Converting prospects into paying customers isn’t a short-term process. The customer must be nurtured, right from the beginning of the conversion funnel and throughout the end-to-end customer journey. What is customer nurturing? Customer nurturing ensures that marketers can build long-term relationships with customers via several marketing activities. Marketers are now focusing on a holistic customer journey transformation, instead of concentrating on individual and distinct stages of the digital customer journey. This is done by steadily nurturing the customers via email marketing. As per a study conducted by the Data & Marketing Association, UK, for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42. Email marketing is the most convenient and beneficial tactic available with regards to lead nurturing. Availing an efficient email management software can ensure that you can personalize your email marketing strategy and ensure a higher percentage of prospects are converting. Read on to know 6 email marketing strategies that will assist you in nurturing customer relationships.
Create personas
Standardized and homogeneous email marketing campaigns can be ineffective, as your customers may have varied needs and requirements. This signifies the importance of creating buyer personas, based on which, personalized email marketing campaigns can be designed. An email management software usually includes analytics that can be used to create personas. Advanced automation solutions can ensure that marketers can gather pertinent customer data like demographics, behavioural patterns, purchase trends, stage of the customer journey, interests, lifestyle and more, which in turn can help in understanding the customer better. An in-depth comprehension of the customer is vital as it helps in nurturing them with relevant content and thereby developing a long-term relationship with them. Once the buyer persona has been created, email campaigns can be created that are targeted and adds some value to the customer.
Attractive Content
As per Martech Advisor, adding videos to emails can increase click rates by 300%. Using attractive and engaging content in emails is crucial in acquiring the attention of your customers. Using understandable and interesting content and visuals in emails is the most effective way to drive the customer journey transformation. The average office worker receives 121 emails per day. That’s a lot of emails! In order to capture and retain the recipient’s interest, you must provide something extra. Most email recipients check emails while they are travelling, or while doing some work. Nobody has the time to read a content-heavy email. An email that focuses less on written content and more on images, graphics and videos will make it effortless for receivers to read the email.
Optimize
Email marketing can only reach its full potential with optimization. What is optimization? It is nothing but a methodology employed to ensure that visitors who open the email from different devices receive an experience that is optimized for that device. This is especially important when the email includes videos. With a vast majority of people opening emails on their mobile phones, lack of optimization can result in negative outcomes. An email management software comes with several capabilities like advanced automation, third party application integration and more. This ensures that you can optimize your emails across all devices, like, mobile, desktop, tablet etc and nurture customer relationships with a superior experience.
Incentivize
Cementing customer loyalty is an indispensable part of long-term customer retention. Most customers ignore the emails that they receive due to reasons like lack of time, irrelevant content, unengaging subject line etc. Your email marketing campaigns must offer something that is of value to the recipient. Offering incentives is a great way to pique the interest of your email recipients and prompt them to engage with your email content. Exclusive offers and discounts can ensure customer delight and drive the customer journey transformation. Prospects will engage more if they get some tangible reason to engage. Exclusive offers, gifts or invitations are material reasons that influence prospects to open emails. Ensuring customer engagement, in turn, helps in nurturing customer relationships.
Timeliness
Even the most efficacious email marketing campaign can lose the upper hand if it isn’t implemented in a time-bound manner. Why is time such an important factor for email marketing?The effectiveness of email marketing campaigns is directly proportional to metrics like open rates, click rates, unsubscribe rates, bounce rates, complaint rates and more. The objective is to guarantee that all these metrics are optimal. There are certain days of the week as well as time during the day which are more conducive towards obtaining higher clicks and conversions. An email management software can not only help you measure and analyse the days and time when your email marketing campaigns receive the maximum momentum, but also, assist you in pre-planning all your email marketing campaigns. This will ensure that all your important event-related emails go out much before the event date and your customers are not bombarded with unnecessary emails. Sending time-bound emails with relevant details is a great way to nurture long-term customer relationships.
Relevant & personalized content
Last, but not the least, what you include in your emails plays a vital role in nurturing customer relationships and enabling the customer journey transformation. Content that is customized according to the singular needs of your prospective customers reflects paramount results. An email management software can help you track all your engagements, interactions and clicks. Based on such analytical data you can get a deep understanding of the pain points and desires of your prospective leads, thereby enabling you to design more personalized and relevant email marketing campaigns. You can also take email personalization to the next level by segmenting your customers into homogeneous groups using analytics. Based on the defining characteristics of these homogeneous groups, you can target your prospective customers with tailored content and email conversion optimization tactics.
Any marketer worth his salt knows the fact that it’s much easier to retain existing customers than to acquire new customers. Nurturing your customers through email marketing is an engaging and effective way in cementing long-term relationships with customers and retaining them, thereby driving the customer journey transformation. While it may be arduous to design, execute, track and analyse email campaigns on your own, a systematic email management software can assist you, enabling you to concentrate on your core activities. Know more about our robust and scalable email management solutions.
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