Seven ways to improve your e-mail marketing programme

E-mail marketing enables you to target your customers with relevant, valuable and timely content to meet their needs and to increase your conversions and sales. It can provide you with many benefits, including the ability to:

• Increase brand awareness: so that when prospective customers are ready to engage, you are front of mind

• Share content and expertise: providing your audience with valuable information and useful assets

• Showcase your products or services: your customers know what you can offer them and the benefits that this can bring to them

• Generate leads: offer your customers something of value in exchange for their data

• Create and sustain relationships: through personalised and engaging e-mail marketing content

• Nurture your leads: provide your customers with content that meets their wants and needs.

Many of you are already be reaping these benefits and seeing positive results from your e-mail marketing strategy.   

Ready for the next step?

If you are already utilising e-mail marketing, here are seven ways you can refine your programme: 

1.     Improve your welcome e-mail programme: the first few e-mails that you send to new subscribers are likely to be the most responsive so make sure that your value proposition is communicated in your first e-mail. If you haven’t already, you should look to extend your welcome e-mail into a multi-step sequence, adding targeting.

2.     Look at your nurture e-mail programme: look at all of your touch points to make sure that you are effectively using techniques to guide prospects through to your overall objective i.e. the consultation, purchase etc

3.     Make sure that your e-mails are as targeted as they can be: Are you sending the same message to one single audience? If so then it is recommended that you send different messages to different audiences, based on job title, gender, location etc. It is likely that your automation system will have this functionality and you should see a marked increase in relevance and response.

4.     Enhance your customer loyalty e-mail programmes: You could use thank you reminder e-mails to thank your customers for being part of your brand journey, reward redemption e-mails providing offers for points accrued and reward expiration reminders to let customers know that vouchers and promotion expiration dates are approaching. Providing a personalised Happy Birthday e-mail and top customers with exclusive perks such as free delivery or special discounts will make them feel special and, and as result, increase their loyalty and advocacy.   

5.     Tailor and target your newsletters: Do you send the same newsletter out to everyone? If so, it would be beneficial for you to tailor it to your audience according to different targeting criteria. This is likely to increase engagement and responses. You can target by demography (age, gender, location), their stage in the lifecycle (frequency and total purchases), purchasing and browsing behaviour and interactions.

6.     Look at the frequency of your e-mails: Test whether increasing the frequency of your e-mail marketing drives additional enquiries and sales during a recession.

7.     Implement win-back e-mail marketing: For those who haven’t purchased from you for a while, it is recommended that you try to ‘win them back’ through e-mail marketing. You can start, for example, with a straight forward ‘hello’ to get people engaging with you again. Then you could offer them an incentive and ask them for their feedback. For those who are unresponsive to the initial ‘hello’, give them a last chance to respond before being unsubscribed. Then the final stage is to unsubscribe them and let them know so that they can re-subscribe if they want to return.

 Your e-mail subscribers will love hearing from you if you are a genuine resource and they can relate to you so remember to keep your e-mail marketing content valuable, relevant and timely.