With each passing year, the importance and relevance of email marketing has increased. In fact, it’s the most effective way to communicate with your clients as they prefer to receive communication from brands through emails. Approximately 2.8 billion people worldwide use email as a digital communications tool and email marketing typically has an ROI potential of 4400 percent.
When used effectively, email marketing can create a brand presence, customer loyalty and boost sales.
So, this year what should be your focus as you plan to use email marketing to connect with your customers? What email marketing goals should you set for 2019?
Storytelling
Building curiosity and unfolding stories
Emails are no longer going to be drab and boring with brands just plainly stating about their products and discount offers. Companies will have to weave stories around their products by creating a series of emails and building curiosity. Then gradually the story will unfold and customer’s curiosity will be satiated at the end of the series of emails.
In case of a travel agency, a series of emails can be a story about how a customer was in search of a destination for his honeymoon and the company assisted him to make the right choice. This can be narrated in the form of a story.
It is an ideal way of letting customers know how your company provides a perfect solution to your travel queries. It is the most befitting way to inform and convince the customer about your services.
Newsletters
Develop a connect
Why would you take painstaking efforts of creating a newsletter? Today, brands have to create interest in the minds of the customers and retain it. Only by informing customers about your offerings, discounts, or wishing them on special occasions isn’t going to make a place in their minds and hearts. You have to share what is happening at your end with the customer. Is there any new CSR activity, employee welfare program or an event that could interest the customer? Talk about your achievement and your disappointments. They too want to know about the company’s performance and its new endeavors.
A brand is something that exists in the mind of the customer. Create that place in their mind.
All this can be shared in the newsletter, which can also be a run through about your discounts offered during the month and how customers responded. You can also share customer stories and views in the newsletter.
Personal privacy
Respecting customer’s choice
In this tech-savvy age where social media doesn’t allow us to keep many secrets, privacy has become a subject of concern. Even the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg thought about posting a 3,000-word note that outlined a more “privacy-focused” future for the company. He clearly said that communication platforms that protect privacy will become more important as compared to today’s open platforms.
Thus, whenever you choose to execute an email campaign you have to keep this concern in mind. Marketers will have to take heed of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is a policy change that will have an effect on the gathering and sharing of third-party information for anyone whose email reaches the member of European Union. This will surely impact everyone’s marketing strategy while communicating with someone in the EU.
Cohesive marketing strategy
Integration with other platforms
None of the marketing platforms can be used individually if you want to reap the maximum benefits from them. Email marketing should be used along with social media, blogs and direct marketing tools to create the maximum impact. Boundaries between various platforms are blurring. The content that we use in emails can be shared on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. You should share blogs through emails and post them on social media.
Each email that you send to customers will have social media handles that will connect the customer to social media pages of the brand. Various offers that are shared on social media should be designed into an email and shared with customers. Integrate your direct marketing efforts with email marketing and social media marketing. Thus, today nothing can work in isolation- it is a cohesive marketing strategy.
Email engagement metrics
Customer’s response and engagement
The most vital test of an email marketing campaign is how much your audiences are involved in your brand and how they respond to your email. Their response is vital to the success of your email marketing campaign.
Customers should look forward to your emails and find them interesting. Only then they will engage with the emails and your brand. Your email open rate is one of the metrics for measuring the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts. Click-through rates show how many subscribers are engaging and taking the desired actions by clicking on the links mentioned in the emails.
When people engage with your emails, more traffic will be directed to the blog or website and more people will avail to the offer leading to a boost in sales.
This year the stress will be on designing emails that are mobile friendly. Also, the call-to-action should be clear and focussed. Multiple calls-to-action confuse the readers and diverts their attention.
Take time to go through the click-through reports to observe what links they click on. This is a great way to understand what content interests the audiences. You can create a special email for audiences who click through particular links and send triggered emails to them. All in all the content should interest your target audiences. These aspects of email marketing will be vital in the year 2019.
Customer Preference
Know your customers
This year is going to be great for marketers who will walk that extra mile to know more about their customers. Know what are your customer’s interests, choices, preferences, and background. When a customer lands on your website observe what pages he /she navigates. If the customer is showing interest in particular products /services you can send a triggered email acknowledging his interest and suggesting other related products.
You can then have a form where certain information about the customer and his choices can be gathered like, email id, how often they would like to get an email, product preferences, occupation, date of birth, etc.
When someone subscribes to the newsletter or email, you should ask what kind of emails would they prefer. Would they like to know about offers, new products, about the company, etc?
This year email marketing is going to be about knowing your customers and connecting with them on various platforms. In 2019 email marketing would also be about cohesive marketing, more newsletters, storytelling and respecting the privacy of customers.
Juvlon is here to guide and assist you through email marketing campaigns. Connect with our team to know more.