Email marketers can take some advice from Dear Abby: Don’t allow your brand communications to be one-sided. Just as a relationship needs give and take, so should your email marketing communications with your customers.
While attending the Email Evolution Conference on April 5-6, one of the key takeaways I received is that there are five levels of email marketing and only one of them is your typical one-sided promotional message.
If you ensure that your email marketing communications program includes regular messages from each of these 5 levels, you’ll keep your customers interested and engaged for years to come:
1. Foundational– Regular, predictable messages to maintain channel relationships. These include newsletters, company announcements, holiday greetings and new product alerts.
2. Informational– Create the KLT (know, like, trust) factor and progress subscribers into deeper relationships by informing, teaching and serving.
3. Promotional– Raise awareness of merchandise, products and services and encourage free trials or purchases.
4. Engaging– Reactivate, entertain or involve your subscribers with interactive content like polls, surveys, webinars, games or contests.
5. 1:1– Highly personalized messages that stimulate action at the individual level. Many are sent in response to a specific subscriber behavior, such as a welcome message, birthday, cart abandonment, expiration, thank-you or related to loyalty/frequency.
How does a highly effective email marketing program impact your revenue?
Even a modest 2% lift in revenue per subscriber delivers astronomical ROI when personalization-driven subscriber retention is a factor. Personalization leads to an 82% increase in open rates and 75% increase in click-through rates (CTR).
Email has higher conversion rates.
Email marketing is still number one compared to Search and Direct in conversion. Email has a whopping 4.29% average order conversion rate versus 3.04% for Search and only 2.93% for Direct. And adding print to an email campaign is shown to increase response rates by up to 35%!
Are you looking to beef up your email marketing communications program?
Before your program is date-worthy, make sure you develop a strategy that includes a focus on your customer, not just your seasonal promotions.