Email marketing has become a cornerstone of many marketing strategies and business models. We have been emailing people to sell stuff since the internet and that crazy modem internet connection beeping sound while it connected.
Now there are a myriad of web-based mail companies like Mailchimp, ConstantContact, Email Octopus and more. Each of them has customizable templates to brand your campaigns and add in custom pictures and links easily. This software also provide excellent metrics on e-mails sent, received, opened, clicks they received, and more. Integrating them with other 3rd party software like CRMs such as HubSpot or Salesforce makes them even more powerful and versatile.
This age-old method of digital reaching out to audiences has evolved into a robust tool in your marketing arsenal. There is business-to-business or B2B e-mail marketing, there are business-to-consumer campaigns, and others – all for driving traffic to your site. Many use newsletters as ways to build their e-mail lists ( or as Mailchimp now calls them ‘Audiences’ ). Then there is the ability to segment your email lists into different groups – you can segment them by putting different user addresses in different Audiences and custom naming each one – this is segmenting by Audience. Another way is to add tags to each contact that is added into your blast list or Audience. Only users with specific tags will receive those specific blasts.
Email Marketing Segmentation
Segmentation is a great way to take advantage of users in different markets or demographics. Try out segmentation using the following as examples:
- Segmenting your users by geographic location – do you want to send a blast at 9a EST that users in PST over in California for example – that they receive at 6am? No way. You can segment your list to customize the time that each segment gets their blasts. Now you can even schedule emails for particular times with particular segments.
- Segmenting your users by demographics – Send age, market, gender, or age as examples. With smart segmentation, you can avoid spending marketing time or dollars targeting teenagers with canes and walkers as one example. Don’t waste a single penny of your marketing dollar. Squeeze every last conversion out of each one you spend with smart and strategic planning.
Drip Campaigns
Drip campaigns are a great way to take advantage of the full power of this powerful form of marketing. Drip campaigns are when a subscriber signs up for a Newsletter for example – it triggers a couple different actions. First, it adds the user to the ‘New Subscribers’ list, then it adds them to the ‘Drip’ list.
This refers to the process of sending consecutive emails after a subscriber or new customer has entered your email queue. First they receive the ‘Thanks for Subscribing’ notification, which is part of the flow but doesn’ actually count as part of the ‘Drip’ in my opinion. In any case it’s part of the process so they get that notification, then they get the newsletter they subscribed to. The next day specifically, in most campaigns we manage, the user will get another email with a special offer. By this time most people who don’t want to hear from us for anything other than the Newsletter – can unsubscribe from their list.
The good thing is that we can make a setting that puts news subscribers into two audiences. Consider this, you can put new signups in a list called “New Subscribers” and an additional list called “Drip List”. So when someone gets into your email marketing machine, they can opt out of the non-newsletter drip campaigns and still be a subscriber in the Newsletters list.
What to Avoid
You want to avoid over emailing people – this in particular annoys me – but best practices incorporate some sort of pestering to bring people back. For example, if you abandon a shopping cart in many stores – you may get an email a little later in the day or the next day saying “Hey did you forget something?” and asks them to come back to the site and finish their checkout process. This is a type of ‘re-targeting’ that can be utilized via email.
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I hope you have found this article to be useful. Get in touch today to talk about how we can help you up your email marketing game. Have a great day!
