Stukent’s Mimic Pro digital marketing simulation offers digital marketing students a hands-on email marketing experience. I feel the limitations of the software clouded the learning process to some degree. However, here are my takeaways from the Mimic Pro email marketing simulation.
Open Rates
Email open rates depend upon your contact’s first impression of your email. This includes your email address, subject line and preview text. In the Mimic Pro simulation, the default for your preview text is the first line of your email copy.
I found the Hubspot Email Marketing Certification course to be beneficial when creating my email subject lines. I avoided using words such as “free” or “% off”. Therefore, my email messages were not disregarded as spam . Instead, I attempted to provide value and a sense of urgency to my contacts with my subject lines. Most of my subjects informed my contacts of current, limited time sales at Kent’s.
I received email open rates consistently between 16% – 17% by following these principles throughout the course of the email marketing simulation.
Email Clicks
The content of your email determines the number of clicks you receive. Following Hubspot’s recommendation, I attempted to be human and conversational in my emails. I included detailed camera features, images, limited time offers and a strong CTA in my email copy despite the limited email templates available in Mimic Pro.
Furthermore, I confirmed that the cameras I featured in my email messages linked to their correct landing pages. This ensured relevancy between the content in my emails and my landing pages.
Finally, I made adjustments as I progressed through the Mimic Pro simulation and my Hubspot certification to ensure my email copy was consistent with the content of my corresponding landing pages.
All these factors contributed to an increase in the email clicks and conversions I received over the course of the simulation.
Mimic Pro Simulation Limitations
I found the lack of information pertaining to the email lists provided by Stukent to be the
biggest limitation of the Mimic Pro email marketing simulation. As I learned from Hubspot, segmentation is essential to a successful email marketing strategy – sending the right email to the right person at the right time.
However, Stukent does not provide adequate information to fully understand the segment characteristics of their email lists. The only conclusion I was able to draw from experimenting with the different contact lists was that I received more opens, clicks and coversions when I sent more emails.
In my opinion, the biggest limitation of the Mimic Pro email marketing simulation was the lack of information pertaining to the email lists provided by Stukent. It was difficult to understand why my emails did not convert without knowing the segmenation characteristics of the contact lists. I used the same landing pages for my emails as I did for my CPC ads. These landing pages typically converted well for my ads. Therefore, I am not sure what to attribute my low email conversions to. Instead, I feel somewhat humbled by the Mimic Pro email marketing experience.
Conclusion
Overall, I felt the Mimic Pro email marketing simulation was beneficial, especially when completed in conjunction with Hubspot’s Email Marketing Certification course. Hubspot provids an in-depth look into email marketing, yet does not offer any hands-on opportunity to apply these skills. Meanwhile, the Mimic Pro email simulation does not go in depth into email marketing skills or knowledge, but instead provides a somewhat realistic experience with email marketing. These two programs compliment each other and offer a well rounded first exposure to email marketing when completed simultaneously.