KEV IN PARTNER
Want to earn more from existing customers? Kevin explains how to personalise your emails and provides five tips to boost customer numbers
Want to earn more from existing customers? Kevin explains how to personalise your emails and provides five tips to boost customer numbers.
Despite the rise of social media, email is still king of the internet marketing heap. I ran a promotion recently with a group of other creatives, using a combination of email, Facebook and Twitter promotion, and you won’t believe what happened next. Over the period of the promotion, 87% of transactions could be attributed to an email, 8% to Facebook and the rest to Twitter. This, despite the social media audiences being an order of magnitude bigger than email lists.
The continuing effectiveness of email makes it all the more surprising that marketers don’t innovate in their communications with customers. For example, it’s common to use an email sequence to sell a product. The sequence usually begins with educational content and ends with the selling phase. Wouldn’t it be nice if the marketer stopped sending sales emails once you’d bought the product, perhaps opting for a welcome email and tips on using it instead? By doing this, emails appear less impersonal to the customer and they feel they’re getting the information they need – rather than being blasted by spam.
Similarly, many people sign up for an email newsletter because they like the overall content, but end up ignoring emails because too many are irrelevant. It’s common for larger firms to have several lists into which they sort customers, based either on past behaviour or what the marketers think they might be interested in. However, it’s much more effective to give subscribers the option, within any message, to opt out of subjects that don’t interest them without unsubscribing from the list as a whole.
Debenhams, for instance, becomes interesting to me precisely twice a year: before Christmas and around the time of my wife’s birthday. The rest of the time, its emails lie unopened in my inbox.
The two faces of marketing email
Broadcast emails are one-off messages to a mailing list. They’re most often used to promote specific events, such as sales, so if customers open the email too late then the offer might have expired. Broadcast messages are the default form for email marketing, since they’re both easy to set up and can produce instant results.
Autoresponder sequences (often called automations), however, are the bread and butter of most long-term internet marketing campaigns, producing results month in, month out, as new subscribers join the list. According to email analytics firm Litmus, while automated messages make up only around 5% of the emails sent by a firm, they contribute more of its income than any other form. Traditionally, an autoresponder begins as soon as a subscriber signs up; emails are sent at a set interval until the pre-programmed sequence is complete.
As inboxes fill up and the number of marketing messages a customer receives passes the saturation point, the days of “set and forget” are behind us. As marketers, whether that’s on behalf of a corporation or our own micro-enterprise, we need to become cleverer with the way we use and encourage our customers’ attention.
Relevant, informed and personal
One way to get future customers onto your mailing list is to offer something they value in exchange for their email address. Classically, this would be a report written to appeal to the specific market the business is targeting. Having provided their email address, the subscriber expects to immediately receive a link to download their report. This is typically the first email in a sequence that both expands on the information already provided and prepares the way for a later sale.
However, these sequences are almost always linear and assume the subscriber has both downloaded and read the report. If they haven’t done either, the later messages are irrelevant and will likely be ignored. A better approach, then, is to set up the automation so that it takes a different path, one that depends on the actions of the subscriber.
For example, if the subscriber doesn’t click the link to download their report, the next email should be a gentle reminder to do so. Those who do click it receive a different message – one that thanks them for downloading it and, perhaps, offers suggestions about the best way to consume the material. This same message is sent to those that didn’t download the message at first, but subsequently clicked on the link; subscribers that never click the link are removed from the automation sequence entirely.
“Debenhams becomes interesting to me twice a year; the rest of the time its emails lie unopened”
Which email provider?
All the main email marketing services offer automation of some sort, but the level of sophistication varies according to price. MailChimp ( mailchimp.com) is the default choice of most marketers and has been beefing up its automation in the past couple of years to the extent that it can now, for example, send an email based on whether a link has been clicked. MailChimp also integrates with many other services, including several ecommerce providers, so it can be used to send emails to customers who abandon their shopping carts. This is an effective way of increasing your conversion rate at no extra cost.
MailerLite ( mailerlite.com) is a cheaper alternative to MailChimp and is my favourite budget service. It offers most of its competitor’s features, but its new automation workflow is easier to use than that of MailChimp, amounting to draggingand-dropping a flowchart with decision blocks and multiple email sequences all in one automation.
Compared to MailChimp and MailerLite, ConvertKit ( convertkit. com) offers a step up in the sort of personalisation you can use. By adding tags to subscribers in response to their actions, you can set up different automations for different combinations of tags. For example, you may have a tag that’s automatically set when a subscriber completes a purchase. You then know not to ever email them again asking them to buy that product.
ConvertKit is powerful, but expensive. For a smallish list of 2,000 subscribers, it charges $49; MailChimp is $25 and MailerLite $10. ConvertKit is only worth the extra if the subscribers on that list are valuable enough to justify the extra expense – and if you’d convert more of them into customers as a result. A small firm building a list by sending out a monthly newsletter with the aim of keeping themselves in their customers’ minds would be better off with MailerLite.
Whichever tool you use, the success of your email marketing depends on how you exploit its potential: successful email marketing is about getting the message right. And, to do that, marketers need to worry less about what they want to say and more about what customers want to read.
Five ways to use email to boost conversion 1
Abandoned cart reminders Typically, only around 10% of visitors to an online shop will add products to their shopping cart – and of those, between 30% and 50% will buy. Of those who leave the site without buying, some will be because they were distracted or unable to complete the transaction at that time. By sending a well-written, polite email the following day, you’ll convert at least some of these to paying customers. Almost all ecommerce systems will preserve the contents of a cart for a while, so the customer doesn’t usually need to add their products again.
I’ve tested this at my online retailer and routinely rescue sales that would otherwise have been lost. Some ecommerce providers include this functionality, and MailChimp integrates with others, so the process is entirely automated. I’m sure you’ve noticed that, for all the effort most firms put into their sales emails, when it comes to your order confirmation and shipping notice, the message looks as though it’s been spewed straight out of a database, without ever passing across a designer’s desk. And yet it is here that the customer is most positive about you and your company. In most cases, you’ll have tried to generate enthusiasm in the customer during the sales process; this should continue afterwards. Once they’ve bought, it’s the perfect opportunity to reinforce your brand and to make the customer feel good about their purchase and about doing business with you again in the future. You may even be able to cross-sell or offer a discount on future purchases. Ask subscribers what interests them early on and send emails on those subjects – in automated sequences and as broadcasts. For example, if Debenhams bothered to ask me about my buying habits, it would send me emails about women’s boots at Christmas and not in between.
“Marketers need to worry less about what they want to say and more about what customers want to read”
Most emails read as if they were written by a machine. In an ever more crowded inbox, you can make your emails stand out by projecting your personality into them. This won’t be appropriate for some businesses, but, in general, customers like to feel they’re dealing with people rather than corporate systems. Having said that, you should avoid the sort of fake personality used by the biggest firms, particularly in the media industry. There’s a lot to be said for having a regular schedule of email broadcasts, but don’t think that customers will miss it if you skip one. In general, they’re not that interested in you. This schedule exists to get you into the habit of formulating a regular email, but it shouldn’t mean you send one when you have nothing to say. Every email must be interesting: if you’re busy planning a major launch, the last thing you should do is send a filler message the week before. All that achieves is to lower the open rate for your launch email.