Email marketing is a medium that you have earned from the beginning. Each email obtained represents a potential customer. If you go to your store and buy, you get a customer that you can retain because you have their contact information.
As a means of marketing, it offers you the following advantages:
- It is economical. Prices per mail sent are meager.
- It is one of the primary means for CRM, an area where we have struggled in marketing. We cram the users’ wallet with so many cards and so many electronic purses that they no longer want to know about them. With email marketing, customer data and history are better preserved for a more effective CRM strategy.
- Help create a long-term strategy. Once you get the email of a person, each person who enters your page knows more about them: what they see, if what they see corresponds to what they buy. This fact allows you to create personalized offers and locate different types of profiles.
If an entrepreneur wishes to initiate an email marketing strategy in their electronic commerce, they should consider having a scalable tool from the start, designed for a long-term strategy. And before starting the first campaign, it must first answer the following questions: what do I want to do, and where do I want to go?
An important and sometimes forgotten part is the ability to form a capable work team.
An email marketing team must have at least two people: one in charge of administering and analyzing the database; another with the task of reviewing the contents of the campaigns. The maximum number of email marketing team is not something fixed. Some companies will require hundreds of people.
With campaign data, analysts can profile your audience, generate models of purchase potential, analyze the database, and monitor the daily performance of campaigns. This last part is significant, especially when it comes to unsubscription metrics. One cannot afford to lose subscribers. These are customers that one had already won.
Email Marketing Automation
For email marketing, in Mexico, strategies are usually made with segmentation, but with contents elaborated manually. This practice is the simplest way, and as it usually begins. We create static content that is sent to a large part of our database.
For example, our analysts identify a segment of customers who watched a television six months ago. With this information, the email marketing specialist can assume that the same group will be interested in a Blu-ray and sends a message showing them this product.
However, to scale up an email marketing strategy, it is necessary to take the next step: create automated and semi-automated campaigns.
After detecting a consumption trend, the specialist can create semi-automated campaigns. For example, a group of our customers usually buy series. Then, one creates a campaign to inform them of the latest site launches every 15 days.
A profitable practice is to automate abandon carts’ emails. The abandon carts are the shopping carts that the customer left without completing the checkout in our online store. If a customer leaves a shopping cart, the program sends a reminder email. These messages give a lot of value; they are only programmed once and are automatically generated by the client’s actions.
Privalia has a good abandon cart program. Their messages create a sense of urgency: it indicates that the promotion is going to end, or that they are the latest products available. These types of campaigns have a high success rate because they are personalized.
An automated campaign only shoots. If it is personalized, it gives excellent results.
Metrics in email marketing
Compared to other digital media, email marketing has more metrics, and we must try to analyze them all. Among the most important parameters, they are:
- First insent. You don’t usually see how many emails were sent effectively. Sometimes campaigns are blocked and put as spam.
- Open rate. This metric refers to how many messages were opened. Success in this metric is in the mail subjects.
- Click to rate. This metric is related to the content of the email and what I want to be clicked on.
- Conversion rate. This metric indicates if the recipient of the message did what one expected. If we talk about e-commerce, the conversion would be to complete a sale. In the case of a newsletter, the conversion is achieved when the recipient reads an article.
How do I know if my email marketing campaign is successful?
Emarketer or IBM has data by industry about the results of email marketing campaigns. However, it is more important to compare with previous campaigns. On those metrics, one must examine the following campaigns. It is not essential to see the open rate of the industry, but of my campaigns. The objective is to improve each previous rate.
Email marketing metrics very rarely with the year; they are not seasonal. In the case of great promotions, they can vary, but in typical, they are the same.
A successful campaign depends on the objective of the strategy. You should not campaign without a goal. Did I meet my goals? If an open rate is low, but I filled my goal, one can consider the campaign to be successful.
It’s hard to find good email marketing campaigns in Mexico. One could highlight Volaris campaigns. Although these are email campaigns created manually and without much profiling, the offers are aggressive. You might not think of going to Cancun, but the price is perfect, and you consider it.
Another notable case is Netflix. They have the series you’ve seen or which one else. His mails are not frequent, but he has an algorithm with suggestions related to the client. Or when there is a new season, it is announced that it will be available.
Customization Strategy
Among the customization strategies that one can highlight, we find Fanatics.com. This e-commerce detects your IP from Mexico and automatically shoots you a promotional code for you to buy. The emails sent include prices in pesos with free shipping to the Mexican Republic. This website is a sports page, and since you enter, you put your favorite teams and send you content related to those teams.
In the NFL store, you include your birthday in the registry. Each birthday, they send your personalized team jersey with a number 0.
There is no way for a human team to do these campaigns, even if it is 100 people. These campaigns are obviously personalized.
Bad practices in email marketing
Companies like GAP, Lyly and Victoria Secret have fallen into some bad email marketing practices. These are quite elaborate campaigns, with striking content. The messages include attractive models but have no profiling.
The GAP buyer receives emails with women’s clothing, although his record indicates that he is not interested in women’s clothing and has never seen women’s clothing on his page, they leave indiscriminately.
Victoria Secret evidently invests a lot of money. The models of their campaigns do not charge cheap. However, the content is always the same, with the same offer. After a month, the user stops opening emails.
In Mexico, there is no personalized content. A good practice for all companies is to start making personalized campaigns. Since the tool is hired, you must see how the segment is profiled, and on the other hand, how the automated content is generated. Without these two elements, there is no way to create successful email marketing campaigns.