high-value content and targeted sales. This comprehensive approach has consistently driven great results for our clients.
I think HexClad does a really good job.
Never spam your list. Use segmentation and adhere to good deliverability practices to ensure your emails are welcomed and effective.
Both email and SMS should be used together to maximize effectiveness. Each channel needs a unique strategy, but they should complement each other, creating a cohesive experience for the customer.
I think SMS is important because email has become a more crowded channel. Additionally, younger generations are moving more towards SMS. We see that SMS has much faster open times, much higher open rates, and is a great tool to have interactive conversations with your customers.
The first five things I recommend to a business starting to use SMS marketing are:
We actually love to use SMS to delight. A really good brand at this is “We’re Not Really Strangers” because they send text messages that are super high value and have grown so fast that now their text message list is a paid service. I think it is important to use SMS as a tool that not only conveys information and sales but also can delight and surprise your customers.
“We’re Not Really Strangers” They do a great job at mixing high-value SMS that give you a positive emotional reaction and connotation with the brand with sales.
I think regulations around SMS marketing are only going to get stricter. The way we have a promotions folder in Gmail for our emails is the way we are going to have one in our text messages in the future.
