Consider this, close to 281 billion emails were sent and received in the year 2018. Of this 124.5 billion were business mails and 111.1 billion were consumer emails. A report by Radiaciti shows that an average office worker receives close to 121 emails per day. So if you think you expect every mail you send out will be opened and read by the recipient, that too without a conscious strategy, think again; because it might not even be seen at the other end.
The whole idea of this article is to discuss if you are a good communicator when it comes to sending marketing emails.
Do you add value to the content?
Is your approach properly targeted or are you shooting in the dark?
These are some of the primary questions to be answered by every email marketing strategist. A good strategy would always revolve around data and good content. This essentially means that the whole object of sending out emails is to get the right content to the right person.
For this, a careful study of the population should be made and it should be divided into strata to understand the demographics. This is the first step in conscious email marketing.
Marketing through digital means requires a very careful approach. Each word spelled will travel the world at the speed of light. Hence, it is very crucial for entrepreneurs to identify the opportunities and threats in the marketing strategy.
How can entrepreneurs turn the tide to their favor? How can the entrepreneurs fully embrace the options?
Well, it’s all quite possible. Let’s have a look at 9 tips that can make a huge difference in bringing the sales numbers up.
Table of Contents
1. Define the Policy and Strategy
As an entrepreneur, beginnings are always tough. You need to plan your business: your finances, production, sales, working capital, etc. Hovering over email marketing, you will see that it is not much different there either.
Setting out the “vision” and the “voice” of the enterprise is the primary step. What the business seeks to achieve and how it wishes to be heard, understood or perceived will be determined through its operations and communications.
2. Leverage Data
We are spilling over to the end of 2019 and the world around us is getting rich gathering, processing and selling data. It is necessarily the oil of the 21st century.
The necessity of data analytics in email marketing revolves around the simple fact that you need to define the “for whom” aspect of your business to make the various parts of your business run smoothly. Identifying and maintaining a customer base requires constant attention to customer tastes, preferences and demographics.
Building a mailing list is a very crucial process in email marketing. You may opt to purchase a list but that’s a really ineffective way of doing marketing as the data would miss so many crucial parameters. It could be like buying woolen clothes for the summer.
Building a list on your own involves identifying and collecting data on prospective customers and analyzing the various parameters and building a targeted approach.
Hacks to build a good mailing list:
- Enable data entry forms for users to subscribe,
- Collect data from references, social media and customer feedback
- Customizing and classifying emails for each group of customers based on their needs, traits, age, gender, etc.
3. Consider the Marketing Funnel
For every product purchased by the customer, he goes through a path called the buyer journey. This is the process through which a prospective customer identifies a product, analyses and compares it in the market and ultimately purchases it. From the point of view of the businessman, a keen study of this path is very crucial.
Commonly there are 5 stages in the prospect marketing funnel:
• Awareness
• Consideration
• Conversion
• Loyalty
• Advocacy
For the marketing process defining a sequence of emails to be sent out at various stages/intervals is crucial and measuring the performance/output at each stage even more so.
4. Create and Share Valuable Content
Email marketing is not just about ranting how great your product is. Once the customer is introduced to the products, the next step is to create value to the customer i.e., make a compelling cause for the customer to subscribe to your emails.
Sending out regular e-letters with rich content that showcases the specific ways your product can be a solution for the customers will help in maintaining a close, cordial relationship with them in the long run. It also helps to establish the “voice” of the business.
5. Test and Revise Keywords & Patterns
The best way to learn what catches the customers’ eyes is catching the trend and trying alternative combinations. The customers will respond quickly to the latest trends in the market and the edgy businesses will adapt to the hottest keywords.
It is highly necessary to constantly revise the content, email format, subject lines, etc. to keep yourself fresh and dynamic in front of the customers.
A general pattern and set of keywords can be identified as ideal for a certain group of the population. This would mean that the mails for the working class should include contents relating to job security, savings and the like.
However, business people would generally be interested in matters concerning the latest trends in markets, stock market indices, updates in technology, etc. This could be further segregated according to the various fields or professions of the recipients.
6. Be Realistic
No matter how good your email strategy is if you cannot keep promises your graph will grow downwards. The consumer market always roots in ingenuity. Fake emails are as bad as fake promises. The recipients will develop a bias against your emails if your words do not appear genuine.
Be sharp and try to explain what exactly your offer is, as simple as possible; exaggerating about the deal is not cool beyond a limit.
7. Respect the Feedback
The customer feedback is one of the most effective ways of improving your business. It is one of the greatest opportunities to identify what exactly the customer wants. Addressing these needs and responding to the feedback and grievances on a real-time basis can prove to be greatly fruitful in the long run. The customers should feel that the interactions are meaningful and their concerns are heard within a reasonable time.
For this, a good AI-enabled chat-bot/auto-reply agent can be a great help. The user responses should be analyzed and taken up by the CRM according to the priority/urgency.
8. Set a Frequency
Once a strategy is in place, it is necessary to decide how many emails will be sent out to each customer in a given period. This requires conscious and critical thinking, as a major part of the population are averse to unfamiliar email addresses.
However, once the customer is acquainted with, there is no need for concern whether the enterprise will be perceived as a spammer. Increasing the frequency of the mails too is necessary to keep in constant touch with the customer and sense the heartbeat of the market.
But remember that there is a fine line between being a nuisance spammer and an effective email marketer.
9. Connect and Reconnect; Find Your Voice
This one is for the bigger guys. Once the business enters the growth phase and surpasses saturation, it is ideal to look back at the distance covered. Over many years, the brand will have established a voice that is perceived in a certain way.
Most huge brands will have gained characterizations like a real person. This often defines how it communicates with its customers. For example, Netflix sends emails that look very casual and informal, mostly like a real person. However, the entire format would change if you take a look at the mails from The Wall Street Journal.
It is advisable to follow a defined style and identity in the communications. For example, If you are trying to be professional and friendly, you will normally address the recipient as “Hi Mr. Alex”, and get into the topic in a slow and clear way. However, for a mail that is intended to be hugely informal, you would just jump right into the topic without much explanation. Keeping up the same style is essential to remain relevant and unique.
Takeaway
For every marketer out there, it is a good thing to do a reality check once the growth phase is touched. The products and the enterprise would have evolved greatly after the many successful years in business. For this reason, it is necessary to understand the perception of the market.
To identify how its voice is heard, the enterprise should run email surveys about the user experiences, and running reward incentivized marketing campaigns in social media and other platforms to evoke discussions. It is also essential to not only focus on what strategy you use but how you implement your strategy.
That’s why deploying a marketing project management software that allows you to monitor and manage your email marketing strategies is a great solution. This, along with the other tips mentioned in this blog, can surely help every marketer in achieving the goal i.e. to reach the market and customers.
About Carson Derrow
