Marketing is all about getting potential customers to KNOW you, LIKE you and TRUST you. Regular email contact is the perfect way to tick the last two off. Think of it as a way to build relationships, rather than as an announcement or campaign tool, and your email marketing will be transformed.
Developing ‘always on’ emails which build relationships will do wonders for
• Conversion of prospects
• Retention of existing customers
• Maximising lifetime value
But what sort of emails should form the basis of your plan? Here are 6 types of emails you should have in your armoury:
What sort of emails should I send to my customers?
1. Welcome
When someone provides their data and opts in to receiving communications from you, it’s essential that you recognise this with a welcome email strategy. This should consist of at least one triggered email confirming their subscription, but in an ideal world you should create an automated email flow with a variety of topics, products or useful information which you think they would benefit fromYou should also take this opportunity to educate or reinforce a bit about your Brand and business; what you do and how you do it. Another thing worth considering here is setting expectations about how often they might hear from you and what sort of them you intend to send them – reassure them your emails will be valuable and that you won’t trouble their inbox.
2. Newsletter
The next email staple is a newsletter; sent regularly, with a number of different messages about your current product range or service activities. This could be sent weekly, fortnightly or monthly – but ideally no more or less often than that. Layer news, awards and company updates with products and offers so that there are a variety of messages to please audiences regardless of their stage of purchase or repurchase. Make sure these a regular to keep your engagement levels high, and ideally give them a title or issue number so that your audience expectations are set E.g. ‘August newsletter’ or ‘Issue 42’
3. Request for review
Another must-have email engagement opportunity is to ask your customers for feedback. When and how this is done will be dependent on your business; if someone has purchase a product, an immediate request for review is appropriate – and then it might take a number
4. New product or service announcement
Another great time to communicate with your audience will be when you have a new product or service to tell them about. Again, you should look to create as many touchpoints as possible in the build up to launch and during the launch phase – don’t assume one email will do. You would be surprised how well a pre-launch teaser campaign will work to raise overall awareness and aid conversion when it comes to opening for order. You also need to send people a message a number of times to achieve cut through and resonance.
For a launch campaign, you should send at least 3 emails: one teaser and two launch communications – but if you can keep people engaged for more, say 3 pre-launch and 3 launch even better:
For example:
1 – Exciting news coming next week
2 – XX is happening and we wanted you to be the first to know
3 – Not long now, the countdown is on
4 – It’s here! Be the first…
5- Everyone’s talking about our new…
6 – It’s not too late to be the envy of the crowd
5. Winback
With your knowledge of your business, you should be able to define when you would expect a repeat or new purchase from each of your customers. Defining a period after this will enable you to classify a contact as ‘lapsed’ or ‘dormant’ – for this group you need a strategy to warm them back up to future conversion; also known as a winback strategy. This automated flow will target messages including what’s changed since they last purchased, new product or service news, and even sales offers to tempt them back.
6. Requalification
For those contacts who have stopped engaging with your communication, it can be useful to run requalification campaigns from time to time to find out where they are at. You can ask them to click on something to show they are still interested (or if indeed they want to unsubscribe), or you can link to a survey with more detailed questions about their feelings about your brand and likelihood to purchase again in the future. This in itself can achieve a re-engagement, it can help steer your strategy based on customer insight, or at the very least it serves as a method to clean up your list – nobody wants a disengaged audience after all!
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