Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the greatest tools for having a direct conversation with your customers over an extended period, so long as your readership continues to accept your drip fed messages. Your (generally) one way conversation begins from the very moment a prospect willingly subscribes to your email list and opts into your pre-set messages. From this moment onwards, you have endless opportunities to turn your subscriber into regular and loyal customers, to test the success of messages affordably and generate good will for your brand.

In a series of apparently ‘personalised’ emails, where audiences are broken down into ‘market segments’, you can introduce yourself in different ways and tell them more about your industry, your company and brand, as well as introducing your products and services in light or heavy touch approaches, depending upon response rates.

Your systematised campaigns can show people social proofs and what other people have reviewed and rated you in the past in order to engender trust, that can warms the reader towards you, versus your competitor. You can inform preferred customers of an ongoing offer or promotion, available exclusively to them as valued customers.

Once you have them converted as a customer, you can keep subscribers coming back for more, by upselling and cross-selling your products, or simply informing them of a new product release.  You can monitor response rates and divert differing customers into alternative message streams, so what they read is tailored to their interests.  In this respect, email marketing is an effective tool to target your varied audiences, to acquire new customers, engage them and keep your customers long-term.

As your business and brand grow, it becomes ever more difficult to give your customer the personal attention they need and to target each and every one of them, based on their particular needs. Hence, it is important to build your email lists and segment them, according to tastes and demographic characteristics.

Customer segmentation is an efficient way to group your customers, based on their demographic attributes, browsing activities on your site, purchasing histories and frequencies of engagement. This need not be an onerous task and means that you are better able to give audiences more of what they want as you categorise groups.  Thus, each customer can receive that personal attention they require and feel valued, because they know that you have their interests in mind with appropriate messaging.

Of course, none of this can be achieved without a level of automation. With the help of email automation, you can create workflows and logic-based rules. so that your customers will receive the right message at the right time, to keep them engaged and interested in you.  Thus you generate more revenues, adding to the customer lifetime value, which in turn creates virtuous cycles.

There are generally four types of email content categories that marketers use, with a different intent in mind:

Informational. These emails are to provide your subscribers with helpful information about you, your company, your industry, how-to instructions, or announcements about how they can make savings on new product releases, or services offered.  

Transactional. These are emails that facilitate a transaction, or tangible step in your customer relationship; they provide an update on an ongoing transaction, such as an order availability or tracking. This type of message include emails about abandoned checkout reminders, order confirmation, shipping and delivery confirmation, invoices, or to provide customer service.

Relational. These emails are aimed at customer retention, often involving sending a message to your existing customers, requesting feedback, or offering to engage subscribers and nurture relationships with them with promotional offers for their eyes only.

Promotional. These emails aim to acquire new customers, or generate more sales from your existing customer base. These messages include invitations for subscribing to a discount code, such as when promoting new product releases. They can also upsell or cross-sell products and encourage your target customers to buy a product, based on their previous habits, or signals via other channels, such as social media.