I’m seeing all sorts of email marketing campaigns circulating. Some good, some could use some help. Here’s some tips based on what we’re seeing.
Today, I want to talk about some of the email campaigns I’m seeing going from some businesses and offer some perspective and some suggestions on how you can do better with email right now in light of what’s going on in the world.
They look like an email blast
One of the things that really caught my attention was some businesses are sending out these emails that look very obvious that they’re just bulk email blasts. They’re just very generic.
There’s no context
There’s nothing in the messaging that shows that they’re really aware of anything that’s going on right now in the world. It’s just business as usual. They’re sending out this email, these emails that are not personalized at all. The content isn’t relevant with the present situation. The worst thing is they’re sending them out too often and they’re repetitive.
Do it wrong and people will tune you out, or even unsubscribe!
If you’re getting emails from a business that are repetitive and don’t make sense to you and don’t really feel relevant or important right now, you’re probably just going to delete them. If you keep getting them, you might actually end up unsubscribing or blocking the sender altogether. On the business side, that’s a big, big loss because you just lost a subscriber on your email list because you weren’t doing things right.
Start With Personalizing
So here’s some suggestions on how you can do email right during the pandemic, during the situation we’re in right now. A suggestion, number one, keep your emails small and personalized.
Segment Your List
If you’ve got a big list, figure out a way to separate this list into logical groups that make sense and create a message that’s going to be relevant to each group. You don’t have to go too, too crazy with how you’re personalizing, just changing a picture and changing a heading goes a long way.
Promote The Right Products and Services
If you’re promoting some products, figure out which products that the people in the group will actually be interested in will go a long way in actually catching someone’s attention when they receive your email right now rather than just kind of drowning in the noise and getting read and deleted and so on. Small campaigns that are hyper-personalized.
People Are Distracted Right Now
We have to remember that a lot of people are working from home right now. Great! Because they have more time to read your emails and surf the net. Not great because they’re also at home, very likely with their families, their spouses and their children. This means distractions are at an all-time high. If someone’s interacting with your website or an email, it’s more likely right now that they’ll drop off because they get distracted by something else that’s happening at home, whether they’re working from home or are living with family members.
Adjust To The Circumstances
We need to adapt and adjust knowing that people are distracted right now and they may not actually follow through and complete that customer journey at the rate that we initially thought of when we planned our campaigns.
Be Smart with Sending
What you can do is you can adjust the sending frequency of your campaigns depending on how people are interacting. For example, if you notice somebody clicked on an email and went to your website but didn’t follow through, they might be a good person for you to re-engage with a couple of days later to touch base with because they know, you know that the action took an interest with you.
Follow Up with Abandoned Cart Owners
Another thing that’s a really good tool if you’re in e-commerce, abandoned cart emails. People are adding stuff to their carts, getting distracted and not completing the purchase. So by leveraging an abandoned cart email, you can send an email to this person and say something like “Hey sir. Or Hey ma’am, we noticed you added this product to your cart, but you weren’t able to complete your purchase, can I help you get it done?”
It shows that you’re being personal in a world right now that is losing its personal touch because we’re all at home with many stores closed.
Reach out to people with some abandoned cart emails to help them get through any obstacle they may have had checking out. Maybe they’re new to making online purchases, maybe they got distracted and they just needed a reminder.
These abandoned cart recovery emails can be a great way to try to get somebody to complete that transaction that stopped when they got distracted.
How To Get Email Addresses Early
One challenge that you may have is many eCommerce sites ask for that email address when people are checking out. So people add a bunch of things to their cart but nobody asks for that email address until they hit the checkout button when you’re asking for payment information cause that’s when it logically makes sense.
The problem with that approach is you don’t capture the email address of a person until they actually are about to pay and complete the purchase. Which means you’re going to have a huge chunk of people that had stuff in their carts but you can’t engage with because you don’t know what their email address is.
Some Ideas – Add a Fun Game Paired with an Offer
I’ve got two ideas you can use to alleviate that problem. One is just implement something that asks for an email address right when they hit the add to cart button, make it sound fun and informal so that it doesn’t look sleazy or look pushy. Try to make it fun or a funny interaction for them to give you their email address. Another thing you can do is use some form of gamification, right? A lot of sites are using some kind of discount spinning wheel or a promotional offer when people get to their website. I’m sure you’ve seen these before, you’ll get to a website and like this wheel of fortune style wheel will pop up and say, slide this wheel to get your discount. Just give us your email address and there’s a bunch of cash discounts or percentage discounts or whatever offers that they have gets people excited and gets their guard down so that they’re excited to give you their email letters since they want that discount! Not only have you gotten their email address, you’ve now given them a discount.
That kind of builds a little bit of sense of urgency in that they want to take advantage of this and they’re more likely to complete that purchase. So those are two ways you can increase the amount or increase how early you get that email address from people so you can recover or try to recover that sale with an abandoned cart recovery email.
Let’s all remember that everything is different right now. People’s priorities are different. People are consuming content online differently. And our email marketing campaigns need to adjust so that we’re able to do the best we can in terms of meeting our business objectives.
But more importantly, maintaining or improving that relationship, that loyalty and that trust that we’ve worked so hard to build with the clients in our email lists to date. So I hope you’re able to get gain some insight from this tip and implement something in your business.
If you need some help and want to just discuss some ideas, feel free to drop a comment below. I’d love to chat about it some more.
