Email marketing has been around for a very long time, but it's still an unbeatable marketing channel. You can stay in touch with customers who have specifically permitted you to do so. Keep them updated about your products and services. You can also launch special promotions like coupon campaigns, ask satisfied customers for reviews and much more. Good email marketing is key to customer engagement and the best part is that it's relatively easy and most importantly, inexpensive!
To begin with, you should try to think from your customer's perspective and imagine all the steps that they will go through when engaging with your company. This way, you have an overview and can create a map of the customers' journey. This is important to identify possible or even necessary interaction points. Find out where your customers potentially need help and offer it proactively, rather than waiting for them to contact you. It's much easier to interact with a customer who is contacted and offered help in advance than a customer who approaches you with a pre-existing problem!
The most important thing is the first contact. The first impression is crucial and can decide whether the subscriber stays with you or unsubscribes. So decide exactly what you want to communicate to your customer. Create the emails and test them. You can use e.g. A/B testing and then use the message that worked better. Make sure you know how the email will be displayed. Do you know what devices your audience uses? Is your email well suited for mobile devices? Make sure your email is "good to go" for smartphones/tablets too!
Now that it is clear which emails should be sent, you should also pay attention to the following points:
Personalization: Always try to make your emails as personal as possible and of course, adapted to your customers! People like to feel seen and recognized.
Subject line: The subject line is the very first thing readers see and they use it to judge your email! So, the subject line of the email may be the most important part of your mail. Keep the subject line short, don’t use too many keywords or punctuation marks. Try to create a sense of urgency or a spark of curiosity. Your subject lines could contain words like: low-stock, limited time offer, special offer, special discount.
CTA: Call to actions is a way to optimize your emails. They should lead to a relevant destination. Make sure they stand out from the rest of your email content!
Images: Building in pictures can make the email appear more interesting and strengthens your message. They can also boost engagement and click-through rate. But make sure they also work for mobile devices!
Monitor your campaign: It is important to stay up to date with how your emails are performing. You need to keep an eye on your opening, most campaigns have an opening rate of around 24%. Check your click-through rate as well, most campaigns average at around 4%. Also, check your Conversion rate, this will show you how many people clicked on a link from your email.
But how often should you get in touch with your audience?
Take into account that customers are most engaged in the first few days, their interest can be seen as a curve that drops steeply quite quickly!
Generally, people tend to lose interest in things that require action within a few days. If people don’t become active within these few days, they are highly unlikely to do so in the future. Therefore, it is important to use these first days in which the interest is still high!
Keeping this in mind, it makes the most sense to contact a customer more frequently during the first 3- 4 days of subscribing. Even daily emails are not a problem at this stage!
If you're wondering how to send such a large number of emails, the answer is easy. You need to resort to a tool. There are numerous free and paid email marketing tools. Depending on your needs, you should check whether a free platform is too limiting in what it allows you to do (e.g. you can only send a certain number of emails).
But what exactly do these platforms do for you? All these tools have a similar structure, as they are all about sending emails to customers. So you can use them to create sign-up forms for your website, set up automatic emails and most importantly, do A/B testing with your emails. You will usually get detailed reports that help you monitor the performance of your email campaigns, such as open and click-through rates. Some platforms have a particularly user-friendly editor for designing emails, while others offer intelligent templates. Depending on your needs and your customer base, you will have to decide which one is right for you. Many of these platforms can naturally be connected to your CMS.
For example, Shopify Email is built directly into Shopify's eCommerce platform. The tool allows you to send up to 2500 emails per month for free. It is also incredibly easy to use and perfect to get started with as an SMB. With Shopify Email you have everything you need presented to you simply and easy to find right in your Dashboard. Just go to Campaign, edit the subject, the recipients and enter your content. You can even upload images if you like! You also immediately get a preview of how your campaign will look on desktop and mobile devices and can get started with reaching your customers right away!
If you want to learn more about online marketing or need support with your online marketing, you can also use our rankingCoach application. It provides you with the most important aspects of online marketing on one single platform.