Following Up with Email Marketing
magine that it’s seven o’clock on a Tuesday morning. You wake up to the beep-
ing of your alarm, roll out of bed, and stumble to the kitchen, where the coffee
that you programmed to brew last night is just finishing its drip cycle. You grab
a mug, add some cream and a tiny sprinkle of sugar, and sit down at the kitchen
table. Then you check your email.
If you’re anything like most adult Americans, this routine may be familiar.
Email is not only part of our daily routines, but also one of our primary sources of
information. It probably isn’t a surprise to you that email has a higher return
on investment than any other channel by far. In fact, email returns an average
4,300 percent return on investment for businesses in the United States.
Email plays an important role in digital marketing because it helps move customers
from one stage of the customer journey (see Chapter 1 for more on the customer
journey) to the next in a way that yields high return on investment. Because email
is both cost effective and time effective, not to mention one of the first channels
that most customers turn to, this channel often yields the best results.
In this chapter, we show you how to create an email plan that gives your custom-
ers a reason to come to you again and again as you grow your business through
dynamic, relationship-based marketing.
Understanding Marketing Emails
To start, it’s important to understand the types of marketing emails that busi-
nesses send. The key to success in email marketing is employing the right type of
email at the right time.
Promotional emails
Promotional emails present the leads and customers on your email list with an
offer. The offers could be promotional content, a gated offer like a white paper or
webinar for more on gated offers brand announcement, product
release, event announcements, or trial offers, just to name a few.
Promotional emails are the most common marketing emails. This isn’t surprising.
Because 66 percent of consumers have made a purchase as a direct result of an
email marketing message, we know that promotional emails work.
Promotional emails provide value and help tee up sales. They’re great for lead
generation, retention, loyalty, engagement, nurturing, sales, and upsells. They
should be part of any email marketing strategy. The problem is that many com-
panies use them as the only part of their email marketing strategy, so they miss
out on opportunities to relate to customers in diverse ways that are often more
effective.
Relational emails
Relational emails deliver value to your customers by providing free content and
information such as subscriber welcomes, newsletters, blog articles, webinar
guides, surveys, social updates, contest announcements, and more.
Relational emails may not sell a product or brand directly, but they build
relationships with the customer by adding value upfront. For example, when your
email subscriber receives a piece of high-quality content in an email newsletter,
he or she is interacting with your brand in a deeper, more meaningful way.
Transactional emails
Transactional emails are sent in response to an action that a customer has taken
with your brand. They include messages such as order confirmations, receipts,
coupon codes, shipping notifications, account creation and product return confir-
mations, support tickets, password reminders, and unsubscribe confirmations.
These emails reengage customers who have engaged with your business in some
way (see “Reengagement campaigns,” later in this chapter) and give the customer
an idea of the voice behind your brand.
Do you follow up quickly and deliver what you promised? Do you have systems in
place that give the customer true value? Do you respect your customers’ wishes?
The leads and customers on your email list are observing how you conduct busi-
ness, and your transactional email is a big part of that.
THE CHEMISTRY OF TRANSACTIONAL
EMAILS
Think about the last time you purchased something you loved — a pair of boots you’d
wanted for years, a new snowboard, a great bottle of wine, or dinner at your favorite
restaurant. Now consider the way you felt when you made that purchase. You were
excited, right?
As you purchase a product that you’ve been wanting, your brain is flooded with feel-
good endorphins. You’re happy about that product. Perhaps an hour later, you get a
shipping confirmation with information about the key features of that snowboard or an
email listing recipes for dishes that go with that wine. You’ve already made a feel-good
purchase, and when the marketer reengages you when you’re still on that high, you
move farther along on your customer journey.Building a Promotional Calendar
The first question many business owners ask us is when to send email. This ques-
tion is a good one because a great email campaign will engage customers like
never before if it’s sent at the right time. Conversely, if an email is sent at the
wrong time, it won’t be as effective as it could be.
The first thing you should do as a business owner or marketer after you decide to
start an email marketing strategy is come up with a promotional calendar. That
way, you’ll know when to send the messaging your customers need when they
want to receive it.
Using a promotional calendar gives you the opportunity to elicit action. It
mobilizes your subscribers to do something that you want them to do — buy
something, ask for information, call you, or come to a store, for example. The
right message delivered at the right time elicits action.
Cataloging your products and services
Before you can build an accurate, all-encompassing promotional calendar, you
have to know exactly what you’re promoting. Spend some time carefully catalog-
ing every product and service that your business offers and taking some time to
understand how to promote it best. At DigitalMarketer, we use a promotional
asset sheet (see Figure 11-2) to keep a detailed record of our assets. Every time we
release a new asset, we add an asset sheet to our list. And every time we update
our promotional calendar or run an email campaign, we spend some time updat-
ing these asset sheets.
Be sure that whatever record you keep of your promotional assets contains the
following information:
» Name of the product or service
» Price (both full price and sale price)
» Where the transaction occurs
» Whether you’ve sold this product or service via email before
» Whether past marketing efforts worked (and why or why not)
» When you last promoted this product or service
» How many emails you sent about this product
» Whether the product is currently available to promote (and if not, why not)You may be wondering why you should spend so much time cataloging your
marketing efforts. Wouldn’t that time be better spent, perhaps, marketing those
assets? The truth is that by carefully tracking the sales of your products, as well as
the marketing campaigns that correspond with your sales, the job of marketing
those assets becomes much easier. When you know what you have available to sell
and the results of the promotions you’ve employed in the past, you can simply do
more of what’s working and less of what isn’t.
The time you spend cataloging and analyzing these assets and the campaigns
surrounding them is valuable marketing time. We believe that all marketers
should gather the promotional assets from all the products and services they
offered so that they know exactly what they can sell, how they can sell it, whom
to sell it to, and (perhaps most important) when to sell it.
Creating an annual promotional.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Your happy
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