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GOLDMAIL - Add your voice!
The power of adding your personal message as an
audio to text, slides or screen images is be amazing.
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NB. Goldmail sits alongside
and uses your current email system making it very easy and quick to get started.
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Email marketing Email marketing continues to be a powerful tool for marketers despite the rise of Social Media. There are now a huge number of email marketing solutions and providers and it can be confusing and difficult to distinguish the differences.
For an individual the email service provider ie. GMail provides the ability to send and receive emails. You may have an email client like Outlook to help you create and manage emails. You may have set up groups and distribution lists to send to more than one recipient at a time in a fairly simple way. Email marketing extends this approach and provides powerful tools to help you grow and develop relationships via email.
For an entrepreneur or person running a small business the email marketing systems provide some more sophisticated functions that are typically required, as well as higher volumes than are typical of personal use.
Selecting and using an email package is the starting point for email marketing.
Email Entry level - broadcasts
Much of the email marketing that is sent is still basically run on a ‘broadcast’ basis. An organisation feels the need to communicate about its products or services to its prospects or customers.
Many organisations still have a relatively small opt-in email address list, with say less than a thousand contacts on it. At this level it is difficult to justify anything more sophisticated than a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to email. Of course there are exceptions.
The concentration is on writing great content that conveys some value to the recipient. Monitoring delivery, open and click rates may be undertaken.
At this point it may be worth asking yourself; why are we doing these emails? What are we trying to achieve?
If your email activity hasn’t been overhauled for a couple of years then you should definitely ask yourself and your colleagues these questions. And maybe you should ask your email recipients what they would like to receive from you.
If broadcast email is achieving your objectives then a refresh of the template could re-vitalise the project.
You may also want to have a push to increase your opt-in list size by recruiting some more recipients. You may also look to segment the list based on some criteria applicable to your marketing and audience.
This is very much an entry level approach, but one where many organisations are operating, given the lack of time and content and data to move up to the next level.
There are many email marketing systems that can provide this capability, too numerous to list in full, but a couple are listed below. In addition most will also do the intermediate level, sequential email campaigns.
- InTouch CRM - currently an email broadcast system and CRM combined, with sequential emailing capability under development. Check for updates.
Add your Voice to your EmailsBefore looking at intermediate level systems there is a very easy way to improve the impact of your emails, and that's by adding an audio-visual message, recording your message to go along with screen-shots, slides, text or spreadsheet information.
There are many situations where this can be really powerful, such as:
- A welcome message when someone registers on your website
- A follow-up to an initial contact at a networking meeting or trade show
- After a fact-finding meeting to summarise discussions and next steps
- To accompany and highlight key points of a quote or proposal
- To thank someone for their order and outline next steps in delivery
- As part of an education process to use features of your product or service.
The Goldmail system is a really easy to use tool for this, with teh added advantage that it integrates well with Outlook, Powerpoint, WORD and EXCEL and can work across your current email system. This is makes it very simple to implement and start to use, so you could be up and running, and sending your first audio-visual message in half an hour or so. Take a look at the side-bar on the left for more information.
Email intermediate level - sequential email series
If in your marketing mix, the email element is falling short or could achieve much more for you then you really should consider stepping up to sequential emails.
This is where email becomes much more ‘event’ driven. An event could be when someone registers on your website, or opens an email, clicks a link, fills in a form, right through to placing an order.
Communication becomes timelier to the recipient and their interest and engagement with you and your company when emails are linked to customer related events.
Content becomes more appropriate to where they are in the decision-making process and also in their relationship with you. The calls to action can also be more specific.
Examples of intermediate level email marketing system are:
Email advance level - Marketing Automation
The potential to take your email campaigns to the next level through email marketing automation is enormous. See below for more description about Email Marketing Automation.
Response rates and conversions should increase considerably. Customer satisfaction should increase and you should avoid or reduce the potential that your emails are considered SPAM or irrelevant by some of your audience. It’s a win:win situation.
However there are considerations, not least the thought and time needed to design and implement an email marketing campaign that is automated. There also needs to be a reasonable return available (ie. you have a fairly high value proposition) and economies of scale, from having a reasonable sized prospect or customer list.
The assistance of an outside specialist can save you time, money and effort and bring fresh ideas to your marketing activity.
Email Marketing Automation Overview
As probably the most rapidly developing element of the broader marketing and sales application suite and CRM ecosystem different people have different views on what this is.
For some, particularly at the enterprise and large company end of the spectrum, it includes the ability to automate many of the back-office activities around campaign planning and execution.
For others it is the ability to map out the lead generation and customer nurture processes and have them executed in a stream-lined way.
For entrepreneurs and people runing smaller businesses, if they think of marketing automation at all it is as a way to automate many of the repetitive tasks associated with the early stages of the lead generation funnel.
Focusing on the latter situation, the ability to track the interaction of an email recipient with the communication you have sent opens up a whole new area of marketing.
Knowing that someone has opened an email and clicked on a link provides the basis for immense knowledge and insight for marketing people.
The ability to monitor these events, and link that to the actions you have taken provides great power. The link between cause and effect opens up many new possibilities, for those who want to invest efffort to improve the results their marketing achieves.
To expand on this, an ‘event’ could be an online registration, inquiry or information request. It might be an order, or a renewal, or even a cancellation. It might be something in your marketing calendar, although there are considerations which I’ll touch on later.
Based on these events then the communication you send can be much more timely. If someone registers or requests information then you don’t just fulfill that as a single response, you maybe send 2-3 other emails automatically, staggered over 2-3 days.
In part these adds strength to your message but also they let your test for a response; was your follow-up opened, did they click, did they respond to the call-to-action you made? And ideally it’s conditional; if they respond to the second email the 3rd and 4th are not generated.
As for the content being personalised, going beyond inserting the recipients name, town, last product ordered etc. there are options. For example, depending on how they progress through a process, such as inviting them to an event, or to trial another product, you can use different language, tone of voice and calls to action.
And when it comes to your marketing calendar you may target active email recipients with invitations to events, to new product launch information etc. in advance of the less active. You should get a better take-up from those actively engaged with your emails.
You could then feed those statistics through to your subsequent emails, such as ‘40% of (group A) wanted information about (offer B)’.
Next Steps
If you would like to improve your email marketing at the current level, or move up to the next level then email me and tell me what your challenge is.
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