We spoke recently about why email marketing is important and why it should be a key part of your amplification strategy. But there’s no sense in sending out a carefully crafted message that doesn’t add value to the people you are trying to target – but who are they anyway? Who are you designing your EDMs for and what are you trying to get them to do?
There is room in everyone’s marketing strategy for email marketing – it’s just a question of whom you’re trying to speak to and what you’re trying to share. Either way, for either a consumer-driven strategy or a business-relations strategy, you need to be crystal clear on what value you are adding and what actions you are asking your recipients to take moving forward.
For an end-consumer driven strategy, you are targeting your customers – those people who engage with your business regularly (or maybe it’s a little less regularly) and who trust you as a solutions provider. Potential customers, I.e. those who haven’t engaged with you as yet, might also fall into this category. It’s about being relevant to your customers at this season in their lives – they might not be engaging with your business forever, so it’s important to add value while you can. Educate them and amplify your blog posts through a targeted EDM. Share exclusive promotional offers with them. Ask them for referrals and to engage with you in new services or products. All of these are easy ways to add value and encourage your customers to do more business with you, which is after all your ultimate goal.
But what if you run a “one-off” business? A business where a customer is really only going to engage with you for one season of their life, like a real estate agent or a wedding venue? This is where you can split your email marketing into two categories – current people who are engaging with you on the consumer side, and business relationship building.
For the wedding venue, for instance, I would suggest running two tandem EDMs. 1 for current enquirers and future brides that is more focused in the day to day happenings in the venue, case studies and any particular offers or events they may be hosting. But it’s important to be aware that the audience for this email will most likely be lower and more transient – brides and grooms aren’t likely to stay on your email marketing list once they have had their wedding. Which brings us to the other list – industry contacts.
This could include any and all vendors within the same industry that you have dealt with and who might be able to refer you business – in the case of the wedding venue, celebrants, photographers, caterers, and florists. Take a different tact with sharing case studies to this group, change your communication style and talk to them about the vendor benefits of working with your venue – these are the people who will be referring you work so you need to make sure that you stay front of their mind too. These same principles can be applied to most businesses, but particularly those businesses that work with other suppliers in the same industry and typically don’t have foot traffic or regular engagements with their clients.
Email marketing can be as complex or as simple as you want it to be. There is nothing simpler than communicating an offer via email to a list of people who already see value in what you do. It comes down to regularity, consistency and how it all looks. Presentation, messaging and actionability is what sets ok email marketing apart from effective email marketing. If you’re not sure which one your communication falls into, maybe it’s time to do things differently. We would love to help you craft strong messages that your clients will engage with, no matter who they are. All you have to do is get in touch via email on Ben@emdesigns.com.ah and we can review your existing email marketing and propose a new way of doing things in 2019 to get you real results.
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