How to maximize your email marketing

Email marketing over the years, has proven to be an invaluable resource in our current business ecosystem. It is arguably, the most scalable and consistent avenues for growing your business. It is very easy to customize, it has wide reach to mobile devises, it is inexpensive and it allows for a quick and direct one on one communication with your customer. As a matter of fact, it has been established that it is the most effective means to employ if one seeks to enhance customer retention and increase business growth especially for small and medium sized businesses. Email marketing has evolved quite drastically over the past few years.

One key factor that highlights these drastic changes, is the death of the “batch and blast” emails where one could simply batch a couple of emails together and blast your message across to thousands. This is no longer the case. The email marketing of this era is all about the experience that you give the user. In this experience centric era of email marketing you have to make your customers happy and in order to do that you not only have to meet their expectations but you need to exceed them as well.

Clients want to be spoken to directly, as unique individuals. How else are you going to capture their attention in this distraction filled world, where they are inundated with multiple demands on their time? Our human brain has neither the time nor the resources to shift through the noise to find the signal that you send out of the deluge of information sent to them throughout the day. The brain simply filters out the content it sees as not relevant.

The question now is: How can I go about creating an impactful email marketing solution for my company? How can I not only create a personalized experience that is not only relevant to my client while simultaneously providing value to my client? This article will give you the tools that you need, to implement in your business to turn your bland, generic email marketing strategy into a marketing phenomenon, converting customers into raging fans for your business.

Choosing Quality over Quantity.

Do you send emails to your clients on a regular basis? How regularly should you contact your clients? On one hand, you obviously would like to have maximized contact and engagement with your clients and remain fresh in their minds. But on the other hand, you do not want to inundate their inbox with information, information which they may not even find useful and may border on annoyance. The question becomes: What is the sweet spot?

While a number of studies have shown us that if you blast your customers with an upwards of thirty emails every month, you will ultimately gain a higher conversion rate, you may actually be doing yourself a great disservice in the long run. When your customers are overwhelmed with too much information from you in the form of emails, more often than not they resort to deleting the emails, or even worse simply unsubscribing.

When it comes to the crucial aspect of consumer preferences, the signs seem to be leading us towards the weekly or at last, the monthly emails as the appropriate path to pursue. According a recent study which has been conducted by Marketing Sherpa, 61% of 257 respondents who had been surveyed revealed that they would like to receive marketing emails at least weekly, while on the other hand the vast majority of Americans (about 86%) admitted preferring to receive marketing emails at least on a weekly basis, while the vast majority of the interviewed (86%) preferred receiving marketing emails at least monthly. This is in sharp contrast to the 15% that would only enjoy getting promotional emails every sing le day.

It cannot be understated the crucial significance of knowing who exactly is your customer.

The importance of knowing your customer can never be understated. Do you know what they want and what they don’t want? What would compel them to open your email? If you send out daily emails, you have to ask yourself, whether the conveyance of your message is a real necessity or not. The ultimate bottom line is simply that quality overrides quantity, especially in the context of marketing and email marketing to be specific. Quality will ensure that you are most effective in your quest to build brand loyalty. So just stop it. Stop focusing on a high frequency of distribution and harness your time energy and effort in bringing your customers and community real value added content that would engage and speak to them on a personal level. That is how you stand apart from the crowd.

Nail the Timing

Did you know that today you only have 3 seconds to seize the attention of the consumer? In a world in which we are constantly bombarded with distractions and someone always attempting to sell us something, first impressions are critical. You have to make every second count and timing plays a pretty huge role in that.

According to NewsCred Insights, tech advances have greatly aided companies and business get the art of timing down to a science. How you ask? Through the use of AI powered machine learning algorithms based on each customer’s pat behavior. Known simply as send time optimization, this process endeavors to find the optimal email delivery system through the use of examination on the customer’s behavior and when they are most likely to see and open email messages.

Slice and dice your email list

Whereas it can be said that it is easy to blast the very same email to your entire customer base, but that should not be the frame work to follow. It is a mere deviation from the “throw mud on the wall see what sticks” strategy. If you want to be more effective, then you need to start focusing your efforts on email segmentation.

User data form MailChimp has revealed that the segmented campaigns (14.64%) get overwhelmingly more opens than non-segmented campaigns (59.99%). In a recent DMA National Client Report it was stated that 77% of the ROI from email marketing is derived from segmented, targeted and triggered campaigns in 2015. So yes, it is definitely very important.

