We have finally reached the end of our workout. Congrats! This is the final part of a five-part blog series that gives strategic advice on how to optimize your email marketing strategy to attract and retain customers. For a quick refresh and warm up, check out parts one, two, three, and four.
In the past, we discussed ‘warming up’ with email and account sign-up, creating emails that go beyond standard personalization, and developing welcome and repurchase series that attract and retain customers. In this post, we will discuss sending the right number of emails, and incorporating email into a comprehensive marketing strategy.
Email marketing is like going to the gym. You get stuck in the same routine, and get complacent with the results. Unless you’re being strategic about how you’re working out, you will not see any sort of benefit or payoff. By making small changes, either at the gym or in your email strategy, you can see a huge lift in your performance.
Feel the Burn, Don’t Burn Out
Is it possible to spend too much time at the gym? If you spend 7 days a week doing the same workout routine, your body will adjust to that routine and stop responding. The same applies to email send frequency. If you send too many emails with the same messaging, you will see your ROI start to decrease. Customers will see the same messages come through their inbox, and delete them without even paying attention. They will adjust to your email strategy and stop responding.
So, what is the perfect amount of time to spend at the gym to see results? The answer isn’t so simple; it’s based on your individual goals, and how much exercise your body needs. The same rule applies to emails; it’s up to individual customers how much interaction they have with your brand. Some customers may be okay with receiving emails three times a week, while others may want just one email a month. It’s important to let the customer decide when and how often they hear from your brand. Include proactive opt-down options when a customer signs up for emails. Let the customer know you care about their preferences at the beginning of the relationship, not as a last-ditch effort to prevent customers from unsubscribing.
Incorporating Email into a Comprehensive Marketing Strategy
We are now at the end of our email marketing workout! During this time, you’ve worked out some important muscles and learned a few marketing lessons along the way. Now that you know how to work the muscles, it’s all about maintenance and putting in work outside of the gym (or in a marketer’s case, outside of email). After a workout, do you go home, lay on the couch for three days, and eat an entire bag of potato chips? Maybe you do, but you won’t see the results of all your hard work. A better strategy would be to go home, eat a healthy, balanced, meal, and get enough sleep so you feel rested in the morning. Going to the gym should be part of a larger wellness strategy that makes you feel happy, healthy, and shows results.
Just like with the gym, email marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Rather, it needs to be incorporated into a larger cross-channel strategy. The goal is to build an improved customer experience and orchestrate a strategy that fuels dynamic, targeted and automated content across all your channels. That’s when marketing can really flex its muscles.
To read more, check out my article in Target Marketing for more tips on email marketing, and be sure to check out parts one through four of our Strengthening Your Email Marketing series.
