Email marketing brings you to your customers’ attention every time you have a product to sell or a message to get out there. Rather than relying on them finding you through SEO, or interacting with you on social media, sending an eshot provides the opportunity to directly contact your customers on a personal level. Also with the rise of mobile internet, email marketing lets you grab your customers’ attention on the move.
With a great message, winning design, and solid campaign, including email into your marketing mix can be hugely powerful and beneficial.
But in an age of online and email spammers and scammers, your business needs to tread the fine line between being informative and being a pest. Your customers and prospects are bombarded with hundreds of emails every day, you need to make sure yours resonates with them and generates interest. So how can you increase open rates, click through rates (CTRs), and the all-important conversion rate?
Targeted messages
Email marketing needs to be targeted to achieve maximum success. By sending a targeted message to a specific and segmented contact list, you will have increased success compared to sending a single message to a blanket audience.
By taking the time to tailor your marketing message to specific sections of your audience or prospect list, your eshots become more personal. The more personal your message, the more successful it will be. So look at your audience and identify clear sectors / demographics and be clear about their problems and how your product and service can help them. Your messaging needs to be concise and resonate with the recipient. Is it compelling? Is it relevant?
Call-to-action assets
If you’ve taken the time to construct an eshot, you want your customers and prospects to perform a certain action. It might be simply to contact you but by offering something of interest (an ‘asset’) that the prospect needs to read, download or click through to, can give you a direct indication of interest. However the asset also needs to be relevant to the reader. Valuable assets are:
White Papers
Datasheets
ROI Calculators
Infographics
Case Studies
Video Testimonials
Free Trials
Risk Calculators
Videos.
Quality, relevant assets can take time to produce but when embedded in to emails offer the reader a compelling click through and therefore increase engagement levels.
Drip Campaigns
A carefully selected series of messages delivered to the prospect by direct marketing methods, such as email, can place the right amount of communication to your prospects with minimal effort on your part.
By applying messages over a prescribed period of time in calculated intervals and in a progressive sequence, drip marketing campaigns help build and maintain awareness of your company and products, and systemically move the prospect into an active sales cycle when they are ready to buy.
Drip marketing campaigns offer two outstanding benefits. First, their response rates almost always exceed single event promotions or campaigns. Second, drip marketing campaigns can be executed with very little effort. It takes time and effort to plan the campaign, craft the messages, schedule the deliveries, create the content assets and the like, but once the setup is complete the campaign can pretty much be put on autopilot. At each of your scheduled intervals you touch the prospect in a low-cost manner without further effort on your part.
Email Automation
There are a number of email clients available such as Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, Vertical response which will make the sending and reporting on eshots much easier, however if you need another level of automation you will need to be looking at marketing automation tools such as Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Silverpop or Act-On. These not only send the emails but allow you to track the recipients behavior and automate responses and other marketing flows (i.e. form fills, registrations, nurture programmes).
If you need any advice or assistance with setting up and running a targeted campaign or implementing a more complex marketing automation solution then please contact us
