Email marketing is a pillar of effective marketing strategies. Email marking is a powerful tool for interacting with an engaged audience, especially because recipients have opted in, indicating their interest. A successful email marketing strategy not only results in conversions or generating leads, it also builds brand personality, recognition and trust.
At Pod Digital, we create bespoke content and email strategies for our clients. We use critical data gathered from your email database to accurately segment your audience so that the content reaches its full potential. We improve customer experience via segmentation, automation and personalised content. This makes sure your email marketing strategy is working for you.
In this article, we will cover:
- What is email marketing?
- Why use email marketing?
- Understanding your audience and building a strategic email marketing plan.
- Automations.
- Segmentation.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools to market your business or brand. It is the only way, other than your website, that you can speak directly to a guaranteed engaged audience.
Your email marketing database is full of potential customers that have signed up for your correspondence. You are in the privileged position of already knowing that the audience has shown an interest in your brand. If used effectively, it can be a relatively small investment for a large return, not only monetarily, but also with brand loyalty from your customers.
Why use email marketing:
It doesn’t all have to be about conversions and generating leads. No matter your industry, it is helpful to have some form of email marketing. It is a signpost of your brand. When your customers receive an email from your branded email address with your official logo, they know they’re in good hands.
Successful email marketing content not only encourages conversions, it also builds your brand’s personality. It is a great way of building brand loyalty, trust and recognition as you are talking directly to your customers. This trust is vital to the decision-making process of a customer. You can enhance their experience through consistent and engaging email content.
Understanding your audience and building an email strategy.
To determine the best strategy for your email marketing plan, it is important to understand your audience. You need to know who you are talking to; this way you can adapt accordingly. Once you understand your audience and aims, you can begin to tailor the content and strategy.
With business-to-business email marketing, it is most important to nurture your relationships with your clients and customers. This early nurturing of these relationships will create loyal customers who are likely to purchase again because they have had a first-class experience.
By capturing your customers’ details with an email marketing database, you can make detailed segments. This will tell you a lot about your audience’s interests and behaviours and make it a lot easier to re-engage with potential clients.
You can encourage repeat purchases or business via your emails (or to make it even easier you can funnel them into post-purchase automation). A post-purchase automation is triggered by a purchase and will send delayed aftercare or repurchase content to this customer. This content could be a reminder of a warranty, a prompt to leave a review or even encourage repurchase.
It is crucial in business-to-customer email marketing to be consistent. For example, you may make brand promises to the customer upon sign up such as, “be the first to know about new products and sales”. Therefore, you should make sure your marketing plan syncs up with your email marketing calendar.
Most people sign up for a brand’s email marketing because they want to know more about the products and services. They will be likely to unsubscribe if they do not feel like you are following through on your brand promises.
Automations
Automations are pre-made content flows triggered by an event, such as a new contact being added to a subscriber’s list. This event could trigger a welcome email flow. Welcome emails are a common automation and often there is an incentive to sign up. This welcome email can deliver that coupon code along with more information about your brand or products to entice the contact to purchase.
There are many automations that can be essential to a successful email strategy for any B2C company. Some examples of common automations include abandon carts, win-back and post-purchase automations. The content in these automations work to recover lost conversions, re-engage older contacts and encourage repeat purchases.
Once these automations are set up, they are a fantastic way to keep in touch with your customers. Depending on the complexity of the flow and content, this can take very little upkeep.
Segmentation
Segmentation is a way to sort your audience via the data gathered about them, their interactions and behaviours. By segmenting your audience, you can target the correct contacts for specific, dynamic content. For example, if you wanted to send an email to a female-only audience, you would segment your audience via gender.
Some email platforms will make predicted guesses about the location and gender of your contacts. However, if you capture this data upon sign-up or through a preference centre, you will know it is a reliable segment.
There is a lot of data you can capture which will then help you to better segment your audience. For example, you could ask for their birthday upon sign up. This would then trigger an automation in which they would receive a birthday message with a 10% off incentive on their birthday.
Sending specific and relevant content to a segment of your audience ensures that an engaged audience receives your emails. This increases open, click through and conversion rates as well as creating a good relationship between the brand and subscribers. It also boosts your sender reputation which is important so inbox providers such as Gmail do not file your marketing emails under spam.
Email Marketing is a vast, strategic marketing channel that can take your marketing planning to the next level. The opportunities and benefits of having an email marketing channel are unbeatable.
At Pod Digital, we craft email marketing strategies bespoke to your business and your requirements. Call, email or fill in our contact form to chat to us about how we could take your marketing to the next level.
