Email Marketing is one of most low-cost, high-yield forms of marketing there is, so it’s no surprise that people are constantly trying to improve their numbers. Email marketing apps are a huge help in increasing productivity and effectiveness, but there’s a lot more you should be doing with your apps to ensure you have the largest impact. Here are 4 ways you can increase email marketing impact today.
1. Keep Your Emails Concise.
It turns out that short and sweet is the best way to be. According to a 2015 user analysis from email scheduler Boomerang, messages that fell between 50 to 125 words were most likely to get replies, with response rates a little higher than 50%. That means short sales pitches – get right to the point and save yourself the time you would have spent writing a novel to each person. If it seems impossible to cut down the content or there is a lot to be explained, the best call-to-action (CTA) might be to set up a phone call or sign up for a webinar.
2. But Don’t Forget to Personalize.
Just because people want short and concise emails doesn’t mean they want generic messaging. You still have to find a way to personalize. It’s shocking that only 39% of retailers send personalized product recommendations via email despite the fact that personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates.
According to an Experion survey, the biggest challenges with personalization are gaining insight quickly enough (40%), having enough data (39%), and inaccurate data (38%). Overcoming these challenges can usually be solved by integrating your apps – meaning the automatic transfer of data from a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool or eCommerce platform to your email marketing platform, leaving you with a 360 degree view of your customer, no duplicates or errors, and purchase history in real-time.
Tara Humphries, the Head of Digital Marketing at WavHello, understands the difficulties of getting email personalization going, but feels like the results makes it more than worth it.
“We use Marketo almost like a CRM, which is only possible if new transactions are being transferred from Shopify (eComm platform) to Marketo (email marketing platform) without duplicates,” said Tara. “Since we set up an integration between Marketo and Shopify, we can send segmented emails based on what each customer has purchased in the past. This has increased our repeat customers by 65%.”
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3. Be Data-Driven.
Experts predict that data-driven marketing is going to rule the future and that means the analytics within most email marketing tools aren’t enough to fuel growth decisions. You need to break down the silos that individually hold information on the same customer and make sure that every detail is visible across departments. That means creating a full, 360 degree view of the person behind each email address you have. What are their past purchases? What is their area code? Have they contacted support before?
With all of these data points in one place, you can create more meaningful insights to drive your email marketing efforts. Measure your campaigns by revenue earned vs. just clicks or create drip marketing campaigns that follow up with customers depending on milestones.
4. Set Up a Lead Cleansing Routine.
The SiriusDecisions 1-10-100 Rule by W. Edwards Deming goes as follows: “It costs about $1 to verify a record as it is entered, about $10 dollars to fix it later, and $100 if nothing is done, as the ramifications of the mistakes are felt over and over again.” Having good, clean lead data not only helps you increase your conversion rates, but it saves money in the long run. Lead cleansing is time consuming and therefore often overlooked, but it’s important to start getting in the habit of doing it today.
Lead cleansing doesn’t have to be difficult and should happen each time a new lead comes in, preferably before you send your first email to that lead. Marc Mastrocola set up a compelling lead cleansing and growth hacking system while running operations at machine learning company H2O.ai. He used an app called People Task to request further information on each lead. First, an employee will determine if this is a real lead or spam. Then he/she will fill in more information on the lead that will be useful for the team, such as the lead’s LinkedIn profile URL, their job title, industry, and city. This human review process not only cleanses the lead pool of bad leads, but enriches the available data. All of these preliminary pieces of information are things that a salesperson might individually research before a phone call, but this automates the information gathering process so that it is always on hand and digitally recorded for more powerful data comparison.
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