In an effort to continue with ways on how to promote your business, I thought it would be good to move away from video and social media marketing and look at another online mode of marketing – emails! I will take you through some basics, your email marketing features, tips on crafting great emails then end with managing and measuring the success of your email campaigns.
In marketing, staying top of mind is important. Emails can be used as a fantastic cost effective tool to increase your effective frequency as choices are constantly increasing and loyalty is being tested. What I mean by effective frequency is comparable to new patient streams. New patients need to be reminded of your existence up to and after the point in which they are ready to make a purchase. Similar to how referral campaigns, Facebook ads and Google ads are ways for you to earn new patients, emails are an extra method for you to remind potential clients your business exists.
To send emails you need email addresses. The easiest way to build a contact list is to ask for emails. This can be in person when they are entering the clinic for the first time or if they are online, include a form for them to complete to receive something of value (a free report, a cost enquiry). As any normal human being does when they first meet somebody, have your first email be introductory in style. Follow it up with some extra details about the services you have on offer. Continue by asking them some additional questions to narrow down their interests. From there, you can already group people into specific audiences which can be used to target them with specific offers or interesting content that applies to them. Further sub-section with more information about whether they would be interested in other services or how often they would like to receive emails. If people have been on your email list for a while anticipate their needs based on past purchases to entice them back. Useful but entertaining content means the clients you are emailing appreciate the emails instead of thinking of them with disgust. In a direct sense, email marketing can be used to approach clients for feedback and gives you the power to provide personal solutions to their problems.
Whatever email marketing service you use, these are the features that to look out for:
- Contact database – Stores all the customer information. Apart from emails, it can also include names, mailing addresses and other essential information. Build it up by uploading your own customer data.
- Ability to subscribe/unsubscribe – A line of code that can be embedded on to your website (like Facebook Pixel) that implements a form to give browsers of the site an option to sign up to the email list. This automatically translates this information back to the service. You can customise the form, which tends to perform better when you ask for a minimal amount of personal information.
- Segmentation – Same as any other platform. There is a way for you to filter your database into lists of people with similar interests or follow similar patterns.
- Email templates – Reusable templates that can be customised to match your brand and align well with different devices.
- Scheduling – The ability to send an email immediately or at a specific time (perhaps you have information on popular times for open rates).
- Tracking – What customers are doing once they have received your email. Opening? Deleting? Clicking through links in the email? These are all examples of metrics that can be tracked.
- Personalisation features – A combination of segmentation and templating. You can customise emails specifically to adhere to certain segmentation lists.
When constructing your email, is it important to consider what a customer is going to see first? As demonstrated below, the “from” field and subject line are the first representatives for your business. Therefore, you need to establish trust and recognition in these fields.
To do this, your email/name needs to be instantly recognisable – clearly identifying you as your business. The subject line should be concise and capture the most relevant information contained in the email. Adding personalisation to the subject lines to include their name or close location can go a long way to increasing open rates. Looking at the example, I find me extremely trustworthy and the subject line says exactly what it needs to and so I would be inclined to open this email.
Within your emails, the paragraphs should be short and focused on a single idea. Be persuasive and engaging, thinking about the right tone of voice for your audience. Remember to be consistent with your brand. Thinking back to my social media articles, I mentioned how you would use different tones for Facebook and LinkedIn. A newsletter can mean you use a casual approach more aligned with Facebook.
The idea of keeping things concise opens the door for you to link to longer articles within your email. These links should be calls to action to act as an encouragement for the reader to click them. Psychologically, someone is likely to click on something if it tells them too. Simultaneously to having links within the text, as ideal customer service practice, provide links at the bottom of each email to unsubscribe, change their preferences or update information.
Managing successful email campaigns can be difficult as there are many aspects to review. It becomes harder when you have to think of ways to improve these aspects, but here are 3 techniques that will help you along the way:
- A/B Testing – Create two versions of the same email to see which one performs better. Test subject lines, frequency of emails, content and images to help construct the best templates for you to use in the future.
- Email specific landing pages – You may have heard of landing pages in relation to Google Ads. For the same reason you would use them online, their purpose is to take someone to the most relevant page. This increases the chance of that person converting to buy that item. You can also make these device-specific to aid in their experience.
- Analytic tools – Touched upon earlier in point 6. Information gathered on how your customers are viewing (or not viewing your email) plays into evolving them. Open rate is the most common metric (and would be used for A/B testing), however clickthrough rates look more specifically at what content drives people on to your website/landing page.
Analytic tools are so essential for understanding audience behaviours because they lead to informed decision making that helps refine the email campaigns. I have mentioned a couple of them already but take this part of the article as a glossary for some of these terms.
Open rate is the simplest of these useful metrics. It is the ratio of people who actively opened the email vs the total number of people who have received the email. Open rate is useful for understanding the effectiveness of the subject line.
Clickthrough rates is the percentage of people who clicked on links to your website from every email opened. It helps to give a top level view of the success of the individual email campaign.
Click to open rates is the total number of clicks vs emails that were actually opened. It gives you a more realistic idea of audience engagement. Of those people who opened the email, how many of them actually clicked something in the email. Again, useful for gaging relevance.
Conversion rate is how many people you sent the email to, compared to the number of people who completed a call to action. For example, signed up for an event or used a discount offer.
Bounce rate is fairly email specific. It is the percentage of email that could not be delivered to customers and were sent back. This can be categorised as a soft bounce or a hard bounce. A soft bounce could happen because the person you are sending the email to has a full inbox or there is a size limit restriction on the email you are sending. A hard bounce is a blocked or incorrect email address.
