Did you know:
For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42. (DMA, 2019)
and
59% of respondents say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions. (SaleCycle, 2018)
When you consider these statistics, the impact of email marketing and its ability to grow your organization is clear.
As you build out your 2021 marketing plan, consider these tactics to refine your strategy and boost the success of your email campaigns in the coming year:
1. Automate
There’s a huge list of the benefits to automation beyond the fact that it’s automatic and will save you time.
Think of the resources and time that you’ve spent on advertising to bring in new leads. The time and investment you and your sales team has put in to acquire new customers.
Not nurturing your leads through email marketing and delighting your customers with messaging that helps them get the most out of your services … It’s like throwing all that time and money out the window!
When you employ effective email automation and consistent messaging, you keep your leads interested and your customers happy, which produces more sales, better customer retention, and a healthier bottom line.
The Critical Impact of Automation
Critical Impact software provides a simple automation builder and advanced automation that is touted as one of the easiest to use on the market. One of the most popular automations is the welcome or onboarding sequence to ensure that new customers are properly welcomed and informed about new products and services as they move through the customer journey. This automation helps businesses promote their additional products and services, and in turn increases upsells and retention among their customer base.
2. Harness the Power of Personalization
Personalization is more than just adding the contact’s first name to the greeting of your email. When we talk personalization, we’re talking about sending a personalized, super-relevant message within the body of the email that serves your contact the information they want within the context of their journey.
The more you personalize your emails, the more it’s like you’re having a conversation with your subscriber. The more personalized, the more human your brand appears, the more trust you build with your brand. The more trust you build, the stronger your sales and retention. Not to mention, when personalization is done effectively, it presents upsell opportunities.
The Critical Impact of Personalization
With Critical Impact software, you can create as many custom fields as you’d like. A custom field allows you to collect and store information about a subscriber that can later be used to create dynamic lists or to merge information into the body of your email message, or subject line for ultra-personalized communications.
See related article: How to Boost Clicks & Conversions with Email Personalization: 3 Actionable Tips
3. Supercharge Your Segmentation
You may have great content but not sending it to the right person at the right time can squash its impact and marketing effectiveness. That’s where segmentation comes in.
By segmenting your list into smaller groups based on similarities, you’ll be able to send hyper-targeted email content that is most relevant to your segment.
For example, say you are hosting a webinar. Leading up the webinar, you could send a series of targeted follow-up emails to people who haven’t yet clicked the link to register for the event.
Common segmentations:
Subscribers
Leads
Customers
Buyer persona segments
The Critical Impact of Segmentation
Critical Impact gives you both list segmentation functionality and advanced list segmentation. With advanced list segmentation, lists can be built dynamically by the Critical Impact system based on rules you set, such as: “Any subscriber that has opened or clicked any message in the past 30 days, put them in X list.”
4. Implement Dynamic Content to Optimize Results
A quick and effective way to energize your open and click rates is by employing dynamic content. Say you have an email newsletter that goes out to customers and a version of the newsletter that is sent to prospects. You could serve specific copy, images, and videos to your customers and different content — say a special offer — to prospects.
With dynamic content, you are providing specific, relevant content within your email that’s more likely to resonate with the audience and bring in better results.
The Critical Impact of Dynamic Content
Within Critical Impact, you can easily add a “dynamic content rule” into your email templates and each subscriber who matches that rule will received personalized content. You can leverage data like purchase history, website activity, email interactions, and even your CRM data, to send tailored content.
5. Make Triggered Emails Part of Your Strategy
Triggered Emails are automated emails based on a date (like customer anniversary) or a behavior (open, click, website activity).
Say a prospect of yours is interested in one of your services. They click the call-to-action in your newsletter that takes them to your web page where they stay for more than 60 seconds.
Based on their interaction with that page and the time they spend on your site, your customer is then added to an automation that sends them more information on that service.
The message is relevant. It’s timely. And, it moves the interested prospect through to the next stage of the buyer journey — quickly and effectively. It’s the right message, to the right person, at the EXACT right time.
The Critical Impact of Triggered Emails
Through Critical Impact software, you can easily set Triggered Emails to your subscribers based on email opens, email clicks, date fields, purchases, or other conditions that you define.
Some popular ways Triggered Emails are used by our clients: A “thank you” and confirmation link is sent to a new subscriber. Reminders are sent to subscribers for expiring contracts or memberships. A “more information” email is sent to subscribers based on website visitor tracking information like time spent on site and pages viewed.
6. Leverage the Integrations Available to You
Not only will integrated systems streamline your processes and reduce costs, they’ll drastically improve efficiency for you and your sales team.
Consider integrating your CRM with your email marketing platform. Through integration, your contact lists and preferences from your CRM are automatically pulled into your email marketing software saving you valuable time and increasing productivity. Additionally, your sales reps will be able to immediately act upon your marketing initiatives for better marketing/sales alignment.
Consider other integrations, too, like Google Analytics. When sending a message with Google Analytics Link Tracking enabled, you’ll be able to see how much of your website traffic came from an email message. You can then use that data to measure conversions and create more personalized, relevant communications that deliver greater results.
The Critical Impact of Integrations
Critical Impact offers integration with Salesforce, Oracle, Google Analytics, and Zapier. You can also use Critical Impact’s API to update contacts, send messages, get tracking information, and much more.
More on Critical Impact Integrations
We’ve Only Just Begun
As you can imagine, there are plenty of ways to level up your email marketing. It’s our hope that these 6 tips serve as your starting point — and your inspiration — to keep on refining and improving your email marketing for greater impact and greater results.
At Critical Impact, our goal has always been to make email marketing extremely simple, and extremely effective. And we deliver on that by maintaining just the right balance of ease-of-use, sophistication, and affordability.
We welcome the opportunity to show you our feature-rich software that marketers find so easy to use for optimizing email marketing performance. To learn more and book a demo, visit staging-criticalimpactcom.kinsta.cloud.