In one of our previous workshops, a participant raised a question if email marketing is relevant in today’s marketing approach. Another question asked was if attempts of email marketing are destined for failure as many perceive email from service providers or businesses as spam.
Before we dive into ways to effective inbound strategy with email marketing, let’s first look into if email marketing strategy is at all fitting for you. This is to clear doubts that you have which are similar to our participants. We truly believe that acknowledging consumer patterns are important. What may work in US or Singapore, may not work locally. This is due to many factors such as internet literacy, internet usage proficiency, and marketing technology adoption rate.
Here in Launchpad, we believe email marketing plays an important role in a buyer’s journey but only if done right and when appropriate. While most individuals undeniably have an email account, the extent to which they use email to obtain information and stay updated needs to be weighed.
Based on a survey conducted in 2017 by GetResponse, it was concluded that Malaysia has the lowest click-through rate from email marketing initiatives. However, effectiveness varies across different industries. Let's take a look at the data of 2 industries below:
To conclude, we believe it’s important to understand the industry and investigate if marketing efforts via email will be appreciated or frowned upon by your prospects and customers. Now that we’ve addressed the elephant in the room, let’s get started on building effective inbound marketing strategy with email marketing.
The inbound methodology in general, consists of 4 main stages: Attract, Convert, Close and Delight. Email marketing is practiced in the close stage after you’ve attracted your prospects, converted them by obtaining personal information and now at the close stage, your role is to nurture them from lead into customers.
We'd like to emphasize that the close stage is truly an intricate one. One wrong email that crosses your lead is a waste of resources as you’ve come so close to closing with your lead and delighting them as customers. The function of email marketing is to support your inbound marketing efforts, gently leading your prospects through the buyer’s journey.
That said, there are three pillars of your business to build an effective marketing strategy:
1. Segmentation
If you’re a marketer, the term ‘segmentation’ is not a foreign one for you. To segment simply means to organize and class individuals into different groups. In the context of an inbound email marketing strategy, it simply means sending the right email to the right person. Do remember that you’re fighting for attention with many other companies that are filling your leads’ inboxes. By sending one email type to all your prospects and customers means you’re disregarding the different phases of the buyer’s journey that they are in. To add, your audiences will also sense the mass email blast you’ve attempted and be put off by it.
Your main objective in executing email marketing is sending emails to the people you know would be happy to receive them. For instance, if your company is offering a special discount to university students, you should not be filling your working-class customers with the same email. Every email needs to be sent with intent and good judgment. Ultimately, segmentation is the marriage between your buyers’ persona and the buyers’ journey. By grouping your buyers into their personas and the stage they’re in their buyer journey, it can be assured that more relevant emails are being sent to your leads. This will avoid your leads from clicking unsubscribe and help increase the click-through rate.
2. Personalization
Always remember that personalization will make your marketing strategies a winning one. That does not mean every email needs to be customized individually. Now that you’ve segmented your leads, create a personalized email for each segment. This may require changing the tone and style of your email and sending relevant offers to relevant segments. We highly recommend practicing behavioral email. Behavioral email is best understood as a practice of sending automated, targeted email to contact based on historical interactions with your company. Also, remember to use this opportunity to be creative and to bond. Personalization is the essence of building a relationship and enforcing trust so be sure to practice and pay a great level of importance to it.
3. Data-driven Analysis
Yes, we pulled the D-word! In inbound marketing, it’s important to quantify every approach to measure success practically. The first step in establishing data-driven analysis is choosing a metric that’s relevant for your business. For instance, you may have sent a discount code via email to 200 of your contact bases and 80 of them have used the code. This may indicate the success of your email marketing initiatives. Metrics are very subjective to the nature of business so do take time to establish which one is important to you.
Next, you would have to identify what the numbers of your metrics mean to your business. Does it indicate success? Or a failure? Perhaps it’s moving but slower than you anticipated. A logical reasoning behind the numbers needs to be enforced.
Third: application. Now that you’ve established metric, understood the reasoning behind the metrics, it’s time to take the lessons and apply to your upcoming emails. Never stop improving your email marketing initiatives and efforts to ensure optimum improvement and growth.
Wrapping Up
In this blog post, we’ve covered the efficiency of email marketing, its importance and ways to build strategic email marketing efforts. We hope we’ve provided sufficient insight for you to confidently decide whether email marketing best fits your organization, and if so, how to get started.
