Email marketing
Tips and tricks for a successful email strategy
March 2019Onboard, convert, retain, repeat. We recently conducted an email strategy discovery project for one of our global clients, Vorwerk. In this article we will share our learnings, findings and tips to make the best out of this channel.
Email marketing is the keystone of any digital marketing strategy when it comes to onboarding, converting and retaining customers.
Below are the key takeaways:
— Strategy is key: email marketing is proven to be the most cost-effective way to promote your products, communicate with your customers and reach your business goals – a well-planned strategy will provide the best marketing ROI.
— Email segmentation makes it possible for content to be more relevant when communicating to groups of individuals with similar characteristics and behaviour. According to Deloitte, you can leverage your open rates by 29% and score a 41% higher click rates by personalising your content. The more you personalise using data signals such as location or weather, the more effective response will be. A recent poll by One Spot report say conversion rates can increase up to 6% with personalization.
— Stylistic and content consistency is fundamental to gaining trust, nurturing long-term relationships and building a personal connection between customers and brands.
In short, the success of email lies on targeted messages for the following reasons:
— They boost the engagement of each user by providing relevant content and real value
— They can help you build meaningful relationships by showing that the brand cares
— Last but not least, targeted messages can improve brand loyalty and customer retention
What about segmentation?
There are different ways you can segment your customers in order to send them targeted messages to motivate them to convert, to stay engaged, or to bring them back from inactivity. Here are most common ones:
1. Demographics: Gender, geo-location, day-part, lifestyle, interest, device, etc
2. Customer type: new customer, VIP, repeating, etc
3. Engagement: website logins, inactive users
4. Performance: Open rate, click through rate, unsubscribe rate
Based on what the activation goals are you may choose any of the parameters above to send targeted and customized messages. What’s really important is to use insights and data from your customers, in order to understand patterns, opportunities and reasons why customers churn.
What else can you do in email marketing?
Reach customers at every relevant moment of their journey
By mapping out the entire customer journey you can identify pain points and opportunities which you can address by providing just what people need, when they need it.
Personalisation — Consider a preference center
Give your customers an opportunity to let you know what content they want and when they prefer to hear from you by implementing a preference center tool in your website.
A/B testing
Formulate a clear hypothesis that is relevant to your business and select the right elements and audience to test it out. Most common elements are: the from, subject line, the headlines, images, links, message length and CTA.
Improve deliverability
Emails are not much of a use unless they actually make it to the customer’s inbox. In order to make sure it happens we recommend the following:
• Make sure your sender IP is trustworthy: Send emails in batches. Start with the users you already know are more engaged. As these emails are received and opened by engaged users, your IP will start to build trust.
• Check if the senders have good reputation: This is the biggest reason why emails are not delivered. Internet service providers automatically reject any emails that fall below a certain score. source: https://www.senderscore.org
• Make sure your customers opted-in: Be transparent and make sure customers consented to receive communications. It is more desirable to have fewer good quality contacts than lots of users marking emails as spam.
• Periodically check blacklists: Blacklists are created to protect users from IPs that have received a high volume of spam reports, so it is always a good idea to check them from time to time (https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx).
Follow guidelines
Whether you’re big or small, make sure there are clear guidelines for visual design and tone of voice. Develop templates and share style guides with your team. Make someone own the process to make sure the brand will communicate with consistent voice.