To Email or Not To Email
Written by Franco Varriano.
Have you ever wondered why some businesses make money off their mailing list, while others struggle to even get a click from prospects? Email marketing, like most marketing practices, can be a very tricky subjects. From the inside, it is the most important communication channel a company has with a customer. From the outside, it can be the email you were waiting for or just another email, maybe spam, depending on your email client or your mood at the moment.
Marketing professionals understand the importance of email marketing but often fail to really communicate the benefit of the practice. Similar to social media, search engine optimization or advertising, email marketing is an investment. We define the word investment as the action or process of investing resources for profit or material result. With email marketing, results can be as tangible as a sale or as intangible as stronger brand recognition in your niche market. The keyword here is investment.
To increase your expected return, you should have an initial strategy in place and adjust along the way. In other words, you should be able to answer the question: why are you emailing your customers? Your answer should ideally be concise, something like we want to announce new products or suggest new products to our customers. Whatever it is, you should have a clear goal before you decide to send emails. Not only it will help you share your objectives with customers; it will also help you choose the right tool to reach your goal. That’s right; email marketing software are awesome, but some are awesomer than others. Knowing what you want to achieve will help you choose the right software for you.
A blog that is collecting emails to share new posts have different requirements than a baby soap online store who is trying to increase their sales via mom & dad’s email. The right email marketing software is the difference between I think I just wasted my marketing budget sending emails and wow, email marketing does work.
Ideally, you should only email your customers once you have a reason to do so, and the right tool to achieve your goal. Irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the internet to a large number of recipients are called spam; you hate it and your customers hate it even more. Clear email objectives (read expected return on investment) will you help craft your message, find the right tool for the mission and track your results.
At rare.io, we work closely with online stores who are looking to increase their revenues with email marketing. They can’t afford to send irrelevant emails, so they use our predictive engine to suggest new products based on customers’ previous behaviours. The relevancy in the email drives a 3–5x increase in email click-through rate. For those stores, predictive email is the key to success. What’s yours?
Feel free to reach out to us via twitter if you need help crafting an email strategy or simply comment below. We look forward helping you succeed.
Next week’s topic: Retention Emails
If you’re an ecommerce merchant and don’t have automated email marketing campaigns setup for your store, you’re losing money. Right now.
Rare.io makes it easy to start using automated email campaigns for common challenges like: Welcome Series, Abandoned Carts, Order Follow-up emails and more! You can learn more about our powerful email marketing automation features here or go ahead and get started right away by using Rare.io for FREE.
And if you’re one of the thousands of merchants who are already using Rare’s Smart Email Marketing software and want to see how our Customer Success Team can work with your brand to grow your revenue – feel free to book a call at your convenience here.
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