In the good old days of fax machines, those who would like to sell ads would buy back a whole lot of fax numbers. Then, they’ll start sending out promotional content. Nowadays, fax machines are obsolete items. People are all doing email marketing instead. However, are you using the same old method like fax machine ads i.e. sending loads of promotional contents to every collected email address? This is spam, which brings you no effects at all.
Recently, I’ve participated in a marketing summit. There were experienced marketing experts whose annual income reached up to 7 to 8 digits in US dollars. Surprisingly, they all ended up showing their appreciation towards email, praising “Email is King!” When most of us perceive email marketing as nearly obsolete as fax machine ads, how could these experts see the twinkling points in it? To date, people still communicate, receive, and deliver messages through email. This greatly shows the possibility of email marketing. Here’s some advice in helping you create better content for email marketing.
First, personalize the content on email marketing. If you think that inscribing the recipient’s title in the email has done the job, there’s still a lot to handle. The most important thing is to customize the email content. Let’s say, you are the owner of a pet shop. And someone just bought several packs of dog food from you. When you target this customer into your mailing list, how would you create the email content? At least not a newsletter, that covers all the product information of your pet shop. It should be a personalized email aimed for dog lovers, with product details that meet the needs of dogs and dog lovers.
Second, keep track of the abandoned carts in your online shop. Abandoned carts are shopping carts left with items unpaid. There might be different reasons for each abandoned cart. But never really leave them behind. They have the potential to become a very successful transaction. All you need to do is to grasp the time and send out an email notification. Remind your patrons to catch up on the unfinished transactions. Or you may even offer coupons to them. The ultimate goal is to rescue the carts and convert them into real transactions.
Third, try the A/B testing format when sending out emails. It’s handy to do so. You just need to prepare two email titles. First, send out the email with title A to the first 15% of recipients. Then, send out title B to the latter 15% of recipients. You will know which type of email title attracts more people to read it after a while. Then, you can use the more popular one and send it to the rest of the recipients. It will surely increase the open rate of your promotional emails.
What’s more? Clean up the email database regularly. As time goes by, the email database must have accumulated a large number of email addresses. Some of them may be expired or belong to unsubscribed users. If you don’t sort out these inappropriate email addresses and keep issuing emails to them, they will become nuisance and spam. As a worst-case scenario, your IP address may be blocked by the email service provider. In any of the above cases, the results are the same. Your email cannot be delivered to the targeted user’s mailbox. It greatly reduces your chance of reaching out to your targeted users. To avoid such a situation, remember to clean up your email database regularly.
There are also tools to help you improve the effectiveness of email marketing. Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign are those good choices. Email marketing will never be outdated when you can skillfully install suitable techniques on it.
Reference: https://www.visiongo.hsbc.com.hk/zh-HK/article/email-marketing-and-fax-machine-ads
