It won’t last for ever, but right now email marketing remains one of the cheapest and easiest tools business owners can use to grow sales and profits. However, there is a but! It has to be done properly. It’s easy to get it wrong, but oh so easy to get it right. Read on to find out how…
There are three key elements that have to make up your ‘communications strategy’ we call it the three C’s – contacts, communications and consistency:
CONTACTS, who do you want to communicate with, your ideal target audience, and this should include existing clients as well as potential new clients, (prospects).
COMMUNICATIONS, what are you actually going to say, bear in mind it has to be of genuine value to the recipient or you will do more harm than good. Bear in mind that email is just one of the various media, you should really be using other media to carry the same message.
CONSISTENCY, there is little to be gained by communicating just once, you need to commit to communicate for the long term, not too often, not too infrequent and be mindful of cost versus benefit, monthly is fine and easily achievable for most businesses.
If you want to get it right follow the following simple steps and you will be amazed at what it can do for your business:
CONTACTS – Just some of the more critical things to watch for:
- If you are not communicating with your existing customers on a regular basis wake up! Your competition will be communicating with them all the time. 68% of customers go elsewhere simply because they did not feel they had any relationships with their supplier, in other words they felt their supplier did not care. Do you care? If yes then demonstrate it… communicate.
- How are you going to get ‘contact’ information? If you have not got details of your existing customers you need to come up with a way of getting it, and you also need strategies for obtaining details of other people who may be in your target market and who may be interested in your product or service.
There are lots of ways to get contact details, but for the time being we are going to focus on actually doing something with the contact details you have collected.
Are you a contact?
Like it or not, to someone else you are a contact on their contact database. How does that feel? Not nice, you want to be treated as a person; one of the most important things you have is your name.
If you want to communicate with people at least use their name, in other words personalise your messages, Dear Steve, works much better than Dear ‘Valued Customer’ the first is personal, the second is an insult, roughly translated it probably comes over as “we could not be bothered to refer to you by name because you are not really that important."
Don’t upset your target audience unnecessarily. Invest some time and effort to get your database cleaned up, actually speaking to people is not such a painful experience, after all your real objective is probably to get them to trust you to the point they are prepared to give you some of their hard earned money. You never know, as well as confirming you have their contact details they might even buy something…
Managing your Contacts
There are lots of tools available to store customer records, you probably have lots on your mobile phone, in your email contact lists, in your accounts system, but can you really communicate with them in an effective and efficient manner, can you get any statistics on your communications? If you are serious about running your business you need to ensure you have a tool to manage this, the most important asset you have, your customer and prospect list, this is where all your money comes from, look after it and it will look after you.
How many contacts have you got? Do you know how many are customers? How many ‘prospects’ have you got? When you communicate do you know how many emails got through, how many emails were opened, who clicked on links… if the answer is no you are not managing your most valuable asset as well as you should.
Get a professional database to manage your contacts. One that includes the tools you need to actually communicate…
COMMUNICATIONS – real and potential customers, don’t upset them…
Who are you talking to, it is not a ‘prospect’, or a ‘customer’, it will be a person, a real flesh and blood human being with feelings. Why should they want to receive your next communication? Whatever you send you must be trying to add value, give them a reason to ’engage’ and above all to want to receive your next message.
This can be tough, sending one message to a broad spectrum to recipients makes it all but impossible to get it right, unless you really do have a broad appeal. The more tightly you can group your customers or prospects the easier it is to get a message that will appeal.
If you cannot come up with a good answer to the question of why should your customer do business with you rather than anyone else you need help, urgently. Take a moment to think about this, what would you say if someone asked you that question?
If your response included things like we pride our selves on customer service and we do a good job it is not good enough… Every one of your competitors will say the same thing, you really do need something to set you apart from your competition. Something you can consistently re-enforce in your communications.
Here is one quick tip to help you ensure you always have something the people receiving your email will want to read. Use testimonials or case studies! Make sure you do it properly, include a description of the customer, mention the nature of their problem or challenge, state how you solved their problem, (preferably in a way no-one else could have done it), and finish off with some nice words of gratitude from a happy client.
If you do use case study information in this way you still won’t appeal to everyone with every communication, but your objective is two fold, 1. don’t get ‘unsubscribed’ by those who are not in the market right now and 2. engage with those who are actively looking to solve their problem right now.
Remember email is not the only ‘media’ we use to communicate, and ideally emails will be short and punchy. If you need to say more provide a ‘click here to read more…’ link to a website or blog where you have more information for those who want it. This will also help you with your search engine strategy to get more ‘leads’ into your ‘prospect database’.
CONSISTENCY – keep up the momentum…
Having decided to communicate with your most valuable asset you need to plan and prioritise to make sure it happens in a consistent manner. You need to keep the same style or ‘tone’ in your communications, remember people agree to keep receiving your communication because they find value in it, don’t change the model, keep giving them what they want. Don’t cause confusion by changing your style or the nature of the content, it will only increase the number of people who unsubscribe.
Can you make your email communications more ‘interactive’? For example don’t just blast out your message as a one way form of broadcast, ask questions and encourage your readers to make their views or comments known. This can be at a one to one level, or for larger volumes semi automated by giving the reader a blog landing page they can comment on. If you can get your customers ‘talking to each other’ via your blog posts you can pick up an enormous amount of highly valuable information to help you in your marketing.
Do you put a call to action in your emails? If you are simply putting a personal sign off this is not exactly a compelling reason for someone to ‘engage’, try to make sure your audience has a logical way to increase their level of engagement with your business.
Bear in mind that we are an increasingly impatient society and we expect instant gratification. If you do put a call to action into your email make it easy for people to respond.
If you don’t do anything else in your email do try to provide a reason for them to remain on your mailing list with a ‘tempter’ for great things to come, even if it is only the headline of your next planned email or upcoming offers and events.
And just in case we fail to practice what we preach please do let us know what you are doing, what is working for you, what is not by commenting on our blog:
And if you want more help or advice you can join any of IRUN online workshops where we cover a range of essential marketing topics, related to the tools you will need to use and how to use them for maximums business benefit. The workshops are free to attend and you can participate from the comfort of your own home, find out more here
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