Here at Cariad, we’re strong opposers of the theory that email marketing is dead because of GDPR. In reality, email marketing is still a fantastic strategy that helps to increase brand loyalty and drive conversions. It’s estimated that marketing and advertising emails influence the buying decisions of 50.7% of customers.
The face of email marketing has changed, and it has become more about personalisation and appealing to already warm-up leads. It’s therefore essential to harness the power of newsletter sign-ups and pop-up forms on your website, as it enables you to build a vast email list of potential and existing customers who have given their permission to be contacted.
Once you’ve established these lists, it’s all about which email marketing provider you choose. We’ve put together a list of the key things to look out for when making that all-important decision.
Third-party integration
Choose an email marketing tool that integrates seamlessly with your customer relationship management (CRM) platform. This will allow you to utilise your existing customer/subscriber database rather than building up a new list from scratch or having to painstakingly manually download and transfer your existing list.
Reporting
As with any type of digital marketing, reporting is key when it comes to email marketing. Ensure that your email marketing provider has a highly detailed insight and reporting functionality. You should be able to measure the effectiveness of your email campaigns, tracking opening statistics, link clicks, subscriber engagement trends and much more.
The purpose of email marketing is to build a relationship with your subscribers and create long term loyalty towards your brand, so it’s really important that you can see how people are engaging with your content. For example, you may notice your open rate decreasing, in which case it might be time to switch up your email content strategy.
Segmentation
One of the great things about email marketing is that you can segment your subscriber list into different audiences. According to Hubspot, marketers who use segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue. Split your audience list into whichever segments you prefer, maybe by potential customers, existing customers, previous customers, audience demographic or geographic location.
Once you have chosen your audience segments, you can tailor the email marketing strategy accordingly and deliver content that is relevant to each audience. Ensure that whichever email marketing service you choose provides the option to easily create audience segments.
Delivery rate
This one seems obvious, but you’d be surprised at how often simple things like this get overlooked when deciding on a marketing tool. A low deliverability rate means the marketing budget has gone to waste on email campaigns that aren’t reaching your target audience.
Make sure you choose a well-established, reputable email marketing provider that can guarantee a high delivery rate (and that your emails won’t end up in the spam folder).
User Experience
Email marketing tools can seem very overwhelming when you first use them, and it can be quite time consuming to create and schedule an email that looks fantastic and will entice people to engage with your brand. It’s important to choose a tool that is easy to navigate, build audiences and create email campaigns that stand out. Choose a provider that has an email template builder with a simple drag and drop tool, for example Mailchimp.
A/B Testing
Select an email marketing tool that offers A/B testing so that you can try out different types of email content to figure out what works best for your audience. This is something that we always recommend for digital marketing campaigns and advertising, so there’s no reason why email should be any different. A/B testing will enable you to optimise your email strategy and maximise ROI.
There are a wide range of email marketing companies to choose from, and we suggest that you take the time to research which one is best for your business. Make sure you select one with great reviews that offers all of the features we’ve listed.
If you’re looking for email marketing expertise, turn to Cariad Marketing, your trusted email marketing agency. We’re here to assist you!
