Email Marketing
Email is a cheap, effective way to build your customer base, but it requires some simple planning steps up front and a consistent, coherent approach. You don’t want to end up in someone’s spam folder because you weren’t able to hook them with your message, and you don’t want to intersperse brief, hyperactive periods with long droughts where you don’t have any activity. In this blog post, we’ll describe how to create an energetic email campaign that reaches out and touches your customers efficiently and effectively.
You can turn contacts into customers with a strong email campaign. The trick is to appear relevant and to target your customers with the information they want. Whenever you have significant activity on your site, you want that to appear in a brief email with a link back to your fresh content. If you post a new blog entry, you need to tell the world about it. Similarly, if you find links to interesting information that reinforces your brand proposition, that’s worth talking about. Finally, any sales events, coupons, special offers, or discount coupons that your marketing campaign has scheduled should go out in an email to your customers and contacts.
You miss out on building your customer base if you don't stay in constant contact, and email is the best way to do it. Putting a creative agency in charge of your email marketing efforts will relieve you of the stress of filling and managing the content pipeline. You certainly have better things to do than write, edit, and push the send button for an activity that should happen continually. Not only that, but if that effort falls on one set of shoulders, you are more likely to stop purposefully planning each communication and ensuring it pushes the messaging you want. You’re more likely to start flailing away and pushing out material that’s easy, rather than what’s right.
You must actively go out and find tomorrow's customers. They’re out there, they’re smart, and they shop around. By continually building up your contact list to thousands and thousands of email addresses, and then pushing a steady stream of interesting, relevant information to them, you’ll set yourself up for long-term success. But you can’t do it alone, and we’re here to help. Step one in developing a successful email program is to put all the basics in place. This means assuring that your mission statement is written down, your goals are in place, and your foundation is strong. You can’t contact your potential customers and confuse them – you need to have a plan and purpose for each email.
Second, once you have a plan, then you can select the specific email program that’s right for you. Churning out regular emails from your personal Gmail account is not the way to go – you need a tool that handles equally the mechanics and the statistics gathering. There’s no point in going down this path if you can’t measure your impact. Our consultants can show you how to embed the right code into your emails to measure clicks, and report back usable metrics.
Finally, you need to set up a process and schedule for your out-bound messaging. Maybe you have several different product lines you want to rotate through the spotlight. Perhaps you have upcoming seasonal specials that deserve mention. By putting a plan in place, with an editorial calendar and a step-by-step process, you’ll assure that you always know what’s next. You’ll have different messages working their way through the pipeline, at various stages of drafting, perfecting, editing, and publishing. You don’t have the time or the energy to micromanage each and every email in your program – you need seasoned professionals to assist you.
Email programs work best when they consistently reinforce your mission statement and your brand, when they deliver interesting information to prospective customers, and when they come out on a regular, repeatable basis. RH+M3 has managed email programs for some of the toughest global customers, and we can get you going in no time. We’ll put you on a managed schedule, and we’ll deliver analyzable metrics that show you how your click rates are growing. Best of all, you’ll see new customers either online, or in your showroom. Your business will grow consistently if you set up a solid, professional email program, and you’ll be freed up to do what you do best – strategize and grow.
