Email marketing is considered one of the most effective marketing channels with 36% of companies producing £51 or more for each £1 spent (National Client Email Report, 2015). However, having not having the knowledge, time and tools can get in the way of making solid progress. So here are a few pointers on how you can take your email marketing to the next level?
1. It’s all about personalisation
If you don’t have at least one initiative towards personalisation in 2016 you won’t see huge strides in performance. Personalisation isn’t simply merging a name into an email but making the content tailored, and relevant to the individual.
A simple starting point is usually to test a few targeted versions of an email – maybe based upon past purchase history. From this, you will get a flavour of the increase in performance of something basic and give you the motivation to plough on putting a comprehensive personalisation strategy together. However, make sure it’s not simply a handful of segments you will have slightly more chance of being relevant with, otherwise, you will soon exhaust any improvements.
2. Trigger, trigger, trigger
There are always more triggers you can deploy. Even if you have the full suite of touch points across the lifecycle such as welcome, nurture, re-purchase, reactivation and conversion, you can be more granular with your targeting. For example, how should you treat those who were previous regular shoppers that haven’t purchased in the last 6 months versus those who only ever bought once?
3. Inspire
We sometimes lose sight on creativity with email marketing when we have all these amazing pieces of technology to set up automated, personalised emails. In a crowded inbox, we all need to fight harder for attention and great creative can provide that added impact to get your message seen and digested.
4. Am I doing the right thing?
Who should we focus our email marketing initiatives on? Where is there the biggest opportunity? A great place to start is in the data you already own and have the ability to analyse by segment what open, click and conversion rates are. From here you will find differences in performance and the idea is to find large segments of customers that underperform compared to others. If you can focus your efforts on planning how to increase their performance to the benchmark level it is far easier to achieve that a global performance increase across the board.
5. Just do it
Everyone talks about being agile nowadays. It’s the latest buzz phrase yet ideal for email marketers to embrace. We can easily setup little experiments or pilots to small groups of customers to get an immediate understanding of what works and why. Ditch the large planning time and simply dive in on a small scale to reduce barriers to getting your initiatives going.
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