Email Marketing that Works!

You may have heard that email marketing is dead. But Blake Puryear at Engine Commerce, says, you couldn’t be more wrong.

“Building a list is challenging. If you want to go easy mode and try to get likes and clicks on facebook, that’s fine, but I would say there is an art and science behind building an email list, where you own that data. If you build your entire audience off a one percent look alike on facebook, you don’t own that. You own every single email address on the list you have acquired and you can reach them and can you use that data across all your platforms.”

— BLAKE PURYEAR

So how do you use email marketing well? Why fuss over your customer’s journey step by step?

A customer’s journey is defined as a particular timeline of events that leads from the introduction to your product or service to the actual purchase and review of your product or service. The steps that get them from exploring who you are to becoming your biggest fan, are not only different, but extremely important to optimizing your success.

So where do I start?

  1. Top of the Funnel- Starting at the top of your funnel with your customers mean usually your customers are introduced to your brand through a facebook ad or through visiting your website. This is when you can be the most varied.
  2. Mid-funnel– This is where you generally retarget your audience. Retargeting is where a customer might view a product and they begin to notice that particular product follows them through ads on other websites or apps. This is where is important to make the most impact. This where you would put your hard sell or coupon offer to drive them to next stop. It is important to note that during this process to vary your graphics and ads. Customers will get bored of the same image over and over, simply changing small aspects of your graphic will give your audience a reason to stop and pause on your ad.
  3. End of the funnel– This is where your customer is ready to purchase or has an item in their cart. We have all placed items in our cart to later abandon our carts and go on to our next task. Keeping your interactions as tight as possible at this stage will help you not let customers slip through your fingers.

So why are they abandoning their cart? Why are they not responding to a particular ad? Who should I be focusing on during each step?

These are all good questions to be asking when reviewing your customer journey. Investigating and analyzing each step of your customer journey ensures that you speak to the needs and concerns of your audience every step of the way.

Quick tips to help with this:

  1. Ensure that your audience are segmented from the get go. Know who you are addressing and when. For example, when audiences are falling off the map from your brand, this is when to hit them with the most dynamic content you have. When you have an audience that is new to your brand, it is time to give them introductions to who you are and why you do what you do.
  2. You content is important- Make sure to provide creative content that introduces you and your brand well and that is of high quality. Create enough that your audience does not get bored of seeing that same thing over and over.

How do I do this with email?

First, it is important to establish, as stated above, email is far from dead. Email is still used every day for communication. However, the strategies for using email campaigns has changed drastically, which has led some to believe that email campaigns no longer work. Change up your email campaign by following a few of these tips:

“We can peg 40 cent to 1.55 per email sent on a welcome series.  If you are acquiring customers and adding email addresses and they fall under this flow, every time an email gets sent you are going to make .40 to a 1.55, which reduces your customer acquisition cost and then builds true fans over time.”

— BLAKE PURYEAR

  1. Create a welcome series of emails. This is incredibly important for your brand and can be sent over a span of weeks to make sure you do not hit your customers too hard with too much information. Engine Commerce uses a 4 week email campaign that give an introduction/thank you for signing up, a hand written note from the CEO, information about the product/service they offer, and what to expect from here on out.
  2. Create automated work flows for particular customer situations: This can look like creating work flows for product view or action or for cart abandonment.
  3. Put your CTA (Call to action) “above the fold”. You call to action should be at the top of your email where it can be easily viewed on any mobile device or desktop. All your links also should have a button.
  4. Choose a metric to focus on– When looking to improve your email campaigns, choose a metric and focus on improving that alone. Whether it be your click through rate, your open rate, or your conversation rate, choose one and begin experimenting on how to improve it. Blake Puryear suggests that Lifetime value outweighs any other metric.
  5. Still not sold on Email Campaigns? Review your software and your tools. You may not be well set up to deliver the best emails. Learn more about what tools you need for your goals.
  6. Do not be prideful– Do not be afraid to let go of past systems or tools. It is ok to admit that a strategy did not pan out like you hoped. Keep moving forward and keeping learning.

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