As the general costs of marketing continue to climb, learning how to maximize cost-efficient email marketing for your business has never been more crucial. And by joining forces with other companies through our Refinement ecosystem, you can increase your return on investment like never before.
In becoming a part of Refinement, you will gain access to integrated email marketing that can be used in a variety of ways for the good of your business. You can learn how to use email marketing to promote your business’s products and services, encourage customer loyalty, improve customer satisfaction, and increase your business’s overall profitability.
Read on, and find out more about how email marketing can be a catalyst for your business’s success.
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is one of the most beneficial forms of advertising to have in your business’s toolbelt. Essentially, it is a form of digital marketing that uses email to promote your business’s products or services. Practically, this looks like sending commercial emails to a list of contacts who have given you express permission to send them information via email.
Out of all the methods of direct marketing, email marketing is the most profitable, generating an average return on investment of $42 for every $1 spent, according to the Data & Marketing Association (2019). Much of this success is due to the move of modern email marketing away from the old one-to-one strategy (one sale generated per email recipient) and toward strategies involving more personalization, predictive analytics, and providing multiple purchase opportunities per contact.
Email marketing can be used in a variety of ways, including informing your customers of new products or offers, building brand awareness, generating leads, building relationships, keeping customers engaged in between purchases, and driving sales overall. For all its many functions and cost efficiency, it is just about necessary that email marketing be a pillar of your marketing strategy.
Direct Marketing
Direct marketing is any type of marketing that depends on direct communication to individual customers instead of communicating through a third party (like mass media). It is called direct marketing because it eliminates any middlemen—it is seller speaking directly to consumer. This is the type of marketing into which Refinement’s email marketing falls.
Direct marketing involves targeting your business’s audience, which in many cases is a more efficient and effective method than advertising to the masses. Targeting your audience through direct marketing helps you personalize your message (which improves customer relationships) and only contact the people likeliest to engage with your business.
Additionally, direct marketing is much easier to measure than media advertising. You can keep a more accurate account of how each consumer is responding to your messages, which helps you see what is working and what is not. Then, as you need, you can make quick adjustments to your content or strategy that will lead to better use of your time, money, and efforts.
Customer Retention
One of the central focuses of Refinement email marketing is customer retention. Customer retention concentrates on turning consumers into repeat buyers so their business is not lost to competitors. We want to provide a pleasurable, personalized experience for all our Refinement businesses’ customers because consumers want to continue to buy from businesses they trust.
If you are great at acquiring customers but are losing the old ones as quickly as you are bringing in the new, then your business is never going to grow. Additionally, retaining customers is 5–25 times cheaper than customer acquisition, according to the Harvard Business Review. This is partly because repeat buyers are likely to freely recommend your business to friends, family, and colleagues, and partly because you do not have to spend as much time or money on trying to convince strangers to trust you. Instead, you can focus your efforts on streamlining your current customer experience to boost customer retention, which will boost your overall return on investment.
Why You Need Email Automation in Email Marketing
You may still be writing out a separate email per customer, and that may be working for you just fine—but it is probably working a lot less than it used to. By using email automation instead, you can reach greater numbers of people with less time and effort, and you are likely to generate more hits off your personalized, automated emails. Also, the repetitive task of email-writing can be taken off your to-do list so you can spend your time in more valuable places.
But one of the greatest benefits of email automation, especially for our Refinement ecosystem, is that we can personalize our customers’ experiences. Using predictive analytics and machine learning, we are able to target our emails to people based on their behavior, preferences, and previous sales. This way, each customer only receives emails about the products and services that will interest them, and our Refinement companies will see more business coming from the emails we send out.
What Is Email Automation?
Email automation is the use of automation software to trigger emails and personalized messages relating to specific actions that customers take on your website, such as when a welcome email is automatically sent to someone who signs up for your mailing list. It is a way to send relevant emails to the right people at the right time without you having to monitor and manually respond to all activity on your website.
