We all had to rip up the rule book in 2020 for obvious reasons and 2021 looks to be heading the same way. Nothing is off the table when it comes to marketing and customer behaviour – it’s difficult to predict anything right now.
But there’s one thing that’s for certain, email marketing still has a massive place in the marketing mix, made even more important during the pandemic. Email marketing remains one of the best ways to connect with your customers, keep them in the loop and build relationships.
In fact, more people than ever are twiddling their thumbs, looking for things to do and shopping online, so this is an opportunity for your business to build on.
Keep things Simple
When you’re drawing up your email marketing strategy, like with any form of ‘strategy’, things can start getting a bit too over the top and complex after a while. Spreadsheets, complicated email flows and 121201 different buying personas can turn your strategy into a nightmare.
One of the best tips is to keep things simple. Getting a schedule sorted for when you want to send your campaigns, what you want them to do and when there’s different demands for your products and services is a good place to start.
Use your experience of when your customer base is most engaged and most in need of your products or services and build sales driven campaigns around this.
Don’t bombard your customers but ensure that your campaigns pique their interest when it matters – provide incentives and offers that give something to your customers, instead of perpetually expecting something back from them.
Measure, measure, measure
What are you doing? What do you want to achieve? How will you get there? Just some of the basic questions you need to be asking yourself before every email campaign. Being able to set clear targets and decide on the metrics that you’re going to monitor helps you to measure whether your campaign is successful and crucially, how to change it if it’s not!
It could be something simple like increase sales from our email campaigns by 5% or sell a specific number of new products that you’re just releasing.
You don’t have to necessarily set quantifiable targets either – because of lockdown, you could be looking to provide some value that’s not exactly tangible, such as sharing recipe ideas or product backstories. Your quantifiable business-related targets can be measured through metrics like conversion rates and revenue but more brand building campaigns with stories and valuable content can be measured through open rates and click through rates.
Make sure you gather as much data as you can from your campaigns to help inform your next ones. Being flexible and pivoting to plan Bs is possible with more data insight that allows you to see what works with your customers and what doesn’t work as well.
For any info or advice to do with your business’ marketing, get in touch with our team at DOWO today.