Using email marketing to turn strangers into your promoters
You already know how powerful email marketing can be. You may still doubt that it can deliver serious returns for you. So let us look at how the right strategy turns email marketing into strong customer relationships.
What customers prefer
The first factor a marketer has to consider when planning strategy is customer preference — and email is the channel most customers want businesses to reach them on.
Do you know how many email accounts exist worldwide?
The answer is over 3.3 billion (25% of them business accounts), and email users send more than 188 billion messages a day (each business account sends or receives 120 emails daily). On top of that, 77% of customers prefer to receive promotional messages by email, and 54% favour businesses that communicate with them by email. Building customer relationships over a permission-based email channel is therefore an effective way to raise loyalty. Getting that permission is not difficult either — 94% of email users are willing to subscribe to promotional email of their own accord. Give recipients relevant, valuable information and you add value to your brand and raise loyalty.
The customer conversion journey
If you do not understand how email marketing raises engagement, you cannot use it to build good customer relationships. The journey looks like this:
Start by promoting the brand, support it with email, and strangers gradually become your promoters. Along the way, interesting email content raises brand awareness and loyalty — adding a call-to-action button, for example. Ultimately you achieve word-of-mouth marketing at zero cost, with your customers promoting your brand for you. Follow that journey and email marketing returns something genuinely encouraging. Still feels abstract? Read on for the engagement strategies.
Email marketing strategy
1. Content — relevant, engaging and personalised
Delivering relevant, engaging email adds value to your brand and raises loyalty. Combine it with personalised content and you build a trusted relationship in which readers want to hear from you. Irrelevant email does the opposite: it ends the conversation and can damage your brand’s reputation.
2. A gentle tone
Do not use pressuring language to push readers into opening. Let them choose when to open and read, and remember the long tail of email marketing covered previously. You can, however, offer an incentive to lift the immediate open rate. A call-to-action button might offer a time-limited discount to early openers — open and read within a week of send, get 20% off. One caution when doing this: avoid words like “urgent”, which can push your email into the spam folder.
3. Segmentation and targeting
This is the key to successful email marketing. First, group readers by shared characteristics — Group A being customers who have bought menswear, Group B those interested in women’s accessories. Then target each group with different content, which of course means preparing the relevant content for each: menswear information to Group A. Specific, relevant content raises loyalty and sustains a trusted relationship.
4. Automated drip marketing
Email marketing is flexible and automatable. You can decide in advance when a particular email reaches a customer, achieving drip marketing at very low cost and creating opportunity. Drip marketing is an automated process that delivers a specific message when a customer completes a specific action, and low-cost, automatable email is the best tool for running it. The marketer writes the emails once, sets the timing, and brand exposure and awareness rise from there. More importantly, with 45% of customers viewing email as a personal communication channel, automated messages keep reminding customers of your brand.
5. It is measurable
Email marketing performance can be measured and tracked. Unlike other direct marketing tools — leaflets, newspapers, even television advertising — where you cannot count how many customers saw your message, email marketing produces plenty of countable data for reporting: open rate, click rate, and other reader social actions (assuming, of course, that your email platform provides effective real-time reporting). You can use that data to improve your strategy, and to pin down what customers prefer — and customer preference is what matters most.
Can you see the extraordinary power of email marketing now? With the right strategy behind it, email marketing delivers returns bigger than you might imagine.