Photo credit: The Skilled Hassan Pasha
Email is a critical channel for prospecting, engaging with new customers and re-engaging previous ones. However most businesses are still using flows, funnels and messaging concepts they developed years ago and many companies are missing out on the latest tools. techniques and features that can help re-energize email revenue.
Here’s 5 ways your business can upgrade your email strategy in 2022:
Smart Segmentation
80% of the clients we work with have 3 or fewer segments:
- Newsletter/Updates Sign Ups
- Customers
- Previous Customers
Each one generally has a set email flow plus ad hoc emails for news, releases, feature announcements. In the past, the idea of segmenting beyond this point usually encountered two issues: extra work to create and maintain segments and whether there’s any incremental benefit.
Both of these questions are easily resolved as modern email marketing programs have built in tools to help manage extra lists and there is absolutely a better return when you can right size your customer messaging, especially for upsells and reactivations.
Testing
A/B is something many organizations strive to implement but often fail to do so in a meaningful way.
Often an organization runs a single test or maybe two and then runs out of ideas or internal willpower to continue refining messaging concepts. Often they believe they have gotten the low hanging fruit out of the way when in many cases results normalize over time and no appreciable gain is noticed.
If you’re not experimenting with basics like subject lines, taglines and main header images, your organization should really look into building a testing repository where ideas and results can be put side by side for all team members to access and contribute to.
Personalization
There was a big push in the mid-2010s to implement 1:1 personalization and often at massive implementation costs.
However brands, even small 10 person companies, can implement there own level of personalization without breaking the bank. Adding personalization is both from a framework in thinking of how users are leveraging products and the practical application of setting up simple data rules and captures for things like abandoned carts, time since last interaction, products you may also like etc …
You don’t need a 6-7 figure software platform and there are a number of out of the box add-ons within platforms that can help brands do this quickly and effectively.
Better Triggers
One of the biggest improvements an organization can make is tying site interaction data to their email lists and developing flows based on it. Users often take 10-20 steps before completing an action and leveraging email as a soft nudge to get them to the next step can quickly pay dividends.
If you use Intercom or a similar technology, most of these actions can be plug and play … example existing user goes to a knowledge base article on price breaks for additional users -> triggers an email to user with a limited time discount coupon/deal.
You’ll want to work on trigger timing to make sure you avoid the creep factor of emailing someone while they are on the site but little steps like the one above can produce major revenue gains.
Rethink Customer Flows
The pandemic changed how we buy and think about the products and services in our lives. There’s a lot of value in going back to what infrastructure is in place and seeing if it makes sense for not only the current environment economically but the current environment overall.
Preferences, use cases, price sensitivity has all changed and companies need to adapt their email messaging flows accordingly.