Email marketing is a common practice among businesses that sell products and services, but if you ask companies on how effective it is, you’ll get a varied response. Some consider it to be the backbone of their marketing and PR campaigns that keep customers and clients invested, while others have come to the conclusion that customers don’t really care about extraneous marketing campaigns.
However, there’s the possibility that the latter just hasn’t done it right. There’s an art to making a compelling email campaign and how to sustain it long-term. In this post, I will show some ways that you can do both.
Segment and give choices to email recipients
Different customers are interested in different things. Some of them will only want notification of discounts, some will want product news and updates, yet more people will be interested in how the company is doing. A one-size-fits-all email campaign may seem like a good compromise but it tends to drive people away more than anything, as what they want to see is buried under irrelevant sections.
Make sure that when a customer or client joins your mailing list, show them that they can choose what they want to see: that way, they get the information they want to see while you get to see what they’re interested in, making targeted emails much easier.
Provide some value to your recipients
At the end of the day, your potential recipient doesn’t sign up to email campaigns just to see how the company’s doing (unless they’re clients); they want to get something out of it, whether it’s a discount, advice articles on your service/product, information on new services/products and so on. Make sure that your emails aren’t just “puff pieces”.
Don’t spam them – EVER
If your email campaign is losing subscribers rapidly despite sending several high-quality emails a week, it should be a sign that your current email campaign schedule is overwhelming them. Give your marketing department a break and slow things down: the end result being your marketing team doesn’t run out of ideas early and an email will be seen as a pleasant surprise rather than an irritating distraction for your recipients.
Responsively-designed emails
A pretty basic rule but one that companies frequently break is that smartphones are already king of the hill when it comes to reading and checking emails for most people. If your email looks like a mess when viewed on a smartphone screen, you’re making a bad impression out of the gate to a large section of your recipients. Always check to see if they look good on a smartphone screen, or use responsive design principles to make sure it’ll work everywhere.
Provide an exit survey
It’s an old and popular adage: “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything”, but it doesn’t make any sense for business. Negative feedback can be very useful to gauge the opinions of your customers, so if you’ve got a survey open to ask the recipient why they don’t want your emails, you might get that sage advice you wouldn’t get on your own.
At the end of the day, your email marketing campaign should be an integral part of your marketing and PR campaign, and utilising it properly can give you that loyal customer/client base that your company always wanted.
