Email Marketing
Email marketing is a golden opportunity. Because of the personal nature of email, you can connect directly with customers or subscribers by offering them valuable and relevant content. When they’ve given you their contact information, you can reward them with useful content and unique offers. In fact, done properly, email marketing is an act of mutual trust.
Golden Opportunity
Although the opportunity is golden, email marketing requires planning and insight. To keep up with customers’ expectations for a seamless experience, you may need multiple types of software, functions such as automation and properly organized lists.
Email marketing lets you build a relationship with your customers during their journey towards conversion. Conversion in email marketing might mean asking for information, requesting a quote, subscribing, purchasing a product or service, or making a donation. Just remember that you are a guest in their inbox, and—with good planning, thoughtfully targeted content and a respectful strategy—you will have excellent results.
What An Email Marketing Strategy Looks Like
The elements of an email marketing strategy will depend on your business or organization and your goals. Your strategy might include specific tactics or ways to improve existing content. What we recommend will generally include some or all of the following.
Intake
The first and most important step is to encourage people to engage with you by signing up or asking for information, so you can bring them into your email funnel—with their permission. If they’re on your website, tactics might include generating inquiries about products or services. Your strategy should integrate with real-time lead-tracking and lead-management software (e.g., BAM). A pop-up to request something relevant to the user who’s on your site can work if they’re about to leave the site.
Lead Nurturing
At this stage, you want to build opportunities using content that supports sales, especially if it can be customized to suit your target customers’ needs and wants. By providing customers with the information they’re looking for, your sales team has an opening for follow-up discussion.
Content can take many forms at this stage—high-level expertise, sell sheets, blog posts, white papers, reminder messaging and product comparisons, to name just a few. Further down the sales funnel, emails can be more functional, providing confirmations for bookings, quotes and appointment follow-ups.
Customer Service
This stage gives you product- or service-related touchpoints with new or current customers. A first or early email might contain welcome or onboarding content. Further along, you might send a service or subscription renewal offer.
If the email recipient hasn't engaged with you in a while, you can send a customer re-engagement email that includes an offer. This will encourage them to interact or shop with you after an absence.
Community Management
Your community is your email database, so whether you send out a newsletter or customer promotions, managing your community means knowing who your audiences are and segmenting them according to the type of content they’re most likely to respond to.
Examples of content at this stage may include informational updates, subtle upsells, seasonal content, awareness of new or highlighted products, referral programs, contest or event announcements, sponsorships or any engaging content that builds awareness.
Promotions
Promotions may be included under community management, or they may require a category of their own. Promotional emails reward your best customers and help you get in front of leads that haven't yet converted.
One of the best tactics at this stage is the LTO (limited time offer). By extending an offer with some urgency (“three days only”; “by midnight tonight”; etc.) you greatly increase your odds of converting the customer who opens and reads your email.
Loyalty
The last step is to track and measure customer satisfaction. That way , you can optimize your content according to the feedback you’re getting.
It’s important to learn what your customers want—from phone calls, reviews online or feedback forms—and adjust your email strategy accordingly.
Email Campaign Measurement
The only way to understand the success of your email campaign will be to measure the results. In this all-important stage, we are able to measure and monitor many important variables:
- List size and growth
Open and click-through rates
List health and deliverability
Revenue and conversions
Attribution
Segment analysis
Our experienced account executives can walk you through what each of these means and how we compare your results with your stated goals and key performance indicators.
Contact Us Today
Contact us today to learn more about our process and deliverables that will help make your next email campaign successful. We’ll answer any questions you may have about email marketing to give you the best value for your investment.
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