Email marketing is an efficient way for businesses to reach out to customers, gain brand awareness and drive sales. Yet, maintaining the right balance between engaging and annoying customers is always a common issue for businesses who want to maximise the effectiveness of their email campaigns without pestering subscribers.
The Importance of Email Marketing
‘Lithus’ study finds that businesses still prefer and excel at using email marketing to reach out to their customers. With an average ROI of $36 per dollar, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing channels. Also, email marketing offers organizations the convenience of talking directly to customers without getting sucked up in the clamour of social media and other platforms.
The Risks of Over-Communication
Email Marketing is a useful strategy, but companies should understand the dangers of informing their customers more than necessary. E-mails can cause subscriber fatigue, when subscribers get too busy with the content of the brand. This can lead to subscribers unsubscribing, marking emails as spam or simply disregarding them.
Finding the Balance
The most important ingredient of email marketing is frequency versus relevance. Some tips for businesses on how to strike the balance:
1. Segment the Email List
Segmentation is an important step towards maintaining a balance between email delivery and value. By breaking down the email list into more targeted groups based on similar traits, businesses can deliver extremely targeted and customized messages to each group. This in turn helps keep subscribers engaged and eliminates subscriber fatigue.
There are many ways to divide an email list into demographics (age, gender, region, etc. ), buyer behavior (purchase history, web traffic, email response, etc. ), and explicitly mentioned preferences (interests, types of content, communication frequency, etc.). Each category can have its own content schedule, enabling the business to tailor the frequency and relevancy of content to each subscriber’s requirements and preferences.
Consider the following examples of segmentation techniques for email lists:
1. Demographic Segmentation
Demographic segmentation is maybe the easiest, and yet the most powerful, way of segmenting. It lets businesses create lists by age, sex, region, or income. For instance, suppose a clothing store divides its email lists by gender and so sends two different types of messages to male and female subscribers respectively. In that scenario, every niche will receive individualized content tailored to his or her specific clothes and fashion needs.
Consider your list members: Email them fashion tips for men and fashion tips for women. It’s not just this targeted delivery that makes sure subscribers get relevant content, but the feeling of feeling like they are being heard will boost subscriber engagement as well.
2. Behavioral Segmentation
Behavioral segmentation is one of the most powerful approaches for segmentation. You can analyze purchases, browsing behavior, and engagement data to create a few segmented email lists. A retailer can also categorize its valued customers — customers who have already purchased items or clicked/open/open emails from the brand.
Therefore, enterprise can provide high value subscribers with exclusive discounts or offers, or let them avail early access to new products, in order to foster customer loyalty and, thus, nurture relationships with the highest value customers. The segment-specific strategy will not only yield loyalty but lead to increased engagement and spending in all aspects.
3. Interest-based Segmentation
Interest-based segmentation takes personalization a step further, giving subscribers a way to define their interests at the point of signup. By providing options when signing up is related to product types, subjects or types of content, businesses can ensure that they’re generating an email list that represents subscriber interests.
A hiking company may ask its customers to describe their hobbies: Hiking, Camping, Fishing. As a thank you, subscribers will receive each and every newsletter created that contains highly targeted content about their niche – not only pertinent, but highly anticipated, as well. Such customization means that a brand really cares about what customers want, thus encouraging and intensifying the subscribers’ brand engagement and trust levels.
2. Personalize the Messaging
Personalised emails with the right content and offers are likely to get opened and clicked on by recipients. Businesses need to leverage subscriber information to customise the message according to the interests and demands of the subscriber. This can be as simple as informing the subscriber name in the subject line, or suggesting items based on what you’ve already bought, or providing subscribers with content based on their interests. Personalization not only helps in engaging with a user but also reinforces your connection with the subscriber.
3. Monitor Subscriber Engagement
It’s important to keep track of subscriber conversion metrics like open rates and click through rate to identify how well an email campaign performs. If your subscriber number is too low, you should consider lowering the frequency of communication. — Businesses should also keep an eye on unsubscribes and spam complaints as this can mean that the subscriber is getting too many emails or irrelevant content.
4. Provide Value
All emails should provide value to the customer (be it a deal, tips or industry news). Firms must not send emails that are strictly promotional or commercial because these emails fatigue subscribers and deflate them. Rather, businesses should strive to provide valuable content that is centered on the subscriber’s interests and demands.
5. Let Subscribers Manage Their Preferences.
Businesses need to allow subscribers to manage their email subscriptions — including the number of emails and the email formats that they receive. This enables subscribers to personalize their email experience according to their preferences, thereby avoiding subscriber burnout and unsubscriptions. Businesses can also access preference centers to access more subscriber data such as interest and communication preferences in order to further personalize the messages.
Conclusion
Businesses can use email marketing to interact with customers and increase sales. Businesses should however be careful about maintaining the right balance between frequency and relevance so that they don’t get too many signals in. Through segmenting, messaging, measuring subscribers, delivering value, and giving subscribers the ability to determine their preferences, businesses can ensure the optimal efficiency of their email campaigns.