One of the key ways we achieve this in our Refinement ecosystem is by linking website and predictive analytics with our email marketing platform. By drawing clues from customer behavior and previous purchases, we are able to reach people with automated emails that contain only the offers and information that are relevant to their interests—which increases their satisfaction and our profitability.
Promotion Announcement Emails
Promotion announcement emails are an essential part of email marketing. They are emails sent to inform your contacts about important news, updates, or changes in your business. The customers on your mailing list want to stay in the loop concerning your business, so announcement letters are a necessary part of your email marketing strategy.
Promotion announcement emails can announce a variety of news, including the release of a new product, a special event, or an upcoming sale. Probably most frequently, announcement emails are used to generate buzz around new products, and these announcements are vital if you want to prevent your products from falling flat. With Refinement, we want to promptly provide customers with the proper awareness of company news in order to ensure our products’—and our businesses’—success.
Email Newsletters
Email newsletters are periodical emails that inform your contact list of your business’s latest news and updates. They are somewhat like promotion announcement emails, but newsletters contain a more comprehensive look at your company, as opposed to promotion announcements which focus on one specific piece of news.
Your email newsletters can be sent however frequently you desire (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.), can be used for a variety of purposes, and can contain many different types of information, depending on your business’s goals. Types of information you could incorporate in your newsletter include notifications of new blog posts, links to your social media accounts/websites, reminders of upcoming events or product releases, or news from your industry.
That being said, however, your contacts will not want to read just anything. You should consider what type of information will add immediate value to your customers’ lives because, ultimately, the goal of sending out email newsletters is to increase the value you provide to your customers in order to keep them engaged with your business.
Targeted Email Marketing
Targeted emails are personalized messages that are sent to a specific portion of your contact list. They are an important part of modern email marketing because not all your customers shop the same—they likely come from different age brackets, live in different places, have different jobs, and are interested in different things. Using targeted emails, you can reach customers with only the emails that are most relevant to them—emails they are most likely to care about and respond to.
Refinement uses predictive analytics and machine learning to identify the types of people interacting with our companies and uses that information to pinpoint the types of products and information they are most likely to engage with. Using that data, we can send out the right targeted emails to improve our businesses’ relevancy, response rate, profitability, customer loyalty, and customer retention.
Retention Emails
As stated above, customer retention should be a key component of your email marketing strategy because it is much more profitable than always marketing to acquire new customers. One way we focus on customer retention is through retention emails—targeted messages sent to existing customers to increase their engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction. They are sent with the purpose of letting your customers know you value their business, which keeps them returning to engage with your company.
There are several kinds of retention emails, depending on the customer segment you are trying to target. And although the following list is not extensive, here are a few types to be aware of:
- Welcome emails—these show the customer from the get-go that they matter to you
- Thank you emails—especially after purchases
- Reminder emails—such as reminders of items the customer placed in their online shopping carts that they never finished purchasing or of looming account expiration dates
- Win-back emails—to encourage inactive customers to re-engage
Benefits of Email Marketing Automation
As we said earlier, perhaps the greatest benefit of email marketing automation is how it helps you create a more customized consumer experience—which is key to boosting engagement with your business and return on investment.
But not only does email marketing automation help you personalize your messages—it does so without requiring you to write out a specific email for every customer. And even as you write fewer emails overall, email automation still keeps you from having to resort to impersonal mass emails.
It does this by including personalized fields (such as first name) in your emails that are automatically filled in with the relevant information from your mailing list. Personalizing emails in this way through automation has a 6 times higher response rate than emails that are generic to everyone, according to Experian.
Another way email marketing automation helps you personalize your customers’ experiences is that it allows you to segment your customer database into different groups that have similar ages, interests, or buyer behavior. This way, you can make sure your contacts are only receiving content that is relevant to them—content they are most likely to respond to.
Customer Cultivation
Customer cultivation can be understood in a couple of different ways, but the way we want to look at it is the process of marketing to new customers in order to increase their loyalty and engagement with your business and make them core customers. After you have attracted a new customer with a one- or two-time purchase, you want to nurture your relationship with them to turn them into three-, four-, or five-time buyers (or more).
