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Email marketing is one of the marketing forms that entrepreneurs use to get more return on investment from marketing and sales. Research reveals that for every $1 spent on email marketing, you get $38 in return. In addition, the current statistics show that over 1.5 billion people are active email users, which could be potential customers.
Research shows that email marketing campaigns achieve an engagement rate of 22.86% compared to a 0.6% social media engagement rate. This makes email marketing one of the most important marketing strategies and forms that entrepreneurs should consider to get to the target audience.
Email Marketing Automation
Direct email marketing is not enough. You need to do automation too. Email automation is a process where you send targeted email campaigns to your customers through a pre-built and self-operating system.
Email marketing automation is a strategy in which email marketers send triggered or timed emails to subscriber lists.
Benefits Of Email Marketing Automation
Saves time - Automation allows you to schedule campaigns that go out when you intend them to go out. Automation handles your database and aligns all the information to use at your convenience. In addition, the process frees up time for you to carry out other relevant tasks.
Prospecting - While every company starts small, the goal is to achieve scale and grow as a company and brand. But unfortunately, circumstances are going to force you to scale. Email Automation software provides analyses, growth reports and forecasts, which can help you prospect and be proofed against any troubles in the future.
Email Marketing can't work alone.
You are only tracking your prospects' open and click-through rates with direct email marketing. These leads are not ready enough for the sales team to pursue and lead into a conversion.
Additionally, with email marketing alone, you can't ably tell in what buying stage your buyers are. So in the end, you will be sending out blast emails to all prospects without consideration of their stage in the cycle.
Relying on essential email marketing is not scalable if you are a growing company. The more leads you have in your database or campaigns you want to run, the more time-consuming it becomes to create mass blasts.
In the above scenarios, you need to merge marketing automation with email marketing for premium results in your marketing efforts. Generic marketing is not directed to anyone, and hence it might not get you conversions. There are so many things to focus on when communicating with your customers. The more relevant the message is to the customer's needs, the more the reader's attention is drawn closer, and they are likely to keep open your mails consistently. This encourages a higher conversion rate. Sending relevant emails improves open and clickthrough rates.
The marketing team is tasked with formulating goals for their marketing automation campaigns, and these should be in line with what the organization is looking to achieve. These goals can include signing up for a newsletter, filling out a form, and purchasing a product/service.
The Best Email Marketing Automation Strategies To Optimize Your Marketing
An email marketing automation strategy can be defined as a set of procedures that an email marketer follows through automated tasks to achieve the intended marketing goals through email marketing.
An email marketing automation strategy requires significant planning and forethought. By dedicating time to planning your email marketing strategy, you can meet your goals more effectively and create the best campaigns possible.
1. Set email marketing goals
Setting goals for your team and the campaign is good motivation for great performance. The goals should be in line with your business goals. After the goals have been set, you can know how to go forward with newsletter templates, visuals, copy, and other important aspects of email marketing.
2. Identify Your Target Audience
Knowing your target market and the audience is very key for your business. To know your business, you might need to have a buyer persona in place; this helps you know your target audience, what kind of things they like, where they are, and their preferences. Additionally, your buyer persona should include; demographic information about your supporters or purchasers.
This information includes; age, gender, income, what they do, and any other thing you would like to know about your customers. Finally, you can ask your audience what drives them and the problems your product or service can address concerning the above.
3. Divide your email lists according to buyer persona
Segmenting and dividing email lists involves categorizing your audience according to their specific needs and interests. The audience can be categorized into different groups; for instance, if you have an audience that shares mutual interests, you can put them in their group. Most people open and read emails that serve and speak to their preferences. Having your audience categorized differently helps to draft different email newsletter lists so that you can share with different target audiences depending on interests.
Having multiple email newsletter lists for the different target audiences helps boost the subscription rate from the business website visitors. In addition, it is noted that sales representatives and marketers who used segmented campaigns improved revenue for the business by about 760%.
4. Customize your emails to your prospective and potential customers
Giving an email a personalized connection shows the recipient that you took time and thought about them. This makes the reader gain some glimmer of interest.
Including the recipient in the email improves the reader's trust and motivates them to act, making nurturing easy.
Take-home tips for personalizing emails to recipients;
Add your first name
Send messages as an individual and not a company
Put up email gated landing pages to collect customer names and data
Customize your automated triggered emails.
Getting a chance to interact and exchange with a customer is an opportunity to showcase your product and speak to a potential buyer. In addition, adding your names to the email message gains the trust and confidence of a client. This could help you elongate your conversation with a client and finally convince them to make a sale.
5. Run A/B test to track results and measure performance
Tracking results to determine the performance of an email marketing campaign is vital. To run an A/B test, you need to send your campaign to two segments in your email contact list. Then check the view rates, open rates and clickthroughs.
Tracking results depends on your key performance indicators. In this case, the key performance indicators could be sales conversion, click-through rate, open rate, view rate and delivery rate.
You can track performance results by;
Doing an A/B test of your email copy on two or more contact segments
Measure the results of each email campaign to test performance
Use performance results to optimize and grow your conversion rate
6. Match your landing pages and email copy
To create a conducive and fantastic experience for your customers, matching your landing page and email marketing campaign is vital. A consistent and single visual image builds trust amongst customers, which keeps them around your page. This helps you increase sales conversion. Therefore, keep your landing page copy and email message copy the same.
Keynotes to help you match your email copy and landing page;
Improve sales conversions by aligning email campaign with the landing pages
Make cohesive and compelling visuals and text for your campaigns
Simplify the work of your prospective customers so that they can identify your ask.