Building relationships through email marketing

Team CallRail had the awesome opportunity of attending this year’s Digital Summit Series in Atlanta. The two-day conference held multiple sessions on digital marketing strategy and best practices, boasting speakers from big names like Google, Facebook, and eBay. While several aspects of digital strategy were covered, one of the most prevalent topics was email marketing.

Email marketing can be either your team’s biggest pain point or greatest asset. At Digital Summit, Corinne Roberts and Jason Dent from Campaign Monitor touched on key takeaways marketers should keep in mind when creating their email strategy. Their session centered around the importance of getting personal and building one-on-one relationships through email.

Let’s Get Personal

Even though there is an incredible amount of noise in the sphere of communication with customers, email remains one of the most effective methods to reach your audience. Sure, you could rely on organic reach through social media, but the organic reach is declining. PPC ads can quickly bust your budget and native advertising is difficult to attribute to your bottom line. We are all bombarded with countless ads, causing us to go “ad blind” and find ways around them.

In this year alone, there will be 293 billion emails sent to consumers per day. If you want to amplify your message and cut through all the inbox noise, your emails need to be timely, relevant, and personalized. If you’re not talking to your customers by name about something relevant to them when they’re interested in hearing about it, they’re probably not listening to you. This demand is causing a dramatic shift from mass marketing to one-on-one marketing.  

Simply put, email has become an art. The process of creating emails has become very involved, and it’s important to consider certain points. 

Roberts and Dent offered seven great steps to get started with your personal approach:

1. Evaluate your marketing technology stack. Do those tools fit your data needs, team, and functionality? 36 percent of marketers consider personalization a challenge. Do your research and choose the technology based on your goals, not on IT-driven objectives. You want to be sure your team can focus on reaching their goals without having to deal with technical issues.
2. Choose your customer data system and stick to it. Determine which internal business apps will be the “central source of truth” for customer data. Maintaining accuracy of your customer data will fuel compelling one-on-one messages.
3. Enrich your customer data with integrations. Map out all the places you collect consumer data. Brainstorm data types or conduct research on customer personas to tailor your messages. 56 percent of people unsubscribe from an email list because the information isn’t relevant to them.
4. Map out a segmented email strategy.  Identify what you want your audience to do. Whether that’s making a purchase, reading a blog post, or visiting your website, you should segment your audience based on the data you’re already capturing. Analyze that data to find insights and reveal who you’ll need to target to achieve your goals.
5. Deliver targeted content to drive the ideal behavior. “One size fits all” is not an effective strategy. Make your desired next step explicit and simple. Users not only want personalized digital content, they expect it.
6. Be thoughtful about when and how you send. It’s not just about the right message, but about the right timing and methodology. Consult your data to optimize the best time to send messages for maximum engagement. Also, consider the way you’ve structured your emails and what types of subject lines drive clicks since 23% of email opens occur within the first hour of delivery, dropping by half in the second hour.
7. Measure, optimize, and iterate. Email marketing is not a set-it-and-forget-it strategy. It needs constant monitoring and optimizing. Track the results of your emails to make sure they are delivering the desired outcomes. If not, adopt a more refined approach. Analyze performance at the campaign level holistically and in comparison to your other marketing channels.

Understanding how to set your marketing team up for success with the right tools and data is crucial. You need a polished strategy to effectively leverage data to personalize your customers’ experience. Put these tips into action and empower your team with great results!