Six ideas for new email marketing campaigns

Regular email marketing campaigns to clients and contacts is a great way of spreading the news about your company, driving interest in your brand and generating customer enquiries.

The most common approach companies take with email marketing is to regularly summarise their most recent news and blogs in an enewsletter with a list of links back to their website. While this tactic will engage a number of your customers and prospects, and show what content most people are interested in, there are plenty of other ways of using email as part of your marketing campaigns.

Introduce yourself with a welcome email

If someone subscribes to your enewsletter list, instead of sending the standard registration message you could send an automated warm and friendly introduction thanking the person for their interest and telling them more about your business.

Focus on one thing only

Rather than sending people an enewsletter comprising several stories, focus on just one thing – whether that is a forthcoming event, a special offer, an award win or a major news announcement. Just because you plan to send email marketing campaigns once a quarter, don’t hold back important announcements until you’ve ‘got enough other stories’.

Launch a new product or service

When launching a new product you will have a lot of information that you need customers and prospects to absorb very quickly (product features, benefits for the customer, testimonials, pricing and how to buy to name just a few). Email is an ideal tool for doing this. You can also create urgency around the product by offering a discount with an expiration date.

Target a niche group

If you can drill down into your data to develop some relevant market segments you can send highly targeted and relevant emails to these segments. For example, if you have a case study focused on one industry, you can send this content to the most relevant people on your database, rather than sending it to your whole database.

Do some market research

By pairing your email newsletter with a research tool like SurveyMonkey you can conduct regular polls and surveys of your database to inform your future marketing activity. Many enewsletter tools offer the ability to conduct split testing where you can test the responses to different subject lines or copy within the e-mail – to maximise open and click through rates.

Deliver some training

One challenge for businesses in very technical markets is ensuring that staff are trained and kept up to date on relevant trends and developments. If this is true of your industry you could develop a series of automated training emails to customers to allow them to learn at their own pace. Formats could include weekly tips, step-by-step guides, links to training videos, frequently asked questions and links to online tests and quizzes to embed learning.