Technology is continuing to evolve at a rapid speed! And the world today is increasingly moving toward virtual reality to bridge physical gaps and create enthralling digital experiences.
Even in this fast-paced world of digitalization, email is still one of the most popular forms of marketing channels that is continuing to reap rich dividends for businesses! Be it generating leads, creating brand awareness, building new relationships, or nurturing existing customers, email marketing helps businesses boost their sales in a million different ways!
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One of the competitive advantages that make emails stand out from other kinds of marketing is the fact that they can be personalized! According to Salesforce’s recent State of the Connected Support, email is the #1 channel that customers prefer for communicating with brands and it also offers better returns than social media!
Being a trusted Salesforce partner, here in this blog, we have shared some key strategies that you can leverage to ace your email marketing game. Let’s get started!
1. Unify your data to find the right audience
The key to creating a successful email marketing campaign lies in creating a single source of truth for customer data. When you bring together the data from sales, marketing, and customer service, you can easily segment your audience into groups based on a variety of attributes and characteristics. This will also enable you to send targeted emails to subsections of your audience, with the information that is most relevant to them.
2. Make use of first-party and zero-party data
First-party and zero-party data play a vital role when it comes to accelerating the results of email marketing efforts. It also promotes a lot of cross-selling opportunities.
Imagine if your ideal customer has found you online and made a purchase with you (or at least shown interest to purchase your products or avail your services). Now, you can personalize their experience by analyzing their behaviors, actions, or interests they demonstrated while visiting your website. This is how you can effectively leverage your first-party data.
As opposed to this, zero-party data is any data that your customers willingly share in exchange for a more personalized experience.
Let’s say your customer has purchased a particular brand’s mobile phone from your online store. Now, they want to know more about that specific product in the upcoming days too. It can be anything like exchange options or new launches from the same brand. You can easily send targeted emails to these clients who are truly interested in the product and drive a connected customer journey.
3. Optimize email templates according to the device
According to recent statistics, 55% of email is now opened on a mobile device! As desktop opens are steadily declining, being able to execute marketing campaigns that display and operate effectively on mobile devices is an essential skill. But still, you have to be proactive and ensure that your messages are optimized for all devices.
And don’t forget, the only difference between gaining a new customer and ending up in someone’s trash folder entirely depends on how you optimize your email templates.
4. Deliver tailor-made content based on your customer’s interest
Your customers provide their contact information to you in the hope that you will help them find solutions that will address their unique needs. This exchange should be taken seriously, and you should think about the ways in which you can address their personalized needs effectively.
By using the information that is provided by the customer and the data that is collected through Salesforce you can easily personalize the content for your customers. And if you wish to create more opportunities, you should have more content variation. For instance, you should have content variation based on the product categories, stages in the customer lifecycle, and the recent activity of your customers.
Audience segmentation will also help you provide tailor-made content to your customers in a more streamlined way.
No matter how rewarding content personalization is, the process demands a lot of time, meticulous planning, and some manual work. The best way to get this done is with the help of a trusted Salesforce solution provider, who can efficiently leverage automation and AI to simplify your personalization efforts.
5. Grow your subscriber list organically!
If you want to deliver value to your audience and grow organically, stop buying email lists. Email marketing works best when you treat your customers well by giving them the information they need. And in general, your customers dislike the feeling of being on the receiving end of an unwanted sales pitch! Don’t ever make them feel so!
From now on say bye-bye to “batch and blast” emails and start growing your subscriber list organically by offering personalized recommendations that build trust between your business and customers. Moreover, when you are sending emails to those subscribers who have actively signed up for and are frequently opening your emails, you will have a favorable reputation in the eyes of your inbox providers.
6. Create an automated email journey!
When it comes to email marketing the chances of creating a unique, personalized email for every customer are comparatively low. This is where automation plays a huge role in uplifting your marketing efforts. Automated emails increase your click-through rates, and they also reduce your marketing spending significantly by 80%. For instance, when your customers are curious to know about the price drop of laptops, they don’t want to get a regular batch and blast mail from you about the price drop or launch of tabs!
To avoid this discord, you can integrate your Marketing Cloud with Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, get a complete picture of your customers and use the insights for automation. Using Marketing Cloud Journey Builder, you can create branching email journeys based on customer personas and actions. No more sending inappropriate product recommendations to your customers!
7. Evaluate your email performance and optimize accordingly
Your email marketing efforts do not stop with finding the right audience, creating, and sending the mail. In fact, creating and sending emails is only half the battle when you don’t proceed forward with measuring the performance of your campaign and using the metrics to optimize accordingly.
When it comes to email marketing the common metrics are open rate, bounce rate, email click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, new subscribers, and unengaged subscribers. If you are not getting the desired results from your email campaign, you can go ahead, experiment, and perform A/B testing to get more in-depth results about which emails work best for your customers.
For instance, if your click-through rates are low, you can create two emails (one with a different CTA). By leveraging Analytics builder, you can easily find out which specific kind of email is getting the best click-through rate. If it is type A; you can send more such emails for your upcoming campaigns. Figuring out what works is now super easy!
8. Harness the power of AI!
Artificial Intelligence will help you keep the guesswork out of your marketing efforts! It has the potential to leverage your customer details to identify the opportunities and the gaps in your email marketing! Moreover, in today’s climate knowing how to impart empathy in your email communications will take your brand closer to your customers and help you build a lasting relationship.
AI in email marketing will enable you to…
- Personalize and create more meaningful conversations with your customers.
- Send emails when your customers are more likely to read them.
- Deliver the right emotion in the email.
Wrap Up!
Email is one of the most effective marketing channels that you can leverage to drive your customers’ engagement with your brand and boost business processes. By tapping into the full potential of Salesforce, and by implementing the best practices we have suggested, you will be able to take your email marketing efforts to the next level.
But depending upon your industry and various business needs, you should know how to optimize the platform to achieve impressive returns.
Our certified Salesforce experts will harmonize with your marketing goals and provide the right automation solutions to ensure that you get the desired actions in your email marketing efforts!
