Key Elements to Consider When Building an Email Marketing Campaign
Does email still work? In a recent survey, 73% of marketers rated email as the number one digital channel for ROI. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to create great email programs.
Using email for lead generation can generate an impressive ROI, but only if you do it right.
So how do you make sure your emails stand out? How do you generate leads and sales from emails that land in homeowners’ increasingly full email inboxes?
There are a number of factors that lead to success with email. Let’s look at each one.
Targeted Email
The word “relevance” is used frequently in digital marketing. It means that your message – whether it’s an email, social post, picture or video – has value for your audience. Email can give you terrific opportunities to be relevant to your audience by targeting your messages to individuals based on what they’re interested in.
Grouping your audience by different characteristics – called segmenting – and creating email messages specifically based on what is interesting to those groups can boost your opens, click-throughs and ultimately ROI.
A/B Email Testing
Figuring out which of two different messages works better is one of the things email does best. Testing two approaches to a portion of your audience lets you see which generates better response. Then, you can “roll out” the better-performing email to your full list.
Automate Your Email
Email can be part of an ongoing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. The CRM system available through RCG allows you to build workflows, dynamically segment and create autoresponders.
Workflows are basically a series of customer communications that you build once and allow to run automatically. They can be simple as just a string of emails going out once a week to complex contact plans that incorporate emails, sales calls and triggered events based on customer actions. Think of complex email workflows like a “choose your adventure” novel for your customers where each click they make can move them on a different path through the sales funnel.
This uses something referred to Dynamic Segmentation. As customers interact with your CRM emails, their preferences and clicks become a permanent part of their customer file in the system. This information can be used to deliver more relevant messages … even in real-time!
Autoresponders can make sure customers and prospects get the information they want, right when they want it. This is particularly important in our culture of instant gratification.
Best Time For Email
Autoresponders and dynamic segmentation can help customers get information at the moment they want it. But it’s also important to choose the right timing for scheduled emails.
Research shows that open rates for emails peak on Tuesdays, followed by a decrease on Wednesday and another bump on Thursdays. Some emailers recommend sending informational and educational emails on Tuesday and any offer-driven or actionable emails on Thursday.
As for the best time to send emails, open rates are almost always better in the afternoon or evening.
These are good email timing guidelines to begin with. But it’s important to remember that every audience is different. If you’re using a system like RCG’s CRM solution to manage your emails, you can track your own results and tailor your emails to the days and times that work best for your audience.
The Overall Key to Email Success
The most important thing to remember when using email for lead generation is to design every email campaign with your audience’s interests and preferences in mind. The more you can do to tailor your email to your audience (or segments of your audience) the better ROI you’ll experience.