Published on November 12th, 2020 | by Bibhuranjan

Email Marketing Technology to help you be more productive

Email marketing is here to stay

Email newsletters are still a big source of sales for companies that do it right. It’s ultimately a numbers game, where only a % of readers will open the thing in the first place and then a % of those will click something and an even smaller % of those who will actually purchase something.

So the larger the database you start with the more revenue you can generate, but the database has to be called what marketers term as “clean”.

This involves 2 things; “recency” how up to date the customer information is like their last purchase is within the last 12months, their email is still the email they are using, and “relevancy” i.e. is what you are talking about in the newsletter of interest to the customer, they may have bought a pair of garden boots from you, but they may not be interested in caring for a floribunda rose bush.

For example, digitogy.eu/it uses a mailing list which is a perfect example of the concept outlined here in the email marketing section.

Gardening the Weeds

To clean up your data, you need software to help you. First, you can use email checkers to verify each email in your list. The basic ones just check the format of the email has an “@” sign in the address, but better ones will check if they are known spam traps, or commonly refuse commercial email messages.

They will actually ping the domain address too to check the company is still live and receiving emails. You need a clean sending domain to ensure as many of these emails sent get through the ISP and spam filters because your own domain or a “tarnished” one could mean your emails are blocked before the user even gets to see the email.

Then you can go and manually create a series of gardening emails that ask the reader if they are still interested in your company, products and willing to opt in to receiving your newsletter going forward.

This may scare you because you think half of the customers will drop off, but better to be left with 50% that are really interested in receiving your information and will interact than lots of dead readers who bring down all your valuable metrics like CTR and open rates.

Emails are cheap to send, but still have a cost of sending, so sending to people who will never open your email is the same as pouring budget down the drain.

A much better way is to set up a sequence of emails that give the customer 3 or 4 chances to respond, just in case they miss the first few attempts at contact. These can be pre-written and scheduled to go out with a couple of days in between each to maximize getting seen and getting a response.

Email Design

Once you have your clean database, you can start designing a great newsletter, the content should be original but there is software that can help you scrape news content or subject material to give you content that relates to your niche.

The design of the email is important for aesthetics but also to ensure that it renders and displays nicely for any device whether the reader is using a mobile phone, tablet or pc. So using HTML5 to make the content mobile-friendly is key and most email management software has built-in template builders that are mobile responsive, meaning regardless of the size of the screen, OS, android or iPhone the newsletter will display correctly on the screens.

Design with template blocks that don’t require coding will save you immeasurable time and resources, and having an image library will allow you to make your newsletters more attractive and engaging.

Ad Integration

Some great features of Mailchimp, Sendinblue and other top email marketing software are the ability to integrate your database with your website and ads. So, let’s say a visitor comes to your website but leaves without making a purchase, a retargeting ad can record their IP address and display ads in their browser to keep your brand in their front of mind.

Facebook ads can be integrated with your email database to show Facebook ads to customers who have signed up to your newsletter. And there is now a function to build a lookalike list from your customer list based on other Facebook users with similar profiles or interests. Since it makes perfect sense, the people most likely to buy from you are people similar to people who have already bought from you.

Finally, with data analytics and AI a lot of this software gives you data and insights into your CRM and email activity.

So you know what is working best and what next steps would help you repeat that success or move the customers onto more purchases. They will crunch data, like clicks, interaction with your newsletter and heat maps to see what insights you can gain for your customers. In the past this was done manually, with a fair helping of gut feel and top-level only insights, now you can get really hard data and insights with multiple variables to really make use of each email and each person in your database.

Photo by Headway on Unsplash

Tags: business growth, email marketing, mailing list

About the Author

Bibhuranjan Editorial Officer, technofaq.org I'm an avid tech enthusiast at heart. I like to mug up on new and exciting developments on science and tech and have a deep love for PC gaming. Other hobbies include writing blog posts, music and DIY projects.