The Covid-19 pandemic has compelled many businesses to solely rely on digital marketing to promote their products and services. The lockdown severely affected Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) and has resulted in revenue losses. To revive from such a situation, small businesses need to creatively leverage digital marketing tools and identify new ways to acquire customers.
Some of the ways companies are marketing their products and services digitally are:
In this blog, we will discuss email marketing. It is a popularly used marketing strategy by companies to convert leads into customers. Despite various social media channels and other marketing platforms, email marketing remains the most popular and used process to communicate with customers. There are multiple ways to leverage email as a strategy to attract and retain customers. Here are several common practices of email marketing campaigns.
Studies done by various companies suggest that email is the best way to communicate with your customer and directly impact your business ROI. Any email marketing strategy depends on the stage of the customer’s journey and the defined objective of an enterprise. Here are some common practices of email marketing campaigns:
Campaign Objective | Stage of Customer Journey | Usage Stat% |
|---|---|---|
Welcoming Customers | Onboarding | 92% |
Informing About Upcoming Features | Existing Customers | 89% |
Promoting Offers, Sales & Events | Existing and Left Customers | 72% |
Requesting for Feedback | Relatively Old Customers | 78% |
Remarketing – Upsell or Cross-sell | Existing Customers | 87% |
As you see, understanding the customer’s journey and sending out the right set of emails at the right time is very important to make the email marketing campaign successful.
We know, analyzing the journey of thousands of customers manually is not possible. Therefore, SMBs mostly rely on CRM platforms. If we can combine CRM and email marketing, it will scale the process and minimize the risk of sending irrelevant emails to your valuable customers. Just segment the customers based on the stage of their journey and set up the email marketing campaign from the CRM itself.
When a prospect decides to become your customer you need to be ready with an effective onboarding process. Welcoming Customer is a mandatory template for any company and it is one of the most crucial emails sent out to your ‘just turned’ customer. The email should be promising, simple, and easy to understand. Remember this email is going out to people who are new to your business. One of the best samples for this can be:
Hi [name],
Thanks for signing up for [product name]!
As a special thank you, we’re giving you 15% off when you sign up for a paid plan.
Simply use the coupon below at the checkout.
[Discount Code]
This is an important template to communicate with your customers about the upcoming features of your product. It is also the best way to cross-sell or upsell your services or products to your customers.
Hey [name],
The big day has finally come! We just finished [the product, e.g. the most awaited product for your customers].
We’d like to reward all our loyal supporters by allowing you to pre-order the features, before anyone else.
[add an element of scarcity, e.g. Only the first 100 lucky customers will get the feature for free!]
[Add CTA, e.g. Pre-Order now]
Promotions and discounts are proven strategies, especially in the B2C market, to attract and retain customers. We often get offers on clothes, books, accessories, phones, and laptops, etc. To make a sale or discount successful you need to reach out to your customers informing them about the discount and encourage them to buy. What can be better than reaching out to your customers via email marketing?
Dear [name],
We are excited to announce that, due to our remarkable growth over the last [enter number] of years, we are expanding!
In fact, we are opening a new store in [enter location and specifics].
We invite you to celebrate with us during the big opening day on [enter date]. There will be many exciting surprises, including irresistible discounts.
[Add specific CTA depending on your specific offer, in this example -] If you want to make use of your opening day discount, please click on the button below so we can send you the discount code.
See you there.
Team [name of your brand]
Feedback helps companies understand their customers’ needs, satisfaction level, and their issues better. Therefore it is necessary to ask for your customers’ feedback. It can be easily done with the help of email marketing.
Dear [Name],
We really appreciate your choosing the [name of the product]
Since we want to make it better for your business we would like to ask, whether you like [product name]? How can we make it better?
It should take less than 2 minutes, and your feedback will help us make [product name] better!
Thank you,
Team [Company name]
Email marketing is an effective and powerful tool to communicate with your customers. However, it is rather tedious to collect all the customers’ information, based on their journey level and then send them the mail. That’s where the effectiveness of CRM software integrated with an email marketing tool can help.
There are many email marketing software available in the market. But a CRM that also offers email marketing can help reach out to your customers easily. You can select the leads from the CRM dashboard and send out the email to chosen customers. ConvergeHub is a CRM that offers complete customer lifecycle management. It is more than a CRM that offers billing, marketing, sales, and services in a unified platform. It facilitates the analysis of customers’ stages (customer’s journey position) and helps you to select a suitable email marketing campaign.
Customer relationship management software brings all the leads together, it is meant to help you deal with your customers better and easier. With the combination of email marketing, it will be easy for you to manage everything on just one platform. You can easily cut off the long hours of importing data to email marketing platforms. Just set up the campaign and you have everything within the CRM.
Email marketing campaigns come with a risk of being identified as spam, high unsubscription rate, and bounces; resulting in a bad reputation for the company. But mail spam can be avoided with the following practice:
Email marketing is the key to communicating with your customers easily. Just one click and you reach out to many at once. CRM and email marketing are a great combination only if small and medium businesses can make the most of it.
Also Read – 9 Powerful Marketing Strategies To Grow Your Business Faster
