When you think of creating next-level customer experience, you probably focus on eliminating wait times, creating a friendly support/service team, optimizing marketing personalization, and building an intuitive website design. But have you ever thought of optimizing your B2C email marketing strategy?
Wait, email is dated, right? With all the new, more instant, forms of modern communication out there, isn’t email past its prime?
But here’s the reality: With over 480 billion emails sent every day (and growing), email remains very relevant in the digital economy. For a B2C brand, email is not just a nice-to-have, it’s an incredibly valuable money-making asset that should (if done correctly) contribute to a large amount of annual revenue.
Email success comes down to how well you optimize your B2C email marketing strategy.
So, let’s get into these numbers: If your email marketing accounts for 30% of your B2C revenue and you do $5 million in sales, email becomes a $1.5 million asset. Are you treating email like the $1.5 million asset that it is?
B2C email marketing strategy: Why getting it right matters
Email is unlike other forms of B2C communication. Don’t believe me? Is there any other way you can think of for a corporation to reach an individual consumer with a message, using their name, personalized to their shopping/buying preferences, on their mobile device, with an alert noting the arrival of the message?
There is simply no other technology out there used by 91% of people on the internet that offers businesses the ability to communicate with their consumers in such a way. And if email marketing is done right, every $1 spent can contribute to $44 in revenue, according to a Campaign Monitor study.
Yet businesses don’t use email in its most effective form.
When it comes to focusing email around customer experience, you can break down best practices into two main areas:
- The way the email campaign is made
- The way the email campaign is sent
Let’s look at how you can turn your email campaigns into a valued asset for improving customer experience.
5 steps for effective B2C email marketing
- Make it personal
With modern technology, email can be tailored to create a much more engaging experience. Personalization can be as simple as using the customer’s name in the introduction or as advanced as positioning products and promotions they are likely to enjoy. Personalization will go a long way in not only helping improve the ROI of the campaign, but also in deepening the connection recipients have with the brand.
- Optimize content
The quality of content in your email campaign is critical. The subject line must be optimized so it’s both compelling and on-brand. The subject line is the first thing people will see when they get your email and, in most cases, the deciding factor of whether or not they open it. In a Hubspot study, it was found that something as simple as an emoji in the subject line helped 56% of companies increase their open rates.
Once they have opened the email, you need to capitalize on an enticing design and well-thought-out call to action. Button size, colors, brand recognition, image to text ratio, headlines, incentives, and copy all have a huge impact on your ability to use email to build an experience that consumers want to be a part of.
- Build email lists the right way
Once the content is personalized and optimized, the next thing to focus on is delivery.
Lists are everything when it comes to turning your email marketing campaign into a revenue-generating, brand-building tool for your business. Rule No. 1 when it comes to email lists is to never buy a list. Lists should ALWAYS be sourced organically through opt-in forms on your website, point-of-sale interactions, and content CTAs.
There are many ways to build solid lists that are made up only of people who genuinely want to receive communication from you. The better your audience, the better your email will perform, which will not only result in higher ROI, but a happier more loyal recipient base.
- Send smartly
So even if the recipients are customers who thoroughly enjoy your products/services, they will undoubtedly unsubscribe if you don’t send correctly.
When sending marketing email, keep close track of your open and click rates. Those who are interacting positively with your email should continue to receive marketing emails on a controlled, timely basis. Those who have not opened the email, or the next one, or the next one, clearly aren’t interested and should be added to a suppression list.
Opens and clicks data will tell you everything you need to know about the recipients and how often they should be receiving emails. Low engagement? Scale back your email and focus on further optimizing the content that your audience is engaging with.
Have you ever gone on a date that went well, but didn’t get an answer to your follow-up text? So you sent another, and the next morning you sent another, and then you sent three per week for the next four months. Well, you wouldn’t do that for obvious reasons, yet companies still treat their recipients in this same manner.
Just because someone signs up for your email, doesn’t mean they want to get bombarded with email for the rest of their days. However, more than a few large-scale B2C and B2B companies don’t get it.
There isn’t a one-size-fits all approach to email frequency, so you need to conduct testing (i.e. A/B testing) in a calculated, closely monitored way, to find the sweet spot. Some customers may prefer one a month, while others may prefer one a day; it’s your responsibility as a sender to figure that out.
- Use reliable email infrastructure
Even if you optimize your email content and recipient lists, it’s useless without the proper infrastructure to send the email reliably, on time, every time. This means you need someone to manage your own, in-house email infrastructure who knows email inside and out. Or you can work with an email service provider who manages their own servers and provides support.
Email isn’t new or cutting-edge technology, yet it has evolved into an incredibly useful tool used by businesses to connect with their customer base in a way that no other technologies can accomplish. If done right, using best practices, email has the ability to generate revenue and create a compelling experience that build customer trust and loyalty.
