In the last post, I looked at the importance of relevant email campaigns as well as engaging consumers by using segmentation and targeting tactics through automated emails.  

This post will provide more advice on how to manage and implement the most relevant, targeted emails for customer engagement and maximum ROI.

Marketing channels – mobile & social

Email marketing will develop alongside the advancements in mobile and social. We already see email content being shared through social networks and with more people opening emails through mobile phones and tablets, your email marketing will need to embrace these changes.

Mobile

With the ability to check emails on the go, many people filter through their inboxes on mobiles and make snap quick decisions on what they will read and what to delete. This makes the job of grabbing their attention that much harder so be sure to set up your email templates to render correctly on different devices.  Utilising mobile reporting statistics in your email marketing software will allow you to understand who is viewing your emails and from what device.

In April 2012, eConsultancy reported that in a study of 974m emails sent, mobile open rates had grown from 20.24% in the first half 2011 to 27.39% in the second half of the year. This demonstrates mobile email needs to be taken into consideration by marketers during the course of 2012.

Social media

Social media has become a big part of everyday communications over the last few years and has become an important part of email marketing.

Ways in which social media should be integrated within your email campaigns include:

  • Have a simple Facebook signup page to drive subscribers to help build your email database and place an incentive on this page to encourage sign ups
  • Include share buttons within your emails, to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest etc, to enable you to spread your message outside of your subscribers list and increase response rates and brand awareness

Social media is a great method of communication and a good way of reaching people but this doesn’t necessarily lead to increased conversions and ultimately revenue. Social media will simply serve as a funnel for driving subscribers and communicating, with email marketing working as the real sales driver.

Deliverability

Deliverability is a fundamental principle of email marketing; if your emails aren’t reaching inboxes then you’ve wasted time, effort and money. No matter what the reason for your email not reaching recipients, you have lost out on the opens, clicks, downloads and potential sales.

In late 2011 the term graymail surfaced. It was a term coined by Hotmail and can be described as emails that are not spam as the subscriber opted in to receive them, but their interest in the emails has diminished over time and they are marking them as spam with the ISP. In short, another hoop for email marketers to jump through within the rules of deliverability.

Keeping your subscribers engaged is the key to ensuring they don’t mark your mail as spam or unsubscribe. The key to this is to think about:

  • Relevancy
  • Engagement
  • Marketing Channels

Planning the most relevant, targeted emails that engage customers to respond is the key to email communications during the current climate.