Just like old-fashioned letters, emails are a channel for conversational, interactive, and personalized communications. Businesses have been using it as a customer relationship building tool for years, with a successful email marketing campaign yielding an ROI of up to $38 for every $1 spent.
In fact, a whopping 66% of customers make a purchase as a result of a clicked-through email.
But, there are so many other benefits that emails can bring.
Here’s everything that a quality email marketing campaign can do for your business:
- Improved branding.
- Better targeting.
- Personalized approach.
- Improved engagement.
- Provide additional metrics.
- Great testing opportunities.
1. Improved branding
Email is a valuable brand building tool.
Together with your website and social media presence, email creates a set of specific associations recognized by your leads and customers. It adds value to your brand message and the products or services you offer. They speak of all three pillars of a brand – purpose, identity, and trust.
Brand-wise, a quality email marketing campaign can:
- Provide businesses with a direct communication channel to their customers.
- Establish a reliable reference point between brands and consumers.
- Open and maintain a dialogue with all segments of your target audience.
- Build strong and long-lasting relationships with regular customers.
- Foster customer loyalty and weave a network of dedicated followers.
Since a brand is defined as a “unique design, sign, symbol, words, or a combination of these, employed in creating an image that identifies a product and differentiates it from its competitors”, the email service must work hand in hand with other touch points to achieve a uniform level of consistency and coherence.
As a part of the experience marketing, email strengthens the overall brand image.
Over time, this image becomes associated with credibility, quality and customer satisfaction.
Here’s how to use email to build brand awareness:
Personality & voice
To be successful, an email marketing campaign has to reflect the same personality and tone of voice used for other points of contact with the customer. Whatever tone of voice you choose – be it professional and serious or friendly and informal – your brand personality must always evoke trust.
Pro tip: Be as colloquial as you can without damaging your professional image.
Consistent templates
Let the best logo identify your visual scheme (the combination of colors, shapes, and text that embodies your brand message), and use it to build an email template of consistent style and design. Also, pay attention to positioning and make sure to emphasize your logo, brand name, and CTA.
Pro tip: If you need something fresh, check out custom logo design contests.
Focus on relationships
Instead of constant sales pitches (this strategy will only qualify your emails as spam), focus on building relationships with your subscribers. Use this opportunity to learn more about your customers, and to give them a chance to learn more about you. Show your genuine care and empathy.
Pro tip: Show your appreciation by sending a welcome email to every new subscriber.
2. Better targeting
Successful email marketing requires a reliable set of automation tools.
Don’t try to avoid them, since they boast powerful capabilities for audience segmentation. Email and targeting are inseparably intertwined – a subscription list typically includes every person from a brand’s CRM database, providing a direct link for nurturing relationships with existing customers.
But that’s not all.
Email-based customer relationships let you generate a lot of knowledge about modern-day consumers in general. From previous interactions, you can learn a lot about their needs and pain points, preferred solutions and common behavior, and use that data when targeting new customers.
Use email automation tools to answers these questions:
- At what point do customers decide to make a purchase, and what is the decisive factor?
- What kind of message or offer do they respond to the best?
- What is their preferred purchase platform, a website or social media?
That way, email can serve as a potent tool for testing marketing and conversion techniques, pinpointing current behavior, and predicting future trends. Segment your subscribers according to their needs and habits, and you’ll have a solid overview of how your leads think and what they expect.
3. Personalized approach
Being defined as a consumerist climate that values journey more than a destination, the experience economy heavily relies on email marketing to personalize B2C interactions. In this context, email can help your brand develop a 360-degree customer view and custom-tailor individual brand experiences.
Also, personalized email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14%.
Translated to sales, this guarantees up to 10% more conversions.
Experience economy or not, consumers want to be treated as individuals with highly specific needs and problems. They don’t want to waste their time on products and services they don’t need. Also, they expect the experience to be customized across all touch points. Naturally, this includes email as well.
Here’s how to develop a personalized approach with email:
Ask the right questions
Use welcome emails to ask new subscribers what they expect of your future relationship. Are they just browsing for solutions, or are they looking for a quick buy option? What platforms and payment systems do they prefer? Are they interested in receiving your emails, and what do they want to read?
Pro tip: Create a short quiz and ask them basic questions about what they like.
Segment your subscribers
When you ask them the right questions, new subscribers can help you create different customer personas and establish a unique approach for each audience segment. You’ll know what every group wants to see (announcements, special offers, or buyers’ guides), and when they want to receive them.
Pro tip: Use email marketing automation tools for super-segmentation.
4. Improved engagement
In the long run, email marketing campaigns can help you nurture relationships, retarget old customers, and inspire loyalty. But they can also accelerate the conversion process, and serve as an immediate touch point that tips potential customers over the edge of a sales funnel and directly to the CRM base.
This is achieved with automated behavioral trigger emails and convincing CTAs.
Behavior-triggered emails elicit a real-time action by providing a direct link to your offer. There’s a newly launched product that’s yet to be presented to your audience? Simply send an announcement, create a compelling call-to-action, and offer a pre-sale discount to a certain number of fastest buyers.
Email can be used for improved customer engagement in a couple of other ways:
- Announcements and newsletters raise brand awareness and keep customers in the loop.
- Special offers and loyalty prices create a sense of urgency that drives smooth conversions.
- Helpful articles and relevant buyers’ guides intensify subscribers’ interest in your offer.
5. Provided additional metrics
I’ve already hinted that email automation tools can help brands learn more about existing customers and modern-day consumers, but their built-in analytics can do so much more for marketing and conversion strategies. For starters, they can tell you how to plan further growth and development.
These are the email metrics that every brand should track:
- Click-through rate
The percentage of subscribers who clicked on a link attached to an email is traditionally used in A/B testing, as it provides insight into how engaging a campaign is. This is especially important when you’re sending behavior-triggered messages with the intention of inspiring a direct response or conversion.
- Conversion rate
While click-through rates pertain to any action elicited with email, conversion rates give a clear overview of how many sales an email marketing campaign has managed to make. Since conversions are the end-goal of every marketing strategy, this metric is crucial for determining the overall success.
- List growth rate
Your email list will naturally shrink and expand over time, therefore measure the growth rate to establish whether or not you’re moving in the right direction. Email sharing rate can also help you with this, and all with a clear purpose – to let you know how your campaign contributes to lead acquisition.
- Email marketing ROI
Finally, track your overall email marketing ROI rate to find out whether or not this technique pays off in the context of your general sales strategy. How many leads do you generate via email marketing, and how does this number translate to potential revenue? To track these leads, set up an SLA system.
See the new Email Marketing Benchmarks report for loads of useful data.
6. Great testing opportunities
Email marketing can promote virtually everything, but it can also help you test your strategies before you put them in place. Thanks to the metrics above, you can see exactly where you stand with your blog promotion, product launch, or service improvement, not to mention your relationships.
Whenever there’s a fresh idea that must be vetted, create a new email template and send it to your brand’s most loyal customers for feedback. Not only does this ensure a direct response, but it can also save you from wasting your time, money, and energy on something that won’t improve your ROI.
Time and time again, email marketing has proved itself as the best customer conversion technique.
Its impact on modern-day businesses is invaluable, primarily thanks to its relationship-building potential and audience targeting capabilities. When you add to that a personalized approach, improved engagement, and insightful metrics, you get a well-oiled automated growth hack machine.
Do you have some more insights on what a good email marketing campaign did for your business? Feel free to share it in the comment section below!
The post 6 Things a Quality Email Marketing Campaign Can Do for You appeared first on GetResponse Blog - Online Marketing Tips.
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