email marketing
Email is a universal digital marketing tool. Most people, who use the internet, utilize email. Pathways to market through are well known and generally quite disciplined. Consumers regularly sign up to email newsletters expecting early info on special deals, but marketers persist in bombarding registered members with one-size-fits-all offers. If this practise continues, it will destroy email as a relevant marketing tool.
In our modern world of instant EVERYTHING ? personalization, multichannel- communication and relevance is everything. If you are a digital marketer that is only capable of throwing generic offers at consumers, you should surrender now, because you have no place in the future of email marketing. Modern email marketers should sort their lists and generate distinct and relevant messages for each of their sub-sets. Although it might be more work, it?s well worth it!
People have become ?difficult? in a figurative sense. If your message does not recognize who I am, what I like and does not arrive at the right time with the right deal ? YOU ARE $*#!&@*!… A run of the mill email message receives less than 6 seconds of deliberation. If you?re lucky, the reader will open it, but for the most part, it simply gets deleted. Ouch!
Despite all of the potential stumbling blocks, there still is a light at the end of the tunnel, and a few trusted email marketing practises still remain. Not surprisingly, hard-hitting subject lines stimulate more e-mails being opened. Huge fonts and bold badges pinpoint links that steer clicks for a higher conversion rate. Trusted email templates should be followed ? putting the key message on the top of the email with a maximum word-count of 400.
Producing subdivision segmentation is not as hard as software vendors and email providers make it sound. There are seven easy steps that can be followed to create a swankier, more intelligent email marketing letter.
Create Simple Segments
Segmentation is the primary task on the road to competitive conservation. Segmented email marketing campaigns generates up to five times the performance of non-segmented campaigns. Anybody can categorize their list by using baseline variables. You should categorize by age, gender, geography, product usage and channel preference. After categorization you can test to see what works and what segment should be focussed on for maximum impact.
Use Triggered Communications
Send emails to establish a dialog between you and the client. Try to focus on the Q&A (Question & Answer) model. This is where answers to surveys incite subsequent messages. Clients adore to be asked questions, and are thrilled when a business responds to their contribution. Once someone responds, pause for a day and reply back to them. When a client conveys a fondness for a certain channel or content; respond suitably to that information.
There are simple/logical ways to know when to send out your newsletters. For instance ? you know that weekends are a more prominent time to do shopping. By figuring that out, you now know that you should send your product related email marketing letters before the weekend hits. This is also true for products that are related to seasonal events ? like Valentine?s Day or Mother?s day. The above mentioned would be simpler with an automatic email system that is dictated by embedded business rules, but if you?re not lazy, you could even use Excel to manage your email list.
Try to work across different channels
A new, smart way to obtain relevant data is to follow a continuing brand or industry conversation through social media. Any usable information can then be used as content for your e-mail marketing campaign. Once a customer comments on your Facebook wall or supportively tweets regarding your brand, you can view these actions as a trigger mechanism to thank your customers or to send a follow-up message. In the case where you are asking customers to rate their online store visits or review purchased products, always respond with a personal email and/or follow-up bargain if they respond.
Your clients are interacting with you across certain channels, even if they?re not aware of it. Brands should foresee this behaviour and employ email as a direct, one-to-one follow-up instrument.
Develop choices
E-mails that contain a link to your branded website are an advertisement, not a relationship building tool. A creative way to create dialogue between you and your customers are to add questions or polls that seek/ request interaction. Customers are usually eager critics and they like an opportunity to express their attitudes. By inserting these request links in an email, you are driving the users to a devoted landing page or a social media platform. This converts email from a one-way advertisement into a branded interactive experience. A true marketer / customer relationship is about collaboration over a period of time, not repeated flushes of short form advertisement.
Testing with Personalization
Social media causes the world to become instantaneous, personal and translucent. Investigate client attitudes by using an actual person?s name in the ?FROM? line of your email letter and emit/send mail messages from regional store managers. From a brand perspective, an email offers an opportunity to create personal relationships amongst customers and businesses. Certain brands can insert client?s names and monitor purchase history and preferences to fill email templates. Those marketers, who cannot personalize by closing the gap between a corporate brand and its customers, should try and establish a reliable contact strategy.
Launch a contact strategy
You, as email marketer, should evaluate how much is enough and how much is excessive. Knowledgeable email marketers determine limits on the number of contacts per record in a given timeframe. Various email marketers limit their interactions/communications to once weekly or twice monthly. Every single brand and sector has a separate business and messaging/communication pace. Evaluate and set limits centred on your business and conform to those set limits.
Govern technology available to your campaign
An increasing amount of consumers read email messages on their mobile gadgets/devices. New statistics estimate that 10-20% of all emails are read on mobile devices. There is nothing worse than opening an email that is all outlines and broken images ? Try to design a mobile responsive email format and utilize sniffers to serve emails that are optimized for mobiles.
Comparably, many images result in red X?s on personal computers. Try to assign ALT-attribute tags where possible, so that the user can at least read what the image is about. Place your primary offer or most important subject at the top of your email letter in TEXT spaces. This will ensure that you most important message gets across, because some computer users block images (or have strange frame settings that disallows image display) in their email accounts.
Email marketing is here to stay! Current marketers are hooked on email blasts, many of which result in probable sales. This is all fine and dandy, but unless marketers use email in ways that traverse with shifting consumer trends and expectations, email?s marketing value will drop against mobile and social media.
Article Source: http://www.articlealley.com/http://meggan.articlealley.com/seven-simple-ways-to-keep-email-marketing-competitive-2407623.html
Seven simple ways to keep email marketing competitive
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