The challenging part of email segmentation primarily lies with the work load. You have to seek out and collect information that you can find on each individual in a way that is both convenient to the customer and does not seem too invasive. This can be achieved by coming up with quizzes, surveys, competitions and giveaways or any other type of email engagement that will assist us in gaining an insight into the mind of the customer. There specific chinks, quirks, tastes and preferences. Whereas this may seem like an epic daunting task, it is important to always remember that you have that once you have obtained the data, you will have the enormous capability to run personalized and innovative campaigns that will be in tune with the needs of the customers and communicate with them on a personal level.

Here are some of the creative ways you can implement in segmenting your respective email lists.

1.    Age

Age can be a very useful resource in giving you a unique perspective of not only what your audience may be interested in, but the type of style, approach and tone you should use when it comes to crafting your emails.

For instance, if you are targeting a millennial, it will be preferred that you use a casual tone and delivery in your messaging. You can thus incorporate such links to social media and video which would greatly appeal to this demographic, which will for the most part, be consuming emails via mobile. Remember, Millennials also know when they are being marketed to, which is why it’s particularly important to focus on value-added content rather than presenting them with an outright sales pitch.

Baby Boomers, on the other hand, are the least likely to make a purchase on their smartphones. And when it comes to reading, they prefer articles that are only 300 words at the most.

2.    Gender

Gender segmentation serves a crucial way in aiding you serve your customers with more efficiency. Here’s why:

·        In a recent study done by media post it was reported that women are “42% more likely than men are to make a purchase through a shopping app. It was further established that the cost of acquiring a female user is markedly lower for women than men.

·        Furthermore, according to a recent study, it was established that females usually take into consideration the opinions of other people before purchasing a specific product. This thus shows that the female buyer is more cautious than her male counterpart. This shows the important role testimonials and reviews play in aiding the decision making process of whether or not to make a purchase.

·        Further studies have also established that men have an overall sharper spatial perspective due to the fairly larger size of their parietal lobe, hence, pictures are likely to catch their attention and consequently lead them to click through. Whereas women respond much better to content that will shed light on your product, especially the customer testimonials.

3.    Geography

By having a grasp of geographical information you can be able to let your customers know exactly where they are, and how you can help them access certain local events happening in novel places near them like regional promotions. By also paying attention to their local time zone you can send to them emails that are not only appropriate to their time zone but convenient as well.

4.    Money Spent

The customer who purchases items that are at a higher price points is going to be very different form the customer who is more sale-driven. By having a grasp of who is interested in what you are doing you can be able to provide them with information of new arrivals, trends and discounts accordingly.

5.    Past Purchases

When you segment by past purchases, it will enable you to capitalize on the consumers that you have already converted into active customers. For instance imagine you are sending these customers offers for certain items that will complement previous purchases. Or if you could send them relevant notices for refills so that they are aware of all the available reorders and specials. What do you think will happen? The sales would go up wouldn't they? This is the key opportunity you can utilize to turn your customers into repeat customers and build a real relationship. Therefore, success in this field all lies with the customer experience at this point. You need to roll out the red carpet and be ready to go above and beyond so that you can solve all the crucial needs of the user so that you can convert them from existing customers to raving fans.

In order to master email marketing, it is crucial that you focus on creating a specialized campaign that is specifically tailored to each of your individual customers. The mail should speak to them. Target them specifically. You need to understand what exactly they want, their needs and their consequent desires. Find out their age, their location, their gender and also their habits. How do they consume the media? What are the biggest pain points that they experience and how can you remedy this? What brings them joy and how can you provide them with more of this positivity?

Email marketing puts you in the driver’s seat of the kind of interaction you will have with your clients. It provides you with an opportunity to connect with the customer in ways hitherto never experienced before. So in order to succeed in this endeavor it is crucial you understand your audience inside and out because, when it is all said and done and you have connected with your customer you will be able to leverage this connection to build a stronger and more profitable relationship with your customer that will take your brand and business to new heights.

TRANSFORM YOUR BUSINESS TODAY!

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ABOUT MICHAEL FLYNN

Mentor, educator, leader, author, entrepreneur, father, philanthropist, master persuader, sales trainer and musician who has traveled to over 22 countries addressing and advising various leading businesses and CEOs globally. Michael has taken failing companies and transformed them into hugely profitable business. Michael gives you the tools and gives you the how.