What we will cover
Are you leaving money on the table?
If you are not yet using email marketing to connect with your existing customer base, the answer is almost certainly yes.
Just how much you are losing out on will depend on various factors, including the industry you work in, but you will get a better idea of the true cost to your business when you look at your campaign results.
How email marketing adds value
Why is email marketing important? Email marketing is not just about increasing sales. It is also a powerful way to add value to your business and differentiate you from your competitors.
For example, every time you send a content-packed newsletter to your customer base, you are proving to them that you are prepared to provide a quality service for free.
This alone is likely to result in more loyalty from your customers and prospects but you can increase that sense of value further by including special ‘email only’ or ‘early bird’ discounts.
Combining email with your blog and social media
Email marketing delivers better results when combined with other aspects of your (ideally localised) digital marketing activity.
For example, you can add signup forms to your Facebook pages or use hosted forms to enable followers to join your mailing list from a range of social media platforms.
Placing a form or even a simple link at the end of your blog posts can also help swell your list, especially if you use some of the smart personalisation tools detailed later in the article.
The integration works two ways. You can also use your email marketing to ensure customers and prospects don’t miss out on your content. For example, you can email them whenever you launch a blog post or, if you are very prolific, send them a digest in a weekly newsletter.
You could also curate a list of thought provoking social media articles you have shared during the week.
Automating the process
At this stage, you may be thinking: ‘Agh, I just don’t have the time for all of that!’
Fortunately, email marketing platforms like Mailchimp offer simple ways to automate a lot of the process.
You may need to put a bit of time into designing your initial campaigns but by using pre-designed templates and inbuilt scripts you shouldn’t need to spend much more than an hour a week to keep the process ticking along.
Monitoring and optimising campaigns
To maximise the ROI of your campaigns, you will need to monitor results and make use of your email marketing platform’s personalisation tools.
The simplest way to monitor the results of your email marketing are via the statistics provided by your email marketing platform and, for a deeper dive, by connecting your platform to Google Analytics or whatever other analytics software you use.
Mailchimp metrics
Mailchimp provides its users with some very useful metrics including open rate, click-through rate (CTR) and unsubscribe rates.
Although stats vary widely across industry types, Mailchimp have calculated an average open rate of 20.81%, which means around a fifth of those who receive an email newsletter will open it.
The average CTR is much smaller at 2.43%. This is the proportion of people who click on hyperlinks within the email received.
By assigning a value to each click, you can start to generate an ROI for your email marketing (and realise how much revenue you were losing out on beforehand!)
By integrating Mailchimp with Google Analytics, Google will place a cookie on each email recipient’s browser which will then track that user’s wider behaviour across the internet.
This will help you to fine-tune your campaigns based on user behaviour and preferences. It will also provide rich information you can use to refine your buyer personas.
Tag and segment for relevant messaging
Campaigns can be optimised in various smart ways using Mailchimp’s segment, tag and custom fields features.
Once you have set these up, it will be a simple task to create specific campaigns that only go to that portion of your customer base for whom the content is relevant.
You can even send out specialised templates which contain one section dedicated to general content and another dynamic, personalised section which appears differently to different audience groups.
For example, say you run a shoe store. Your monthly newsletter could update everyone about your new store opening hours while offering discounts on either school shoes or hiking boots based on the demographics of your audience.
Smart CRM integrations
The power of email marketing doesn’t even stop there. By linking your campaigns to your customer relationship management (CRM) software, you can embed them within your overall sales process.
Hubspot, SalesForce and Zoho are just three of the CRM platforms which can integrate with Mailchimp for this purpose.
Master email marketing with Vu
It’s one thing to understand the basics of email marketing but if you really want to see a significant increase in the ROI of your email campaigns, we recommend taking advantage of our dedicated email marketing training course.
This comprehensive course will get you started in building or developing your list and will go on to cover everything from embedding signup forms with your website design to make sure your communications are GDPR compliant.
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