– By Ben Teggin
Email Marketing is one of the most powerful and personal ways of connecting with your customers and prospects and can be integrated with your social media marketing more generally. Making sure your message stands out from everyone else is the most important thing. Here are a few tips to help you:
Segment your lists – Split your data into relevant categories/groups. Send relevant information to people who have requested it. You will see a higher ‘open rate’ and ‘click through’ rate if you segment your lists and send targeted campaigns. Categories could be: ‘clients who purchased in past three months’; ‘prospects’; ‘clients who attended an event’ etc.
Subject line – Keep the subject line catchy but short and sweet. You only have a few seconds to catch the recipient’s attention.
Compelling content/hook – Keep the most important message above the fold. People will lose interest if they have to start scrolling down to see the offer/message. A campaign needs to engage the audience so make sure the information in the email is relevant.
Personalisation – Personalisation is not just about putting the recipient’s name in the body of the email. It’s about understanding your customers/prospects. You should have a good knowledge of your customers’ needs, use this to your advantage and make sure your content is relevant to the people you are sending it to.
Promote across social media – Social Media now plays a big part in communication for businesses, with a growing number signing-up and using Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. When you send out your email campaigns, make sure you include links for people to share your email. If it is of interest to the recipient and they feel it might be of interest to everyone else, they will pass it on to their connections.
For example, we recently sent out a campaign promoting a new service and linked the campaign to our Twitter page. As a result of this, we received six enquiries from people we have never spoken to before because existing clients had re-tweeted our message to their followers.
Follow-up – In my experience the most successful email campaigns we have done are the ones where we have taken the time to follow-up after sending out.
A lot of businesses make the mistake of thinking that once they send the email campaign the phone will just ring and everyone who received the email will want their services. Sadly it doesn’t work like this. You have to put time aside to ring the people who you know have opened the email or clicked onto a link in the email because that indicates a level of interest from that person.
Next time you are thinking of sending an email campaign, use the steps above and see what difference it makes to your success.
About Ben Teggin
Ben is the Managing Director of KulaHub, a CRM & Email Marketing system that helps Businesses to manage their contacts and also send out targeted email campaigns to their customers/prospects.