If you are not email marketing, it begs the question why.
You might have heard the term ‘spray and pray’ and chances are that you may also be frustrated at spending so much time, effort and money to place huge content in as many places as possible, hoping someone sees it.
In its most basic definition, email marketing is the promotion of products and services via email. In its evolved definition today, it is direct mail on steroids that lets you directly target exactly who you want to engage with and cultivate meaningful relationships.
You can’t be faulted for thinking email marketing had fizzled out of the B2B marketing mix, as the digital age took hold and social media, search engine and mobile marketing exploded, but you couldn’t be more wrong.
It is perhaps because of this digital and social cacophony that the humble email is very much alive and kicking. Businesses are paying increasing attention to this channel and you would be challenged to find research results that indicate anything other than that email marketing is the most effective digital marketing channel, pipping social media, SEO and PPC to the post.
Source: Email marketing and marketing automation excellence report 2017
There are lists of the types of emails that can be used depending on the purpose of your email campaigns, but basically the types roll up into two groups.
However, you’ll find that they are not stand-alone, and that there will be times when you’ll do the relevant brand engagement job in a transaction email and vice versa.
There are many types of email campaigns from the lists referred to above, but before you get to integrating them into your communications strategy, first carefully consider the role of email marketing in your marketing strategy and how it should most effectively and sustainably serve both your business and customers.
Start by clearly establishing what you want to achieve and you’ll find that your objectives will roll up into one of these four common strategies, which are all essentially about creating engaged and actively profitable customers:
We can control who we admit to our inboxes and tend to guard them like Siamese cats to a Japanese emperor’s palace. When prospects and clients sign up to receive your email communications (or at least don’t unsubscribe!), this portion of your market is gold – they are indicating commitment to engage and an interest in what you have to say.
In getting this conscious nod (i.e. you haven’t spammed them) from prospects and clients welcoming you straight into their inbox, you have achieved immediate and mindful engagement with this portion of your market and have a higher guarantee they’ll receive your communications. Getting into their inbox is a tremendous privilege.
With email, there is a better opportunity your content will be seen read than, for example, interrupting your audience with an ad while they’re focused on something else, or hoping they’ll catch your post on their newsfeed while new newsfeeds tumble onto their wall after yours.
Brands need to be where their audience is and according to The Digital Landscape in South Africa 2017report, while mobile accounts for 75% of all web traffic (so be sure to have a highly responsive website and a mobile-first strategy) and social media is the main reason why people are accessing the internet, almost 60% access the internet via desktop and spend 33% of the reported average of 14 hours a day on the internet checking emails.
If you have such a large audience not only sitting behind a desktop but also spending so much time each day accessing emails, it stands to reason that this could be considered a captive audience for your email campaigns.
Email marketing provides the channel to directly reach the right audience with the right message at the right time.
Directly reaching the right audience means first segmenting your market. As a starting point, Wikipedia offers a really user-friendly summary of how to use the broad framework of segmenting, targeting and positioning (STP) in the step-by-step process of segmenting your markets. This is where you start laying the foundation to take the ‘spraying’ out of ‘spraying and praying’.
Needless to say, The Database is the loadstone of email marketing as, after all, it is the repository of all that valuable gen about your prospects and clients and it should be your leads generation pot of gold. The devil truly is in the detail and The Database is where sweating the small stuff can take on a whole new meaning as you collect and organise the data.
Like defining the criteria used to segment your markets, there should be a purpose to building The Database and an idea of how you plan to use it, so that you know what data to collect.
Two main things to consider are that you want to set and maintain a high level of data integrity, which means collecting quality date. And collecting quality data takes time. But really, if you’re doing this in-house, the key data you need to kick off your email marketing could look like this:
Pretty self-explanatory, but it is worth highlighting the inclusion of a few fields that will immediately save you a bunch of trouble when generating Lists (a database of email recipients) on an email service and bring credibility to your brand make your sales force and financial guy love you.
You cracked the nod to get into the inbox, now you need to validate why you are there. If you’re flying by the seat of your pants and knocking out ad hoc content, you don’t have a plan. Content strategy should be well planned in order to craft relevant, interesting and meaningful messaging. Failing to plan is planning to fail, and low response rates are born right here in the planning phase.
You want a high open rate don’t you? And to overcome the challenge of keeping customers engaged with your brand? So craft messaging that solves your customer’s problems and takes away their pain. Customer-centricity is not a trend. It’s an absolute requirement and a driver of your customer experience. Think about it... it’s an open invitation for subscribers to boot you from their inbox if you’re putting your business’s goals and product and/or service before their problem or need.
Personalisation? Humanisation! ‘Hi Jane’ or ‘Dear Mr Smith’ is a great start (are you thinking back to the detail in The Database? P.S. Dear Csrolyn from a leading retailer really irks me...), but email marketing has moved beyond this level of personalisation to engaging with customers about their individual needs, problems and preferences. Your customer should feel like each and every email is relevant to them as an individual.
The devil’s in the detail again! If your call to action (CTA) is driving traffic to your website, for the love of all things sacred, don’t drop them on your home page. Take them directly to the relevant section. Nothing’s more irritating than a link taking you to a home page and expecting you to dig around. Not going to happen!
If you are not already email marketing, or have not already allocated more budget to increase your email marketing efforts, or at the very least are already planning to capitalise on this cost effective, increasingly credible and precision-targeted tool, then the time is now.
Do you need to focus and strengthen your business?
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