Email Marketing: Customer acquisition or loyalty tool?
Email Marketing: Customer acquisition or loyalty tool?
Email marketing is the obvious successor to direct Mail. It takes on many of the same good practices. Email marketing opens up new uses as well. Or is it not interesting?
The first innovation of email marketing is its cost. Sending an email to several tens of thousands of people costs a few dollars. No wonder our mail boxes are filled with newsletters and unsolicited emails.
Communicating with customers or prospects has become accessible to all companies. Still, we need to know how to use email marketing well.
Email marketing as a tool for prospecting
The simple way to prospect by email marketing is to buy an email database, load it into an email marketing tool and press send.
The results of this campaign will, however, be poor and underwhelming and will hardly cover the cost of purchasing the database. If you send to 1000 emails purchased:
60% are can be good 600 emails
10% (and that's already a lot) people will open your email 60 people
5% Click in your email or 5 people
5% will leave you their contact information or buy, or 0.15 people
So, you see that in all cases prospecting email marketing is a matter of volume. To improve these statistics, you can:
Buy a quality database or better, partner with a company with a well-maintained database.
Target your campaign to the maximum. The more personalized it is, the better your conversion rates will be at all stages.
The less your campaign is targeted and personalized, the more spam it can be. Spam can be a hidden cost to your campaign. Being perceived as Spam is damaging to your brand image. It also requires additional technical costs to send your emails (not free to be a pirate …)
A good campaign of prospecting by email marketing is personalized to the maximum. It is important to segment the database in a relevant way and to adapt the message.
Email marketing as a loyalty tool
When a customer buys from you he starts a relationship with you and gives you permission to make contact with him. This permission is a real asset and your email marketing has to take care of it.
If you send a newsletter identical to all of your customers, you will slowly and surely destroy your relationship with your clients. You will have low reply stats and click rates of the same order of magnitude.
If your emailing campaigns are well prepared and personalized, you will be able to reach open rates of more than 50% and clicks greater than 20%. This is where email marketing reveals its true potential.
The email marketing tools today allow you to personalize your emails, the frequency, the content and their date of dispatch according to each customer. You can develop marketing campaigns that were in the sweetest dreams of direct mail professionals.
Email marketing is useful for loyalty building when used to improve and maintain your relationship with your customers. Personalization is once again the word and it is accessible to all today.
Enter the world of personalized marketing
Whether you are in prospecting or in loyalty mode the important thing today is the personalization of your email marketing campaigns.
Prospect or customer, the cost is the same and you can use the same techniques. Email marketing tools allow you to create a relationship with all the people who someday or other might want to buy your products.
Your challenge to succeed in your email marketing is to produce the content and services that will interest your potential buyers’ community. To offer them this content and services at the right time.