- August 5, 2014
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Email Going Stale? Freshen It Up with Six Easy Strategies
Email marketing is working for most retailers, says a recent MarketingSherpa study. So well in fact that companies may risk falling into a rut and letting customer connections go stale. To help integrated marketers keep campaigns fresh, Website Magazine ran a two-part series offering these and other strategies in which companies can use email to:
- Nurture Relationships. Times have changed and so have your tools. But the old saying about it being easier to keep current customers than to acquire new ones still rings true. So why not send a couponed thank you to tell customers that you’ve missed them? Emails with coupons get higher open, click and transaction rates AND 48 percent higher revenue than noncouponed promotional messages, according to Website Magazine.
- Obtain Reviews. Reviews build trust by offering instant credibility. In fact, 79 percent of consumers in one 2013 poll said that they trusted online reviews as much as personal recommendations. So, while thanking customers for their purchases via email, include a request for a simple review. Provide the necessary links or buttons to make sharing, liking and pinning comments easy.
- Issue Alerts. This one’s aimed at online retailers and mostly applies to “back-in-stock” alerts that consumers can request when an item they’re shopping for is temporarily unavailable. When the product returns, and you send the back-in-stock notification, provide a direct link to the product purchase page to encourage immediate action. If the article has been discontinued, try to salvage the sale by courteously suggesting a similar alternative.
- Recognize Birthdays. Fun strategy? Yes. Personal touch. Absolutely. Problem is, every data-savvy retailer resourceful enough to capture personal information uses it. So in the week or so before your customer’s big day, her inbox overfloweth with all manner of irresistible enticements. Beauty-product retailer Sephora takes a different tack: sending well wishes two months after the fact, offering a promo code for a free happy belated birthday gift. Riskier? Perhaps. But the argument for avoiding the crowd and the clutter is irrefutable. Try both and see which works best.
- Promote Slow Sellers. Sorry, but not all of your products are top sellers. Ease off of pushing the leaders for a while and give the lowly laggards a fighting chance. With a little extra email marketing love (driven by some smartly mined analytics data) you can increase the awareness, familiarity and sales of products that have been flying under your customers’ radar. Check page views and conversions to see which items could use the boost.
- Give VIP Discounts. Acknowledge and reward loyal customers with special, money-saving ‘thank-you’ offers. Transaction rates and revenue-per-email rates for these so-called “Friends and Family discounts,” were a whopping 75 percent higher than other benchmarks, in one recent study from Experian.
Email marketing works for most small companies. But not if messages or templates have grown musty, fusty or stale. To keep your email marketing campaigns vibrant and engaging, combine these proven methods with the strategies suggested above:
- Supercharge Your Subject Lines
- Use Video in Email
- Ten Ways to Grow Your List
