Pollen Marketing

Life Cycle Email Marketing takes email marketing to the next level.  You may also have heard these referred to as auto-responders.  In the case of a newbie email subscriber a trigger email series can be anything from a welcoming email series, bonus gifts, free presentations, a list of your frequently asked questions, offers and so on.  You have received a number of these emails before right?

• Confirmation of order or shipping detail
• Request for feedback on a purchase
• Request to tell all your friends about a purchase
• Happy birthday email with coupons
• You didn’t finish your order email
• Renew your subscription or contract
• “You may also like” emails showing you the other products and services also available?  Maybe at a buyers discount.
• Request for a product/service review
• Welcome message

I certainly think there’s a lack of knowledge about these mechanisms and plenty of opportunities that are missed.  It can be tailored to a company’s different types of customers and central to their interest.  We use well trigger emails to attract the customer’s interest, educate the buyer and nurture the lead.

Some prospects are not ready to buy your offer right now, particularly in the services industry. Great email automation can get them further along the buying cycle, and automate your sales before you engage your business development team.

According to a recent survey made by StrongMail in 2011, 46% of the businesses surveyed were already using automated, event-triggered, email marketing programs.

Interesting enough, the survey highlighted that the industry with the biggest life cycle email marketing usage is the travel & hospitality, closely followed by the retail industry.  Travelling to certain parts of the country or globe is very cyclical and email auto-responders for certain times of the year are just one brilliant example.  Once they are set up, you can forget about them but be assured that your prospects are getting a full tour of your brand.

The main benefits the survey respondents found about using these campaigns are shown in the graph below.

According to the survey, the main impediment companies find in implementing life cycle email marketing campaigns is the budget.  I think the investment is not so big, given the ROI on email marketing as a whole is the best per dollar spent.  Business should take advantage of it and I bet we could come up with 10 different ways for you to use trigger email right now!

For more hot uses on email automation, get the Effective Email Marketing Guide.

 

Now here is a thought. Would it be great to find out exactly what makes your client’s tick? Imagine a device that could tell you exactly what made your customers heart leap? If something could tell you what motivates your customers and genuinely interests them, would you want it? Of course you can pay a for some market research usually starting at $8,000.00. Or….

The advancement of most cost effective, sometimes free email marketing software, that kind of knowledge is built-in. Indeed knowing inside your clients heads has been possible for some time. The reporting functionality on email marketing software like this is pretty standard out of the box. You just may not have been aware of the implications or know how to use it.

So here is a pretty common scenario for you.  You email out  an update to your database with your usual helpful tips. Ensure you place hyperlinks within your article. Only put a short version of the story in the actual email (25-35 words) and add a link to read more back at your website. There is no need to complicate it and get bogged down in the data. Just knowing what links most people click is telling you what to include in your next offer or what products are the most interesting.  For the campaigns we have created for our clients, there is almost always a clear winner when it comes to links clicked within an email. See the example below.

So be creative and customise your message knowing what interests people.  Or maybe do a review of your products and have hyperlinks on some of the features or benefits.  Which one gets clicked on most?  Perhaps you enhance that feature or provide more information on your website or brochure.  You may even plan the next product release on that type of priceless data.

 

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While email marketing continues to rule, but many businesses I have surveyed have struggled to get a regular meaning program of the ground. Is your business one of them?   What has been the main blockage that has prevented you from starting or maintaining an email marketing program? I would love to help you overcome these issues in the comments below…

But here are some great reasons for revisiting email marketing that you may not of thought of yet…

• Email reporting is so advanced, you can identify what your market is trying to tell you about what products they want and what features interest them.
• Set up and forget a welcome series that validate your expertise and educate your prospects about what you do.
• Highest ROI per dollar spent of any of the online marketing tools.
• Ultimate story telling channel
• Affordable online tools available with features that are out of this world (just take a pick).
• Amazing speed to market once you have built a valuable list.
• Isolate the characteristics of your brand that do or don’t appeal to your audience increase the amount emails are opened and read.
• Track and measure the engagement levels of new marketing initiatives almost instantaneously.
• Prevent the costly expense of un-targeted marketing.
• Prospects and customers know exactly what you deliver.
• Ease to begin dialogue with new prospects and quickly convey what you stand for.
• Quicken the sales process with clever conversation about your people, products or services.
• Email programs have become easier and easier to use.
• Know the customers that are most interested in new product announcement or event and follow up on them individually.