You are forgiven if you think that email marketing has gone the way of the fax machine. 20 years ago, email was a novelty instead of an *ahem* appliance. Inboxes require maintenance. Constantly having to check overflowing inboxes stresses people out. Email used to be an efficient way for person-to-person contact, whether intraoffice communication between colleagues or personal messaging with friends and family. Somewhere along the way to 2018 email has become a pain in the neck due to the sheer volume of superfluous messages received in a day.
However, as a business, you are missing golden opportunities by ignoring email as part of your inbound marketing mix. Email is no longer tied to a computer where a person has to sit down, boot up, and sort through an inbox to decide which messages are important enough to open. Service providers had to implement the spam filter to separate the wheat from the chaff. Your marketing emails need to be the wheat.
Email campaigns can “deliver” (pun intended) huge ROI if executed with tact and finesse. The internet has become the default tool for searching for information. Site traffic is a core metric for marketers. Capturing a user’s email address can be golden. Site traffic should be vigorously analyzed by visitor behavior: time of day, time on site, the number of pages visited, the technology used to reach the site, frequency, and ultimately conversions. By segmenting your site traffic with the buyers journey in mind, you are able to craft targeted email campaigns for each segment.
Maintain Your Mailing Lists
Email campaigns should not be one-size-fits-all as they were (and sometimes are). That is the best way to get caught in the spam filter net or worse yet, the dreaded unsubscribe. With your carefully segmented data in hand, you can determine which visitors are leads, which visitors have made a purchase (or by whatever means your business defines a conversion), and which visitors are brand loyalists. This means having several email lists to work with that results in a monumentally improved open rate because your email campaigns are designed with each person’s progress on the buying journey in mind.
Design Emails with Mobile In Mind
Email marketing via mobile devices is the new postcard without the cost of printing and mailing to every single person who’s ever stopped in “just browsing”. Nearly everyone has a smartphone with push notifications for email. You can grab someone’s attention immediately. Mobile devices are able to download email quickly as well as render high-quality graphics, unlike mobile search, which is clunky and sometimes poorly executed on a smaller screen. Email can be the perfect way to reach even your most tech-savvy customers. An email provides a direct link to your site. Once you’ve grabbed their attention, deliver the message they are waiting to hear with a short and punchy subject line. It’s more personal. Repeat customers feel connected to your business with “insider only” promotions to reward loyalty. Potential leads have a compelling reason to revisit your site.
Create Landing Pages
A best practice is to have different landing pages for different campaigns. If you are offering an “insider only” promotion, have the email link lead directly to the promotion with a simple checkout method. If your campaign’s objective is to offer information, the email link should lead directly to the blog or whitepaper with clean, simple contact information. You can test different versions of a landing page to optimize your click-through rate. Email campaigns are valuable because they solve a customer’s problems. They are solutions in the palm of the hand.
Conclusion
Email campaigns are a valuable part of your marketing mix because they are convenient to the customer. Customers are always making purchase decisions for themselves and for business. As a marketer, you put the balance in work/life balance by providing the perfect solution to a potentially tedious, time-consuming purchase decision.
Be the wheat in the inbox. Chaff is just another word for spam.
To learn more about how to improve your marketing strategies, give us a call at 661-702-1310!
