Mass mailings are used to increase sales, maintain customer loyalty, and attract traffic to a website. The goals may be different, but the problems of marketers are typical: emails going into spam and being ignored by customers.
I suggest that we review together an algorithm of actions that will (hopefully) help you in your e-mail affiliate marketing.
STEP 1: GATHER A RELEVANT CONTACT BASE
The right approach to selecting contacts for mailings is an important step that helps you interact with target customers and not drain your marketing budget. You can gather a legitimate base in two ways: by yourself or with the help of cellular operators’ data.
Self-collection. Using this approach, you recruit a loyal base that is highly likely to read emails and messages.
If you attract customers through the site, be sure to make a checkbox in the form of communication with consent to process data and receive messages. To keep relevant contacts in the database, send a subscription confirmation email. This will exclude addresses and phone numbers with errors and uninterested customers from your contacts.
Paper consents should be digitized. It happens that they get lost among the documents, and when a client complains, it is impossible to prove that he really left the consent.
Use of targeted mailing services. With the help of mobile operators’ data, the necessary base can be recruited in one day: big data of operators contains information about consents, as well as interests, geolocation, visited sites and so on. The marketer only needs to select the target groups that match the portrait of the target audience.
If client data is obtained through the service of targeted mailings, then only users who have already signed consents at the conclusion of the contract for services will get into the database. With the help of such a service, you can not only collect the base, but also verify the ready base, if you suddenly find out that not all clients have given explicit consent.
STEP 2: SEGMENT YOUR AUDIENCE AND PERSONALIZE YOUR OFFERS
The main mistake of everyone involved in mailings is burning out the base with frequent and irrelevant offers. Usually, companies send information about special offers and discounts to all saved phone and email addresses without segmenting the recipients.
To see for yourself, just open your email and see how many promotional emails you receive and how many of them are opened.
To work with your audience, turn to CRM-marketing: collect statistics on communication channels, analyze the number of conversions and sales figures, test hypotheses and conduct A/B tests. The accumulated information on customer experience will allow you to identify the triggers of the target audience.
Trigger mailings are suitable for companies that implement mass marketing strategies, but for businesses with an ABM approach, mass mailings can only be of benefit in service and transactional communications.
Geotrigger. A lively example of using geolocation-aware triggered mailings is sending messages to attendees of a trade show. For e-commerce, it could be sending messages about the opening of a new order pickup location to people who live nearby.
STEP 3: CREATE CONTENT BASED ON YOUR AUDIENCE’S INTERESTS
Information overload of users is talked about everywhere, so instead of platitudes about the art of attention retention, I will share solutions from practice.
1 message = 1 messege. This formula works for all types of mailings. In sms, offer goods or services that are interesting to the client, write numbers in the offer, for example, the size of the discount. Through verbs, call to action, inform about restrictions and leave information for feedback. The same structure can be used for messengers.
Email newsletters have no limitations in symbols, but the rules remain the same – specificity and timeliness.
Tip. If the base for email newsletters is fresh, then send the first letter only to part of the base, gradually increasing the number of recipients, so as not to spoil the reputation of the sending domain and not to get into spam. Following this rule helped a network of massage parlors with a base of 140 thousand email addresses to reduce the number of undelivered emails from 8 to 4 thousand, and increase email open rate by 230%.
Users are loyal to service content – this is information about transactions, upcoming appointments with specialists, charges for loyalty programs. Unlike advertising mailings, service traffic is cheaper and all mobile communication channels are available for it: email, sms, WhatsApp, Viber, etc.
STEP 4: USE RELEVANT CHANNELS
Content distribution is as important as the content itself. Sending through channels that your target audience uses ensures high deliverability and open rates. If a customer has not received or opened a message, it can be reached through cascading mailings.
Cascades and savings. Cascading mailings are sending messages to multiple channels sequentially. The cheapest channel is used first, such as Viber. If the customer does not receive the message, it is sent through channels with a higher cost: SMS, WhatsApp. Cascading is completed when the message is delivered to the recipient.
STEP 5: END THE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE CUSTOMER WITH CARE
Don’t be afraid of unsubscribes. Consider them as a profitable situation, because you are no longer wasting time and money on an untargeted customer. That’s why it’s important to think of a scheme that will give the user the opportunity to quickly end the communication.
For email newsletters, this is the standard unsubscribe button in the footer of the email. When clicked, it can start with a question about the reason for unsubscribing, which will help marketers adjust the strategy and content plan.
Unsubscribing via messengers happens through the functionality of the service, the user blocks the sender. So I repeat – take care of your customers’ consent!
For mailings that will appeal to users and increase sales, it is important to gather a loyal base with consents to process personal data and receive messages. The main thing in a successful mass mailing is analyzing the audience, its segmentation, quick testing of channels, hypotheses and triggers.
If you see that the mailing is not showing results – change your strategy. We live in a reality where the speed of experimentation and continuous testing determines success.
All that you need for affiliate marketing, you’ll find below.
