Regardless of the business objective or the size of your business, email marketing serves as an awesome way to connect with customers minus large budgets. However, this serves as a big responsibility for you. People only share their email addresses with trustworthy people. Given the idea of a company newsletter a thought? Keep in mind a few tips from the pros before starting.
Subscribe function – easily found
Wherever you post your signup form on your social media properties, homepage, blog or wherever your fans may already be active, decide carefully. Here is one of the first few places your target audience will be interacting with you for the first time. Don’t go overboard with the required fields – keep it to name, email address. Otherwise, the reader gets scared away.
Subscribers should be aware of what to expect
From company updates, president’s letters, e-commerce sales or weekly tips, the content of the email newsletter can change. But it is essential to inform readers what they are about to receive and how often they could receive it. The signup form serves as a great tool for giving subscribers all the right information, allowing them to decide if they wish to be on the list or not.
Welcome emails need to be sent
It is a good point to remind people of the reason they’re on your list and reassure readers that good content is coming their way really soon. You could choose to send subscribers exclusive content or a special offer as your way of thanking them for their loyalty.
Create the newsletter to fit the brand
Your brand’s look and feel must be aligned with your email campaigns. When choosing a template choose once that includes company colors and logo in the email header. Once your emails are consistent with the remainder of the content, readers start to feel a lot more familiar.
Read How to Create Beautiful Email Templates in SocialBot
Create your acquisition strategy
Upon prioritizing audience growth, start by analyzing places your customers already engage with your brand. Now you determine how to grow those experiences while driving interactive engagement using new tools and techniques. Example – optimizing acquisition forms for mobile is a must. When customers on mobile devices are not able to fill out your form faster and easier, your business loses out.
Mobile optimization is critical
There is a stiff penalty for brands not optimizing email for mobile. 63% of your audience will delete their emails immediately if not optimized for mobile. Ensure the mobile experience is elegant from the start. If your welcome email is optimized for mobile, subscribers realize they’re in for an amazing pleasant mobile experience for the time they will be spending with your brand.
Keep your data relevant always
Do an inventory check of the data you plan on sharing with customers. Assess it to ensure you are sending targeted messages and not ‘batch and blast’ communication. Using simple data points such as location and gender helps improve the subscriber experience. On social media one pro tip is to use Facebook’s geo-targeting feature using status updates. Work towards to never repeating the same promotional messaging via social media which you would be using an email as your customers would get burned out and your brand starts to lose value.
Across-channel accessibility
Consumer channel preferences are influenced by the ability to easily archive and access messages at later times. When mobile devices replicate the majority of the desktop experience, a majority of consumer ‘park’ messages on purposes in order to take later action from computers. Email continues to remain a powerful channel thanks to its ability to bridge the three-device environment of the tablet, PC or smartphone.
Permission pending
Some very smart people (Seth Godin) have ensured the email channel is permanently connected to the idea of ‘permission marketing’ where brands are required to seek permission from the customer before bombarding them with email marketing messages. To ensure you obtain the right permissions before going ahead with your email strategy. Once permission is obtained, personalization and building data around the customer are the next steps.
Questions that could arise include:
- Will you be spamming me?
- Will I receive discounts?
- What do I receive when I give you my email address?
- Will I receive relevant offers?
Work towards getting whitelisted
The majority of reputable email service providers are proficient in ensuring your emails are not blocked by the key ISPs. They, however, cannot control if your emails hit the inbox or end up as spam. Work towards getting whitelisted – it is the same as being marked as a friend and the optimum way to do this is by being added to your customer’s address book. You can easily achieve this via providing instructions at the top of each email, especially on the thank and 1st follow up email.
Deal-driven emails
If you are not creating the best deals for your business available via email, chances are you are ignoring the biggest direct audience for this content. Recent studies show people prefer email to Facebook for deals as it is much more difficult for deals to be missed in the inbox compared to the waterfall of posts in the News Feed.
Social Networks & sharing
Sharing doesn’t remain on just social media networks. If your brand emphasizes only what consumers share through social networks, you’re only hitting the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface exist the private and introverted consumers who will share content off your radar through word of mouth and eventually email.
Abandoning prior to purchase?
Work on and tailor your frequency and number of abandoned cart emails to purchases made, and that item’s typical purchase window. Example, a few expensive purchases need a lot more time in justifying spend for the purchase window to be larger. Alternatively, an abandoned cart email about a water purifier should be sent immediately to come across as helpful as those customers would require clean water to drink at the earliest. Quick thinking lands you a reputation as a thoughtful brand. Pay special attention to your industry’s typical purchase window, and send your abandoned cart emails in the right manner and frequency.
Conclusion
If you can imagine each customer being worth $5 to you, you immediately see the value towards retention and the impact on your bottom line. Let us know in the comments below how email marketing has served you best.
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