The recent downturn in the global and local financial economy has companies looking for cost-effective ways to develop and maintain quality relationships with their customers. The challenge for 2009 is for marketers to achieve reductions in order to maintain a competitive advantage and promote profitability profitability in difficult times.
E-mail marketing is an obvious choice for many marketers, because the profitability of e-mail marketing is unparalleled. That is why more marketers than ever before use e-mail as one of their key communication channels — not only to acquire new customers, but also to strengthen relationships with existing customers.
But with a large number of companies sending email to improve cost-effectiveness, marketers need to ensure that their campaigns are in line with best practices in order to achieve cutting and not get lost.
Here it is. Perhaps now is the time to consider reviewing your email marketing strategy?
Does your communication strategy achieve your business goals?
To answer this rather important question, I suggest you start exploring 5 specific areas:
- content
- Database
- Technologies
- legal
- Making report
To interest customers, considering the possibility of updating the appearance of your email. View a refreshing or even redesigning template to bring new life. If you use a limited budget, simply updating images or updating your color palette, you can work well.
Make sure your brand stands out, and your key messages are not buried. In moments when your customers receive a lot of emails from various sources, perhaps including your competitors, you need them to remember you the most.
The most important thing is to keep your content relevant. Content is what drives customers to engage in their brand and communications. Include content that appeals to customers on issues they are interested in to build lasting relationships over time. The more you show to customers, the more you understand their needs, the more interaction with your brand. An effective way to understand the understanding of relevance is an online survey, a quick survey or analysis of scrolling and browsing data.
You may also consider creating a running e-mail program to ensure relevancy. There is no better time for communication than right after the client indicated that they are interested right now.
Database
An important database is needed. Marketers should always look for opportunities to expand their database. Having a client's permission to send email will be more beneficial in the long term than sending an email to thousands of people who do not know you or your brand. Many companies make the mistake of just renting an email list from a broker list and expecting a great result. In many cases, this is the surest way to damage your brand and potentially negatively impact your existing customer relationships.
If you thought about ideas, here are six quick ways to start growing your database:
- Add a checkbox & # 39; in the order form for inclusion in your database.
- Include a well-organized inclusion button or link to your website or email campaigns.
- Enable & # 39; forms at events, conferences, in the waiting area and in other physical locations.
- Encourage and streamline your sales team to add potential customers to your database or sign up for newsletters.
- Participation in joint registration. (but make sure you follow the procedures for not participating in Co-registrants)
- Increase the quality rather than the quantity of your database by regularly cleaning out non-responsive members or bounces.
Email technology is constantly evolving. To ensure that your email campaign results do not go back, it is important to be aware of key technologies, requirements, and events that may affect how your email is viewed or delivered.
For example, when Microsoft Outlook 2007 & # 39; marketers had to be released to make changes to their email templates to consider how the images were blocked from viewing. This has become a priority to ensure that emails can be read by your customers who have had their images turned off. For delivery purposes, keep track of new IP addresses that may require reputation monitoring, and try to specify the IP addresses of your mail servers if you are not using ESP that already does.
If your company sends a large amount of email every month, it is important to ensure that your mail servers (or your ESPs) can handle the amount of mail sent. Remember that even if your list size is relatively small, you can be competitive with many other clients who send large lists from the same server, which can lead to a significant delay in sending email. Also consider that if you expect to bring a lot of traffic to your site, you need to ensure that your servers can handle the load, otherwise your efforts can be wasted.
Remember that when it comes to ESP, you usually get what you pay for. Therefore, if you have decided to go with a cheaper provider, make sure that you compare their SLA, reliability and reputation before you risk your important campaigns.
legal
Keep track of all legal email marketing responsibilities. This will ensure that your email marketing campaigns start with the right foot. Failure to comply with this requirement may result in damage to customer relations and, possibly, to your IP-address in the black list, which will allow you to disable communication with you via email.
To avoid this, comply with all federal and state laws, including any changes. Provide up-to-date Privacy Policy and be able to easily select and deactivate subscribers.
The bright thing that I encountered with a number of marketers is sending emails from promotions and applications hosted on web servers, where it is forged from the address to be compatible with ESP, which sends its regular emails. This was very quickly reviewed on servers that were blacklisted by large providers that have very sensitive SPAM traps, without marketers who understand until the end of the promotion. Make sure you integrate any promotions or e-mails initiated through your usual deployment mechanism. If you cannot, it may be time to rethink who you use to send your emails.
Making report
Reviewing your email will unnecessarily forget a lot of useful information that will help improve your email marketing results. Often the problem is to make time and make an effort to analyze. A good place to start is to compare your performance over the past 6 months or a year across all your email messages to compare performance:
- Open prices
- CPCs
- Bounce rates
- Refuse tariffs
- Purchase rates
If you find, for example, that your open rate has declined over the past year, you can turn on the topic testing to determine why customers are not opening your emails.
Including subject lines and body testing will allow you to identify keywords, topics, and phrases that your customers are most sensitive to. If you can determine what drives your customers to open your email, then you have a competitive advantage.
In 2009, with an email marketing strategy review, management can be confident that you will optimize your email channel and best present your brand to your customers. Attention. Sound strategy can help you move forward and provide a breakthrough in what looks like a very difficult year.
