Putting Your Email to Work for You

By now, using email to help market your products and services is pretty much “old hat.” It’s stranger not to engage in email marketing than it is to set up your own list and start collecting recipients. That doesn’t mean, however, that email marketing hasn’t changed since entrepreneurs started using it. On the contrary! Email marketing has changed significantly–and there are no signs of an evolutionary slowdown.

It behooves every entrepreneur and established CEO to regularly audit their email marketing campaigns to see what has been working, what has not, and to make changes accordingly. And, if you aren’t doing the following things, you should start doing them immediately.

Automation

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a solopreneur or manage a company with hundreds of employees: the sending out of your email messages should not be something someone does manually. Instead, you should be composing and perfecting your emails ahead of time and then scheduling their release. Automation reduces the likelihood that someone will make a mistake and send the wrong email to the wrong person. And with the plethora of marketing automation tools available, you should be able to find a good tool for your specific needs.

Note: It is worth monitoring your automation so that, in the event of a disaster or other large event, you can turn your scheduled messages off until an appropriate time to resume your campaign has arrived. This is particularly important for social media messages.

Personalization

The internet community figured out the “%NAME%” hack that allows list managers to insert a person’s name into a marketing message. They know that you are not writing to them personally when you send them your ads and newsletters. Even so, messages that contain the person’s name have a higher conversion rate than those that don’t.

Using the person’s name, however, isn’t the only step you should be taking to personalize your marketing messages. Email list servers and tools have advanced to the point where you can also include previous purchases made by the recipient and there are algorithms that will allow you to also include predictions about what the recipient might like to purchase in the future.

The best example of personalized email marketing is Amazon. In addition to thanking a person for their order, they automatically follow up with the recipient on that order to get feedback. This is an incredibly important part of email marketing that many entrepreneurs get wrong: email isn’t just about getting more sales, it’s about keeping your customers.

Video

It’s true: automatically playing videos are almost universally hated among web users. Even so, there is no denying the jump in conversions that happens when an email marketing campaign includes video.

Rest assured, this doesn’t mean that you have to place the video directly in the messages you send to your list. Instead, snapshots and links are typically enough to get the job done.

And, like with “traditional” email marketing, it is important to personalize your video-centric email campaigns as well.

• Make sure the email contains the person’s name.
• Make sure the email contains information about the person’s previous orders or dealings with your company.
• Make sure the video is as personalized as possible.

Wait, what? Don’t panic: we don’t mean literally personalize every video. The amount of money it would take to personalize a video for every recipient on your list would be astronomic. When we talk about video personalization we mean making several videos that will cater to different aspects of your audiences demographics. Break up the videos by location, age, gender, education level, etc. This is simpler to do than you might think! And it can increase your conversion rate so much you’ll think you’re hallucinating.

As long as we have email, there is going to be email marketing. Make sure you know how to grab the attention of your contemporary audience. It’s worth putting in more work to increase your conversions and profits, right?