More Effective Than Many Realize
Email marketing can do more for your business than many people realize. There has been an assumption that email marketing is behind the times, but it isn’t owing to something called CRM. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. Essentially, especially with large lists of leads, CRM assures you don’t repeat yourself.
You can “rank” leads based on their likelihood of converting to the products or services of your business. Once they’ve been ranked, you can just “go down the list”. With email outreach, that can look a number of different ways. On the one hand you can automatically email everybody on the list at intervals.
That’s going to be problematic because it turns your business into a “spam” company. Nobody likes unnecessary advertisement messages. On the other hand, you can fill out details of leads after you’ve ranked them and send pre-written messages with the appearances of personalization.
Essentially, you strategically classify leads based on where they are in the “buyer’s journey”. There are three stages; awareness, research, and conversion. If customers are just now becoming aware of what you offer, then you may want to send them advertisement resources via email which match that reality. If they’re considering a purchase, give them deeper data.
Developing Ways To “Capture” More Email Addresses
Email marketing is more effective when you properly “gauge” the likelihood of acquisition based on a given lead. However, if you don’t have any email addresses in your lead list, then it doesn’t matter how efficient email outreach or CRM is. So what you want to do is develop the means by which emails can be sent to you.
You might make a “white paper” that requires a reader to enter their email address to read your information. This can put them on your recurring list, but if you “spam” their inbox every day, you’ll get blocked quick. So once you put “email gates” in front of content, you’ve got to find ways of classifying potential customers.
Part of that customer classification will involve qualifying the validity of your business. Using Search Engine Optimization can help your business be more visible on the web, like Bill Lentis explains. As regards email marketing, it’s essential those who you send messages to are able to see your business on the online infrastructure which defines today’s business environment.
If you get people to click on your email links, and that leads them to something that looks fishy, you lose the value of the email. However, when they see that you’re a legitimate enterprise, then suddenly the email you’ve sent has acted as a vector for more “research”, and voila—your potential client is further down the “sales funnel”.
KPIs Maximize Outreach Effectiveness
To get the most from email marketing, beyond CRM and strategies designed to legitimize your business, you additionally need to keep careful data pertaining to user interaction. How often do those to whom you send messages interact with them? How many conversions do you get per 100 emails? Numbers like that can be complicated; you may want to outsource marketing.
The point is, in order to gauge the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign, you’ve got to develop relevant KPIs. Key Performance Indicators can be of many different types. CTR refers to Click Through Rate, and indicates the level of interaction a given digital ad ultimately has. This KPI helps determine if your marketing investment is producing returns or not.
At the end of the day, you’re looking for greater Return On Investment, or ROI, than the ultimate cost of whatever marketing you’re putting out there. Email marketing can definitely produce the ROI you’re looking for, but you’ll need to keep careful numbers, “grade” leads, find ways of pulling them in, and legitimize yourself on the web apart from emails.