Email marketing is one of the most effective internet marketing strategies for a wide range of businesses and that’s because it is effective at creating and maintaining customer loyalty. It’s also a great vehicle for creating customer advocates that will recommend you to friends, family and colleagues.
- Relatively cheap to implement
- Highly measurable
- Creates trust and builds relationships
- Highly profitable
- Easy to set up and manage
- No steep learning curve
However, email marketing has its detractors, and they highlight that it leads to spam; it is not effective, and it annoys loyal customers. Our experience is very different though and we’ve found it to be one of the most effective direct marketing tools
Capture emails on your website
Set up a newsletter box for people to sign up to on your website. You will be amazed how that could lead to greater profitability when you market to a list that has shown a lot of interest in what you have to offer.
There are many free and low priced email programs to help you with this, including Mailchimp and Aweber and setting up your lists and campaigns is easy.
If you are not capturing emails on your website, then you are losing out on a big opportunity to increase sales or leads for your business.
There are many free plug-ins on platforms like WordPress such as Mailmunch that will help you to capture emails and then market to them your products or services. The return on investment for email marketing is unmatched by most other forms of online marketing tactics especially for B2B businesses.
Incentive (Offer)
Always think about the benefits that your subscribers will get from your email. So, you should include a big benefit or incentive to encourage click through to your website and make a purchase or download or other action that you require.
Examples of effective email incentives include coupons, vouchers, discount, free offer, free whitepaper, free Ebook, prize draw and other similar ones. You could also have multiple calls to action because this is likely to increase clicks to your site or a call from them too.
Targeting and Timing
Emails should be targeted at the right people and at a time when they are most likely to open and respond. Timing includes specific hours of the day when your recipients are available and also days of the weeks that have a higher response rate in your industry.
It also includes the time in the month and the time of the year, especially around particular events or holidays like Christmas, for retailers.
You should also consider their time zone especially if you are mailing to people in a different country or region.
Integration
Integration of email campaigns should be with other communication channels, and branding should be consistent across all platforms and touch points including advertising. It should also be integrated with offline marketing campaigns and should fit in with these communications.
Copy
This is part of the creative and mostly includes text that should be written to a high standard and appeal to the target audience.
It should include a well-written subject line that passes spam filters, a heading that creates awareness and interest, text in bullet points that increase desire and a call to action that links to your website or other resources. Copywriting is a specialised skill, and you should hire or engage a professional writer in producing your copy.
Attributes
Assess your email including the ‘from’, subject line, address, date/time, format (HTML or text) to ensure that it is targeted and effective. You should send out Multipart/MIME messages that can display text or HTML according to the email readers capability.
Landing Page or Microsite
Ensure a well-designed landing page or microsite that recipients click-through to, and include offers and promises that you made in your email.
This helps to increase engagement, build trust, boost sales and reduce bounce rates. The opposite is that you could see a high unsubscribe rate and some recipients marking your email as spam
Creative
It’s important to get the design of the email including its layout, colour and image right to increase engagement and clicks to your website.
The design should be simple and easy to understand, and it should match the brand image of your website and other online contact points of your business. One effective design structure is to mirror the website and this increases trust with recipients and reinforces your brand image.
Relevance
For your email campaigns to be successful, your offers and promotions should meet the needs and wants of your target markets. If they have opted-in on your website, then you have a higher list quality than a rented or cold list, and you will have a better understanding of what they require.
So, it’s important that your lists are highly segmented and that you promote offers that closely match their needs and wants.
Relatively low cost of fulfillment
Compared to other online channels, email marketing is relatively low cost to implement and manage, and its returns are high too. This is especially the case with an in-house list of subscribers, customers and lists built from business connections.
With cold or rented list where recipients are not familiar with the business or have little knowledge of it, then returns are usually lower, and costs are higher, but overall it is an effective marketing strategy.
Email is much cheaper than other direct marketing tactics like direct mail because there is no cost of postage or costs to create leaflets, letters, brochures and other promotional materials. The only costs you are likely to incur are from email platforms like Mailchimp and Constant Contact.
Direct response
Email is primarily a direct response medium and it’s used much less for brand awareness. As a direct response medium, it encourages immediate action like making a purchase.
