Getting More Customers to Read and Respond to Your Email Campaigns
Most of us by now recognize the value of an email marketing tool to design a sophisticated email, outsource the delivery and ensure deliverability past the spam blockers. With email marketing tools as low as $15 a month, these tools are ubiquitous and used by everyone from the neighborhood dry cleaner to law firms. At pennies to send with instantly measurable results, email has proven ROI.
But everyday I hear about organizations struggling with response rates from their email campaigns. How do you get more people to open your email (which you’ve probably spent hours or even days creating) and more importantly react to it? Here I’ve outlined a few email marketing practices that guarantee better results.
Interests, Value and Customer Relationships
The key to successful email marketing campaigns is leveraging the data in your customer relationship management (CRM) system. Tracking your customers’ interests, communicating products and services related to these interests and utilizing the email marketing system tools ensure improved response rates from your campaigns.
The only way to effectively and efficiently do this is through integration between your email marketing system and your Microsoft Dynamics CRM system. Many organizations use email marketing tools but very few leverage tools integrated to their customer relationship management system. Organizations spent countless hours gathering profile data on their constituents but they rarely utilize this data to the fullest extent.
Think of the powerful messages you could send to your constituents if you communicated messages that resonated with their daily needs. Do you think they might open your email?
Personalized Subject Lines
I receive multiple newsletters, invitations etc via email every day. The only ones I open are those that have an enticing subject line that resonates with me. It’s no coincidence that these subject lines are personalized to my interests. There are multiple ‘big brother’ type tools out there that experienced Email Marketers (not Emailers) are tracking in their customer relationship management systems and utilizing to increase their effectiveness. It works… I always open their emails.
Send Time Optimization (STO) is the new SEO.
Clients always ask what day/time of week is the best to send the email. The answer is that there is no perfect universal time. Personally, if you hit me with a marketing email at 10pm, I most likely will read it even if it isn’t very personalized. I’m a night owl and just starting my evening at 10pm. However, my neighbor may just be turning in and never read your email.
STO has the ability to analyze each recipient and what day/time they tend to read and click through most of your emails. This is an extremely effective tool for decreasing the chance of an email getting buried in the recipient's inbox and will help to increase open, click-through, and conversion rates.
Hopefully this will help you to make the shift from an Emailer to an Email marketer! Happy Emailing!
e-Newsletter SignupPosted by Allison Brown on Fri - Jun 25, 2010
