5 Ways to Improve Email Marketing-Based Lead Generation
August 5, 2011 at 10:08 am Dan Costello 4 comments
Some argue email marketing is dead and no longer relevant or effective. However, adult Internet users remain 11.8% more likely to follow a link to your company’s website through an email campaign than a pay per click banner, pop-up or pop-under window, full motion video or a floating advertisement.*
This higher conversion rate explains marketers’ top two objectives this year:
- Be more relevant – Improve segmentation and targeting
- Be more engaging – Improve digital demand generation and online relationship building**
Email marketing continues to offer benefits above traditional marketing. Correctly using these email marketing best practices, marketers can add value and growth to their lead generation and segmentation efforts.
5 Email Marketing Tips to Improve Segmentation and Lead Generation:
1. Collect data over time
Many marketers try to gain customers’ information in one step and often scare away the people they are attempting to attract. The best way to collect details via email is slowly and over time. People are more willing to offer information after continual interaction, gained trust and non-invasive questioning.
The questions you ask and data you collect are strongly determined by the type of marketing and sales strategy you have. When sending email campaigns, start with the basics and work your way into data collection. The most basic items include the name, email address and possibly a phone number. Additional demographic information should be collected at a later date.
To further enhance your data collection and tracking, email marketers who use GravityMail have access to analytical tracking of visitors, links they follow, conversion rates and can include additional analytical tagging with Google Analytics.
2. Keep email lists clean
Email lists should be free of data entry errors, un-subscribes, auto-generated email accounts(no-reply@), misspelled email accounts and syntax errors. Its a matter of basic housekeeping and systematically reviewing to ensure you have a clean list with active participants. In addition, clean lists offer a concise perspective into the habits of the people included in your lists and offers great opportunity for segmentation. Through continued monitoring, filtering, editing and cleaning of email lists, marketers can create a strong tool to enhance their marketing strategies and return on investment. For example, as part of reviewing lists, marketers can keep people engaged by reaching out if contacts stop responding or become inactive recipients.
3. Align email campaigns with your marketing strategy
One of the most common mistakes is sending email campaigns that do not correlate to your company’s strategic marketing plan. Companies often send emails with little relevance or correlation to the overall scheme of things. The best way to connect emails to your company’s marketing plan is to create a strategic campaign map. This will help determine your campaign’s plan of attack and the direction it takes your readers before the next email. Look at the big picture goals of your strategic plan, and break the points down into steps which you can correlate with email campaigns.
4. Incorporate other digital channels into your landing page
Every email campaign should include some type of landing page; whether your blog, a customized web page you’ve created, home page or use of a social media outlet. Always help direct readers where you want them to go. Direct them to current news about your company and products on social media outlets or if you are not actively updating your social media accounts, directing them to your website. Believe it or not, people are still 22% more likely to regularly follow company’s’ email campaigns than follow them on a social network***. So don’t underestimate the importance of effectively engaging your customers through email and utilizing email to increase engagement through other channels.
5. Listen before you speak
Social media has given customers a voice they have never had before and they are taking advantage of the new channels available to share their thoughts about your company and products. Marketers must be willing to listen if they want to be relevant and successful creating leads and sales. Listening to people allows marketers additional opportunities for data collection, determining trending topics, incorporating segments and creating marketing campaigns with high ROI. In addition, companies and marketers willing to listen to their customer base are much more likely to be talked about (in a good way) than companies who do not.
Despite what you may read, studies show that email marketing is not dead and remains very effective. If you follow these basic principles and invest in email marketing you are sure to see the ROI as qualified leads roll in.
Not a GravityMail customer? Contact Acumium today and start increasing your lead generation and sales figures through relevant email campaigns with analytical tracking.
Are you already a GravityMail customer but would like help?
Call us at: 608-310-9700 x521 or email us at sales@acumium.com.
*Experian Simmions, “National Consumer Study”, February 16, 2011
**CMO Council, “The 2011 State of Marketing” sponsored by Deloitte and Openet, July 17, 2011
***Netpop Research, “Social Face-Off: A comparison of US and China Social Media Use”, April 27, 2011
Entry filed under: Email Marketing, GravityMail. Tags: Email Marketing, GravityMail.
1.
Thomas@United Database | August 9, 2011 at 5:48 am
Good article. One point to add is about keeping your mailing lists updated. Asking your readers whether they want your emails once is 9 months is a good idea.
2.
bthoffmann | August 19, 2011 at 9:01 pm
I agree that updated lists are key for email success. What type of updates do you feel are most important?
3.
how to write an email | August 19, 2011 at 10:31 am
Nice write I, I think another thing people should consider is their subject lines, as they play a big role on your open rates, you want them to be interesting and enticing. It seems email marketing is the only way of making money online were you have almost total control over your success, so it’s an avenue, I’d definitely recommend.
4.
bthoffmann | August 19, 2011 at 9:08 pm
Exactly! Email users tend to “judge a book by its cover” and rely heavily on the subject line content. Unfortunately it can be very difficult to create an engaging subject line. How do you create an engaging subject line? Do you prefer to be informative or humorous?