After your company website, email marketing is the second most powerful advertising and promotion tool for your business, which, in addition, requires extremely little input. It is working, and is sure to work just as fine — so far.
revise your email marketing strategy and start getting more clients
START WITH GOALS
No goal — no motivation, no destination, and, finally, a long way to nowhere... Ask yourself: "What effect do I want to produce" Think over your strategy: whom should you email and with what, so that it could be attractive and motivating, and — most important — how often?
EMPLOY GRAPHICS AND VIDEO
Both of them attract more attention to your messages. Emails of versatile HTML format look much more vivid than those of plain text format and get considerably more feedback from customers. Always remember to send a test email to yourself first, to make sure it looks fine and does not land in spam.
DO NOT OVERINDULGE
In order to keep your messages readable and pleasant to look at, don't go too far with their design. The abundance of colors, fonts and graphics can make your message difficult to read. Try to place the most important information above in the headline. Neat and simple design will make your email easy to read and pleasant to look at. All the rest is a digression from your goal, which is — to sell.
FOCUS ON THE ESSENTIAL
Emails are more frequently browsed from smartphones and tablets, where browsing takes much quicker than on computers. Bear it in mind while creating your emails: keep their content brief, meaty and motivating.
Each message must stimulate your potential or existing client to act. Form the appeal in terse and neat phrases. If you have a lot of information to deliver — do it in portions, launching a series of short emails. This is infinitely more efficient than pouring it all at once.
...how likely are you ever to read something like that?..
TEASE
Think of an interesting topic that would resonate with your customers and encourage them to open your further messages. Here are a few examples: "4 common mistakes when selling an apartment", "3 days only to buy your dream car for a special price", "What plastic window to select". Alternatively, you can divide your customers into groups by similar parameters and email each group with a certain topic. Use interactive content: infographics, polls, calculating and configurating tools, and even online games.
GIVE USEFUL TIPS
People quickly get bored with plain advertising. Mix it up with something they are interested in. Add the sort of content, which will make it worthwhile to open your message and click the link to read more, thus making another step towards purchase.
OFFER ADDITIONAL MOTIVATION
The reputation of email advertising is tarnished by its bulk character. To make your emails sound more unique, you need to feature additional motivation, such as bonuses, free gifts or larger discounts. Be moderate here, however: frequent sales and endless discounts take down the product attractiveness (cheap = no one wants). How about offering something more valuable? For example, explain how exactly your clients can benefit from your product/service: instead of listing the product features, try to show how it can make life better, easier and more comfortable.
You can resort to the so-called "Unboxing", verbally "unpacking" your product.
For instance, this company offers its clients to experience all the benefits of the loyalty program membership:
YOUR CLIENTS CRAVE FOR PERSONALIZATION
So give it to them! You will no longer surprise anyone by mentioning their name in the email — your clients expect much more. Collect facts about their life (favorite brands, resorts, etc.), store this info in your CRM and use it to make your messages even more targeted and personalized. For instance, you can include a short survey in a greeting email for new clients and get the information from there. In any case, your readers must enjoy the experience of having a live conversation with you.
ALWAYS KEEP YOUR WORD
Giving promises you can't keep can cost you both trust and clients.
Grant your clients the prerogative to select the frequency they want to get emails from you: specify the link to the subscription parameters page in each message.
UPDATE YOUR CUSTOMER EMAILS DATABASE
Regularly revise your customer emails database to see, who is ignoring your campaigns. Try to analyze why your emails are being rejected, and modify them so that they could regain their popularity with these subscribers. If this doesn't help, do not hesitate to remove the non-responsive subscribers from your mail list. Always strive for quality, not quantity.
Keep record of email topics and that elicit the most of subscribers' response and use it to make your further content more targeted and better segment it.
MEASURE YOUR EFFORT
Focus on one priority — be it increasing the number of potential clients, boosting sales or anything else. Define the assessment criteria you are going to apply.
Important notice: do not limit your client communication to email only: use other channels to build stable relationships with those who prefer social networks, messengers and chats.
email campaigns: when and how often
Client registration for subscription should immediately be followed by a greeting email with a welcoming gift. This is the best way to start out a dialogue with your potential client. Your welcoming email should necessarily contain the information about email campaigns frequency and the unsubscribe link.
A welcoming email must be sent immediately upon registration, before the client gets absorbed with something else. Another reason to send it right away is client's expectation to get a welcoming sign on your part. Statistics show that most new subscribers tend to make purchases during the 24 hours following their registration.
Your next email should be sent in a day or two. Dedicate it to eliciting some information about your client: birthday, place of residence, shopping and entertainment habits, etc. Be careful not to turn this into a forced interrogation or fishing for personal details. Amusing question forms, such as interactive tests, will increase your chances to get a sincere reply.
In another couple of days feel free to convert the clients to your "cult": offer them to join your company group on Facebook, Instagram and other social media. This is an indispensable step on your way to client loyalty and word of mouth marketing.
so...
- Email marketing, being very affordable, really works magic.
- If you still haven't created a welcoming email template — do it now. Revise it, if already created, in order to improve.
- Compose a whole series of welcoming emails in order to raise profits. Include other communication channels to your campaigns — use social networks and messengers.
- Do not overindulge in sophisticated design. Emails should be easily readable and accessible from smartphones. Generate only useful and concise content, personalize it and add some bonuses to capture clients' attention.
- Perform recurrent analysis and efficiency assessment. If necessary, modify your marketing strategy.