Every single day over 300 billion emails are sent by brands to customers and prospects throughout the globe – with the sole intention of grabbing a few seconds of their attention and encouraging engagement.
However, there’s no question that this is a vast amount of online noise for any marketer to contend with, and a challenge our industry’s professionals face each time they devise a fresh campaign.
So, how can you not only overcome these difficulties but ensure you’re getting your message read by the right person at the right time?
The truth is, email marketing is something of a battlefield. As a low-cost way for brands to converse with their audience, many organisations see it as a sure-fire route to driving engagement, without busting the marketing budget.
However, that doesn’t mean you should be adding to the digital cacophony and sending out digital comms every week, without really thinking about who you’re delivering these to. If you are guilty of this, your ‘batch and blast’ – and irrelevant – emails will most likely turn-off several individuals in your contact base, as they move onto a competitor who is creating content they want to read.
It’s about quality over quantity
That’s why many marketers are turning to automation to help them in their quest to understand their audience on a deeper level – and well before another brand does.
With an intuitive tool drawing out the critical data you need, you can begin to identify recipient patterns, capitalise on of-the-moment online attitudes, and build a more complete picture of what each individual is interested in.
From this, you should then be able to craft hyper-personalised content that’s based on each consumer’s specific behaviours, because you know the message they want to receive, at what time, and their preferred method of communication.
But before you begin your next email, there is another important point to note. It typically takes six touchpoints before a recipient is truly engaged with your brand’s message. So, that’s why we recommend you structure your next campaign using this six-step email sequence:
1. Begin with the ‘introduction’ email
This is a great starting point because it’s the perfect chance to let your recipient know about you and your brand, and what you have to offer. It’s about building intrigue in a succinct way.
2. Next, it’s the ‘social proof’
Any individual that you’re trying to engage with wants to know exactly why they should trust you. The best way to do this is by evidencing your credibility. Here, focus on case studies or testimonials as your word-of-mouth endorsement.
3. Your third email focuses on what the reader will ‘gain’
If a consumer was to find out more about you, what’s in it for them? This is the question your next piece of digital comms should cover
4. Then, you’re into the ‘fear’ phase
Nobody likes experiencing FOMO (fear of missing out), so craft your email content around why you’re presenting them with an opportunity they can’t afford to swerve
5. The penultimate email is ‘logic’
A great way to bring together everything you’ve already said throughout the journey, here you should underline why buying into your product or service is an obvious choice for the reader
6. Finally, tie-up your sequence with ‘urgency’
Let’s keep this explanation short – if the recipient doesn’t act now, they’ll miss out on the opportunity altogether.
When you nurture your reader via this type of sophisticated journey, it’s also important that you respond positively to their engagements throughout. Marketing automation can help you here as it’ll identify which email they’ve interacted with, so you can effectively ‘take them out’ of the sequence at the appropriate phase. After all, the last thing you want to do is keep sending them comms when they’ve already bought into your messaging at an earlier stage.
Ready to begin your next digital comms campaign? Good luck!
By Force24
www.force24.co.uk
