How to ensure your email campaign grabs your customers’ attention

February 11, 2017

In today’s mobile world, email is still one of the most, if not ‘the’ most effective forms of marketing. With the ability to access emails almost anytime and anywhere, marketers have the opportunity to reveal their products to the public on a much larger scale.

However, people can be apathetic towards a large chunk of the sponsored or branded emails they receive. In order to overcome a potential client’s indifference, one must be creative and relevant. New and innovative marketing strategies are needed to combat the public’s immunity to ‘traditional’ email advertisement and to avoid having your efforts tossed aside, joining the online junkyard that is generic email marketing.

Standard ‘batch and blast’ emails are now just a nuisance to the customer. Sending these will surely hinder your email marketing, as it will be taken as though you don’t care about your customer, nor the experience that you are trying to offer them.

Today, marketers can go further and really push the boundaries. Sending a personalised email can go a long way into resolving this issue. Personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates, and it shows the company cares about the customer, instilling trust and faith in the brand.

Email marketing is nothing without an appealing subject line, and tackling this is where marketers have to get creative. Personalising the subject line isn’t the sole solution to achieving email excellence, but it’s certainly going to catch the recipient’s eye. Emails with personalised subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.

Personalisation is proven to smash the benchmarks set for email marketing. The Entertainer, the UKs largest high street toy retailer, recently saw huge increases from their marketing efforts by sending powerful and relevant emails. “We tripled our email revenue last year compared to the year before. It’s not like we have massively grown the database. All we have done is send better messages to the same people and got better results.” Rob Wood, Head of Online, The Entertainer - Source: SmartFocus.

True personalisation is being able to bring all of your data together and actually making something of it. To truly personalise your marketing efforts, you need to include everything in your messaging from what time of day it is? What is the weather like? What device the consumer is using? What is the users’ online behaviour like? Bringing all of this (and more) together will show the customer that you do care about them, which is key to ensuring customer retention.

Location, location, location! This segment of data needs to be utilised in order to keep the message relevant and to access true personalisation. Context is key in today’s competitive corporate jungle, and catching your customer at the right time (real-time) is essential in order to stay in the game. For legitimate contextualisation, marketers need to be interacting with the customer in real-time, offering the products and deals that are pertinent to the consumer. Contextualisation and personalisation go hand in hand, and to master both of these aspects truly means mastering your marketing abilities.

‘Peak Performance saw a 50% increase in AOV along with 33% increase in website clicks through contextualisation and personalisation.’ – Source: SmartFocus.

The most important aspect of email and mobile marketing is that emails are not considered intrusive anymore, whereas an offer promoted via text message could be. As emails are considered more favourable, they rectify the problems associated with direct-to-consumer mobile promotion, whilst allowing insights from location-based software to keep the message directly relevant, personal and in context.

‘Is email marketing dying?’ is a question that’s been lingering for a while now. The truth is, with technology around mobile further progressing, the ways businesses can further integrate and interact with email advances as well. Mobile offers marketers a real opportunity to get creative and surpass the boundaries that are being set on a daily basis. Email is still one of the most effective products of promotion, with excellent ROI, and it helps to maintain trust between the business and the client.

Having said this, traditional and irrelevant emails are certainly going to be left behind. Just as technology advances so too does customer expectation, which means you as a marketer need to be able to utilize your data and products to their full potential.

Author: Kym Reynolds
Source: http://www.marketingtechnews.net/news/2017/jan/31/how-ensure...