One of the valuable assets an organization has is its email list. It's also one of the most underused assets. According to a 2020 report, 66% of all businesses don't use their email list to communicate with customers or promote their business.
That's a big mistake. Email is an inexpensive and effective way to deliver messages to your prospects and past customers. It is one of the best ways to increase the lifetime value of each customer. With a higher customer lifetime value, organizations can afford to spend more to acquire each customer and thus outspend the competition to increase market share.
Here are five awesome email marketing strategies DAP uses to grow our own agency and to help our clients grow their own organizations:
1. Finding Creative Ways to Brand Emails
Branding plays a role in every marketing campaign. Your brand is your organization's identity, the first thing people think of when your organization comes to mind. It's natural to want your branding to be front-and-center in your outreach to your prospects and customers.
Email marketing is not exempt ... but it does have to be handled delicately. Your emails are worthless if no one opens your emails or clicks on the offer links you include in them. Everything we do has to be with an eye toward increasing the open and click-through rates of our emails.
Many branding techniques that work on your website or social media campaigns actually undermine your clickthrough rate. Remember, email subscribers have invited you into their email inbox, their personal digital space. In theory, it's an honor that they usually reserve for friends, colleagues, and family members.
If you shout at them in that space with brand colors and slogans, expect ignored emails, unsubscribes, and spam tags that will reduce the overall deliverability of your entire email domain.
People will open emails, however, if they are from people. Pinpointe Marketing observed a whopping 35% increase in open rates for emails that come from accounts with a personal name, not a brand name.
So how do you brand a personal name? With personal branding, naturally. Personal branding isn't just for Instagram influencers-it forms a part of every branding campaign we do, if for no other reason than to establish an "attractive character" as the sender of your email campaigns.
Another key avenue of email branding is the writing style, including the subject lines and the body. We carefully build an email style guide to include subtle branding, while maintaining the appearance of a dashed-off text email from a friend, rather than a marketing message from an organization.
2. Using the Welcome Email Sequence to Tell the Brand Story
Most organizations know that they need to send a "Welcome" email to new subscribers, but they often miss a valuable opportunity to form a bond with those new subscribers as part of that all-important first impression.
Monetizing an email list is all about building a relationship with your subscribers, not just spamming them with content and offers. If your subscribers are excited to see your name pop up in their inbox, you have an email list that is worth its weight in gold.
According to Get Response, welcome emails have a massive 82% open rate, compared to 21% for standard emails. We get our clients started on the right foot by using the welcome email as a chance to tell the brand's story-again, in the voice of the "attractive character" who represents the personalized face of the brand.
We don't just do one long email telling the story, either. Most prospects don't have that kind of time to devote to one long email. Instead, we give them a "teaser" for the story in the welcome email and tell them to look forward to that email tomorrow.
Then the brand's story then unfolds over a series of first-person narrative emails over the next 5-7 days, each email ending with a cliffhanger and teasing the next day's email installment. Do it right, and the new subscriber will treat your brand story like appointment television, waiting with baited breath for your next email. The increased open rate and subscriber buy-in from this strategy are priceless.
3. Segmenting the List for Easy Personalization
Many organizations have no more personalization to their emails than the [FirstName] shortcode, but the secret is out-you're not individually writing every member of your list, and the subscribers know it. Email personalization in 2021 is much bigger a deal than that.
Marketing is all about getting the right message in front of the right prospect. How do you identify the right prospect for a particular message? With a segmented list-a list tagged and divided according to different subscriber characteristics-you can create email messages with actual personalization.
You can segment your list by demographics (sex, age, etc), geography, which product they purchased (if any), when they purchased, etc. This way, you can create automated, customized follow-up emails that refer to specific characteristics of the prospect, or specific actions they may have recently taken. You can also make targeted upsell and cross-sell offers. Your prospects will be more likely to bite at these offers, because you are speaking their language and engaged with their behavior.
4. Creating a Newsletter
Content marketing forms a major part of nearly every client strategy we execute. It's one of the highest-margin long-term marketing strategies. One easy way to magnify the impact of our content strategy is to create a monthly or weekly "newsletter" email.
A newsletter doesn't have to be complicated or intricate. We just round up the content we deployed in that time period into an easy-to-read digest with links. In addition to providing another opportunity to engage your subscriber list, this strategy has the added benefit of driving more traffic to your website.
5. Choosing a Secure Email Provider
Email security is everybody's business, and we take our responsibility to our clients seriously. 60% of all small and medium-sized businesses fail within six months of suffering a data breach.
Email is actually a key vector of attacks like Phishing and social engineering. We don't use just any old provider; we take care to work only with the most secure email providers to make sure our efforts don't put our clients' valuable data and reputation at risk.
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Email marketing is a powerful tool to build out the back-end of your organization. These five strategies help us maximize the return our clients get on that investment, enabling them to grow, scale, expand their product and service stack, and meet or exceed their revenue goals.
