Email marketing goes beyond online products and tacky ring tones. While low-value offers and blatant spam tend to dominate the world of email marketing, there’s a major industry built around online offers, business services, and valuable products that goes unseen to most.
For example, many service businesses and product-based businesses aiming for long-term customer and client relationships hire an agency to handle email marketing and other digital marketing campaigns. The goal is not to push products or force sales, but to increase trust and build connections. Just like footwear giant Zappos uses customer service as an opportunity to build long-term prospects, these marketers use email not to directly sell, but to create a sales-friendly environment.
The Key to Email Marketing Success
In email marketing, communicating as close to a personal level as possible is key. Online businesses, especially startups, have to ensure that relationships need to be built in order for subscribers to be open to communications and, in the near future, marketing messages. Without the sense of trust brought about by such a relationship, email marketing will be useless.
To develop and maintain that type of relationship, startups must know everything they can about their subscribers. While email marketing can work well just with knowledge of demographics, a greater degree of success can be achieved with knowledge of what subscribers like, what they do, and where they go, specifically when they are online. This is usually achieved through marketing help from firms experienced at scaling startups.
Developing Personal Relationships with Email Marketing Subscribers
Knowing that kind of information will enable marketers to properly segment their subscriber base and consequently develop better email marketing campaigns that will lead to higher conversion rates. Furthermore, such information will allow marketers to communicate to each subscriber on a personal level. Being able to do so is crucial, especially when two-way communications are encouraged to develop valuable customer relationships.
Although it is definitely worth it, maintaining two-way communications will surely be more difficult for marketers and business owners. Much time must be allocated for reading as well as replying to emails. Nevertheless, there are things that can be done to ease the process. Among them is automation. While the concept of automated responses don’t seem to bring about a sense of email marketing personalization, it does have tons of benefits and can work out pretty well if used correctly.
Using Automated Responses Without Compromising Personalization
Almost everyone who goes through a major company’s customer service center experiences issues. It’s the result of scale – service becomes disrupted and ineffective by the company’s size, and ends up doing the opposite of what it’s supposed to. People grow to hate automation and form letters because they don’t help them, instead offering irrelevant and unnecessary advice.
Serious email marketers should use the same technology, but achieve the opposite result. When used strategically and effectively, email templates and automated responses become less of a hassle and much more of a success indicator. If clients and customers appreciate the security that comes from a large company, email marketers should give it to them by mimicking the appearance without the frustrations.
Automated responses have many uses. For example, a business that receives requests for estimates or status of orders can use them to manage expectations and to let them know how long it could take before a detailed reply. Clients rarely like waiting for nothing, but are quite content waiting when they know something good is coming. Email marketers should be detailed, clear, and honest in their automated emails to gain the trust, and continual work, of their subscribers and prospective clients.
There are a lot of ways automated responses and templates can help in developing professional yet personal relationships with subscribers. Marketers that use them properly know how valuable they can be to the success of any email marketing campaign.
