Are your email marketing efforts meeting your expectations? With too many businesses taking the ‘spam’ approach, here are 5 steps that can make all the difference.
With channels like influencer marketing and social media advertising taking centre stage in recent years, it’s easy to assume that other aspects of digital outreach are losing their potential to attract leads and promote businesses. While this may be true in some cases, email marketing remains a heavy player in marketing. Email marketing strategies are still hugely popular for their power to nurture and convert potential leads.
As Hubspot states in their ‘Email Marketing Guide’, “Email isn’t dead. It’s one of the few marketing channels we can use to build an authentic connection with the humans that keep our businesses alive”. Emails offer a one-on-one connection with your customer and while it can be abused, it can also be the point of establishing a trusting relationship with a great return on investment.
Just because you are a business appearing in a mailbox, doesn’t mean that you have to act like you are spam. Effective email campaigns avoid this classification at all costs, working to provide potential customers with content that they’re actually interested in. Much of this can be achieved through a proper understanding of your customer base and the ensuing segmentation of your list. Ensuring you’re providing relevant information will keep users from unsubscribing and allow you to further grow your reach.
With that said, here are 5 steps to effective email marketing:
1. Focus on Your List
Your list of email contacts is quite possibly the single most important aspect of your campaign. You need to ensure that everyone on there wants to be contacted by you. This means; no buying lists, no emailing people that haven’t agreed to be emailed and no ignoring unsubscribes. While taking these routes may be tempting if you have a small database to begin with, your results will suffer in the long run if you are spamming people.The major benefits of chatbots lay in their capacity to improve efficiency. With advanced chatbots able to handle many customer enquiries, via Facebook or a website for example, they reduce the need for an employee to be on hand to respond. This opportunity not only frees up time but can improve customer service due to fast response times.
Advanced chatbots can also offer a multitude of benefits within businesses. With implementation, there are available features that can enable this technology to serve in data management, internal communication and operations management.
Chatbots are appropriate and accepted in social media, as seen in Facebook’s Messenger Bots, and are now commonly featured in popular websites as an enhancement of the customer experience (which you can check out for yourself on Air New Zealand’s website). Their effectiveness, however, remains subject to their development, making choosing the right one for your business imperative.
2. Invest in a ‘Lead Magnet’
If you haven’t got a list of people interested in your products or services, you are going to have to draw people into signing up to hear from you. One of the best ways to do this is through lead magnets. A lead magnet is usually an item that a customer wants from you and in return, they’ll sign-up to your database to get it. Your lead magnet will depend on your industry, but it is always of value and hyper-relevant to your audience. Coupons, gated content and tutorials are all examples of great lead magnets.
3. Segment Your List
Your customers won’t all be at the same stage of the buyer journey while they sit in your list, so it’s important that you don’t treat them in the same way. People who are yet to make a purchase, people who have made a single purchase and people who are regular consumers will all react differently to your emails. Segment these people into groups and tailor the content you send them accordingly, you’re guaranteed to see a difference in engagement.
4. Split Test, Record and Optimise Your Emails Based
Split testing is all about trying out new things, seeing what’s working (or what isn’t) and then improving it. As you partake in email marketing, you should always test your campaigns, so you can get a gauge on how people are interacting with your content. This will allow you to improve and entice more people with the emails you send out.
5. Get Personal
People like to be noticed. When you’re popping up in somebody’s mailbox, it’s important that they know who you are and that they know that you know who they are. Email marketing is most effective when it’s tailored to the person and their interests. There are a number of ways this can be done and some of them are incredibly easy. Simply including a person’s first name, for example, can drastically boost open rates.
Email Marketing is Still a Fruitful Marketing Tool
While it may not seem as exciting as some of the other marketing mediums out there, email is still capable of achieving fantastic things for businesses. With unparalleled intimacy, brands are able to communicate offerings and foster meaningful relationships with their audience. Taking on these 5 tips in your campaigns will allow you to adhere to best practices and secure the results you are after.