Email marketing – the tried and true digital platform for connecting with your audience, promoting your brand, and selling your offerings. Despite increasing numbers of emails sent to consumers on a daily basis — especially around the holidays — a well-crafted and strategic message can have a large impact on your customers and lead nurturing efforts.
So how do you create a successful email marketing campaign during “the most wonderful time of the year” while cutting through the clutter and juggling busy employee schedules?
In this post, we will dive into some of our best strategic email marketing hacks and how automated systems like FlowUp can help you boost your holiday campaign results without the headaches.
Why Email Marketing?
Email marketing can promote a diverse range of offerings for little to no cost, and is, therefore, the preferred method of communication for many brands. Emails can be used to simply tell your brand’s story, promote sales of a specific product or service, and everything in between!
When executed properly, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective communication channels available to raise brand awareness and promote products and services.
A 2015 study by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) found that for every $1 spent on email marketing, there is an average return on investment (ROI) of $38.
Email Marketing Hacks: Supercharge your Holiday Campaigns
With many brands looking to amplify their sales during this critical time, it is important to stand out in your consumers’ inboxes. Here are some email marketing hacks to ensure your success this holiday season:
Build and Maintain Your Subscriber List
The first step for a successful email campaign is having an existing list of subscribers in your CRM. Your email list must be made up of individuals who have opted-in to communication from your brand. Those who have actively opted-in to your messages are the most likely to engage with your communications, thereby increasing the ROI of your campaigns. Be sure to keep your email list up-to-date, making it easier to identify where consumers are in your sales funnel and tailor messaging to their specific needs.
Define and Segment Your Audience
Understanding your offering and having a clear idea of your target audience is critical for effectively communicating. There are infinite ways to segment your audience, and each requires a true understanding of your strategic priorities. An effective way to segment your audience is by their stage in the customer journey, such as whether they are existing customers, warm leads, or new opt-ins.
Once you have defined your audience, identify answers to the following questions to craft relevant messaging, increasing the likelihood that they will engage with you:
- When do they prefer to be communicated with?
- Is there a specific vernacular that resonates with them most?
- What activities distinguish this audience from the general population?
After analyzing your audience using the above criteria, you will have a better idea of your target audience. With FlowUp, you can create customized plans based on your lead status to deliver timely and relevant communications at any time. With more relevant and personalized emails to recipients, click-through rates and sales from your campaigns are likely to increase.
Personalize Your Message
No two consumers are the same, and it is important to recognize their differences in your email communications. With countless emails hitting any inbox on a daily basis, personalized touches can make the difference when consumers are making decisions on which communications to engage with and which to ignore.
Personalize greetings or include specific solutions to the consumer’s needs based on the previously collected information. By using systems like FlowUp, brands can build customized paths with triggers and responses, so the appropriate next step happens every time.
Establish Frequencies and Schedules
Frequency of email communication can be tricky — send too many emails and your subscribers tune out or delete your messages, but send too few and your consumers may forget about you altogether. In order to determine ideal frequencies for your campaigns, identify the habits of your target audience. Create a schedule based on the information you know about your consumers, but be willing to be flexible. As the campaign is underway, monitor metrics like click-through rates to adjust for optimal results.
Use Automation to Your Advantage
Especially with increasingly hectic schedules around the holidays, it is easy for managers to become overwhelmed with email marketing campaigns, forgetting to send them out or sending at less-than-ideal times. By investing in an automation system like FlowUp, a series of emails can be scheduled ahead of time, ensuring you are communicating with prospects at the perfect time, every time. Keep the conversation going without having to be online 24/7 with auto-response capabilities triggered by consumer action.
Omnichannel Marketing – The New Generation Outbound Marketing Strategy
In addition to Email marketing, one more thing marketers must follow in today’s time and that is to add other channels in their campaign and make it an omnichannel marketing campaign to make the campaign more effective and broad to reach a larger audience with the variety of communication to get better reach in comparison to single-channel outreach.
Bottom line:
Email is something that every individual around the world opens almost once a day in worst cases, normally it’s more than that and hence it makes that one of the most preferred outbound marketing channels to send the offers and create brand awareness. What you need to know are the hacks to follow for a specific campaign type like we discussed above about the Holiday marketing campaign. To know more, please connect with our support team at help@flowup.com and get started today!