It’s five times cheaper to retain an existing customer than it is to attract a new one – especially when email marketing makes it so easy and affordable. Indeed, 80% of SMBs found email marketing to be a key tactic in customer retention, compared with 44% who found Social Media to be helpful.
Yes, email marketing can be cheap compared to other marketing techniques, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give it your full attention, because if done right, email marketing can bring exceptional results. What is more, there is plenty of strategy involved in email marketing – and the best part is that it’s all very easy to measure.
Here are 5 useful tips on how to go about email marketing based on tried strategies by several small businesses.
1) Try market segmentation
Unlike a billboard, where you have no control over who drives down the freeway, email marketing hits its target every time. Therefore, as far as marketing campaigns go, it’s the perfect medium for marketing segmentation – in other words, tailoring your message by the audience.
Knowing your target audience is a job half done. In that sense, you need to familiarize yourself with your intended demographic based on their:
1) Gender
2) Age
3) Social status
4) Lifecycle
5) Occupation
6) Income
7) Generation
8) Location.
“Our learnings thus far have concluded that millennials react positively to campaigns that contain infographics,” Veta said, whereas “Gen X and baby boomers readers tend to click on action buttons to read more about a certain topic.”
For transregional campaigns, Josh Ogle, founder of The Original Agency, suggested his clients segment according to time zone.
“We send an email at 10 AM, for example, but always 10 AM in the locale where the user resides,” Ogle said, thus ending the problem of their European customers receiving “Good Morning!” emails at 4 PM For one client, this yielded a 29% relative improvement in open rates in the first 24 hours.
Segmenting can even be done in several layers.
“Break lists up depending on where your contacts are in the buyer’s journey, and segment based on what you know about them,” said Maria Mora, content director at Big Sea. “Then tailor messages that are appropriate to those contacts at the right time.”
2) Personalize your email
The more personalized an email, the less likely it is to get lost in an inbox of spam. There’s an easy way to make an email more personable – have it literally come from a person.
“One thing we saw an instant bump in open rates from was when we put the email coming from the owner’s name instead of the company name,” said Jeff Moriarty, who runs Moriarty’s Gem Art.
As a side benefit, this helps differentiate your company as a small business.
“Customers appreciate not being hit by just sales emails and find the ones we send much more valuable than most other retailers,” Moriarty said.
3) State the benefits particular to the recipient
Once you’ve got your campaign strategy down, focus on the subtleties of messaging. This starts with the first thing your customers will see – the subject line. If it doesn’t pique their curiosity among the other emails in their inbox, they’ll likely delete it.
To create an attractive subject, Ryan Gould, vice president of strategy and marketing services at Elevation Marketing, advised getting personal with customers by being upfront about who you are and what you can do for them.
“Customers really don’t care about what your email is offering. They just want to know how it’s going to benefit them,” he said. “If that is coming across clearly in the subject line, and it’s paired with a sense of urgency, such as a time limit, odds are they will want to read more. Using questions … and mentioning current (and relevant) events are also excellent ways to pique readers’ curiosity.”
“Even better would be to personalize these benefits with subject lines such as “‘X’ helps influencers like you get paid by doing ‘Y,'” said Quincy Smith, SEO and content manager at Ampjar. After applying targeted benefits marketing to his own campaigns, Smith increased open rates from 8% to 17%.
4) Be concise and include a CTA
Don’t complicate your emails. Say exactly what you want to say in a way that will interest readers. You don’t have to type paragraphs of content that no one will read – think press release, not a manifesto.
“Instead of including several long articles that will take readers a long time to scroll through, keep it brief and include a link to your blog where they can read more,” said Emily Sidley, senior director of marketing and PR at Three Girls Media Inc. “This is especially important because the majority of consumers check email on their phones. If the email is too long, they won’t spend time scrolling through on their tiny handheld screen.”
A rule of thumb is that if your emails take longer than two to three minutes to read, you’re likely to be ignored, added Mora.
Moreover, a clever subject line may improve your open rate, but in order to increase engagement, you have to increase your click-through rate, or the percentage of subscribers following email links to your webpage. This is where you’ll need a call to action – a simple direct request.
“You can’t expect your audience to guess what you want them to do next,” said Kendra Jones, a PR and marketing strategist specializing in influencer marketing. “Placing concise calls to action, such as ‘Click here to download your free guide,’ that are hyperlinked to the opt-in increased my click-through rate by 18%.”
Try A/B testing
Aside from taking the deductive approach – testing new strategies by observing relative improvement in open and click-through rates – there’s another way to improve, however, and that’s by pitting two strategies against each other.
You can experiment with two variables, such as two subject lines, to discover which performs best, said Sean Nichols, marketing manager at SiteVisibility.
Nichols recommended testing just one part of the email (e.g., subject lines or images) at a time so there aren’t too many variables. This will ensure more accurate results.
The more of these tests you do, the more likely you are to discover an unexpected strategy. For example, after running a variety of A/B tests, Keynote Search found that using imagery with a close-up of someone’s face increased its click-through rate by 17%, Turk said.
It’s easy enough to test preconceived strategies like the ones on this list. With A/B testing, however, marketers may find strategies it never occurred to them to try out.
If you need help with your email marketing strategy and execution, contact TheIuvo today! We can’t wait to talk to you.
