Many new marketing channels continue to pop up as new technologies enter the marketplace. Despite the new channels, one thing remains true. Email Marketing continues to be a channel that proves to yield high ROI. The level of personalization and customization continues to grow, making email marketing even more profitable than it was a few years ago.
Email marketers should consider implementing these four email strategies to stay ahead of the competition and generate strong results.
1. Personalization will put the right content in front of the right prospects at the right time
Consumers not only want personalization, they expect it. When they are targeted through email just like everyone else, click rates and conversion rates are lower. Email marketing content can and should be more deliberate based on customers behaviour. When personalization was something new, the idea of using data was sometimes seen as intrusive. Now, using data to create a more personalized email in a deliberate way can deliver success. Marketers are starting to test AI platforms to deliver more personalized unique email experiences. This innovation in technology should enable marketers to identify content combinations that perform better, faster and more efficiently.
2. Lead nurturing converts more prospects to customers
As a marketer, you want to be as efficient with your time and generate the best results possible. While it would be nice to send an email to a prospect or lead and have them become a customer in one try, that doesn’t usually happen. This is why lead nurturing is so important. Lead nurturing is developing relationships with leads and nurturing them through the buying process.
More than half the people in a company’s CRM are not ready to buy. Contacts can enter a CRM in several different ways: downloading a lead magnet, providing a business card at an event, cold outreach campaign, etc. When someone provides you with an email address, this does not mean they are ready to purchase or even ready to engage in conversation. Lead nurturing is providing relevant targeted content that helps them understand that value of what your business offers. When scaling a business and collecting more and more leads every year, it’s essential to utilize automation resources for your lead nurturing to make sure you’re touching your audience at every step of the buying process. When a business focuses on lead nurturing, they make 50 percent more sales at a 33 percent lower cost.
3. The rise of interactive content is resulting in highly engaged leads
A great way to stand out and deliver value with email is by providing something different and unique. Interactive content is becoming more common and for good reason. With interactive content, marketers can attract an audience, increase engagement, boost site traffic and improve conversion rates. Our attention span today is shorter than ever with people using their smartphones constantly or having a million tabs open on their computers.
How are you going to win the attention of your prospect? Additionally, the world has gone mobile and with everyone using apps for basically everything, mobile users expect interactivity since apps are much more engaging than web pages. People want to interact. Humans naturally learn best by doing so when we create content to engage our audience, they will likely enjoy it a lot more as well. Create interactive content such as a tool, quiz, assessment that allow prospects to do more than simply read.
4. Quality over quantity (deliverability + greater spend in targeted digital acquisition)
Deliverability has become a serious concern for marketers. Due to poor data management and increased standards from major ISPs like Gmail, Yahoo and AOL, emails can quickly land in the SPAM folder, or the promotions folder in the case of Gmail, making all that hard work in creative useless. To ensure that emails reach everyone on the distribution list, it’s important to send relevant content to a list of people who actually want to hear from you.
Focusing on the quality of the email and the quality of the list will yield much better results than focusing on the number of emails sent to the largest list possible.To become better at quality over quantity, embracing segmentation, data and email verification will be more important.
Email is forever changing but it continues to be a channel that can have a positive ROI if done correctly. Just like with any marketing channel, it’s important to know how to continue to win in that channel. What was done 1, 3 or 5 years ago won’t continue to bring the same results. New rules, technologies, consumer behaviours
