Email marketing is one of the most popular, direct and cost effective method of reaching out to your target customers. It has revolutionized the widespread usage of digital marketing and forms the nucleus of digital outreach.

With more number of organizations running up to take their slice of customers’ attention, effective use of email marketing takes center stage. Typical challenges that people face are:

• How do I ensure that my emails are not lost in all the promotional emails my customers get?
• How to increase Open/Click rates of my email campaigns?
• What is the best time of the day to run my campaign?
• Which is the best day of the week to run my b2b email marketing campaign?
• What are the ways of making email marketing effective?
• How do I generate more b2b leads from my email campaigns?

These are some of the questions that prop up in every marketer’s mind. While making email marketing effective has multiple parameters that need to be addressed over a period of time, the key 3 strategies to be adopted to increase ROI are as below:

Here we answer all these questions to give you a head start to effective email marketing strategy.

1. Run targeted email campaigns!

Sending email is cheap. Most people fall prey to this and adopt “Spray and Pray” strategy. Means, send emails to everybody and hope somebody will read it and become a lead!!

This does not work!

Humans send 3 billion emails a day, most of which are marketing emails. All of us receive countless marketing emails which are not targeted for us and we ignore them or unsubscribe.

To get the user interested in your email, it has to be relevant for him. To make it relevant, following key points should be taken care of.

a. Create micro-segments of customers

Create a subset of the customers or companies for which the email is meant. It can be based on geography, industry, business challenge (if you know), size of company etc. It should have segments for designations like Sales Head, Marketing Head, CIO, etc. Chances are that what will appeal to a sales head will be different from what appeals to a CIO!

zigihub lets you create micro-segments of your customers on the fly within seconds. This way it becomes easy for you to see how many people fall in that segment and modify the segment as required.

b. Create email content targeted for that micro-segment

Content has to be relevant to that company. It should identify potential business problem and how your solutions can help solving it. Quantification of the benefits and a relevant use case makes a good read.al

• Emails should not sell, but offer a solution to a problem, like,
• “Are you struggling to increase your sales team’s productivity?”
• “Are your IT budgets restricting your ability to execute projects?”
• It can also be educational in nature, like,
• “5 ways to boost your website traffic”.

c. Personalize your email

Email should be addressed to “First Name” of the recipient. It can also mention the city/State of the recipient if possible.

It should offer that personal touch to provide help and should not come across as a machine generated email. For this purpose, the name of the company or city can also be added in the campaign email.

Since the email, will be targeted to a specific micro-segment, the content will be relevant to them. With personalization embedded, the email becomes meaningful for the recipients prompting them to open and read the email.

2. Send emails on the right day at the right time!

When to send an email / run an email marketing campaign? This is the most important question asked for running the campaigns.

This depends on the type of emails, your business, target audience and host of other factors. One solution does not fit everybody and one needs a platform that provides you the guidance to decide the right strategy.

Taking into consideration the common learnings like not to send business emails on Monday mornings etc., the marketer should experiment with various days and times and see when he is getting the most open/click rates.

Taking cognizance of this common problem, zigihub has developed an effective email monitoring strategy that helps you to identify

• The best day of the week to send your email or run your email marketing campaign, and
• The best time of the day to do so.

The below analytics show the best day and times for open/click rates of your emails. One can experiment with various combinations and arrive at the one that suits best for a particular type of campaign.

Evidently, this eases a lot of your trouble pondering around when to run your campaigns. Being a tried and tested strategy, it aids in quicker decision making.

3. Measure effectiveness of your email campaigns and improve along the way!

A good marketing platform enables you to simplify your marketing efforts by automating and integrating your email marketing efforts systematically. Running your marketing campaign using this platform will render benefits that will guide your next campaign strategy.

Measuring the ROI and effectiveness of your campaigns is equally important and critical. zigihub makes this possible through its intelligent and data-driven campaign monitoring system. It will single out your most effective campaign based on higher website traffic and website leads.

Traffic Analytics and Click Analytics calculates

• Anonymous to Known conversion ratio
• After how many visits an Anonymous visitor converts into Known visitor

Campaign reports to help you track your website leads and provide a scientific glance at the Known Visitor trends.

On the other hand, the campaign dashboard gives a clear picture of your campaign effectiveness in a nutshell with helpful data-driven insights like

• Number of campaigns run
• Number of emails sent and delivered
• Success rate
• Total website visits
• Anonymous website visits
• Known website visits
• Unique website visits
• Website Leads – feedback, forms submitted, registrations, etc.
• Top ten states by website visits.

Conclusion

Email marketing looks simple but actually is a complex process if you want to do it right, and make it effective. A good platform does the job for you efficiently and effectively using machine learning and data science. Email marketing can actually do wonders in growing your leads at a very low cost.