Building an email list puts your company in direct contact with potential customers, opening up a world of opportunities that could substantially improve your bottom line.
Unfortunately, your email list may have gone stale. If you haven’t engaged your recipients lately, it’s time to put some effort into refreshing it right away, so you can leverage your email list to increase profits.
It’s so important to identify the right email marketing platform to make the most of your email list. By utilizing software to multiply your efforts, the following tips will make it easy to see results.
#1. Begin with List Segmentation
Review your list for different types of recipients and then use email segmentation to address each group. If you try treating everyone the same way, only a small percentage of your list will re-engage with you. This is especially important for engaging recipients who have long since stopped even opening your messages.
CXL has some great examples of how companies have successfully segmented their email lists. However, if it’s been awhile since you’ve heard from your recipients, consider starting with a simple email survey, which can be a last resort to reengage inactive subscribers before cutting them loose.
#2. Get Rid of Dead Weight
As you look through your current list, you’ll probably also find that many of your recipients simply aren’t worth the investment. This could be for a number of reasons, like:
- They don’t respond
- They only respond to free offers but show no signs of converting
- Their email addresses bounce
Email marketing lists naturally degrade over time, usually by 20% to 30% per year, so get in the habit of regularly reviewing yours and dropping recipients who show no sign of adding to your ROI. Email marketing software makes this really easy to do.
#3. Change Up the Format
While personalizing the subject line is definitely a good start (it could boost your open rate by 26%), you can also change the actual aesthetics of the message, too.
If your emails look like all the other messages your recipients currently receive from other companies and people, don’t expect them to be too excited about the prospect of reconnecting with your list.
Instead, treat your emails more like blogs. Use graphics, your company’s color scheme/logo, and subheadings where appropriate. Proper email formatting can do a lot to grab interest from a recipient who otherwise would have scanned your message and moved on.
Unless you’re good with coding, email marketing software is the only way to create the desired effect. This type of platform can also automate much of the process in the future so all you need to do is choose the template you want to use and write your email message.
#4. Create Better Content
Obviously, improved content will go a long way toward reinvigorating your email list. Give people what they want and they’ll be much more likely to open your emails in the future.
The best possible content for your emails will depend largely on your market. Once again, using software will give you key insights about this kind of information.
You might find that open rates do best when you address a specific problem many of your recipients have right in the subject line.
On the other hand, they may be more interested in industry news or forecasting what the future may hold.
Remember to use segmentation here. Some segments will like some types of content better than others, so cater to these desires. Email automation can be used to identify who’s interested in what and send the appropriate email messages automatically.
Use Email Automation Software to Bring Your Email List Back to Life
You put a lot of time and energy into building your email list. Don’t let it gather dust when it could be actively supporting your bottom line. Now that you have rejuvenated your email list, it’s time to utilize email automation to engage with that list.
Make it Personal
Email automation gives marketers the ability to dynamically send personalized emails based on data they already have in disparate systems like Salesforce CRM and Shopify ecommerce. Marketing automation software, like Sendinblue, makes this really easy to do through their integration with these different business systems. Once integrated, the data is aggregated and can be segmented based on things like age, gender, birthday, location and purchase history.
Use this data to create personalized email marketing campaigns. For example, an online wine retailer wants to remind all his current customers whose spouse has a birthday in the next three months that a great bottle of wine can be the perfect gift.
An email marketing campaign can be created to automatically send all customers, who have entered their spouses’ birthdays (this data could be collected through a survey or during account creation on the ecommerce platform), an email three months in advance of the date. The email could be personalized using the recipient’s name, their spouse’s name, their spouse’s birthday and even a suggested bottle of wine based on their purchase history collected from the ecommerce platform.
Make it Dynamic
This is where email automation’s true power lies. Email workflow mapping allows you to create customer journeys that dynamically send emails based on the recipient’s behavior in the previous email.
To explain how this works, we can use the same example as above. Using email automation workflows, the online wine retailer could create a customer journey based on how his customers interact with the spouse’s birthday email. If the recipient opens the email and clicks through, another email can be sent two months before their birthday reminding them how a bottle of wine makes a great gift. This can continue on a pre-defined schedule up until a week before their birthday at which time an offer is given for a 10% discount off their order.
Any number of customer journeys can be created for every email based on how a recipient engages (or doesn’t) with each email. This personalizes the email content on a 1:1 basis since the recipient only receives emails based on how he interacts with each email.
Building a highly engaged email list that receives personalized content is still the holy grail of digital marketing. According to a study conducted by the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing has a ROI of 4300%. With returns like that, every business needs to invest in continually rejuvenating their email list and automating their personalized email campaigns.
What strategies do you use to rejuvenate your email list?
