281 trillion emails are sent per day. On average, a person receives 72 emails a day and spends 30% of the time of their workday in their inbox. This supposes a lot of competition for an online business.
Do you think they will really read all those emails? Correct: nobody does.
To take advantage of your email marketing campaign you must send emails that your customers find irresistible.
How? If you take into account the relationship of each of your customers with your business, you can send personal emails so that each individual finds them relevant.
1. Segment your users
The first most obvious step for email marketing campaigns that will make your customers happier. Do not send the same message to everyone! It seems obvious, but not many companies take the time to create different content for each type of customer.
There are many ways to segment your customer base, the easiest and the one that provides the best results in the short term is the RFM analysis:
Recency (the time since the last time the customer bought)
Frequency (purchases made over a period of time)
Monetary (the amount spent)
And then there are other much more complex ways that include statistical models that analyze a lot of historical data and future estimates.
Even the simplest segmentation will put you ahead of your competition. The next time you send a promotional newsletter I recommend that you, at least, segment your customer base into two groups:
– Customers who have already purchased before
– New customers
Use simple segmentations to change your offer in each email you send, this way, your profits will increase with each campaign.
For example, offering new customers who have subscribed but never bought anything, a discount. And, on the other hand, give access to those old and loyal customers, before any other, an advance of “hidden” products of the new season, as a reward for their loyalty.
It’s as easy as changing the order of your customer database and adding true or false values to your email marketing list. Measure the results and compare them with the ones you got when you carried out your promotions without segmenting.
Use this valuable information for segmentation purposes when you send them emails and you will be ahead of most e-commerce competitors that simply sends similar offers week after week.
2. Activate automatic campaigns
Automatic emails give you the power to personalize in a way that you would never manage to recreate manually, besides helping to differentiate yourself from your competition without big investments or efforts. Below you will find a few examples of high-quality automatic messages and client mailing examples:
2.1. The founder sends an email less one hour after client’s registration
Obviously, these types of messages are impossible to send manually. With a little engineering and ensuring that you keep things as simple as possible, you can quickly implement an email of this type that reaches your customers automatically.
As long as you keep track of possible answers, you will discover that campaigns like this work very well with new customers.
2.2. Deepen your funnel
Every company has some type of funnel or conversion funnel.
You must track the exact location of the funnel where your customers are located, that is, the specific phase in which your client is located before fulfilling the determined objective of your website: a registration, purchase or the generation of a lead. In this way, you can use the emails to move them from one step to the next.
The best way to do this is by providing useful information at each stage of the process. Send to tens, hundreds or thousands of clients personalized emails is not a task to do manually, automatic emails do allow you to send individualized and relevant information.
This does not mean that you should use very formal language or millions of images. The combination of email marketing targeting dedicated landing pages is a lethal combination: take advantage of it.
3. Send the email from your own account
I did a search the other day for the term “noreply” in my inbox and the result was more than 1000 emails during last year. I may receive more emails than the average, but they are too many results for the address “noreply@domain.com”.
These emails are sent by startups, big firms and everything that is in between. In most cases, they are promotional emails or updates.
This is not a sufficient reason to use a no reply type address like email marketing. Even if you are sending the email to hundreds of thousands of users, you can always use an “info@yourdomain.com” or “support@yourdomain.com” address.
Active communication with your customers is the future of email marketing.
As Hubspot points out in one of its articles: brands gain engagement at any time and through any means.
Always try to use a personal email account that allows your customers to respond if they wish.
What happens if your customer has a question about a sale?
What happens if your client wants to reply to ask how to download a new feature?It may be possible that only 10% of your customers take the trouble to enter your website, look for support email or create a ticket with a technical problem, but I can guarantee that 90% will simply forget about you when Check that they cannot click the “send” button.
Do you want to miss what 90% of your clients have to tell you? Talking to your customers is everything when you are running an online business. You cannot chat with them after the cash register, but you can do it through the email.
Use a REAL email address and never a reply@yourdomain.com
4. Carry out an A / B test
Best businesses carry out their A / B tests to improve their landing pages and funnels or marketing funnels regularly.
… but very rarely do any of these companies carry out this A / B test for their email campaigns as they should. Conducting an A / B test may seem complex but it is as simple as you want to do it.
As a close example, I was recently analyzing the format of the emails I send with the new blog entries:
Do users prefer to receive the full article in the email or prefer a summary with a link to the blog?
What if I add an image to the email? Will I notice any difference?
All these hypotheses are based on my desire to write emails that my clients like the most. Getting a customer to open, click and convert from an email of yours is important and is becoming easier to obtain thanks to the number of tools that exist today to carry out an A / B test.
Therefore, the next time you are organizing your campaign, do not forget to create a second version of it:
Try different email addresses (for example, using Lina at Revi, instead of Lina Pedelini, raise my opening fees)
Try different subject lines (it’s better with or without capitals, shorter, longer issues, the same subject as the email title …)
Test with different templates
Test with different formats
Try different offers
… and more. Here you will see the result of my last A / B test for the email subject line. To carry out the hypothesis, I simply removed “Revi” from the subject line and tried my approach to be more “mysterious” or “tempting” – surprisingly, the email’s opening rate dropped dramatically when I introduced the variation. Lesson learned!
Carrying out a simple A / B test can be very useful. With a few extra hours of work (or even less) you will find permanent ways to send emails to your clients that they will simply love.
5. Simplify your content
An email forces you to be simple. There is not much space to inflate the content and, unless you get to the point, you will not get the attention of the reader.
Simplify your writing, spend more time writing content related to where your client is in relation to your business and add a simple call for attention (CTA).
Do I want to read this? This should be the starting point. When you reread what you have written you should constantly ask yourself “would you continue reading? Or would it stop? ”
Am I talking as I would like you to speak to me? The tone is difficult to control, you have to be yourself and find a “voice” that makes sense for your customers and your business. Always check that you are using a respectful, professional and consistent tone.
Can I shorten something? Many people have the bad habit of repeating themselves and writing too much. Nothing happens with long texts (in fact, in many cases they convert better) but long does not mean cash by default. Teach someone your text to get a second opinion.
Where is the call for attention? Having a single call to action and repeating it several times should be your goal for each email you write. Keep it simple, straightforward and make sure your customers get where you want to send them.
Check your emails thoroughly before sending them! They should be consistent, with well-written content (take your time) and repeat a single CTA.
6. Distribute your knowledge for free
A well-tested tactic, your customers will love to share your “secrets” with them.
Too many managers worry about sharing too much information as if the success of business was based only on ideas.
The most successful online businesses establish the philosophy of sharing as the core part of their business.
Share all your knowledge with your customers. Help them by teaching and they will love you for it.
Email and all email marketing strategies are a great tool for sharing content. It is direct, personal and concrete. Seize it!
and finally, make them happy!
Focus on making your customers happy with your marketing campaign and see how the conversion rate increases.
Use the huge amount of information you can get today from the relationship of your customers with your business and your experience on your website and use it to send better emails, not more emails. Make each email count and you’ll be one step ahead of your competition.
*** This is a guest post from Lina Pedelini, a Customer Service representant at Revi, a review management service for e-commerce. Lina can be found writing about Digital Marketing, Social Media trends, the benefits of collecting customer reviews and tools that help small business to grow. ***
