The average Internet user receives over 80 email messages per day. As these numbers continue to grow, even non-spam email risks getting lost in the clutter. Stand out out and stay engaged with your customers by making your email something they look forward to and find value in. The key to success is in delivering content that is relevant to the needs and interests of each customer individually and not “talking at them” with boilerplate emails.
The availability of easy to use email campaign management tools has enabled more organizations to communicate with their customers directly. The desire to communicate with customers is good , however too many companies believe that merely inserting a customer’s name into a monthly broadcast email qualifies as personalized email. Personalization must go beyond customer names and email is uniquely suited to deliver content that is both relevant to the customer and time-appropriate for them. Moving one step further, for high-ticket or recurring purchase products (or services) email can be used to “nurture” and cultivate customer relationships over time.
Once you determine that your email program would benefit from a “nurturing” strategy, the next logical question is how do you do it? Following are the three critical steps to developing a successful email-nurturing program.
Step 1: Establish a nurturing program objective. First, determine whether the program is establishing a prospect relationship for a future sale or trying to build or retain an existing relationship. Next, determine a specific objective such as a specific number of leads, a percent reduction in defection, or a dollarincrease in LTV (or a specific time increase in duration.)
Step 2: Establish a nurturing development timeline. Once the objective is identified, list the critical customer milestones that both positively and negatively impact your ability to achieve the program objective. Construct an event-trigger based timeline schedule that supports the program objectives. It is during this step that you determine offers that will affect behavior.
Step 3: Develop an email program editorial calendar and content. Building upon the event timeline in Step 2, construct an editorial calendar that supports the development objectives of each contact while maintaining a compelling editorial arc that provides both company generated and third party content. During this step, determine whether you will provide all content in the body of the email or provide content snippets that drive the user back to your website for additional information. Copywriting (or just say “copy tone”) tone, consistency, relevance and quality will have a significant impact on the email’s value to your customer over time – so be sure you engage quality copywriting talent.
If you follow these three steps, you will be prepared to elevate your customer email program from one that talks at your customers to one that nurtures them along a development path designed with their needs in mind and delivering improved campaign performance and higher relevance in their inbox of growing clutter.
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