Email marketing is entering a new era
Are you ready for the new era of Email marketing?
GDPR didn’t do any favours for the marketing industry or for email marketing contacts. A lot of marketers feel as if they were picked on unfairly with the compliance rules.
Email marketing contacts had their inboxes filled with optin emails.
Do you remember them all, or have you blanked them out of your memory?
To be honest, we can’t say that marketers didn’t create the environment for the required changes though. For a long time we have been collecting (or buying) data about prospects and customers.
Marketers have a lot to do – if there is a corner that can be cut, then it will be cut!
It was only a matter of time until something needed to change and that chnage came in the format of GDPR.
We’ve all survived the GDPR compliance deadline, but the new email marketing world that we find ourselves in has changed…..
Forever and for the better.
Contact data can’t be collected in the same way anymore. In most cases we need to get consent to use it too.
Double optin emails are now a requirement. We had a choice whether we used them before GDPR, but now there is no choice at all.
Privacy policies have changed; terms and conditions have changed. We now have to be completely transparent with our prospects and customers. (If we weren’t already doing that before!)
The rules of engagement for email marketing have changed
Forget that data that you bought! Unless you have gained consent to use it, it’s useless to you now.
GDPR has given people the opportunity to clear their inboxes. They got the opportunity to decide who they wanted to keep in touch with and could ignore everyone else.
Anything that they receive in their inbox that they don’t recognise will now raise suspicion (and likely a complaint too)!
We all know about the heavy costs of breaching GDPR compliance. We can’t afford to get email marketing wrong.
Subscribers, prospects, and customers all need to be given the option to choose what they receive, who they receive it from, and how they receive it.
Meaningful relationships are vital to email marketing success in this new era
As marketers we need to take a step back and work out how we can build relationships with our contacts. It’s no longer all about getting a quick sale and burning leads as quicklya s they come in.
Geting people to part with their data is going to be much harder. We need to give even more value and better services just to get them to give us their contact details. We then have the uphill task of turning prospects into leads and then into paying customers.
Under GDPR we have to make it easy for contacts to break up with us and opt out or unsubscribe from our communications and markting activity.
The new era of email marketing isn’t for the feint-hearted!
The stonger the relationship that marketers can build with their contacts, the better the results that they are going to be able to achieve. This is a no-brainer.
How do you warm up the email marketing contacts that you have?
Note: For these tips we are assuming that your contacts have either given consent (which you have documented) , or that you have other reasonable grounds for processing the data in line with GDPR requirements.
No matter whether you are communicating regularly with your contacts or not, GDPR and the media coverage will have impacted on them.
We all saw how many emails that we received to get our consent!!
The relationships that you have – even with your most loyal of contacts – has been put to the test and people have limited patience when it comes to email messaging.
Email marketing isn’t in trouble as a marketing channel, but our approach has to change.
Here are our top 5 tips on mending and building the relationships with your contacts (cold or not):
1. Be contact friendly – permanently!
Seems obvious? Not to every marketing team!
This is all about being contact focussed and being there to support them whilst nurturing the relationship. You might not be able to support your contacts personally 24 hours per day, but you can send email campaigns at the most relevant time for them.
All it takes is to look at your data and see when people open their emails.
Building relationships and warming contacts are the same thing
Use preference centres to find out what your contacts value most and how often they want to hear from you. By giving them the ability to tell you exactly what they want, you inccrease the chances of them engaging with the work that you are doing.
Send updates and articles based on certain segments of your audience and watch your interaction and engagement rates soar!
No matter how warm or cold your contacts, NEVER forget that effective marketing is all about people and their experience with your brand, products and services.
2. Start at the beginning
Most people who have been affected by GDPR are fed up with hearing about it – consumers and companies alike.
We’ve all been given a fresh start, so it makes sense to treat your relationships with your contacts that way too. Start the process again – show them why they decided to stay in touch with you.
Show them what value you can give them again – whether it’s with your products, services, or even just your updates and articles.
Show them some love and you’ll quickly get the relationship back on track.
3. Be strategic
Cold contacts are in this state for a number of reasons. To find out how to warm them up you need to refer to your network.
Segmenting your contact lists is a great way to increase the relevance of your marketing messaging. As your messaging becomes more targeted and relevant to your audience, your conversion rates will rise.
You’ll need some goals to start with. Do youneed to increase conversions from your cold leads, or will you start with driving more engagement first?
Do you have a strategy for warming your email marketing contacts?
Build your communication strategy around your goals and the preferences of each of your segments. If contacts only want emails at specific intervals, don;t move away from that!
Automating your marketing communications makes relationship building and contact nurturing easy. See point 5 for more informaiton.
4. Offer incentives
Don’t worry – I don’t just mean “give them discounts” here!
You need to show them why they opted in and why they still want to receive your marketing messaging. Share your best articles and downloads with them – if they are useful.
Show them why you deserve to stay in their inbox, but don’t go over the top and start begging for them to stick with you.
Be confident that you’re giving them the best content that you can. You will be making those decisions based on the data that you’ve collected, the preferences that they have given you, and insights gained from the behaviours that they are exhibiting.
You are doing that already though, aren’t you?
5. Automate and personalise
Consistency is key to building long lasting relationships with your email contacts.
Email marketing platforms, like Wired Plus, make the creation and sending of emails an easy job.
When you start to segment your contacts and create specific email campaigns that are triggered on a number of behaviours and activities, it can soon become a much bigger job.
Especially if you are doing this as a last minute job on a Firday morning because the Boss needs you to send a campaign out.
If you want to have any chance of communicating on a personal basis with any reasonable number of contacts, you need to become much more proactive than that!
Plan their buyer journeys based their personas and segments and then plan what communications are going to be needed at specific touchpoints through that journey.
Create the contact segments, email campaigns and the automation workflows and then activate them. You’ll save time, you’ll take the effort out of doing everything manually, you’ll be much more efficient, AND you’ll be much more consistent.
As we can see in this graph, the more relevant and personalised the marketing messaging that your contacts receive, the better the conversion rates.
Increasing relevance and building relationships means more conversions
We have work to do
I’ve mentioned it already, but us marketers have a big job to do in mending the relationships with our contacts.
We might not have been the cause of their concerns or negative experience with email recently, but we can certainly do something to give them the best experiences with our marketing communications going forward.
The marketers who get this right are going to be the leaders in the new era of email marketing.
Agree? Disagree? Leave a message below to say hello and to let us know that you’ve called by.
The post Email Marketing: How to Warm Up Cold Email Contacts appeared first on Wired Plus Marketing Hub.
This post first appeared on Wired Plus Email Marketing Platform, please read the originial post: here