Prospects who sign up to your emails usually have one goal in mind – to receive discounts, for product notifications, get coupons, receive deals – and any other offers that they can purchase, download, acquire, etc.
So, all email communications should have a call to action, and this includes links to your website where they can place an order or a telephone number in the email to contact your business and place an order. However, calls to action are many, and it all depends on your business sector and industry.
Fast campaign deployment
Email is fast to create and deploy. One feature that helps this is the many templates that are ready-made to create effective emails for your business. You can also create custom templates in Mailchimp and use them regularly to promote your offers.
Ease of personalisation
Email marketing is one of the best channels, both online and offline, for personalisation. Every aspect of email can be personalised, including:
- the recipients name,
- offers they are interested in or likely to be interested in,
- time when they receive emails
- frequency of communications
- and much more
Options for testing
Email provides many options for testing various features like offers, subject lines, words, calls to action, content and a whole lot more.
This helps you to improve your email communications and increase engagement and click-through to your website. Testing with email is cheap too unlike many other forms of advertising where costs are accrued during the tests.
Integration
Email can easily be integrated in a digital marketing strategy whether that’s for a B2B or B2C business. Integrating email helps to increase customer and visitor loyalty and leads to greater sales and revenue for your business.
Regular newsletter
For businesses of all sizes and sectors, a regular newsletter is an effective way to keep in touch with customers, employees, suppliers, investors and other target audiences. You can create a targeted newsletter for each of these stakeholders to keep them engaged and build relationships that will be profitable for your business.
Creating a newsletter is easy, and you can add an opt-in form to your website that has a good incentive and then create newsletter templates in your email program (Constant Contact, Mailchimp, etc.) and send a newsletter once a month, once a week or whenever is best for your target audience.
Customer survey
Survey programs like Survey Monkey help you to create easily a survey with multiple questions that you can add to your website or email to your clients or contacts. It has features that allow you to email your survey directly to your contacts.
Welcome message
A welcome email is a standard tactic to send out when a visitor has registered or placed an order on your website or via telephone. This is usually automated to speed up the process and to send the recipient a summary of what they have purchased, when to expect their order and as a reference for the order they have just placed.
Limited-time offer
With an in-house list, you can quickly promote offers that have a limited time and increase sales for a very low cost. Emails are cheap to send out, and they are able to grab the recipient’s attention and lead to a high conversion rate especially if they offer great value to your target customers.
Purchase confirmation
This is another standard email communication that is essential to customers who have just placed an order. It helps to build trust and confidence with your business and customers can use the details there to contact you if they have a query or need to update their order.
Winning back lapsed customers
Some of your loyal customers will from time to time lapse, and it’s important that you keep in touch with them and encourage repeat purchases through incentives. You can segment these customers and send automated messages reminding them of the benefits of shopping with your business and incentivise them with a voucher to encourage a purchase.
Newsletter segmented by purchase habits
For automation purposes and efficiency, you should segment your visitors and customers to ensure that you are sending targeted messages to each segment. Segmentation is not as advanced with a standard email list as it is with a database of customers. The two are different, and it’s important to understand how you will manage each and how you will segment customers and subscribers.
Top performers
Your website should highlight the top performing products based on past purchases, and you should email this to your customers to encourage purchases of products that they are likely to be interested in. You can have a top sellers list for each category or a list of top products in the category based on their purchases and send this to your customer base. Amazon does this efficientlly and this type of personalisation leads to higher sales and it’s an effective cross-sell strategy.
Birthday/Anniversary greeting or offer
Show your customers that you appreciate their loyalty to your business by sending them a greeting card or offer on important dates like birthdays and anniversary. This ensures that you are always top of mind with your customers, and it reinforces the relationship.
Product replenishment
Offer your visitors and customers an option to be alerted when a product comes back in stock. Then, send them an email when the product is in stock so they can place an order.
Warranty renewal
Email is effective and cheap to remind customers to renew their warranties, compared to telephone and snail mail. However, it is less effective than telephone and response rates are lower, but you can target many customers for a very low cost.
Abandoned cart
People abandon carts for many reasons including delivery charges that are too high, too many steps to checkout, saving it for future purchase, or as part of product and price research.
So it’s often difficult to know the reason. However, you can email your customers to remind them of items they’ve put in the cart and even send them a discount to encourage them to complete the order.
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