Email marketing is loved by many small to mid-sized companies because of the wildly profitable returns on investment (ROI) compared to other forms of marketing.
Yet many other companies resist implementing an email marketing campaign at all. The resistant company may see the practice as annoying spam. We all hate spam. Don’t do it.
Instead, use your email campaigns for an effective communication method for both sales leads and current clients.
Let’s Count the Ways to Love Email Marketing…
Reach Skeptic Sales Leads
In the old days, a good salesperson could guide a sales lead through the stages of a sales process pretty quickly. Those days are over!
Because of the plethora of information on the internet, almost every sale goes through three stages before the purchase: Awareness, Research and Decision making. So, no matter how good the salesperson is…it is rare to move a sales lead from awareness to a purchase without a research phase.
When your marketing efforts succeed in getting a sales lead aware of the solution you offer, you deserve to get the sale. To accomplish that goal, you must be the source of information in their research phase. If you furnish them the data they need to step into the decision making phase, they will often trust you with the sale.
Measure Marketing Content Effectiveness
During each of the three phases described above, a different email marketing campaign needs to be created. When you devise your email campaigns, include setting up analysis metrics in your online CRM to give feedback.
In the old days, a company would spend their marketing budget on advertising and marketing literature. In most cases, the company had very little evidence about what worked and what didn’t. They clearly knew that half of their marketing budget was wasted – they just didn’t know which half.
Today, a good online CRM with email marketing integration can monitor each time an email is opened and whether the reader found the email interesting enough to click on the content link. Good marketers use this feedback loop to determine whether the strategy needs adjustment or complete revision.
Deepen Customer Trust
Today’s consumer is deeply attached to their power to get information – anywhere, any time. Call it “instant information gratification”. They are experts at reviewing the details of each company offering a product or service. They share with their connections in social media. Clearly, they want to be in charge of knowing the facts.
As a company offering goods and services, the best way to deepen their trust in you is to provide them good information. They have a strong desire to make intelligent buying decisions…and this fact is true with the digital savvy crowd whether they are buying a cell phone or an outrageously expensive corporate suite of software.
They demand that the messages to them be relevant, personal and conversational. If your email marketing strategy includes these elements, they will feel respected and feel that your company ‘gets’ them.
Earn Customer Loyalty
Earlier we talked about the three phases of a customer purchase. In truth, there are four. You know about the radical difference between the cost of acquiring a new sales lead and maintaining a loyal customer. It has never been easier to implement a plan for communicating with existing clients in your CRM.
What you send in your email marketing campaign will vary according to your type of business. However, having an email campaign that fosters loyalty is not optional any more. The same internet that causes new sales leads to research before a purchase can also entice your current customers to leave you.
Find an effective way to continue nourishing your client base through regular emails that add value to their perception of your company. Be cautious of simply sending promotions all the time. Sure, everyone loves a coupon to save money…but it does little to make them feel a deeper customer relationship with you.
A more powerful way to engage a customer long term is to give them the kind of information they might research on the net (if it didn’t come automatically from you).
- Learn what your current clients want to know.
- Send emails that satisfy that desire to know more.
- Monitor which emails are opened and which content links are clicked.
- Adjust your email campaign regularly based on what your customers show you they want.
- Love email marketing because it does so much for your company.