Undertaking an Email Marketing activity makes sense if you establish an action plan before launching a campaign.
1. Set the goals of your Email Marketing strategy:
A good strategy starts with a clear goal: what do you want to achieve by doing Email Marketing? Selling, retaining, creating brand awareness? You can also have more objectives but it is better that you define only one for each campaign you launch, in this way the call to action that will accompany your email will be clear and precise and you will not risk confusing people. Keep in mind that users are easily distracted and that, if they are not routed in a well-defined direction, they do not carry out any action.
Your ultimate goal, as a marketer, is definitely to sell, but you need to be aware that not all of your leads are ready to buy. It can take weeks or months for a lead to turn into a customer. In the meantime, however, you can create the conditions for this transformation to take place: through your emails you can in fact “nourish” your contacts and become a point of reference for needs related to your products. Like? By offering value through useful resources, which have no commercial purpose: you must earn the trust of your contacts.
In fact, you cannot think of doing Email Marketing only with messages inviting to purchase and emails full of discounts, offers and promotions: this can be done by anyone and, unless you want to fight a war at the lowest price, you will not get no benefit from this activity. You will be just one of many, like spam, to be briefly read and trashed.
With Email Marketing you can achieve the following objectives:
- create a relationship of trust between your company and a potential customer;
- retain customers already acquired;
- strengthen brand awareness and brand positioning in the user’s mind, to be the first brand they think of for a specific need;
- generate traffic to a page that is important to you;
- transform simple contacts (leads) into customers;
- convince those who have already bought to buy again;
- keeping the relationship with a potential client alive through constant communications.
- These are also very different objectives, for which Email Marketing provides different strategies.
2. Define the buyer personas of your strategy:
When you start an Email Marketing business you need to know who the people you write to are: only in this way can you offer interesting content right from the subject of your email and attract your potential customers to discover everything you have to offer.
As we have already seen, the inbound approach to marketing is based on the creation of valuable content for users, but the concept of value changes according to the people, so it is essential for you to define who is the recipient of your messages.
To set up an effective Email Marketing strategy, after setting the objectives, you must therefore define your buyer personas, or fictitious but realistic representations of your potential customers that help you better understand what are the needs of the people you want to intercept and how you can satisfy them.
For each type of customer, create a form with all the information that identifies him: gender, age, city of residence, profession, interests, problems, purchasing habits, … You can retrieve these data from the registration form to your list, from the insights of social or from Google Analytics, if you have a website or blog.
3. Apply the conversion funnel to your strategy:
Relationship with your company. In web marketing we talk about conversion funnel: the funnel is a funnel scheme that represents the path that a user takes from the first time he comes into contact with your company to when he converts into a customer. The image of a funnel is used because the upper part, where the first contact takes place, is much wider than the final part: the progressive narrowing of the mouth of a funnel gives a good idea of a path that progressively narrows downwards. ” deepen the relationship between the user and the company.
Placing the buyer personas in a specific point of the funnel allows you to understand the predisposition to purchase of the people registered on your mailing list. This is useful for defining your Email Marketing strategy, deciding whether to send a transactional email, a dem or a newsletter and what is the most suitable content for each segment of your contact list.
For example, you cannot already send a commercial offer to a new subscriber, because he is not yet ready to respond positively to a request of this type. A new member must be “warmed up”, prepared with informational content and resources that meet his needs. In this way, trust in your brand will grow, a necessary prerequisite for achieving a conversion.