The Quick Guide to Email Marketing for Growth

You experience this daily:
You open your inbox to see a bunch of email that can go straight to trash, and then one email that not only grabs your attention but also encourages you to engage with the brand that sent it. 

Engagement focused email marketing can be a game-changer for your digital marketing strategy. Here’s how you can apply email marketing techniques to boost that engagement and drive growth.

1st: Capture Attention in a Cluttered Inbox

In this overload of daily emails, capturing attention is challenging. However, targeted email outreach can bring an advantage. Personalised email marketing speaks directly to individual preferences, making your message stand out. And personalised should be more than:

Real personalisation*, so tailored headlines, based on interest, with tone of voice tweaks, psychological angles fitted to their personality, can dramatically increase open rates and ensure your message resonates. 

* Not saying any of these will come easy

To start, crafting meaningful and relevant content comes from conducting thorough customer research to begin with. Understanding your ideal customer profile (ICP) is crucial. Engage with your existing customers through surveys, interviews, or other means to gain insights into their motivations and preferences.

2nd: Building Interest with Smart Strategies

Capturing attention naturally leads to building interest. Keep your audience engaged with dynamic content tailored to their specific interests. 1:1 Personalisation is the ultimate, and to be honest more textbook than reality in most companies. 

But here are some more pragmatic strategies to enhance your email campaigns:

• Segmented Email Campaigns: Tailor your messages by segmenting your audience based on demographics, previous campaign data, preferences, purchase history, behavior, and lifecycle stage. This ensures more targeted and relevant messaging for each contact segment.

• Trigger-based Emails: Automate personal touches by sending emails based on user actions, such as a welcome email for new subscribers or follow-up emails after a purchase.
  
  Pro Tip: Don’t send a “Please leave a review” email 5 minutes after an order was placed, connect it with your logistics data to at least wait until X period after delivery.

• Dynamic Content: Utilize adaptable content based on preferences for ongoing engagement.

Understanding what email segmentation is and how to increase email open rates can significantly enhance click-through rates and subscriber engagement. 

For example, segmenting your email list by industry, company size, or sales cycle and adapting frequency and email content can increase response rates and revenue.

Also this needs you to have clarity on what emails should serve what goal. Some do not need to drive traffic, some for sure do. Driving E-com won’t benefit from emails stuffed with information, put just enough in to make poeple want to see/know more. 

3rd: Creating Desire (or Need) For More

Transitioning from that initial interest to desire is key to growth. Email automation can drive this effectively, converting potential leads into confirmed customers through a series of thoughtful communications.

Simple explanation of email automation in a flowchart. Source: Beehiiv

• Automated Email Workflows: Nurture leads with pre-set email sequences guiding a seamless customer journey. This approach helps in warming up potential customers and keeping current customers engaged.

• Cross-selling Emails: Introduce complementary products aligning with subscribers’ purchase histories to encourage additional purchases.

• Replenishment Emails: Encourage recurring purchases with timely reminders for reorders.

Example of lowering customer frustration via newsletter content. I personally designed this email flow.

Personalised emails with substantial benefits, tailored content that feels like advice from a trusted advisor will do better than a sales pitch. 

This approach builds a true relationship with your customers and can even encourage positive word of mouth. 

Little bit of personal experience here. At Denon & Marantz, we used email to train customers on how to use our (at the time new) multiroom audio system, HEOS. Since it was tech, that was new to a lot of people, there was a lot of user error happening. Makes sense since people are not unconsciously capable of using that kind of tech yet. We started to send out regular newsletters, each with a small hint or tip on how to use a specific feature. This reduced frustration, lowered product returns and increased customer satisfaction and referrals.

4th: Driving Action and Engagement

Ensuring email drives to a clear Call to Action is crucial. To optimise email campaigns and avoid the spam folder and unsubscribes, consider these techniques:

• A/B Testing: Experiment with different formats, topic orders, subject lines, and CTAs to discover what resonates most with your audience.

• CRM Integration: Integrate CRM systems smoothly to track interactions and refine your strategies. This integration helps in segmenting your audience more accurately and personalising your emails further over time.

• Open and Click-through Rates Analysis: Regularly analyse these metrics to assess effectiveness and adjust your tactics accordingly.

While some may see email marketing as outdated, I think it’s as relevant as ever. Its potential for bringing growth remains solid, particularly when using the right strategies to convert new customers and revitalize cold leads. 

Email is not just about keeping current clients buying more, it’s a tool that allows for:

• automation, 

• economically warming up potential customers, 

• encouraging current customers to acquire new customers for you.

Ready to Revamp Your Email Strategy?

Are you ready to harness the power of email marketing for growth and strive for higher user engagement? Here are some final tips to consider:

• Avoid Spam Filters & Blacklists: Ensure your emails are optimised to avoid spam filters by using relevant subject lines and content that matches the user’s search intent. Your email platform provider can help you with this as well in terms warming up a domain to prevent blacklisting.

• Use Engaging Subject Lines: Craft subject lines that include your primary keywords and are short enough to be fully visible in email apps on mobile.

If you’re starting out try exploring cheaper tools like Beehiiv. Salesforce, Eloqua, etc they are next level, but also next level pricing. With Beehiiv, you can create and send interactive market research surveys inside emails, automate email workflows, and segment your audience with precision.

By following these strategies, you can create an email marketing campaign that not only engages your audience but also drives significant growth for your business at very low incremental costs. 

The key is personalisation, automation, and continuous optimisation. 

Don’t let your emails get lost in the clutter; make them stand out and drive real results.