Even as the world settles into a prolonged economic malaise, savvy email marketers are boosting their email marketing campaigns for ever-greater returns on their investment by using these five simple but powerful methods:
1) Surprise Them by Not Selling
If your newsletters are usually stocked full of offers and product details why not shock your customers by abandoning this format for your next missive? Discuss a subject or subjects that are related to your brand but break with your conventional sales pitch. You might want to comment on the effect on your industry of a specific development; draw attention to upcoming legislation; or direct your customers to a charitable cause that requires their support. Don’t think for a minute that this will be a wasted send, as the benefits you will derive from more profound engagement of your subscribers will pay dividends down the line.
2) Get a Geek to Test It for You
Testing is the cod liver oil of modern email marketing: you admit that it’s good for you, but it’s really hard to get it down. The vast majority of email marketers under-test if they test at all, and it’s really not surprising when you consider that to be a great tester you have to have a profound understanding of Fractional Factorial Testing and know that Taguchi wasn’t a mid-50s Japanese motorcycle. Instead of embarking on a Ph.D. crash course in Multivariate Orthogonal Arrays and Linear Graphs, it is easy to find a geek who lives for this stuff to subcontract out your testing. Outsourcing to a testing enthusiast who calculates Loss Functions in their sleep is much better than you losing sleep over why you can’t optimize your email marketing campaign through the countless benefits of testing.
3) Place Your Signup Link above the Fold on Every Webpage
There are many aspects of your webpage fighting for priority, and each one has its pressing reasons why it has to be prominently featured. However, there are few if any webpage elements as significant or momentous as the link to your email newsletter subscription form. Adding new customers to your database may be the single most important marketing function you implement, so give your signup link the treatment it deserves. If you’re making it difficult for your website visitors to become your subscribers, they will reward you by living up (down) to your expectations!
4) Pre-Fill out Landing Page Forms
You have developed a state of the art landing page specifically keyed to the call to action included in your email newsletters. As your subscriber continues along the path, they arrive at a form where they need to fill in their name and email address. Wait up. The only way that they’ve been able to get to this form is through a call to action on an email where you already have their name and email address, so why are you asking them to fill it in again? Pre-filling out a form with the information you already have on a subscriber and not wasting their time and effort in typing in info you already have will be a powerful incentive for the customer to keep travelling towards a successful checkout.
5) Upsell, Side-Sell, Cross-Sell & Give Away on Your Transactionals
If your process transactional messages essentially consist of: “Thank you for your order. Here is your confirmation number. Bye.”; you’re wasting a massive promotional and marketing opportunity. Your customer is extremely receptive to your business at this time as they have just provided you not only money but trust as well, so offering them additional opportunities to participate in your brand experience will be interpreted in a positive light. You can offer them additional products or services that are directly related to their current purchase; special elite VIP invitations to particular events; or free downloads such as white papers, ebooks or apps.
You can defy the downward economic spiral by empowering your email marketing campaigns with these key tips. And while your competitors are crying the blues, you can be happy-dancing all the way to the bank!
