Hey Sarah!
Is the email campaign right on schedule? I’m super excited about all the conversions we’re going to bring through this well-executed campaign.
Like Sarah’s boss, there are millions of other marketers looking to capitalize on the benefits a successful campaign can bring. Be it a lead generation or nurturing leads, communicating with your audience, sharing newsletters – it all boils down to the target acting upon your communications.
Of all the sweat and pain we go through to build a subscriber list, promote our products/services, reach out to the right audience, bring inbound leads – if you are a digital marketer, I’m sure you would nod as you read that email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels to reach out to the intended audience.
As much fun as it sounds, email marketing indeed is an interesting and exciting process if you think about the well thought out and personalized email pitches, exciting templates to play around, and the joy of hitting the send button being so confident of checking off every detail on a carefully planned list. Well, all of this is fun but aren’t you concerned about the analytics that shows a very unsatisfying number about the count of people who has opened the emails?
People who have accessed your links? The depressing bounce rates?
We face these days in and day out. Considering that a solid chunk of efforts is always directed towards creating good content and a complimenting design, let’s take a closer look at the reasons behind these mind-numbing statistics that put down our excitement; one-by-one.
1. Segmentation of the audience
In the increasingly noisy digital world, it is super hard to cut through the clutter and make the recipient of the mail click on the subject line and take them ahead to the story. So a good email is one that is valuable and relevant. Talking about relevancy, it does matter to whom you are shooting those emails. If at all your email marketing fails, your targeted audience is probably the main reason.
You cannot just shoot out emails to an unsegmented audience. If you think you can send them to an audience that is not classified on the basis of demography, designations, industry, and the probable business challenge you cannot help but be marked as spam and go to the junk folder.
You definitely do not want this.
So, you need to think through to whom your messages are intended. You also need to think about what challenges you are trying to address through your campaign instead of just a brand bragging. Segmentation of the right audience can make a big difference, increase engagement levels and make your audience receptive to messages in improving your click-throughs and boost your email marketing success.
2. Build consistency
Email marketing should not take a backseat once you begin to see good engagement and conversions. You cannot afford to shift focus just because you have good success through email marketing. This is only a better reason to continue directing your efforts through consistent, relevant and messages that are perfectly in sync with the timing or happening of events.
You can remind your customers about your brand, the happenings, your milestones and nurture your relationships in the course. Email marketing is a great way to have lasting business relationships effortlessly.
Once you build a good rapport with your audience and they have begun to give you potential business, your emails can be informative, educating and enlightening. This will make them look forward to your emails and in the course, you can build a lot of credibility for your brand.
Consistency goes a long way in building loyal customers who become advocates for your brand. They would trust you and build a sort of emotional attachment and begin to recommend it to their friends or business circle. All this is doable and people will go to such lengths, provided your content is relevant, reliable, relatable, and regular.
Recommended read: Take a look at this insightful infographic by 99firms for 15 clever hacks to optimize your emails. Not to miss the interesting case studies!
3. Integration of emails with social media
You cannot deny that social media is a boon to digital marketers as it can bring all the traffic, leads, engagement that we crave for. If you see, of all the marketing channels, email campaigns and social media can be tandem.
Email marketing is powerful as compared to social media marketing as the audience on social networks is wider and mostly not segmented. This results in lesser engagement and increased bounce-rates. But, the integration of social media in your email campaigns can help you strengthen both these channels.
How?
Let’s say you have a list of contacts be it your subscribers who love your content or your fine-tuned set of targets to whom your message is perfectly in sync. Now, if you onboard this list on your social media platforms and invite them to engage in your account activities (if you haven’t already) this will really help in surging up their interest and involvement in your brand.
This will be a significant step towards exciting your audience when your emails hit their inboxes.
If people receiving your emails like what you share and are much of a social butterfly, then you should make it easy for them to share it on their social media channels. If you do not have these, there is a higher possibility that they might not make the effort to do it for you. If there are social media icons embedded on every snippet of your content they are likely to share it.
Is the foundation of your goals – a healthy contact list analyzed and addressed?
4. Contact data enrichment
Let’s say your email copy, designs, strategic integrations, demography, and everything is in class. But, what if something that is the foundation of your success is all messed up?
40% of business objectives fail due to inaccurate data.
Even if you reach the right audience through segmentation, it is important that your contacts are valid. Data decay can be a serious issue that is ruining all your efforts. To maintain a good and healthy list of valid contacts is indispensable to maintain good customer relationships because that way you are communicating with an existing prospect.
If your contacts are stale all your efforts become worthless and will be directed towards something that drives nothing. There is increasing importance to sourcing fresh leads, enriching existing contact data and maintaining an updated and rich contact database.
Data becomes obsolete as people change their numbers, email ids, addresses so often that you miss out on it. This makes your database lag behind updates and ends up taking a huge toll on your success.
Need help keeping your contacts, fresh, rich and updated? Tackle email marketing like a pro and increase your marketing and sales success with us. Contact us now!
Nandhini
Blogger and Community Manager
