Automated Email Creates Customer Relationships

Relationships that Matter

If you want your customers coming back for more, keeping in touch with them through email is an important step to take. When they hear from you regularly through quality emails, you stay fresh on their mind and they’re much more likely to come back and purchase again and again.

Use What You Know

These days, CRMs are full of great data points. They contain everything from loyalty club membership information, gender, preferred clothing size, and dozens of other important characteristics, often supplied by the customer.

But a lot of email marketing programs still limit their use of this data to merge tags, meaning they’re just inserting first names or company names into the body of the email.

Really go for personalization, and combine all the data you have (including any data you’ve collected about what a customer does on your site and any real-time information you’re able to collect, like location, device type, even current weather) to target your message, images, or call to action.

Be Bold In Your Delivery

Most customers don’t read their emails. They scan them … and then read, if they’re interested.

Bold, dynamic content is the way to catch a distracted customer’s attention. It also creates a stickier campaign, which prolongs the time your message spends in the inbox. And, if you can create dynamic content that changes based on the time a customer opens your email or the on-site actions they took, you can get them to open the email more than once.

Bold approaches to email can give you more opportunities to convert a customer within a single campaign while also creating a positive lasting impression of your brand.

Test Your Heart Out

Holiday push or no, you want to make the end of the calendar big. As a result, its one of the most intensive times for your email marketing program: send frequency and opens are both up. That means it’s a great time to run tests.

To make this easier on you, find an email marketing solution that can automate your test and control group segmentation. It’ll help you measure the impact of your message, improve performance, and expedite delivery to your full audience, all with a single email send.
– via Monetate

Details You Should Notice

Emails that improve customer relationships all have one vital thing in common –they get opened! If your customers never open your emails, they won’t be able to read all the awesome things you have to say. Which is why the subject line of your email may be the most important part. Let’s take a closer look at subject lines and how to make them open-worthy in the eyes of your customers!

Start With the Subject Line

Subject lines matter – a lot. In fact, 33% of email recipients open email based on subject line alone. To be successful, start by thinking about the subject lines that made you open an email in your own inbox. Best practices include asking a question, being specific, creating a sense of urgency, and keeping subject lines short, and using lower case. Use of personalisation in subject lines can increase the open rate by 22.2%.

Testing subject lines is an extremely important step. For example, you can find out whether a question (“What’s on sale this week?”) or a specific offer (“Save 50% this week only”) resonates better with a particular segment. Using A/B testing, in which you measure the performance of email A against email B, you can experiment with any aspect of an email that might have an impact on conversion, but subject lines are the most common subjects of email tests.. In case of a very large list, say hundreds of thousands of people, the two subject lines can be tested on a smaller percentage of the list, picking the one with the higher open rate and sending it to the remainder of the list.
– via Act-On Marketing Blog

What do you do online to improve your customer relationships? Do you have an automated email system set up?