As a marketer, if your opinion of Email Marketing is that,
- It is SPAM
- It is OLD-SCHOOL
- It did nothing for my business
One plausible explanation, (right in most cases) is that, you are NOT DOING IT RIGHT!Email Marketing is a Marketer's sweet spot. (We'll will see why). If you are not leveraging it enough, you should start re-thinking right away.
The intent of this blog is to provide a checklist of three steps that every Email Marketing campaign should be based upon. I would like to call it the email - SPA (Segment, Personalize, Analyze)Is Email even important?
Let us start with the fundamentals. I was quite skeptical about E-Mail campaigns as a marketing tool unless I discovered how companies have been able to use Hubspot's Email
solution to turn their businesses around. There are few reasons why, as an Inbound Marketer, you cannot ignore E-Mail Marketing.
- Everybody loves email. All of your customers are most likely to use email once in a day
- It is the closest you can stay personal with your potential buyers or customers without being intrusive
- You can use Emails effectively across different stages of 'Inbound Marketing'.
- And it is not so expensive and with amazing RoI
Here is a something I picked up from Hubspot. <Emails deliver a staggering 4300% RoI
So, you love it or hate it.. But you just cannot ignore Email Marketing.
Email Marketing 'SPA'
The best part about your E-Mail marketing strategy is that, you can give is a new life and realize the benefits faster. The formula to a successful Email marketing strategy is simple (source: HubSpot),
Right Audience + Right Timing + Right Content = Success
Getting all three dimensions of success into place comes from clearer understanding of objectives and your customers. It takes three major steps to achieve that success.
- Segment
- Personalize
- Analyze
Segment:
Every new contact that goes into your CRM / Database, is valuable and the contact needs to be processed with care and segmented into different lists based on
- Explicit Information: Provided by the contact like Geographical Information, Age Group, Occupation, demographic information etc.
- Implicit Information: Level of interest (if the contact has downloaded an E-Book, Viewed more than 2 pages in the site), Information gained from Social feeds etc.
Based on the information we gather about the contact, should be making segmented lists that make sense to our businesses.Example: Imagine a company trying to sell insurance products to people who are in the initial stages of their career. A segmented list like, "Contact in the age group >20 & <30 that has viewed more than two pages in the website and downloaded our free offer"
Creating such segmented lists helps us to classify customers based on our target criteria and also upon their level of interest. Higher the level of interest, closer you are towards achieving a success.
Personalize:
Personalizing Emails have evolved tremendously from the age of 'Mail Merge'. It is no more just substituting First name in emails.
In my opinion, an Email has more scope for personaliztion until it comes to a point where the reader cannot identify if it is an automated mailer or a personal one! (Especially in the lead generation phase)Here is a mail I got from HubSpot, a few days after I signed up for a trail.
Marketing Automation tools like HubSpot provide you with the ability to develop this level of personalization and provide automated workflow to trigger such mails.
Analyze:
This is the most critical part of Email Marketing (well, any marketing initiative for that matter!). Email marketing can be made much more effective through testing & analysis to better understand 'Critical Success Factors'.
Every aspect on an email, like subject, sender's name, content on the whole, is extremely critical to our overall objectives. And there is no 'One-size-fits-all to this.
Every email campaign should be based on identifying the elements of email and fix on what works the best. It can be done through techniques like A/B Testing.
So, if you think E-Mail marketing has the potential to support your organization's aggressive targets and you are not doing enough to leverage it, revisit your strategy.
Are businesses in India using Inbound Marketing?
Does inbound marketing real estate have answers to the sector's problems?
