I WILL get results from my Email Marketing

Written on the 8 December 2009

Over the last few years Email Marketing has evolved to become the most cost effective medium to increase loyalty, referrals, repeat customers and revenue in your business. It helps you maintain regular contact with your existing customers and your prospects, showing them that you care. Most importantly, however, it's easy to do will a bit of planning and following our series of "I will" steps. .

I WILL. set aside priority time to plan my Email Marketing strategy.

We have all heard the adage: if you fail to plan then you plan to fail. The reality is if you don't identify what you are hoping to achieve with Email Marketing, how you are going to achieve it, and who is going to manage it, you won't achieve anything. To make it really simple for yourself, decide on the following:

  • What - what do you want to acheive with your Email Marketing?
  • When - what time will you put aside each week to work on your Email marketing?
  • Who - who is going to be the brains and brawn behind your Email Marketing?

Don't over complicate it.  If you are new to email marketing start with some simple email strategies, including some automated email campaigns like welcome letters, then build upon them as you become more confident. For some helpful hints, download our 50+ Goldmine Strategies.

> Click here to download our 50+ email marketing strategies ebook

 

I will... send regular professional email communication.

Frequency is key with your communication, whether it be for your newsletters, email blasts, promotions, reminders, surveys, invitations, tips etc. If you send too often, you risk annoying your readers and causing them to unsubscribe (or worse, mark your emails as spam). But if you don't send often enough, you won't be able to keep your business top of mind and generate the full potential that email marketing could bring your business.

 Whatever frequency you choose (fortnightly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly) for your variety of email communications, make sure you stick to it to ensure your emails raise your business awareness and strengthen your relationships with your followers.

I will... include valuable, relevant content in my emails.

Your subscribers only want to read content that is relevant to them. For example, they will quickly unsubscribe from your newsletters if they get nothing from reading them. So this is why you need to stick to the 80/20 rule 80% about them and 20% about you.  Even though the results businesses are getting from email communication is increasing, so is the number of emails your subscribers are getting, so you need to make sure yours stand out above the crowd.  

News about your company and your team is great, but the reader gets little benefit from that. Stick to valuable relevant articles to your target audience with how-to advice, tips, strategies and statistics that will help them use your products and services or content from your alliances that can help them in other areas of their lives/business etc.

> Click here for more newsletter tips

I will... test and measure my results.

Do you actually know what results you are getting from your current email marketing activities? If you're not testing and measuring then you are more than likely not getting the best results possible.

There are so many really simple areas of your email marketing you can test and tweak. Each time you send an email, split your database into groups and trial different style subject lines (eg. personalised vs not personalised), different send days (eg. Monday vs Friday) and slighty different content to see what persforms the best. You will soon find out what your database responds to!

I will... use surveys to get feedback from customers.

Online surveys are a highly under-utilised email marketing tool . The feedback you can get from surveys is priceless, yet most businesses are not using them. With the Ezy Communicator survey tool, the data collection and graphing is done for you, so there really is no excuse!

Top survey idea - An after-purchase feedback survey, where customers can rank everything from your store décor to the products they purchased, gives you insight and vital KPIs (key performance indicators) for your business you should be monitoring.  

> Click here for more survey tips

I will... build my database.

The more people in your database, the more likely you are to get results from your email marketing. So you need to be constantly adding more people to your database. Adding existing clients, suppliers and alliances is easy adding prospects will require some creativity (talk with your Bloomtools internet consultant on how you can get your website generating new people into your database).

These days people are somewhat hesitant to hand over their email addresses. So you need to make it simple (easy to fill out box, ask them at the point of sale if you have a physical store, just ask for first name and email address) and worth their while (either a one off bonus or ongoing discount for joining will get them over the line).

> Click here for database building tips

We know most people struggle to stick to their New Year's Resolutions, so that's why we've made these really simple for you. Come up with a marketing plan at the start of 2011 that incorporates these activities and watch your open rates, click throughs and conversions increase you'll wonder why you didn't do it in 2010!