Your marketing mix is severely lacking without email marketing, since you may be missing out on a popular communication medium and engaging with hordes of potential customers. Email marketing, simply put, is the modern equivalent of direct mail marketing, although it is much more diverse in its reach and sophisticated in its appeal.
Email marketing, if done right, can be highly influential in improving your overall marketing efforts – especially your content marketing. Targeting your customers by email can be in the form of advertisements, informing them about upcoming events and offers, or simply to interact with them and build friendly and trusting relationships.
That being said, simply using the electronic medium to speak with your leads and customers without a clear marketing approach can be wasteful, and even potentially harmful, for your business. Delivering emails to your customers with irrelevant content and at inappropriate times can do more bad than good for your customer relationships.
• Locate your target market
To create the most relevant, high-quality content, you must first understand who you’re creating it for. Perform detailed studies and analyses on your product or service offerings and use that data to predict the most likely candidates who will be willing to purchase from you.
Avoid borrowing pre-made lists, since they may contain a broad range of customer profiles and you can end up focusing your resources on the wrong people, when it could have been better spent on your favorable customers.
Make use of your other marketing channels to obtain more data about your leads and customers and ideally obtain a 360-degree view of them. A CRM software service can come in handy for effectively collecting all the data from your multiple sources and organizing it into a central database for quicker analysis.
• Recognize your market segments
No two customers are ever the same. Not even the ones that you’ve identified as a potential source for business. A message that is well-received by one customer might not be as valuable to another one. This is why it is important to intelligently segment your customer list to identify and merge customers with similar tastes and requirements.
Some of the parameters on which customers can be segregated can be age groups, geographic locations, purchasing power, transnational histories, preferences, etc. Some emails might be more perceptive to young customers, while some others may be appealing to the more experienced people.
• Produce and deliver relevant content
The aim of email marketing is to make your customers aware about you and your business, and build long-lasting relationships by providing them with value. Create email campaigns that contain useful information in the form of blog posts, info graphics, papers, or social media posts, amongst others.
By studying the individual profiles of your leads and customers located in the various segments, personalize your content to maximize the chances of conversion. A well-established CRM database with effective segmentation can be extremely helpful in gauging customer behavior and preferences, which can help you to tailor-fit your content based on their expectations.
Another important aspect of successful email marketing is delivering the mail at the most opportune time. Keep track of your customer’s behavior and study current trends so that you can understand when they are at their most approachable state. For instance, your customers might not want to receive messages while they’re at work, or while they’re away on a vacation, and sending messages to them in this time period might cause them to get annoyed and break ties with you.
With an integrated CRM software service, you can even schedule the delivery of your email campaigns so that the widest audience can be reached at the best possible time, ensuring that the message is appropriately received by the customer.
• Analyze the performance of your campaigns
Simply planning a campaign and sending it out to the customers isn’t enough. You need to gauge how well the campaign was received, where you fell short and how you can improve your messages for your audience.
Some available performance metrics may include how many mails were opened, how many of them were actually viewed, how many customers interacted with the mail to visit your websites, social media pages, and blog pages, how many customers contacted you for further queries, and how many of them even purchased a product or service.
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