Email marketing

Does email marketing work??

The answer is a resounding yes.

Email marketing does work – in fact, the return on investment on email marketing campaigns is higher than any other digital marketing medium. Like all things to do with marketing, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach, however. It could be that email marketing simply does not deliver a good enough ROI for your business to justify an investment.

So how do we work out if an email marketing strategy is right for your business?

Simple. We create an overall marketing strategy based on an understanding of your business plan and the marketplace you operate in, the activities of your competitors and the profile of your customers. We then look at your corporate brand proposition to enable us to design assets and create content in an appropriate style and tone. We will establish the features and benefits of the products and services you wish to focus on. We will create headline messages and supporting copy which meet the rational needs and emotional drivers of your target audiences. We will establish the pain points of your customers and prospects and write content that provides solutions to their problems.

Of course, creating and sending an email is one thing. Getting recipients to open it up is quite another. The first priority is to minimise the volume of emails that go into their spam folder or get rejected by a firewall. This is not as difficult as you might imagine if you know what you are doing – such as avoiding high risk words, balancing the ratio of images and text, setting up a credible email address from which emails are sent, and making sure your website is deemed trustworthy.

Once an email’s been safely received, the next challenge is to encourage as many people as possible to open it up and read it.

How do you do this?

Time of day, day of the week, subject line header – these are all important and can be tested. It’s all about developing trust, and we achieve this by building relationships – by only ever sending out content that is relevant, engaging and useful. It also helps if the email is personalised in some way too. That doesn’t just mean using an individual’s name, although that can have a positive impact on open rates – it is also possible to personalise according to previous purchase patterns, or towards a particular demographic or psychographic profile. We have even used low-tech personalised videos and these have delivered incredibly impressive results.

Once someone has opened up and read the email, you would normally want them to complete some sort of call to action – maybe to buy something or to express an interest in buying it, or to visit your website or a campaign landing page, or to sign up for a newsletter or one of your social media feeds. Reporting software in the back end of most email marketing platforms will keep you informed about how well your campaigns are performing. If you set up Google Analytics, you can track behaviour and set goals to measure performance.

Which email marketing platform is right for your business?

That depends. On the size of your business, the industry sector you work in, the complexity of your sales cycle, the value of an average sale, the number of products and services you offer, the volume of emails you wish to send – and so on. There are so many options to choose from – and they come with a wide variety of features. We will help you to choose the right options for your business.

You may have heard of marketing automation. This is where emails are triggered and sent automatically – this is an extremely efficient way to optimise performance and can lead to a huge increase in conversion. It can be a little overwhelming to begin with, so it is sensible to start off with a few simple goals and build up slowly from there.

Testing is really important. Email marketing needs to be constantly analysed to see what’s working best. So, we’ll test designs, content, subject lines, times of day, offers, frequency, data segments and anything else we can think of to find out what works best for you. And testing is not a one-off event – it’s a continual process. We’ll monitor performance on an ongoing basis, creating monthly reports that we’ll discuss with you on a regular basis to make sure that campaigns – both tactical and strategic – are working as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Who do you send your emails to?

You have two options. You can either use an existing database of prospects and customers if you have one, or you can buy data that fits the profile of your target market. In the long-term, it’s often best to invest in a strategy to create your own database. How do you do this? In any number of ways, such as by asking people to sign up for your newsletter when they visit your website. We will make sure you don’t fall foul of the latest privacy policy legislation too. The best way to create lists is to ask people to provide their email when they visit your website in return for some added value benefit, or when they purchase something from you of course. You also need to make sure they are happy for you to send them marketing literature and/or to offer your data to third parties. Do this in a transparent and professional way and you will be fine from a GDPR perspective.

Make sure your emails display properly on smartphones too. It seems an obvious point, but a mobile-first strategy is of growing importance when it comes to email marketing. A good time to send emails is either just before or just after work. That means people will be reading them during their commute, which implies that the vast majority will be looking at emails on their smartphones and tablets in order to clear down their inbox before they get to the office or get home. Of course, everyone knows this, so everyone sends emails at these times too, so your email might be lost in all the noise. it might be better to send your emails at a quieter time of the day. Regardless of when you send an email, you only have seconds to get your point across, so make sure that the first impression you deliver is a good one.

That means that the creative execution needs to be sharp – visuals and headlines need to grab a recipient’s attention within seconds. Our creatives will create stunning graphics and hard-hitting copy to produce an enticing email that raises awareness, creates interest, generates desire and compels action. This is known as AIDA and is a classic but effective tool to bear in mind when it comes to any form of marketing.

The best email marketing strategy will support both sides of the sales pipeline process, which is what we refer to as the bowtie marketing principle. You have prospects on one side of the funnel and customers on the other. The aim is to minimise churn and optimise conversion from prospective customers, and to maximise customer lifetime value (CLV) from actual customers by encouraging repeat purchase, recommendation and referral.

The bottom line…

A successful email marketing plan needs to be consistent, serving up interesting, engaging and relevant information on an ongoing basis. That’s why it is so important to make sure you have a structured content plan in place. This can be as sophisticated or as simple as you like. All you need to establish is who you are sending emails to, what your goal is, and how regularly you are going to send them

Looking for an email marketing agency in London? Please get in touch if you would like to find out more about who we are and how we can help. We offer a two-hour marketing consultation without cost or obligation at a venue of your choice to discuss any marketing challenges you are facing.

Please call us on 020 3858 7868

Please email stephen@abacusmarketing.co.uk

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