Email marketing should play an integral part in your company’s overall inbound strategy. Inbound marketing is centred around human connection, and email allows you to build strong relationships with your clients through highly personalised conversations.
Say you have 2,000 contacts in your database. How do you make each email feel personal to each of those people?
I hear someone in the back shouting <insert name>! Yes, and no. While addressing your contacts using their first name makes for a more personal, human experience, what good is it when the rest of the email feels irrelevant? (Hint: precisely zero good.)
Which brings us to segmentation!
Segmentation is extremely important — that is, breaking your contacts list up into smaller chunks, so you can create and send out better-targeted content. What are some criteria or characteristics you should divide your contacts by? To ensure you’re sending out the right content to the right people, think about your buyer personas and where they are in terms of their buyer’s journey. Ask yourself, who is this person? What are their needs? Have they bought one of your products before? Will your email offer them something of value? How often do they expect to hear from you?
Emailing your buyers irrelevant content or contacting them more often than they would want can result in their unsubscribing from your emailing list! Get in their shoes first, act later.
Once your contacts list has been divided into categories, you can begin writing up your emails. Set a goal for every single one you’ll be sending out. Think about what this email is trying to achieve — are you simply sending out a newsletter with your latest updates, or is there a specific call to action you’d like your recipients to respond to? Make sure your aim is clear, and that the layout of your email guides the user; if you include too much information or get your goals all tangled your customers will likely get confused and frustrated reading the contents.
Closely linked to segmentation, setting a clear goal for your email is also crucial in providing your customers with a highly personal experience!
Before hitting send, proofread. For the love of dictionaries, please use spell check. Mistakes can and do happen, but there are ways to minimise your chances of sending out a mass “Happy Holiadys” to your customers. Nobody likes holiadys, especially the happy kind.
Email your latest creation to yourself or your colleagues before you send it out to a segment in your database. See what it looks like, get some feedback, ensure any errors have been eliminated!
Finally, please make sure you have verifiable permission to contact the people you’re sending out emails to. Non-consensual stuff is annoying at best.
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