The strategy for cultivating customers is similar to the strategy for retaining customers: you want to target your emails to the specific consumers who will appreciate them. This will help them see the value that your business adds to their lives and entice them to keep coming back for more. Types of cultivation emails include email newsletters, surveys or feedback emails, user report emails, and welcome and thank you emails.
Audience Segmentation
Audience segmentation is a marketing strategy that includes classifying your business’s target audience into different subgroups so that you can deliver information better tailored to what each group wants to hear about. The subgroups can be marked by many factors, such as age, gender, geographic location, ethnicity, income, occupation, or previous buying behavior.
Audience segmentation is the process that precedes and directs most of the other email marketing strategies we have already mentioned, such as email automation, targeted emails, email newsletters, customer retention and cultivation. By segmenting your contacts into specific groups, you set yourself up for connecting with your customers in ways that are more meaningful for them, and, in turn, for you and your business.
Email Personalization
Email personalization, as you have probably been able to gather by now, is the act of customizing email messages to specific customers based on the data we have been able to gather about them. This aspect of email marketing is vital in the modern world, as consumers have started to be bombarded with a plethora of companies trying to get their attention—today’s consumers are much more attentive and responsive to emails that are personalized with content that matters to them.
At the most basic level, email personalization can merely mean including someone’s name in the subject line. While we definitely want to do that in Refinement, we also strive to implement even more refined personalization tactics that include varying the content of our emails depending on the type of recipient. Using predictive analytics and the information consumers directly provide us with, we seek to reach subgroups of our target audiences with just the kind of content they will want to engage with.
Email Marketing Ideas
There are a myriad of ways you can use email marketing to your business’s benefit. As mentioned above, it is generally a great idea to focus on targeting and personalizing your messages using email marketing automation and to focus on customer retention through sending out email newsletters, promotion announcement emails, and retention emails.
The unique opportunity Refinement offers is the chance to work with other businesses who want to achieve the same goals as you. Using email automation, we implement many different email campaigns, such as the types listed below this section.
And by working together, sharing customer databases and website analytics, we can reach more people with more of what they want to engage with than if each Refinement company were going at it alone. Refinement businesses are able to cross-market with each other, sharing multiple products and opportunities across our network. This leads to greater success for all the businesses involved.
Email Marketing Campaigns
Email campaigns are a coordinated series of emails that are sent over a specific time period to achieve a specific goal. They are designed to reach consumers at the right time with the most relevant content for them and, in turn, help you create trusting relationships with them.
There are many different types of email campaigns you can use in your email automation and audience segmentation strategies, many of which have already been mentioned: welcome emails, promotion announcement emails, feedback request emails, holiday and seasonal emails, invitation emails, reactivation emails, abandoned shopping cart emails, cross-selling and upselling emails, email newsletters, thank you emails, and anniversary emails.
Promotion Announcements
As stated above, promotion announcements are emails sent out to your mailing list that include important news announcements for your business, such as announcements for the release of a new product, a special event, or an upcoming sale. They are vital to the success of your events or new offers—and just as important as sending them out in the first place is developing an email campaign strategy that gets the word out early and often.
If you postpone announcing company news until too late, you will not generate enough excitement around your new product, event, or sale, and you are not as likely to see the level of engagement you want to see with it. Instead of making this mistake, you want to send promotion announcements out well in advance of your event, sale, or product release; this will allow promotion announcement emails to work to your greatest advantage.
Thank You Emails
Thank you emails are a great way to build customer loyalty and increase customer cultivation and retention. By sending out thank you emails via email automation, you help to humanize your business and help your customers’ experience feel even more personal.
You can send out thank you emails for many different reasons. Some examples include the following occasions: after a customer makes a purchase, when a contact subscribes to your email newsletter, on special holidays or birthdays, when a contact signs up for or joins an event, when a customer refers your business to someone else, or after a customer provides feedback or a review. Taking advantage of every opportunity to thank your contacts shows them just how much they matter to you and keeps them coming back for more.
No responses yet