Marketing teams have a great deal of tools at their disposal to help attract well qualified prospects for their sales teams. One tool that often gets overlooked, however, is email. With spam creating such a problem for so many companies, messages that don’t look legitimate or are sent out en masse are often flagged as junk and never make it to the recipient’s inbox. Yet despite this, 73 percent of marketing professionals state that email is core to their business. That’s because they know it works; yet in order to make it really pay off you need to have a solid understanding of how to harness the power of email marketing.
Getting personal
One way to turn off recipients is to send out blanket emails to everyone on your list. For one, you’re looking to get these messages identified as spam. But more importantly, you’re turning off your customers when you do this. Customers want to feel important so that generic email lets them know that you really don’t care. And don’t think that simply adding their first name in the salutation is a personal touch; that can be easily done with any number of software applications. That just tells them that you’re sending the message from a database.
Instead, start to segment your email lists and connect with customers while focusing on the traits that hold the list together. For example, if you were to send out an email hyping your newest product line, customers who haven’t been to your store in a while might find it intriguing while those who recently visited might be bothered by it.
Splitting the list into those who have visited your store since your new products arrived and those who haven’t makes it easier to tailor a message to each group. You can send something to the first group thanking them for their recent visit while the latter gets more of an update as to what is new.
Go mobile
Marketers are well aware that people read their email messages and subscribe to their lists from mobile devices at least 50 percent of the time. Emails need to give those on a mobile device the same experience as the ones reading it on a desktop, so responsive email design is a must nowadays. For those unfamiliar with the term, responsive design is a way of crafting an email (or a web page) so that it responds to the screen size that it’s being displayed on. If done correctly, the content will look the same on a large monitor as it does on a smartphone; with changes only to certain elements.
Additionally, calls to action need to change as a result of the mobile boom. Larger buttons that make it easier for a reader’s fingers to accurately connect with their target often replace clickable anchor text. Images also need to be considered when designing with a mobile first mindset. Not all images will have the same effect on a small screen as they will on a desktop email client.
Even as we rely on other forms of communication such as social media and SMS messaging, email will always be at the forefront of business. As such, salespeople will always need to rely on well-crafted emails to help support them in their role. Make sure that you not only know what the current trend landscape is for email, but also the basics of writing good emails if you really want to make an impression with your customers.
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