Creative Email Marketing and Customer Retention

We’ve all had marketing emails, inboxes full of promotional material, emails screaming “read me” “open me”, what makes the receiver want to click on that email? How can businesses make that email attractive to their target audience?

There is a standard simple list of successful email marketing criteria:

• Catchy subject line
• Loyalty offer or promotion
• Relevant topic
• Clear design features

How can you boost email marketing even further?

1. Give it a spring clean

Are you sending out recurring emails that are unnecessary? Standard, generic emails don’t appeal to anyone. When you first purchase a product or service you may receive one or two run of the mill emails, asking to review the product, giving standard information. However, if the customer continues to receive a monthly email telling them they haven’t completed the online survey – they will be hitting unsubscribe pretty quickly.

2. Automation

Whilst marketing automation is a wonderful thing – make sure it is working! Have you checked your automation emails, are they still effective, are they still triggering the correct workflow? Does the automation process need tweaking? Are your objectives still the same as they were when you set it up?

3. Report

Do you check the performance of your email marketing campaign? Is it actually working? Is it producing the result that it set out to? You could be sending out 10,000 emails and only getting 1% of people opening them and 0.5% clicking through to the website. Constant review and analysis is the only way to stay on top of any changes that may need to be made and make sure that you are not wasting your marketing budgets.

4. Who are you again?

Review your email marketing list regularly. Not so easy if you have a particularly large database but be vigilant that unsubscribes are being noted, as are bounce backs or message failures. Also consider how people actually get onto the list, how is the database put together, what are the criteria for people signing up to be contacted? Once someone is on the list think about why they are being contacted, do you want them to do something? If you want them to purchase something, read something or interact in any way – think about how that experience is for them. Review the steps you are asking them to take and make sure it is an easy process.

5. Update

Keep on top of email templates, don’t let it get stagnant. Keep the template reflective of the brand and website. Make intended actions clear, and keep the template design clean and simple.

So where is email marketing heading?

Audiences are looking for more valuable content, content that isn’t just product information or promotion. Customers want how to guides, tips, recipes, additional information that perhaps isn’t expected but will make a difference to them.

The growing popularity of Marketing Automation platforms will make it easier to personalise emails, making them more specific and more targeted.
Interactive emails will be popular with the addition of surveys, videos, more links to activities making it more of a website experience rather than a flat email document.

Mobile purchasing will become more of a trend. With over 5 billion mobile users in the world, more and more people will be viewing emails and interacting via mobile devices. Emails and websites need to be responsive to accommodate this.

If you need help with email marketing, get in touch with us today.