If you’re like me, you get bombarded with emails! This study shows that by 2018, 97 emails will hit inboxes each day, at an average of 12 emails every working hour. So it’s no surprise that your click rates and open rates are lower than you’d like. The real question is this: How are you going to stand out?
When your email marketing strategy gets a little stale, you can breathe new life into it by changing up your approach. Think about the personas you serve and what problems they might need to solve. Get in their brain and try to understand the trends that might capture their attention. Go one step ahead of them by finding the problem they might not even realize they have, and providing them relevant content to solve that problem. When you send your subscribers content that they don’t expect, they’ll feel compelled to click on your links and interact with your brand.
A fresh strategy means new opportunities to convert your prospects into customers. Here are 3 ideas to spark some inspiration for how you can utilize your email marketing strategy in your quest to meet your personas where they are in their buying journey:
1) Leverage Social Media
Turn social media content into email marketing content. It’s important to at least mention social media in your email marketing campaign, but have you considered using content from social media for your emails? Social media offers a valuable window into your persona’s interests and tendancies. Learn from your social media successes-the posts that have sparked a lot of engagement, and learn from your social media failures. Why did certain posts perform better than others? For the posts that permormed the best, repurpose that message (or something similar) in your emails. Need ideas for creating social media content? We have just the thing!
2) Offer a Product Update Round Up
Product updates can seem too salesy if you send them frequently, but you can give them more interest and power if you publish less-frequent roundups. For instance, you could send an email once a month that details all the product updates and announcements from the previous 30 days. It’s like a catalog of news that can add tremendous excitement to your campaign.
At MINDSCAPE, we send out a monthly blog recap email with a short summary and image of the blogs we’ve published in the previous month. We make sure to include an impactful headline and a link so our users can find more information. By keeping our descriptions short and sweet, our prospects can speed-read the email and get to the information that’s relevant to them.
3) Commemorate a Milestone
Not all email marketing should be promoting your products and services. In fact, you’ll be more successful at engaging your personas if you invite them to celebrate with you. Whether you’re breaking ground on a new facility or ringing in a business birthday, your audience wants to know about it. According to Constant Contact, it’s important to include your customers in these milestones because they’ve played a pivotal role in helping your business achieve its goals.If you let them know through email, you can converse with them on social media or with a blog post about the event.
To generate buzz on social media, use this milestone to set up a promotional event or savings opportunity. For example, James Coney Island (now JCI Grill) celebrates its birthday every year by offering its original coneys at a special price: the number of years it’s been around. In 2015, it celebrated 92 years of existence by offering coneys for 92 cents each. To really unite your personas, create a hashtag that will unify all the social posts created about the milestone.
Creating the ideal email marketing strategy can be difficult, especially if you’re sending the same information week after week. Use the above strategies to change up your approach and garner more interest from subscribers. If you’re still not getting results, request a consultation so we can help you create a plan of action.
