As it has been stated before by Rave Retailer, email marketing is a feature worthy of integration into your online business model. Allowing the ability to inform followers of updates regarding your business or promotional offers quickly, easily, and with promise of good ROI is key within the scope of e-commerce. While email marketing can be of great use to any business with an online element, it is important to know how to utilize this function correctly to ensure the best results from your email marketing campaigns. In order to succeed, follow Rave Retailer’s acronym, ‘SUCCEED’, and watch your campaigns, conversions, ROI, and all other walks of your business…well…succeed!
Simplicity
To make things simplistic is to make things interactive, user friendly, not overwhelming, and enjoyable overall. This goes for your website at large, its navigation, and design, and equally so goes for each and every individual marketing email that you send out to your client base. When building your marketing emails, you want to make everything clear and visibly organized so as to ensure people find what you want them to find, and not get lost in a sea of complexity. Make following your brand seamless with minimalist design and intricacy, effectively conveying your goals for your campaign, and making the decisions on how to proceed easier for your followers.
Urgency
It’s not enough to get people to act on the promotions that your marketing emails convey. You want your followers to feel a sense of urgency, so as to complete their purchase. As we all know from the example of shopping cart abandonment, if people do not pull the trigger on a purchase in a timely fashion, the probability of that purchase being completed lessens as time passes. For this reason a ‘time being of the essence’ approach is key in making sure the promotions in your marketing emails are taken advantage of. Furthermore, implementation of urgency in ways such as promoted flash sales and the like are shown to increase transactions by 35%, over one-third (Experian).
On the other side of the coin, it is also important for the sake of honoring your business. If you give people all of the time in the world to utilize promotions or don’t apply some pressure, you are compromising the integrity of your brand value. Give your brand, your products, and promotions a sense of exclusivity and people will be inclined to buy. So give proper credit to your company and give your followers a timeline that supports their potential for completing beneficial purchases.
Call To Action
Once you have successfully instilled a sense of urgency in your followers, the next step is to give them firm, rigid instruction as to what they must do or how they must proceed now. What they need are calls to action. This has a dual-pronged requisite; it must have written or visual guidance of how you must act, as well as the ability to act, by means of a linked button through which to click in order to complete the action at hand. These criteria enable action, and their placement at pivotal points where decision making is fostered, coax great influence in the fulfillment of action bearing mutual benefit to business and follower. Addressing all of the aforementioned in a marketing email has shown increases of 304% in conversion rates (Entrepreneur). So follow this call to action: perfect your call to action execution!
Content
Manifesting the culmination of all previous points is the topic of content. Content is anything you are trying to sell, and when we say ‘sell’ we don’t mean for money in all cases, although making money will always be an end goal in sight. When we say ‘sell’, we mean the things that you want to pass onto a follower. You could be attempting to sell visits on a blog or newsletter, information about company updates or product lines, and, lastly and obviously, you could be trying to sell sales…selling the idea of selling (cue Inception “BWOOOOONG”)…by virtue of selling the notion of promotions, deals, sales, and more. Utilizing the previous principles of simplicity, urgency, and calls to action, you will frame your content and have the best shot at selling attention towards your content. The only step beyond that is making sure your content is always fresh, updated, looking good, working well, and you’re in good email marketing shape!
Emails
This may sound obvious, but it is crucial, and we feel obligated to communicate this message: emails are key for email marketing, email address lists especially! Attaining email lists is definitely a precursor to actually sending out email marketing campaigns and is not a part of the campaign creation process, as everyone seeing your marketing emails apparently already follows you, but the means to gain email listed followers is noteworthy, so we’ll note it! There are a couple of different ways to achieve this, and they apply to the two groups of people we will encounter visiting our websites: the engaged and the unengaged.
We’ll start with the unengaged, for the sole purpose that we want to spend energy persuading them to follow our brand, but would rather gear our efforts towards those expressing sincere interest. For the unengaged, implement a form of exit-intent technology. What this will do is observe the actions of a visitor, and if said visitor is any in a way that indicates disinterest, a pop-up to join an emailing list for promotions or information will appear on your website to either join or not, the rest is up to them. For the engaged, it gets a little more complex. You want to bring them on board the follow train, but do not want to scare them off with premature pop-ups to join. When engagement is being signalled, give the visitor the time to soak up all information, whether a blog or just perusing your website top to bottom, then at the point of wrap-up, typically the bottom of a page, automated pop-up application will be the most effective mode of email collection (Social Triggers). Gage your visitors and be prepared to approach any visitor type to get those emails and, thus, followers and business.
Engagement
So we used the word “engaged” a lot in the previous point, but we’ll clarify the distinction. The Email point use of “engagement” pertained to how visitors perceive your brand and market, whether they were into it or not. This point of Engagement concerns a brand’s perception of the market or industry and the application of relevant and effective information to appeal to and engage intrigued parties initially or increasingly depending on their status as a follower of your brand within the market. Similar to the previous point, however, is the fact that this effort goes beyond the mere page corners encasing your marketing emails and delves into the backend planning of email marketing campaigns. What this entails is actively seeking out information regarding your market and what is seen as valuable within it and projecting this intelligence to your followers or individuals by whom you desire being followed. In doing this, you maintain strong rapport with your current subscriber base and will ultimately gain more subscriptions.
Delivery
Cool! Your email marketing campaign is all mapped out! You have great but simplistic design housing information and content for you followers about you and your industry, all pieced together with good insight into your client type and their behaviors, and you’re business is awesome to begin with, so the stars are aligned. Now when do you want the stars to shine in a way that they shine brightest? This question is very important to ask oneself. It is not enough to have a great campaign if you are delivering it incorrectly. Understand when your emails will be best received and where the ‘enough is enough’ line is drawn. The best breakdown in terms of arranging an email marketing schedule is to consider what times of the day are effective, what days of the week are effective, and what frequency of emails throughout the month is effective. Of all consumer, 91% are reported to check their email everyday (Build Fire).
So people are always checking their emails, meaning your emails will not get lost in the sea of mail in their inbox, so feel no pressure to post all the time. Furthermore, you do not want to post everyday, one, to be in line with the element of exclusivity that was previously outlined, and two, to ensure your followers do not get sick of having their inbox flooded completely by one brand, so much as to unsubscribe. Depending on your market, aim for once a month, twice a month, or once every week at absolute maximum. Send these emails during the week, not over the weekend. You’ll want to send them during productive hours, but strategically at a time where people are more available within those hours; lunch hours will prove successful (Opt In Monster). In time you will find a frequency and schedule that renders the best results and once you dial that in as well as all other factors, your email marketing campaigns will do wonders for your business!
Conclusion
In conclusion, our email marketing efforts are without a doubt a powerful asset to our online business model, but only when executed in an effective manner. Conveying your message in a way that entices people to buy into following your brand, checking out your informational material, or making a purchase are all going to drive your business to ultimately succeed in the world of e-commerce. So if you want to take your email marketing to the next level, follow Rave Retailer’s ‘SUCCEED’ philosophy and contact Rave Retailer today for more information.