By Rusty Wilson
With the return to prominence of email marketing, businesses everywhere are reaping its benefits to generate more leads, build better relationships, and boost sales.
If you’ve jumped back on the trend and kick-started your email marketing efforts, you’re not alone. The average customer is inundated with an average of 147 emails a day, making it harder than ever to create lead-converting email campaigns. On top of that, spam filters make it tricky to even reach a prospects inbox.
So how can you compete in this competitive medium and utilize the power of email to increase sales? These five innovative email marketing tips will show you how.
Tip #1: Widen Your Net
As direct marketing expert Dan Kennedy advises, anybody who only goes after an immediate sale is a fool; the same applies to email marketing. If each and every email you send is geared at getting a sale, you’re likely to miss out on those prospects who aren’t ready to buy just yet.
While it’s imperative that you have emails asking subscribers to buy, consider these emails the “fat” of your email marketing diet. They’re essential for keeping your business afloat, but without other important “nutrients,” your overall email marketing will fail to live up to its full potential.
Around 10 to 25 percent of your emails should be sales-oriented, while the remaining 75 to 90 percent should be building and strengthening your relationship with your audience. Consider including value-added items–offers that don’t directly sell your product–in your emails. Value-adding email marketing can help you build relationships with prospective customers and allow you to warm up leads that would have never responded to a “buy now” offer.
Value-added items can include:
White papers
Tickets to local events (they don’t have to be yours)
PDFs to download
Videos
Resources
You pretty much want to share anything that will get people to raise their hands and say, “That’s interesting, tell me more!”
Once you get prospects to raise their hands (even if they don’t immediately see the value of your product), you’ll be better able to cater future emails based on what they responded to. Herein lays the key to more targeted, high-converting email campaigns. We’ll see more of that in Tip #2.
Tip #2: Personalize beyond the basics
Long gone are the days when simply adding a customer’s first name to an email message was the best we could do to personalize the message. With advances in email technology, you now have the power to personalize your offers and sales points based on key behavioral indicators.
The great news is that if you’re already sending emails (newsletters, sales emails, informational emails, etc.) to a massive list of prospects, you should have a warehouse of metrics letting you know what subject lines, links, and resources each audience member responded to. By compiling this data, you can divide your list up and tailor emails to the specific desires, needs, and interests that correlate most strongly with each segment.
Although doing this will require more work, it’s an almost guaranteed way to boost conversions. Email services or customer relationship management programs are available that will make the job easier to do. While many of these automated services are pricey, they are well worth the returns and improved conversion rate that come with advanced targeting. And the more automated you can make behavioral targeting, the more time you’ll have to focus on closing appointments.
Tip #3: Strategize an Ironclad Plan
Don’t expect one e-blast to solve all your lead problems–or ten! A conversion strategy that relies on one single email is a recipe for failure. The key to email marketing sales success is to expect a majority of prospects not to respond, and then having a great comeback to increase your response rate.
If someone doesn’t respond to an email, most marketers and salespeople move on. Savvy marketers, however, listen to their “no’s.” In fact, they realize that every email sent creates a large pool of unsatisfied prospects.
Based on what doesn’t satisfy a customer, you can create multiple retries that are based not on guessing, but from leveraging behavioral data. This is known as the “if-then” approach.
If they don’t open an email -> then send it again with a different subject line.
If they don’t click on a link -> then highlight a different benefit for clicking.
Innovative email marketers take great pains to craft “if-then” marketing campaigns with a variety of paths that prospects fall into based on their behaviors. Although doing this requires extra work, it’s a surefire way to boost conversions. The reason it works, quite simply, is because you are not forcing your message onto prospects, but adapting what you say based on what prospects show interest or disinterest in.
One really effective way of using this approach is through newsletters or other email templates that have a variety of topics and headlines covering several aspects of your business. By sending these out to your list, you will be able to see which links were clicked on most. This data will give you insight into what topics are most popular. It can also be used to split up a larger list into smaller segments based on click behavior.
Tip #4: Don’t Expect Loyalty, Earn It
Want to know how successful a company’s email marketing is? Simply sign up to their email list and note how many times they send it to you. If they’re like most, you’ll receive a welcome email, a few offer emails, and never hear from them again. Compare this to companies built through email, such as Groupon or Living Social; with these, receive daily emails until you unsubscribe.
Herein leads us to Tip #4: Do not expect customer loyalty, earn it. If you want email marketing to boost sales and increase revenue, it’s critical that you email your list frequently.
As we discussed earlier, however, sending 100 percent sales-oriented emails may not work for your industry as it does for commerce-centered brands like Groupon. Therefore, it is important to build an email strategy that balances sales and relationship building into a cohesive whole. Monthly newsletters and holiday-themed emails are simple ways to stay in front of customers while strengthening relationships.
So how much is too much and when does sending emails go overboard? While there are many opinions and data on this, the best way to measure how much frequency is too much is based on profitability and conversions. If emailing 10 times a month is profitable, why would you not continue doing that? If, however, sending 11 emails is the tipping point to a negative ROI, go back to 10. It’s imperative that you study your performance data and allow it to guide your email communication strategy.
Remember, day-to-day loyalty is the product of day-to-day marketing.
Tip #5: Study Your Results, Fine-Tune, and Try Again
Email marketing has one primary purpose for business: making sales. Just as sales representatives have quotas and numbers to hit, your emails should have key metrics to hit as well. And with advanced technology you can easily test and fine-tune your emails to boost conversions.
Here are a few key email metrics to watch for, and how to optimize them for better conversions.
Email Open Rate–No matter how brilliant your email campaign may be, if the emails don’t get opened, you’re going to sink. There are two key factors that influence your open rate and should be tested frequently:
Subject lines
“From” fields
If your email open rate fluctuates with every send, most likely you should focus on testing subject lines to find which ones resonate best with your audience. If, however, you find your emails consistently get low open rates, the problem may be the “From” field.
One very effective tip is to try personalizing your From Address. Changing your From Address from a generic “XYZ Company” to “Bob at XYZ” could potentially get more people interested in what you have to say.
The key, of course, is to test. You will not know what works and what doesn’t without evaluating the numbers.
Click Rate–A great open rate means little if those who open the email do not click on the links you want them to. Your emails’ click rate gives a clear picture of whether your email is getting the desired action or not.
Should your email deliver low click rates of below 3 to 5 percent (depending on the type of email and link), this may be an indication of either:
Poor copy that doesn’t intrigue openers enough to click
Poor design that doesn’t visually guide viewers to click
Testing both copy and design are essential ways to boost click rate, and as a result, increase your conversions.
Email Marketing–Summing It Up
Email marketing is an open frontier with endless possibilities to optimize for conversions. If you find that your email marketing program isn’t converting well, the easiest way to fix this is to:
Test more.
Segment your list and personalize your email campaigns.
Send more frequently.
Implementing these practices is a surefire way to get your email marketing program to start converting more leads in no time.
About the Author
Post by: Rusty Wilson
Rusty Wilson is Director of Sales for Quotit Corporation, an insurance software industry leader that offers over 40,000 plan options and more than 300 carriers. To learn more about Quotit products visit www.quotit.com/quotit-software.
Company: Quotit Corporation
Website: www.quotit.com
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
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