E-mail marketing is one of the most effective and inexpensive ways to market. It is a fantastic way to build loyalty, advertise new products or sales, educate and engage your audience. Sounds great, right? Well, there are a few simple rules to follow when planning your campaigns that can help maintain and increase the size of your e-mail database.
Be Consistent
Decide how often you’re going to blast out to your database, and stick to that plan. Once a month is a great starting point, then you can increase frequency from there. When people sign up to receive information from your company, they WANT to hear from you. If you wait too long to reach out, they may lose interest or worse, lose confidence in your brand.
Make Sharing Easy
One of the best ways to help your message spread, is by making it easy for readers to share interesting information with friends. If you’re not including a share bar at the top of each blast with social media and forward to a friend links, it is a wasted opportunity to have your database do your marketing for you!
Segment your list
You will generally see much higher response rates and better list retention when your customer has requested to receive specific information. Good practice is to offer checkboxes on your sign up page that allows the user to select what specific information they are interested in receiving. Maybe they only want you to blast them with sales and promotions. Perhaps they are interested in new product launches. Alternatively, some customers may only want article based blasts. This way, you are only sending out relevant blasts and the changes of a customer unsubscribing are substantially lower.
Study Metrics
The metrics garnered from your e-mail campaigns are like gold so treat them as such! Analyzing the behavior of your database and then adjusting your next blast accordingly can be a sure-fire way to increase the success of your e-mail marketing efforts. Some key metrics I always assess are ‘open rates’, ‘click-through rates’, ‘conversion rates’ and ‘unsubscribe rates’. By looking at these number and adjusting your content, subject line or frequency, you can dramatically improve the success of each campaign.
Stick to what you know
Yes it would be easy to just talk about your products or services but you should also use your e-mail marketing campaigns to educate your customer as to why you’re an expert and industry leader. Share news, tips and tricks and any benefits that don’t cost the reader a penny. That will help you build brand loyalty and that is the most valuable asset around. My favorite example of this takes me back to the first time I walked into a Lululemon retail store. It was on West 4th in Vancouver. It might even have been their original store. I was looking at a pair of their famous yoga pants and a clerk walked up to me and told me everything there was to know about the fabric they use, why it’s the best and what the benefit would be to me (ie sweat wicking, no stretch, no smell, etc). It was a completely no-pressure sales approach and whether I bought the pants or not, I left armed with some great knowledge about fabric and production techniques. That one visit made me feel like they were the only place to shop for athletic gear because they knew so much about the product. I was (and still am) hooked!
