Getting personal and relevant with your customers, without breaking the bank.
What is CRM and Email Marketing?
At its very basic, email marketing is when a company uses data to send relevant and timely messages to their customers to promote a specific action. Email marketing can broadly fit into two categories:
Retention:
This is the most common form of the direct marketing tool and describes when a company uses their own data set of opted in email addresses to build relationships with its customer base. Content can range from soft-touch newsletter stories to more commercially driven x-sell and promotional campaigns.
Acquisition:
This technique uses email to get new customers and visitors to your website, not using your own data. You can buy clean data sets from Third Party data providers like Experian and Acxiom, or work with other companies to send co-branded emails and offers. This can then help to grow your own customer base.
Different Types of Email Campaigns
As retention is by far the most effective, we can break it down into specific campaign types:
Event-Triggered:
This can relate to timing or customer lifecycle. Using a specific event to tailor your audience and your messaging. It could be a special offer, a customer’s birthday, an abandoned shopping trolley and so on. The key is using these events to trigger a relevant message and engage your customer.
Newsletter:
Keep the conversation regular and insightful. Sending informative content to your base to keep the communication going will help with retention and reinforce brand awareness.
It’s not just about sending one email once a month to your whole base, it’s about talking to specific audiences with targeted content. Mass email = high unsubscribes.
X-Sell:
You know all about your audiences, you know what floats their boat, you know that they are engaged with your brand. Now you need to try and sell them other products they are likely to be interested in, without being too pushy.
If you can get it right, it’s a great tool to increase customer lifetime value and get people even more engaged in your brand.
Programmes/Sequences:
Think Welcome, Post Quote, Sign Up, Loyalty Programmes. Using automation to send out an email sequence to drive sales and engagement. These should be segmented to your audience.
The key to all of the above is to segment your audience and treat each segment differently. This is where Customer Relationship Management (CRM) comes into play.
You need good CRM systems in place to help you manage your audience lists into digestible chunks and automate your campaigns based on these segments.
The Bottom Line…
To become intelligent in email marketing, the key is to truly understand your audience and have the right email systems to support it. Gone are the days of bulk email sends, and now it’s all about making your campaigns personalised, relevant and timely- and having that 1 to 1 conversation. Get this right and you’ll reap the rewards…
If you want to read a bit more about Email and how you can make it a success, take a look at our in-depth article; Inbox Overload: Can Email Still Work?
How we can help…
Got a database, but not sure where to start? Or fancy getting closer to your customers?
Email as a marketing tool can be a very versatile and low-cost way to inform, educate and build a relationship with your customers. BUT it’s also a great way to drive sales too.
With its vast capabilities, it can be hard to know where to start- with data segmentation, system automation, testing and so much more! But we can help you find the right email strategy to hit your business goals and budget.
Some Email Marketing jobs we can help with:
Data Cleansing and Segmentation
Create Responsive Email Designs
Content Creation and Testing
Customer Journey Analysis and Campaign Automation
Integrating Email as part of a Wider Marketing Strategy
Onboarding new eCRM platforms
Variety of Email Campaigns (Build, Set-Up, Execution & Optimisation):
Event Triggered
Newsletter
X-sell
Welcome Programme
Offers/Promotion
Acquisition
We can help with your Email Marketing strategy
If you’ve read this far and you’d like to know a bit more about Email Strategy and how DigitalFoxes can help, just drop us a line…
