Email marketing is one of the most common marketing channels through which marketers try to nurture leads or existing customers. Most prospects and users of existing services and products receive a plethora of emails through the day. But what does it take for marketers to put certain best practices in place to ensure that these emails receive the desired attention and action from their audience? Start by keeping in mind the few things your prospects probably don’t like about your email:
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An Inaccessible ‘’Reply-to’’ Email
Most marketers will use an alias or alternate email to broadcast bulk email messages, the type of email name/email address used to send emails to prospects and existing customers may differ from what they normally use for their daily work.
But for either broadcast list, if your reply-to email is a generic automated email (like no-reply@xxx.com) or something that is neither accessible nor really used by an executive at your brand, you are already actively negatively impact the ROI of your email marketing performance.
One of the easiest things to do to boost email engagement and add better value to your email outreach is, building creative call to actions and ensure your email sending address is a valid identity used by someone on your team, in short, anything besides a ‘’no-reply’’ setting.
At a time when users are demanding better personalization and always-on access to the brands they deal with, this could turn out to be a basic requirement to ensure your prospects and customers have the choice to write back to you to share their thoughts or opinions or simply ask a question when needed.
You’re Not Connecting Email Marketing Behavior to Website Behavior
We live and market in an age where it is more than crucial to understand the intent and purchase interest of leads and prospects before marketing anything to them: this helps fuel better campaigns and also to put the right, most relevant products and services in front of them based on their buying interest.
If a set of prospects have clicked on links to your product or service pages to your website, from your email, it is important to collect this data and purchase intent in a central platform.
Otherwise, it can create a disconnect for when the same prospect visits your website through another channel: here’s why.
When you track and understand how prospects and your audience are interacting with your email and how they are engaging with links and call to action prompts that in most cases will lead back to one of your resources or gated content or product/services pages, you can use that information to customize the next email send or pitch or browsing behavior for the prospect as a next step.
Connecting the data will prevent marketers from sending information about irrelevant products and services to users while allowing marketers to use the data to fuel deeper
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Giving them the Option to Unsubscribe but then Remarketing to them despite it!
For every email marketing or bulk sales email campaign, you need to include a relevant unsubscribe link to allow your recipients the option to opt-out.
Sneaky marketers will still use an unsubscribe request to try and market back to that prospect, in a world where your audience is already spoilt for choice and the overall brand and user experience is integral to gaining or losing a customer, depending on how things flow, ensuring that your unsubscribe process is seamless and doesn’t disrupt the prospect again can be useful in the long run.
Rather than maintaining an unsubscribe cadence through which marketers send an email asking for confirmation that the user wants to opt-out (thereby forcing them to interact with the brand again), it might make sense to simply add a little of fairness and creativity to the unsubscribe next step. Once user clicks on your unsubscribe, an automated email thanking them for their support so far, for instance, is a better way to acknowledge what they want (which is to unsubscribe and not be remarketed to!).
Not Personalizing Marketing and Sales Asks in your Cadence
There are always a plethora of factors that affect your prospect’s decision to buy or delay purchase of a particular product or service. While you can track your prospect’s behavior upto a point, you can’t know everything about their intent or influencing factors.
This is where marketing and salespeople can take a cue to add customized questions and asks into their email cadences, with the aim of gathering the right information from the audience. Ask prospects and customers at the end of an email what they are looking for or in what ways you can help them better achieve their goals. This is just a start,
But connecting these responses to their overall engagement behavior can actually allow marketers to build specific next-steps for these prospects based on what they say they need or want at the moment.
Winning at Email Marketing
Marketers and sales teams send a bunch of email nurtures and prospecting cadences out every day. Your audience is already receiving all of this from a multitude of brands. The secret doesn’t lie in sending more emails, but in sending the right kind of emails at the right time, with the right prompts. For this to happen in a seamless manner it is crucial for marketers to assess email engagement behaviors, craft the right call to actions and questions through their cadences and understand more about their prospects in real-time.
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