When you’re trying to grow your business, there’s nothing more practical than a well-written and carefully-executed email campaign.
Experts say that email marketing offers the highest return on investment (time and money) for your business, at nearly $40 returned for every $1 spent. But you may exceed that return depending on the effort you put into it.
Joining business associations, using reverse email lookups, sticky messages, and other techniques and tools will accelerate your email marketing campaign’s returns.
Capturing emails will get you started, whether at point of sale or on your website. It may be more effective to offer an incentive in exchange for the email, such as a discount on future orders/purchases, highlights of industry developments or news, or other customer-pleasing information (always keeping it upbeat).
Grow your list with alternative tools such as email lookup or username search for B2B clients. Your email list is only strong if it’s constantly being expanded, pruned, and segmented.
You may want to target prospective customers by creating a profile of your dream customer and working backward from there by identifying likely individuals, locating their email addresses, and establishing relationships through engaging email content.
Consistency in your message and brand is key. Take time to plan your message style, frequency, and strategy, which requires allocating resources, even outsourcing blog entries. Folks want to associate with positivity and uplifting content, whether there’s a material reward (such as a discount) or not. Can you:
Takeaway impact should be clear for each message, otherwise it’s not worth the time. What valuable content are you offering to the customer:
Accuracy and effort are rewarded. Be sure a second or third person reads the email before it is sent. Try sending test emails to review the message in its final format, and open on multiple devices to trouble-shoot any layout issues.
Segmenting messages increases the impact. It means creating one email directed at retail customers and another for suppliers, professional associates, or other groups. Reverse email look ups can be helpful here to determine which group or groups the individual belongs to.
Segmenting may also be done geographically, by age, or by other demographics (people with children, by income brackets, etc.), much of which can be learned through reverse email look-ups and username search tools for those who are motivated to do so.
These messages may use much of the same content but with subtle differences in tone and approach. For instance, employee-made video shorts of behind-the-scenes activities can make retail customers feel closer or more invested as well as being useful for sending to industry associates.
Subject lines are crucial to getting eyeballs on your email message. Be creative, perhaps offer an in-house incentive to the employee who comes up with the best/most opened subject line in a 6-month period. Suggestions for this most important component include:
Deliver something of value. By sending an email you’re asking for a person’s time. In exchange, be sure to make it worthwhile with unique insights, information, an announcement, amazing eye candy, or a significant offer.
You don’t want “unsubscribe” to be their best option. Other tips:
Measuring the impact of your email campaigns is simplified by most commercial email platforms. Check the bounce rate and other results to make changes for future campaigns.
You can also check this parameters to find out more:
Act on your analysis of messages. If you’re not achieving the desired outcome, it’s time to reconsider your approach. Perhaps you should send a “win back” message to those who haven’t opened an email in a certain period of time.
Ben is a Web Operations Executive at InfoTracer who takes a wide view from the whole system. He authors guides on entire security posture, both physical and cyber. Enjoys sharing the best practices and does it the right way!
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