When the term 'Email Marketing' is mentioned, everyone seems to think they know about it but most often, it's 'email blast' that they talk about.
What is Email Blast?
Creating a list of email addresses, designing a proper email and sending it to them all is called 'email blast'. Email Blast is the traditional way of sending an email to a huge number of email ids on the list and then expect the interested ones to respond back but truly speaking, Email blast doesn't really have any proper strategy.
A lot of companies undermine the value of Email Marketing because they tend to think of Email Marketing as a medium that blasts emails. Email Marketing is still one of the most powerful digital marketing mediums and accounts for lesser cost per acquisitions than most other channels, including social media, direct mail, paid search and display networks.
Email marketing has evolved and needs to be automated for better conversions.
1. Integrate Email marketing into the buyer's journey
Inbound marketing starts with creating your ideal buyer personas, which happens to be the generalized representation of your ideal buyers. The landing pages are usually optimized for the requirements of the buyer. Once the person fills in the form and gives your company their details, then the lead has to nurtured to make sure they are sales ready. This is where email marketing comes into play. Sending them educational content using email marketing campaigns, which are fully automated, is an effective way of building trust and nurturing the leads. Automating the campaigns make it easy as the right content for the buyer persona gets delivered to the lead at the right time. Most marketers forget that it is easier to sell to a current customer than a new one. Keeping the current lot happy must be top priority. Again, Email Marketing applications can be used effectively here and can be automated to send survey emails and promotional offers to the existing customers.
2. Concentrate on improving the conversion rate
The purpose of email marketing is to convince the lead to finally make a sale. The success of the email marketing campaign should be rightly defined the high conversion rate.
A/B testing would let you to see which content, layout and design are performing better.
Monitor the bounce rates, open rates and click through rates to find out which campaigns are performing well.
Use captivating titles and clearly defined Call to Action Areas.
Check if your emails are responsive in various devices and screen sizes.
3. Segment your list and personalize the content
People are going to be at different stages of the buyer's journey and the same content is not going to suit two leads - one at an advanced stage in the marketing funnel and some one at the initial stage of the funnel. This is where list segmentation can be used to great effect. You can segment your list based on job title, engagement level and buying habits. The purpose of list segmentation is personalization. Personalization doesn't mean you have to only address your lead with their name but also send relevant content that suits your needs. If you get your segments right, your leads will receive the content the actually need, which would increase the chance of a conversion. List Segmentation will reduce the number of unsubscribes and help your emails avoid spam filters, in addition to increasing your open rate and click through rate.
Deepak founded VizConn in 2011 and writes about Digital Marketing, CMS, UX design and business in our blog. Got a question for Deepak? Let us know and we will pass it on to him. He responds to most questions via email.
