1 email doesn’t make a campaign

Email is a great method for selling and getting your product or message in front of users. But having a potential customer see your message is one thing, but how do you go about motivating them to take action ? Here a few tips we’ve been thinking about for the last couple of weeks, when we were putting together our Email Lifecycle product.

Increase the interactivity

How often are you contacting your customers ? Is this communicated when they sign up for your list. A simple welcome email, with some links, tips and possibly extra information from your blog a few days after they sign up can really be beneficial. It sets the tone of the relationship from an early stage, and you are less likely to get a high number of unsubscribes when you deliver your next campaign

If your business only sends out emails every quarter, it may be relatively quite some time before they from your company again. But sending them offers or information about on going promotions just after they’ve signed up will reinforce the connection to your business.Most email marketing systems allow you to segment your users by signup date, so why not contact people who’ve recently signed up ? You can use the opportunity to welcome them to your mailing list, discuss something topic or new on your website, and start to open up the communication. Make it more personal by saying things like,

Seeing as you’ve recently signed up we’d like to welcome you to our email list on X. Here at Y company we’ve been working on a number of tasks during the month of August, like WYT. Here’s a link to our blog post that we wrote last week, it’s about how W was developed over the past 2 years. We’ve also seen that many of of customers are interested in buying Y when they purchase T. These are the two most popular products we had since we last summer.

If I could ask you one question, maybe could you share with me one thing you love about our company / product ?

In this example I used the date reference to remind people that this is an email that was specifically crafted for new members to your list, not  just for everyone. Again, I’ll reiterate, you want people to open and read the emails you send to them. By being more personable  you’ll achieve better open rates. Openly asking for feedback is one way to achieve this.

Types of emails to send

If you are just sending out a newsletter with your companies latest products, perhaps you could think of adding in some of the following to make it more compelling :

• special offers
• reminders that special offers are expiring
• what’s hot in the industry
• topical news around your product
• use cases & case studies
• customer testimonials or stories about how they used your product
• ask for feedback
• run a competition
• ask users to interact on social media or share the email
• etc.

Pre-selling / conditioning for new products

On a launch of a new product, having a single campaign saying that “X is now in your store“, simply isn’t enough. We recommend that you send an email or two before the launch giving a sneak peak about what you are up to, trying to stoke the interest in your product. If you are only going to contact a person once about your new news, you may find that you’ve reached them at a busy time, and your email will simply be browsed over.

By sending more emails and emails that have a higher value than just a sales pitch, the more likely they will read and take action when you want them to. Sending a single email doesn’t make it into a campaign. One of the great advantages of most email software is that these emails can be scheduled, so you can prepared them as part of your marketing and launch effort in advance.

How much is an email address worth ?

There have been reports that an email address can be worth over €100 [1] to a business. An customers email address is only going to be worth this if you maximise how you interact with them and try to keep them engaged with your brand. Sending regular emails with useful content will help you reach this goal.

Remember that email marketing is a push permission  marketing. They are allowing you to push information to them whenever you want. Of course they can elect to leave your list at any time, but right now they have given you permission to contact them when you see fit. This type of relationship needs to be maintained. Being able to remind people to visit your website is a very useful tool. The likely hood that someone is spontaneously going to visit your website without some type of reminder is low.

Email is not just about sales, it’s education

While we did say in the first paragraph that email is a great way of getting people to buy, it also serves a much more important service, namely education. You can’t expect that your customer will automatically know all the benefits or features that your product offers. Sending some information on tips for usage, how other people interacted the item isn’t a direct sales pitch, it’s more of an education. In fact this is one of the reasons why email is such a great way to educate people. In fact this is something we are working on with EmailTrainer.com, but more on that later.

If you have a software as a service business, you will certainly want to educate and engage with your paying customer to decrease the churn rate. You should have a system in place to reach out to potential flight risk customers. You’ve done the hardest part already, to get them in the door and pay, but now your focus should be on how you can best keep them. For example being in the position to notice that a user has only used 10% of your features, and hasn’t logged in in a few weeks. These types of customers would definitely benefit from an ‘educational email’.

Email Lifecycle product

If you would like help with getting to grips with your email campaigns check our this our Email Lifecycle product