Email Marketing Is More Powerful Than Ever

Despite so many in the make money online arena claiming that email marketing is on its way out thanks to social networking and new forms of communication, the facts really are so very different.

Still today, email continues to play a pivotal role for  just about every person trying to figure out how to make money working online  and using both mass and targeted customer communication.

According to Epsilon, email is used far more regularly than social networking for personal communication, while 30% of companies in Econsultancy’s Email Marketing Industry Census stated a Return On Investment (ROI) generated  from email in of 500%+.

Of course, the challenge really lies  in understanding how to connect with  customers using email marketing and integrating with other channels like social media (twitter, facebook, diggit etc), instead of relying on just email blasts in the often forlorn hope that someone will respond because you’ve taken the time to email. Our little old world is a really noisy place and each of us bulging with so many home business ideas  needs to understand how to make our email marketing communications targeted, relevant and really worth reading.

So today, I am providing you with 6 strategies about what you can do with email marketing to help improve performance and make money in 2010 and  well beyond:

1. Drive click open rates and more importantly click throughs with customer reviews

Research from Manage Smarter (September 2009) stated that 74% of people are influenced by the opinions of others when buying products. 47% of the 1,000 shoppers that were polled said they look at on-site reviews both before and when making a decision.

So the first objective is to get customer reviews on your website. These are not only good for on-page conversion, but they have the additional benefit of supporting Search Engine Optimization, as major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing place greater value on rich, relevant and congruent  content such as  customer reviews.

The second objective is to drive lots of new visitors to your site by promoting your review and email is a perfect strategy for doing this.  Don’t over complicate things at the start. Just  simply send an email with a relevant well respected and highly rated product and link through to the product and a ratings and reviews landing page, which perhaps even includes an opt in page.

The next step is to increase sophistication and segment your email audience so that individuals receive review content based on their browsing/buying behavior.

2. Increase connection with social media

Every time you make contact with a customer, you have a chance to offer them some of your social media services. To make your social media presence worthwhile, you need an audience, a community, to engage with. The more people you get signed up and staying in touch, the greater your chance of getting their attention when you need to persuade them to open their wallet.

Have a standard button in each of your emails that points to your social profiles. Educate your customers on the benefits of following you. Feature comments from other customers to demonstrate the value. You could even add a screenshot of your current Twitter feed?

Buying cycles can be extremely long, especially when people are more cautious with spending their hard earned money in the current economic climate. So, keep people connected with your product, services and brand during ‘quiet’ times by providing added value content via social forums like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. I have found out from personal experience that this can lead to walletshare.

Social media can also play a quid pro quo role – how?  You can highlight and encourage newsletter sign-up on your social profiles.  Did you know for example, it is possible to add a newsletter sign-up box on your Facebook business page.

3. Improve relevance with event triggers

This can be really effective if you integrate with on-site functionality like wishlists and bookmarking – an email trigger alerts your customers to the ability to create a birthday wishlist on your site and bookmark to their friends.

Set-up customer email preferences to support event dates, allowing customers to tell you when something special is happening. Use automated emails and dynamic content to tailor messaging to the customer e.g. if a customer has given you his Father’s birthday, make sure the content contains gifts relevant to the Dad.

66% of companies don’t send emails on specific dates like birthdays – so let me ask you a question. How can you use event triggers to improve customer service and engagement via email?

4. Don’t ignore abandonment emailing

Retargeting is an effective way of driving conversion by email. Adestra research demonstrates that two thirds of companies fail to send emails to customers who have abandoned their baskets. Is that unbelievable or what? Just think about powerful little tools like http://www.exitgrabber.com and put them to use.

There are so many reasons why people abandon baskets and I’ve talked about this at length in earlier blogs – you can’t deal with them all but some people simply leave due to frustration with the checkout process or because they’ve been distracted. Abandonment emails offer a route to tackling the issues immediately and striking while the iron is what hot.

According to Silverpop, Diapers.com experienced an increase in email open rate of 48% for abandonment emails and a net conversion rate of 129% higher.

5. Increase activity with a complete lifecycle approach

If I’m one of your fresh new subscribers to your newsletter, what can I expect that makes it compelling reading? Why should I instantly think of opening, clicking and even buying?

As a loyal lifetime customer, how do you provide me with a differentiated service that recognizes me as an individual based on my previous behaviour? You can start your own lifecycle approach by splitting customers into 4 segments:

• Nursery program for newbies

Welcome emails, introductory offer to incentivise activity and highlight key elements of the website

• Activation program

Test subject lines to drive open rates, test offers and content to uplift click through and purchases.

• Retention program

Use dynamic content to personalise email content and segment your database to increase the relevance and impact of your emails. Don’t bore people into inactivity. For instance take Email Marketer 6.0 just about to be released and available from www.Interspire.com. You can personalize your greeting and also images according to multiple segments. Dynamic content is very powerful indeed and becoming mainstream in email marketing.

• Data cleansing

You need to reactivate unsubscribed customers with timely offers and messages. Purge ‘dead’ contacts from your database and focus your time and money on those who are interested in what you’ve got to say.

6. Increase the breadth and width of your reach with viral triggers

Make sure that every email you send has a send-to-friend button enabling people to share your content with their friends. This button should land them on a branded form page allowing them to enter multiple email addresses. Re-assure people that you will not use their friends’ email addresses for marketing purposes and make sure you stick to your promise.

On your site add social bookmarking. This enables visitors to bookmark key pages (product and content) across their social networks, increasing content reach. Add This provides a free tool that is easy to implement.

This is not an exhaustive list – there is always room for improvement with email so I recommend maintaining a continuous dialogue with your customers to find out what else you could be doing to improve the quality and relevance of your email marketing.

Whatever you do don’t let the Web2.0 and social media buzz words distract you – you need to define how they can support every make money working online opportunity that comes across your path and enhance existing marketing channels like email, not replace them.

May your success be more than you can hold.

Kevin

http://www.CambridgeBusinessAcademy.com

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