Email marketing remains beneficial for all sizes of businesses but particularly useful for startups who want an economically viable alternative to formal marketing set up that they can ill afford. For maximum accessibility in reaching out to the audience at a personal level, there is hardly anything better than email. Emails are omnipresent because users can access it from all kinds of devices and the popularity of mobile devices has to give emails marketers a shot in the arm.
Email marketing had gone through a rough patch when marketers started abusing the media by using it for advertising that became a cause for bigger disappointment for clients and customers. Instead of helping to get closer to customers, the rampant use of spammy and unsolicited emails resulted in growing consumer resentment towards emails.
However, there is nothing inherently wrong with emails for marketing except that some people have misused it and given it a bad name. The loss was on the part of the companies that tried to act smart and earned the wrath of consumers who did not take any time to blacklist these companies by blocking their emails. In the process, these companies lost existing customers who opted out for some other brands that respected the choice of consumers and were less intrusive in using emails.
Intelligent communication holds the key
Startups have to be careful in using emails for marketing by ensuring that they use it carefully while keeping the target customers in good humor. Emails are excellent tools for building a customer base almost without any investment and the best choice for startups that have to cope up with the financial constraints and scanty resources in marketing. They must know how to capitalize on the potential of email marketing that can create highly personalized marketing campaigns,which go a long way in creating and retaining customers. Creating messages that have a personal touch that users find informative and useful are highly effective than pitching loudly to sell products blatantly, feels the professional of the best SEO Company.
When users find your messages interesting, they would keep their inbox open for you and await the next messages eagerly. To know about the ways of doing it correctly, keep reading.
Create buyer personas
By using the data from market research and customer data, you have to create buyer profiles that capture the various traits of customer personality that translates into buyer personas. By creating buyer personas that represent the ideal customer, you give a face to the particular customer segment that becomes its identity for use in marketing. You can even give a name to it for easy identification. Buyer personas make it easy to categorize customers into small segments for visualizing how a representative from the category would look like.
Customized messages
It becomes easy to step into the shoes of customers by evaluating buyer personas. You could try to understand what kind of reaction the email would generate had you been in the customer’s place. It becomes easy to understand what kind of value customers might expect from the message. The small segments that you assign to customers based on buyer personas come alive as it becomes more tangible. Creating customized emails become easy, as you know what the audience would expect and serve them the right value that satisfies them.
Customer segmentation
Researching and analyzing the target audience is a pre-requisite before sending out marketing emails. On knowing different types of customers, you can group them into various small segments which marketers fondly call micro-segmentation. After creating broad groups of customers according to the types, you have to create smaller sub-groups or segments by considering attributes that are more specific. While the broad group might base on the age, sex, and region of customers, you could break it down further to make it more specific by using the data related to their exact location, profession and buying habits. You can use some available software for creating micro-segments of customers by sorting out the data. Having done the segmentation, the stage is now set to launch the email marketing campaign.
Concise content
Now that you know your customer very well, it is natural that you would like to showcase your business to them in the best possible way by capturing all relevant aspects that help to promote business. You could become inclined to include lots of information, advice and even a huge list of special offers. While the intention is good, you could face the problem of being verbose and taxing the patience of customers. If customers get bored with the message, it will do more harm than good. Therefore, striking a balance between too much and too little is what you have to achieve in creating content for email marketing. Create crisp and interesting content that delivers value upfront because no one would be interested in hunting for value. Keeping the content brief enhances its readability, and once customers read the content,they would automatically derive its value.
Provide additional reward
Besides offering some basic value to customers through the email marketing campaign, you must delight them by providing some extra value. Once you can ascertain the interests and buying habits of customers, you can interact with them closely and provide additional value besides transacting business. Providing an e-book that they might find interesting could be one way of paying them back more than what they had asked for. The idea behind such marketing is not so much to sell something but to provide value to customers that they would treasure. Staying away from being too much promotional with content that blabbers about the goodness of products and focusing on conveying value is the right approach because it creates closeness with customers. Customers have signed up for your email list in the hope that they would receive some value from your communications.
Learning the art of being less annoying with emails and bonding with customers by sharing value areskills that marketers have to acquire for deriving proper gains from email marketing.
