
You don’t need to look far to realise it takes a savvy marketer to weather this storm. With the latest reports indicating that marketing budgets are continuing to fall (The Q3 Bellwether report highlights 35% of marketing budgets are being revised downwards), I think it’s time for marketers to really look hard to see how their budgets can be maximised.
It’s a time when every penny counts and only the most effective and provable channels are being used, so – step forward email marketing!
In the B2C world email is widely regarded as the most effective form of marketing spend, with campaigns generating upwards of £25 for every £1 spent. Although popular with B2B marketers, the email hasn’t had the same impact on the bottom line.
There are tactics that you can adopt that will help you to generate the best return and revenue every time.
Ensure email is integrated into your overall strategy
If email operates in isolation you are missing out on the real opportunities and results the channel can bring your business. Email not only provides a good mechanism for communicating with customers and prospects, but lets you learn more about them. Integration should be two way; your business should know what is happening from your email communications and your email communications should know what is happening in the rest of the business.
As an example, let the rest of the business know who’s interacting with your emails, when and how. Let your sale team know which prospects have opened your emails or your account managers know which clients have shown an interest in a particular product. This is vital information to helping them close business, and in short prove the impact marketers are having on the business.
Conversely if you are aware of where someone is in the buying cycle, the email communications can be tailored to ensure the recipient receives the most relevant information. This helps to close the deal or an unhappy customer could be sent a better deal.
Really understand your customer
All too often we fall into the mistake of thinking about someone as an email address or a segment of our database. Remember they are not; they are an individual who sits behind the computer and ultimately makes the decision to buy your products or services.
Whether you meet the prospect or customer face-to-face or engage them online, ask them questions (collect their data). This enables you to get to know them. Remember you don’t need to ask them everything straight away. You can learn more about them as your relationship blossoms.
Asking for a little often is usually better than asking for everything straight away and it also shows you are interested and care about them.
The golden rule is to ask questions that give you information to enable you to deliver emails that people / customers / prospects really want and need.
Follow up info@, enquiries@ and any other generic email addresses
Generic email addresses such as info@ are usually used by groups of people within a business, all who will have different agendas, objectives and interests. How can you talk to them all as individuals? You can’t! Take the time to call a customer who provides a generic address to find out more about them and get their own business address. You can then build a relationship and talk to them individually.
Failure to follow up on generic addresses can have a negative impact on your email marketing activity. People sending to these addresses are often blocked or filtered prior to delivery. Even worse still many blacklists use generic addresses as a method of monitoring for “spammers”. Removing these generic addresses from your database will help to improve your campaign delivery and ultimately response rates.
Be relevant all of the time
Successful email marketing is built upon giving the customers what they want, when they want it. Or in other words ensure that the content of every message you send is relevant and of benefit to the customer and meets their expectations. If you have integrated email into your business and really know your customer it should be very easy to be relevant when you send them email communications. Profiling your customer data, analysing recipient behaviour and talking to the customer facing people within your business will enable you to deliver relevant and timely information to your recipients.
Consider that your email communications like your business has a brand value, it’s not enough to be relevant some of the time you need to be relevant all of the time. Every time you send an email that isn’t valuable to your recipients it erodes your email brand value and the next time the recipient receives an email they are that little bit less likely to open and interact with it.
Be relevant all of the time and you will run campaigns that deliver results and your return on investment will soar. Surely something worth trying in these troubled times of credit crunches and marketing budget cuts?
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