There are plenty of ways to send out your EDMs (Electronic Direct Mail) and newsletters, and equally as many platforms and managers on offer.
MailChimp has become the industry standard and, like Wordpress, has become infinitely compatible with your digital marketing campaign. It can seamlessly plug into your Facebook account, filter to selected audiences, provide follow-up emails and be customised precisely to your requirements.
What is wrong with simply sending out a blanket email? While it might seem valid enough, sending the same newsletter to your audience, you might not only be missing out on increasing our business potential, you could actively be turning people away.
Let us take as a hypothetical example Bruno’s Gym in Bondi. Craig, an experienced and self-confessed CrossFit addict, has just moved to Bondi from Melbourne. Bruno’s Gym was recommended to him, so he attends an orientation. Craig fills in a few forms, including his email address, and then is shown around the gym to all the facilities that would benefit his advanced fitness regimen.
One week later, Craig receives a Bruno’s Gym email newsletter. The main focus of the email is promoting their ‘Get Your Bikini Body in Shape for Summer’. Craig is rather proud of his physique, but a ‘bikini body’ isn’t really his desired outcome, so he deletes the email.
The next week, it is a beginner’s pilates class that Bruno’s Gym is promoting, the next a two-for-one entry-level offer, and so it goes on. Finally, Craig is sent a ‘ten months for the price of twelve’ offer – a deal he would have gladly taken, had he not already unsubscribed after being inundated by irrelevant newsletters. Added to that, he didn’t feel like the gym was taking his fitness seriously and moved his membership to Core Fitness Gym two blocks away.
Every business can, in some way, relate to this scenario. One email simply isn’t enough, but managing hundreds, even thousands of email addresses is almost impossible. By building Groups into your Mailchimp account, you can filter your emails according to how they are received, the clients’ interests or any other form of categorisation you require.
Groups are subdivisions of an overall list. By building your Mailchimp audience this way, you can not only target the most relevant people for your particular EDMs, you can also avoid flooding them with multiples of the same email. A single list cannot contain multiples of the same email address, meaning therefore that the groups within that list will also be free of duplicates, avoiding your customers ever feeling hassled or bombarded.
The beauty of this feature is that, once your groups are established, everything is automated. Depending on where they sign up or what options they choose, your customers’ email addresses are automatically sent to the appropriate group, allowing you to target their preferences or customer level, allowing you to remarket to the ideal demographic.
Returning to Craig, had Bruno’s Gym had some options on their sign-up form for Craig to choose from, they could have placed him in the correct group. From here, he would find out about Bruno’s Gym’s sunrise CrossFit special, the after-hours Cross-Club of like-minded crossfitters or any one of a dozen topics far more relevant than how Craig might look this summer in a thong!
This incredibly powerful tool has great potential when it comes to filtering your audience through the marketing funnel. You can slowly refine your audiences, creating mail lists of people who are finding you for the first time, your elite clients who need special attention and everyone in between, meaning that the emails they receive are going to be exactly what they wish to read and exactly what they need to push them over the edge to becoming valuable, loyal, paying customers.
We often think of EDMs as single, autonomous entities, perhaps comprising our latest news, links to our website and maybe a promotional offer, but a well-orchestrated campaign can tell a story, build interest and maximise on sales.
Across three or four simple and quick emails, you could hint at something exciting ‘coming soon’, direct traffic to social media for a more engaging experience, offer a call-to-action and finally unveil your latest product. This can provide two seemingly contradictory outcomes: you will reduce your audience and maximise your audience.
To explain, a multiple-email campaign has the potential to whittle away the loose connections, those who have signed up accidentally or some time ago, or who have lost interest in your offerings for some reason. This will then leave the truly engaged customers, who will become intrigued and engaged as the campaign progresses, making them far more likely to convert once the campaign has run its course.
EDMs are one of the three cornerstones of digital marketing, offering you a direct line to your customers to promote your website and products, showcasing your vibrant and wonderful social media and offering your customers exclusivity and that personal touch that social media and websites often can’t provide. Likewise, websites are your major source of sign-ups, the doorway to your clients, if you will, and social media can provide the gossipy hype to have your clients simply itching to become a part of your newsletter network.
While some of us might dread the prospect of sitting in front of a screen for an entire day to pen their newsletters, the beauty of Mailchimp is that, once the templates have been correctly set up, completing your monthly emails can be an absolute breeze, as easy as just copying and pasting from your website or social media. Of course, you can go into far greater depth, telling your life story or sharing a blog (and always with a handy little ‘read more’ button to direct people to your website!), but your newsletters don’t have to have a beginning, a middle and an end, they merely need to offer enticement for all of the other wonderful treats you have on offer as a business.
Lastly, one feature of Mailchimp that can truly pay dividends for e-Commerce site owners – quite literally – is to implement an abandoned cart automated email. Did you know that, just like your local car park on a Sunday morning, the internet is gridlocked with abandoned shopping carts – over 67 percent of all carts activated?
That’s a staggering number of wasted transactions that could, at least partially, have been converted into valuable sales.
Mailchimp allows you to create an automated email to send to anyone who doesn’t complete their sale, offering a friendly little “*ahem* did you forget something?” Certainly, many may have changed their minds, but if you can even persuade a few of them to complete their transactions, automatically and without so much as lifting a finger, it is a sensational tool for your business.
If you would like to find out more about how EDMs and Digital Marketing can help your business, contact us today.
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