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Winning email campaigns
Using email campaigns as a form of marketing can be hugely effective. They help you maintain an element of rapport, simply by touching base regularly with your current clients. And it’s a great touch point to open a dialogue with prospects.
Reporting and statistical data from an email marketing platform can also provide an insight into your contacts, by seeing who opened the email and who clicked on different subject lines or links. It’s great feedback on what people find interesting.
But before you go sending out bulk emails to clients, there are some crucial elements to take into consideration when contacting clients via email. Here are just some of the basic pointers. You can also go as far as thinking about the day of the week and time of day you send the email, to generate more readership. Do your research, have someone on your team who works on this and, over time, you’ll be surprised by the results.
Get approval
These days there are strict rules surrounding invasion of privacy and, in this instance, spam. Before you send an email to a customer or prospect, you need their approval for you to contact them. When filling out client forms or retaining any sort of information, use this as an opportunity to ask if they’d like to receive promotional information or emails relating to your products or services. Another thing to remember is the unsubscribe button. This is almost as important as the request for approval and needs to be evident in all your client communications. Do your research about what needs to be included, and add these to your email templates.
Quality Content
You know when you receive uninteresting snail mail in the post at home? Before you even look at it, it’s scrunched into a ball and thrown in the bin. Well, unless your emails have substance, the same thing is going to happen: instant deletion. If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say it at all. If you find your emails are lacking in quality content, send them out less frequently so that you have some interesting information when you do send something out. Of course, if you have a special promotion or some exciting news, you can deviate from the plan and send this out as a special bulletin.
Get Personal
Thanks to technology, we can now use real names in bulk email marketing campaigns, rather than just a ‘hi there’. Regardless of the software program you’re using, it should have the capability to perform this task. What you’ll need to do first is ensure your database captures information correctly, so that when your email is sent out, Mary isn’t receiving Robert’s letter.
Don’t bombard
No one likes to be hounded. If you bombard your clients with constant emails, they’ll very quickly unsubscribe. How much you have to tell people will drive how regularly you send emails. But consider also how many other businesses may also be emailing your clients and the sense of pressure or outright annoyance this creates. For your own email campaigns, once a week or fortnight is generally best and perhaps even as infrequently as once a month.
