In order for your marketing initiatives to be effective for your business, you need to make sure they complement one another. This blog will focus on using email marketing to target and build relationships with your customer. Moreover, outlining how to use it effectively as well as the risks to watch out for.
Email marketing is one the most powerful channels to communicate with your audience and offers great advertising returns for your business.
1. Get Permission
Seth Godin (1999) suggests that permission marketing is the most effective to ensure that your customers begin on the right path for a sustainable relationship. Asking for permission makes sure your sending information to the people who are keen to hear from your business and that you respect their privacy.
Permission is easy to acquire it can be done by offering something of value such as a discount, coupon or a free item.
You can also use a double opt-in system that requires subscribers to open confirmation email and click the link in the email to confirm the subscription giving your business a valid subscriber mailing list and proof the customer gave you permission.
2. Keep messages personal and relevant:
Mohammadi et al. (2013) emphasize the importance of keeping messages personal and relevant as it can help build strong relationships between businesses and customers. Therefore, whenever it makes sense you should include personalized information when conducting your emails. You can start this process by personalizing the subject line and writing something catchy and enticing.
An example could be personalized subject line with their name included is known to produce higher click-through rates and those that don’t. When sending emails to your customer don’t address them as ”dear customer” as customers find it less personal and don’t send from a sales@gmail.com as they prefer to interact with actual people.
By mentioning the product, including images and adding page links it makes the content relevant to the customer and the higher probability they will interact with the email.
3. Call to Action
So, your customers have opened your email it’s time for a clear call to action. Call to action (CTA) is extremely important as it helps to persuade your subscribers to click on your content and interact with it (Mohammadi et al. 2013).
The key to delivering a strong call to action is to implement an automated system this is because it will get better results, higher conversions and provide information on your customer behaviours (Mohammadi et al. 2013).
Below is an example of go daddy (2018) promotional call to action that offers 30% off.
4. Test your campaigns
Use A/B testing to find out what is working and what is not in your campaign. This can be done by sending two similar emails to your mailing lists and add variations to the subject line, content and display. The aim is to find the option your customer responds to better.
Click here to see how campaign monitor can help your business.
Risks
- White et al. (2008) disagrees with Mohammadi et al. (2013) and suggest that personalization can be harmful to consumers may find it too personal. They build from psychological reactance research in the direction that suggests too much personalization consumers may result in a personalization reactance. The idea the consumer will resist themselves by opening the email. This could to customers concern about data protection including identity theft and fraud.
- You should only be sending emails to individuals who have given you permission to do so. As it is a legal requirement under the EU compliance of general data protection regulation (GDPR). The law gives greater control, protection and rights of their data. If your business has been found to breach you could be fined 4% of global turnover. If you send messages to people who haven’t subscribed they would view it as spam and this can cause monetary damage
- Chaffrey and Chadwick (2016) suggest that different customers will have different preferences for email offers, content and frequency. If communication preferences are not done well it has a negative impact on engagement and response of the recipients. Know your customer find out their response using A/B tests.
- Email response decay is a big issue in email marketing this is because, when subscribers join they are very responsive but overtime the engagement decreases. However, one solution to overcome this problem is to set email triggers to remind your customer about your business with a voucher, new products you have available.
Summary:
Overall I hope this blog post gave you new insights into improving email marketing and identify the risks for your business.
Read More 4 great tips to boost engagement in email marketing
Recent Comments