Effective Large-Scale Email Campaigns For Dealerships
Published by
Hale Soucie
on
Email marketing is one of the most effective inbound marketing methods. Here’s a few main points to keep in mind when crafting an effective email campaign using data.
Simply put, email marketing is one of the most effective inbound marketing methods- if someone voluntarily gives you their email address and stays on your mailing list, they are a lot more likely to spend with you than someone who simply follows you on social media. So much more likely, actually, that email campaigns with existing customers are 40 times more effective1 than outreach attempts for new customers on social media.
Email marketing is an important part of your digital marketing strategy, and the data that you collect about your customer is going to shape that strategy. Here are some ways that you can build far more effective email campaigns using that data.
Personalization and Segmentation
Many email marketing programs make it easy to create segments of customers based on demographics, purchasing behaviors, indicated interests, and other information. You don’t have to worry about creating campaigns for one broad demographic and hoping for the best any more; instead, you can place your customers into as many refined segments as would be appropriate for your business, leading to more effective email campaigns.
77% of total ROI2 from email marketing comes from these highly-targeted segmented campaigns. If you have a product that appeals to only one or a few segments but not your whole email list, this can both cut down on delivery costs as well as only show that email to the people most likely to engage with it, helping to reduce the number of unsubscriptions per campaign.
You could take it a step even further and personalize emails sent to those segments to increase engagement even more. Personalized emails increase click-through rates by an average of 14%, and conversion rates by an average of 10%3, compared to emails that aren’t personalized. The amount of data you have available will ultimately decide the degree of personalization you can put into these email campaigns, but simple things like the customer’s first name and their birthday can improve engagement by acknowledging them the in the subject line and message body. Emails with personalized subject lines are also 26% more likely to be opened than emails that lack them.
Use Customers’ Purchasing Habits to Craft Personalized Emails
Data science has enabled businesses to examine their customers’ purchasing behaviors throughout time and use them to create segments as well as marketing opportunities.
By looking at the purchasing history of your customers and seeing how it stacks up over time, you can see how much your customers are willing to spend, whether they make use of promo codes, how often they buy from you, the times of year more infrequent customers make purchases, and other important factors. This data can help you create personalized emails for flash sales, clearances, and new arrivals in each segment’s or individual customer’s desired price range or item type.
Make Your Campaigns Mobile-Compatible
More and more emails are being opened up on mobile devices today, so you need to be sure that your email campaigns can be properly viewed and optimized for mobile devices. Looking at Gmail’s 900 million users alone, 75% of them access their email accounts on smartphones4 and your site needs to be mobile-friendly as well once users start tapping links from their devices.
If you want clicks and conversions, you need to design your email campaigns with mobile devices in mind. The email needs to look great on a small screen and you want clickable links to be large and noticeable so that the user will want to tap it right away without having to enlarge the screen. If your campaigns tend to be image-heavy, you may want to scale back or reduce file size so that it loads faster and is less likely to crash the device.
Facilitating click-throughs is integral to having an effective email campaign strategy, but especially so for mobile devices that could crash more easily than a computer and experience slower load times.
In Summary
By personalizing emails and optimizing them for the mobile experience, email engagement is bound to drastically increase. Valuable data like customers’ purchasing habits and interests presents valuable opportunities for effective segmentation. Facilitating clicks will then go a long a way towards keeping conversion and engagement rates up.
References:
1) https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/email-marketing-new-rules/
2) http://www.emailmonday.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/National-client-email-2015-DMA.pdf
3) http://www.aberdeen.com/research/7635/ra-social-media-marketing/content.aspx
4) https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/28/gmail-now-has-900m-active-users-75-on-mobile/