Volker Weiwer, CEO, eCircle explains how to implement a winning lifecycle email strategy to increase the results of your email marketing program.
Email marketing can be an invaluable and profitable channel if marketers use it effectively to optimise their strategy and increase the relevancy of their messages to further engage their recipients.
It’s all about building mutual trust between the user and brand; facilitated by the knowledge you have about their preferences, habits and behaviour. If you can also show that you know your customer at every step of their journey, you have an ever more efficient email marketing strategy.
Before you begin your campaign you need to think about what you want to achieve, how to get to know your recipients better, the way the email addresses were collected and the best way to segment your data. Think of a global communication strategy with different kinds of messages adapted to your recipients so that they feel they are not only an email address. This way, your messages will be perceived as a response to their needs and therefore the engagement with your brand or product, as well as the performance of your campaigns, will improve.
1. Send welcome messages:
As soon as a user registers, makes a purchase or downloads a file, you should send them a welcome message. This ensures that the first contact you make occurs at the moment when they are the most receptive. It also allows you to get some more information about your recipient, such as their personal preferences, which you can then use to tailor your future communication to their needs, and establish a lifecycle approach to build a long term relationship. It is vital at this stage to be clear and honest with your customers – this will ensure trust and confidence amongst your users, which is essential for your future relationships.
2. Convert your subscribers into customers:
In any recipient list, there will always be a variety of people with a different level of engagement with your brand. This is the reason why you should segment your list and split it into several groups according to users’ behaviour. New subscribers therefore need to have a specific welcome communication before landing into your regular newsletter list.
A group of new subscribers receiving your newsletters prior to making a purchase will be less engaged with your brand, so it’s your job to give customers tailored reasons to buy your products. As soon as a recipient makes a purchase, you should aim to maintain the interest of this customer by offering rewards for repeat buying, for example. Look at your data around purchases, opened emails over the last week, month or 3-6 months, and implement a triggered email campaign to retain engagement. This way, you will be able to adapt the content of your message according to the lifecycle of your customers and drive sales by having the right offer at the right moment, including a clear call to action.
3. Implement a reactivation programme:
The real challenge for all of us is to keep the lists active. Don’t ignore less active recipients, create a specific group for them with a specific campaign. By addressing these customers with special messages you can encourage them to open your emails. You can also create a reactivation program including different messages to test behaviour or to understand why your subscriber doesn’t want to hear from you anymore, i.e. is the frequency of emails too high? Is the content no longer of interest? Does the recipient want to be removed from your lists?
By Volker Weiwer
CEO
eCircle
www.ecircle.com
