Getting the Most From Your Email Marketing Campaign
An email marketing campaign offers a convenient and inexpensive way to communicate new offers to your existing customers. In carefully managed contexts, email marketing also provides connections with thousands of potential new customers.
A successful email marketing campaign requires paying attention to testing, evaluating your market and managing the message you want to send.
- Test your messages –Â Small differences in subject lines, opt-in pages, marketing copy and other elements can make the difference between being read and getting deleted. Split testing lets you try different approaches on a small segment of your potential customers to see what works best. Once you know what generates the most response, you can send that message to a larger number of recipients and reasonably expect a better ROI.
- Conduct surveys –Â When you have a responsive mailing list of existing customers, you don’t have to guess what they want from you. Conduct an email survey and ask them directly. An occasional survey is also a good way to maintain awareness of your business in your customers’ minds.
- Avoid the temptation to constantly sell –Â Not every email message needs to contain a sales pitch. Regularly send out email messages that contain helpful information, a warm greeting, useful commentary and other material that will improve customer relationships and deepen their appreciation of your business.
- Market to existing segments –Â Use what you know about your customer base to craft messages that appeal to particular segments. A scattershot approach to your email marketing campaign will likely produce poor results. However, if you know a segment of your customers is particularly interested in a product or service, you can devise specialized offers and messages that will generate better response from those customers.
- Update mailing lists regularly –Â Establish what you consider acceptable criteria for number of email messages opened within a specific time period. When members of your mailing list stop opening your emails, remove them from the list. AÂ fresh and responsive list will provide much better ROI.
How are you using email marketing to improve customer relationships and grow your business?
Image via Shutterstock.com