I know this is hard to hear, but not every prospect or customer visits your site, blog, or social media accounts on a daily basis. Sadly, they may miss your witty tweets or your thought-provoking articles when they’re posted and shared. So what’s another way to make sure your audience is receiving the content you’re producing? Email. Studies show that people spend over six hours of their days consuming information in their inboxes, so that’s where you should be as well. But of course, people are inundated with emails so you also need to stand out with creative emails.
Here are some tips to building a strategic and creative email marketing plan:
Build a quality list
You likely have a database of contacts already that consist of prospects, existing and former customers, press, and more. This is a good starting point for an email marketing list, but you’ll need to continue to scrub and add to the list. We started with our Salesforce database for email marketing, but have since expanded the list through acquisition tactics across our sites and on Facebook. We encourage newsletter sign ups through targeted ads that reach our core audience. These subscribers have proved they are qualified leads through high open and click rates.
Additionally, we use tools to regularly scrub and update our lists of contacts at target companies. This is essential to getting the most out of your email marketing. After all, if you’re not reaching the people who you want to reach, what’s the point of spending your time creating and distributing email communication?
Use HTML and text-based emails
In my years as a business to business marketer, I’ve found that both HTML and text-based emails are effective in reaching, engaging and developing meaningful relationships with prospects and customers alike. Generally, I’ve used HTML emails when I am sending a templated newsletter I update on a regular basis. These HTML emails are creative and catchy, and show off our top-performing content. The regular communication through this type of newsletter is something our audience comes to expect and look forward to.
On the other hand, text-based emails can be just as effective in reaching and engaging an audience. Often times, I use text-based emails to announce sales specials, engage on a personal level, develop strong relationships and humanize the brand I’m working on behalf of. I’ve found that these personal text-based emails generate a higher response rate and lead to more meaningful and continued communication.
Consistency is key
To build on the prior bullet point a bit more, I want to talk about how important it is to develop and utilize a consistent and human voice when communicating through email. It will help you to gain the trust and authority you need to create, develop, and nurture relationships with prospects and customers. But perhaps even more important is to consistently provide unique and helpful content to your subscribers. Sharing your best content on a regular basis will be something your audience comes to expect and respect. It’ll turn you and your brand into a trusted source for what your audience is looking for and will help your subscribers learn that you are the leader in your industry.
Encourage feedback and interaction
No email communication is complete without a call to action. Figure out what you want your audience to do with the information you include in your email. Is your goal to make your subscribers read a post? Is it to get them to review a sponsorship opportunity? Is it to encourage them to contact you for information about something you’re selling? Whatever it may be, make it very clear in all of your communication. If you’ve done a good job including relevant and quality content, making the subscribers trust you and showing your brand’s authoratative voice, they will want more information and you need to make it easy for them!
Implement automation
Sometimes it’s not enough to just send an email and encourage feedback and interaction – you need to do a bit more. This is where marketing automation can help. Implementing a series of email triggers for specific actions a prospect or customer takes within your emails can help you personalize your follow up and show your prospect you know what they want from you. For example, say you send an email with ten different links, you’d want to have ten different emails set up to be triggered depending on which link is clicked.
If one of your links directs to a content marketing piece, you’ll want the email triggered to be focused on content marketing needs and how your brand can help accomplish those nees. If one of your links directs to an event marketing piece, focus your automated email on event marketing needs and how your brand can help fulfill those needs. This type of personalized communication will help you develop a lead quickly into a likely customer
Consistent, helpful and creative email communication will help you cut through the inbox clutter, establish trust, and turn prospects into customers and customers into lifelong partners. Get it right and you’ll see many benefits from a well-established email marketing plan.
Do you have other tips to share? Add them to our comments section.
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