What can an Email Marketing Consultant do for me?
If you are lacking the necessary experience in running good email marketing campaigns, or are simply not getting the open/click through rates you desire, then going external to an email marketing consultant would be a good step forward.
Having run campaigns for businesses across technology, professional services, fashion, subscription products, healthcare, I come with a vast array of experience. Similarly, the target audiences have varied between the residential consumer to corporate business buyers, for both low and high value items.
An email marketing consultant will address important areas such as:
- Overall strategy - sales, leads, brand awareness etc
- Your USPs and how to communicate them
- Brand Guidelines and compelling designs
- Your email recipient data and any required segmentation of messages
- Conclusions and action points that can be drawn from reports
- The email marketing and CRM technologies
What does an Email Marketing strategy look like?
Successful email marketing is about driving home the right message to the right customer.
The layman's explanation would be "don't send cat food advertising to a dog owner". Seems obvious of course, but there is a lot of work that goes into understanding what each individual customer of yours wants to hear from your business.
Open rates and click through rates go up if your message is right and your intentions are clear. Do you want them to buy a product? Do you want them to sign up to something, or read an influential argument?
People get so many email messages, that you need to stand out from the (lazy) rest of the crowd by being personal and on point. And that means data.
The importance of email recipient segmentation
Many organisations will send the same monthly message to a list of 10,000 recipients and get an email open rate is 11%, and the click through rate hovers around 2%.
And then wonder why.
When I worked on the Zen Internet email marketing campaign of over 100,000 recipients, we would regularly send out about 12 different campaigns tailoring the message and call to action in each. They would easily hit 40% open rates, and 12-18% click through rates.
Even then, a detailed study of the reports might recommend that 15 campaigns were sent out next time, after the user data was further segmented by the recipient's actions and assumed / chosen preferences.
How Email Marketing needs a good CRM
Good email segmentation relies on a good CRM though.
The likes of Zoho, Hubspot, Saleforce and Capsule are all becoming necessary cornerstones of modernising businesses - if you haven't got one then I can explain why you need a good CRM.
Simply paying your subscription isn't enough though - you need to buy INTO them as well. From initial detailed configuration of what a customer record should look like - think database fields: name, address etc - to the additional tagged elements.
A tag might be "dog owner" or "cat owner", but could equally be their typical user interactions e.g. opened Campaign A 3 times, clicked Campaign B twice.
A good CRM will allow you to break down the mass of recipient data into individuals.
And emailing individuals will always have better response rates.
Email marketing and content marketing - the best of friends
What to send your users?
If you are regularly producing content then these are the easy messages to send out to your user base:
- How much dry versus wet food should I give my cat?
- What nutritional value do raw meat bones offer my dog?
- 12 beautiful fish tanks arrangements
This content should be inspiring, informative and/or entertaining.
It might be influential content that connects people to your brand, or it might be more direct "buy now whilst stocks last" content to generate an action.
So many eCommerce businesses simply send out product offers; and so many professional services companies send out boring Latest News pieces. Both of these can become tiresome and be ignored quickly.
If you want some good ideas of what to send to your users, and how best to generate opens / clicks / purchases / sign ups, then get in touch with me, or take a detailed look at the email marketing services I offer.