by Patrick Zuluaga, PMZ Marketing [Download Article]
Yes, I used the term “to engage with your target customers” because it is a key point in ensuring that your email marketing efforts are successful. Engagement encourages your readers to interact with you and make the conversation a “two-way street”. Engagement helps you understand their issues so that you can communicate relevant messages to build your brand and image, create loyal customers and opportunities with increasing revenues and better marketing results for your efforts.
Email marketing will grow your business when you focus first on the value you can deliver to your readers and provide them the options of engaging with you.
Here are some reasons why you should use email marketing in your communications strategy:
-
Generates a high return on investment
- Inexpensive compared to other advertising
- It is simple to use
- Keep in touch and top of mind with your audience
- Allows you to send different relevant messages to a segmented database
- It is quick - you can measure the results within 48-hours
- Most importantly, you can engage with your audience
How can we make email marketing work hard for you?
- First you need to be absolutely clear about what you want to achieve with your email marketing efforts. Is it customer acquisition using promotional offers? Is it sales lead generation to secure qualified prospects? Is it customer nurturing and retention with relevant & informative newsletters? Whatever it is you must have a clear and defined business objective.
- Second you need to prepare messages that are relevant and interesting to your target audience. This means making the effort to segment your contact database so that you can become more relevant as you developing a deeper understanding of your segmented database.
- Third give them the options to interact and engage with you and among themselves. Within your email message you can provide ‘call to actions’ that will encourage your readers to email a comment or suggestion, take a survey or poll vote, send them to your Blog to start a thread of comments and interactions from among your readers.
- Fourth add a time-based element to your message as this will create a sense of urgency and a higher level of engagement.
How can engagement help you build your business?
-
When your readers engage with you they are expressing an interest in your message and in receiving communications from you. They will have read your message, have taken the call to action, visit your online web presence and continue to building a relationship with you and your business.
- The continuing engagement moves them closer to becoming a customer or client. You may have heard that you need at least seven touch points to develop a comfort level for your potential customers to make a purchase from you.
- An engaged audience is likely to attract others via referrals (refer-a-friend) and networking. Your engage audience are likely to become valuable customers, contribute user-generated content and recommend your products and services to friends through message forwarding and social networks.
In conclusion, when implementing an email marketing program that engages with your audience you must remember to listen to what is being said and take on-board the comments as marketing research feedback. This valuable engagement loop-back will allow you to improve your ability to send out more relevant message that will further build your audience relationship and foster your business growth.