10 Ways Email Marketing Can Start Fueling More Engaged Clients and Prospects
Let’s face it, using email marketing as a means to further engage your clients and prospects can be a challenge in the long-term. Email alone is static, yet it is still an efficient way to communicate online. If you are already using email marketing to promote your expertise, product or service you probably have found that over a period of time that your statistics and more importantly, results, start to stagnate – for example, you might find that your open rates and click through rates seems to generally stay the same. Again, this is assuming you have done nothing but simply send the same kind of information to your subscribers with the same call-to-action. I would put the typical weekly or monthly newsletters into this category. What happens here is that your email subscribers start to generate habits. Think about some of the emails you get and what you do with them. Some of them you open
and take time to read and others you might delete or unsubscribe.Your email subscribers are forming the same habits around your email campaigns as well. So how do you overcome this issue and turn email marketing into a tool that continues to growth in its effectiveness?
The first step in improving your email marketing effectiveness is to develop a campaign structure that is geared to continually break the habits of your email subscribers. This means CHANGE. Below is a short list of campaign ideas that you could implement:
- Start a contest on your Facebook Fan Page or other social networking tool you use to communicate with clients and prospects (i.e. Social HubSite). You can see a great example of this by visiting one of the Facebook pages for our clients at http://facebook.com/pafamilydining.
- Bring humor into your content. This is a great way to tap into a foundational human need.
- Share what’s trending. Go to http://google.com/trends to find out what people are searching for and what are the hot topics right now.
- Use video. One of the top reasons why certain people don’t spend time in your emails is due to the time and attention factor. I have always found a video call-to-action to produce results. I’ve done it with video taping myself giving an internet marketing tip in my car then labeling the subject line with the word “Video” and posting it. The email can simply be the title, screenshot of the video with a play button and a link. You can start seeing the effectiveness of video email to small groups or individuals for free by visiting http://sendvideoemail.me.
- Who’s got the lucky number? When setting up your email campaign use the data-binding tool that allows you to assign separate data fields with each subscriber. In Excel you would just want to create a new column. From there you can assign each subscriber with a unique number (use the incremental values feature in Excel). When you have uploaded your email list and are setting up your campaign, you can include the new data field and call it something along the lines of “Your Lucky Number”. Each time you send the email you can promote a prize giveaway to the subscriber that has the lucky number. It’s crazy, but simple little bribes like this can work wonders.
- Host a live seminar/webinar. Take time to get to know individuals on your email list. Hosting a live in-person seminar or webinar can be a great tool to allow the conversation to go beyond the inbox.
- Send individual video emails to subscribers. Use the http://sendvideoemail.me tool to send a quick video email to individual subscribers simply saying thank you and offering suggestions to what they want to see next. If this seems too time consuming, hire a virtual assistant or have someone in your office work on it. It’s well worth the time invested.
- Feature a client case study. Case studies are a great way to bring relevance into your campaigns. Featuring a client success story will help those that are opening your emails envision how what you have done for someone else might work for them.
- Simply say happy birthday. One of the keys to success in any online communication effort is to show your connections how well you have been listening. If don’t already have it, start collecting birthdays from your clients and prospects then send them an email on their birthday. You could start by using a tool such as http://happybirthday.com.
- Pay attention to how you are adding people to your list. The above ideas are great and can really help spark the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. One of the most basic and proactive ways you can start engaging more clients and prospects is by setting up the right email collection methods. If you are just blindly entering names in from random business cards you collected at some point you are going to have an uphill battle using email to communicate effectively. I have several ideas that I could list, but am going to hold you accountable to ask me directly
In short, email marketing is an effective and efficient tool to use as long as you pay attention to how your subscribers are interacting with it. It can serve as the glue to all of the other activities you use online to engage clients and prospects. The first step is to identify what you want to get out of it and then design a strategy that includes proper execution and monitoring. Please feel free to reach out to me directly so we can work together in making sure you are getting the most out of your email marketing efforts and overall online communication effort. Please email me directly, call my cell at 717-579-8343 or fill out the contact form on the bottom right of the page.
