Will performing email blasts and sending newsletters regularly guarantee conversions?
As a marketer, conceptualizing email campaigns and performing email blasts is part and parcel of your daily routine. Often, marketers tend to believe that regularly sending newsletters and the occasional email campaign will help them achieve the desired conversion.
If marketers follow this approach, they may face these issues:
- Falling short of reaching their conversion goals
- Minimal or no growth for their product/service
- Emails they send may earn a negative reputation and land in the spam folder
This implies that performing a single email blast and sending newsletters isn't sufficient and will not guarantee results. To achieve better conversion rates, you must:
- Send followup campaigns
- Offer personalized content
- Use email autoresponders
- Re-target contacts
Additionally, you need to maintain a healthy mailing list, test your campaign before sending, and practice targeted marketing to achieve better results.
Don't worry! We've got you covered. In Zoho Campaigns, we have features called Follow-up Campaigns and Autoresponders. Within those features, you'll find plenty of campaign models to choose from. If you haven't checked them out, click here to take a look.
Let's learn a little more about nurturing your contacts with the help of follow-up campaigns and autoresponders:
Nurturing potential leads/contacts
Contact nurturing is the process of understanding the needs and interests of your contacts, educating them about your product/service, and persuading them to purchase. When you start pitching your product/service, you must nurture your contacts by sending follow-up campaigns.
Here are a few follow-up campaigns that you can use to nurture your contacts:
Chain campaign
A chain campaign is a follow-up campaign that is sent to re-target the recipients of your previous campaigns. The chain campaigns are primarily sent with the goal of reaching unresponsive contacts and increasing the open rate. You can send any number of chain campaigns to achieve the desired conversion.
Child campaign
A child campaign is a follow-up campaign sent to contacts based on the action they performed in the parent campaign. You can send only one child campaign for a parent campaign. You can use the following approaches to sending a child campaign:
- For contacts who opened the parent campaign: You can send similar campaigns to keep your contacts engaged.
- For contacts who clicked links in the parent campaign: You can analyze the links clicked and offer relevant content.
- For contacts who didn't open your email: Your goal is to figure out what your contact is interested in and offer relevant content. You can do this by offering topics and asking them to choose the ones they're interested in.
Click here to learn more about the chain and child campaigns.
Coupon campaign
Apart from planning your campaigns, you must work to create a strong customer base. Offering coupons is an easy way to create a solid customer base and strengthen your brand's identity. You can use a coupon campaign to:
- Persuade contacts to purchase your products/services
- Reward active contacts
- Entice inactive contacts to read and open your emails more actively
- Improve email engagement, open rates, and click rates
Click here to learn more about the coupon campaign.
Email automation
Zoho Campaigns's autoresponders are built specifically to help you nurture contacts. They help you send a series of automated emails based on a contact's activity. You can use the following autoresponders to nurture contacts effectively:
Signup autoresponders
Whenever a contact signs up to receive your emails, the best way to start a conversation is by sending a welcome email and introducing your product/service. You can do this by using signup autoresponders. The signup autoresponder is immediately triggered when a contact signs up and enters a mailing list. You can configure the signup autoresponder to send an attractive welcome email, followed by an email series that provides information about your product/service and its benefits. This will create a positive impact on your contacts and help them understand your offerings better.
Click here to learn more about the signup autoresponder.
Smart series autoresponder
After you welcome contacts and introduce your product/service to them, you can start pitching by setting up a smart series autoresponder. This autoresponder lets you create and schedule a series of emails. After associating the smart series autoresponder to a mailing list, you need to craft the message you wish to send, set the date and time at which you want the autoresponder to start sending emails, and create the necessary followup messages.
Contacts who signed up before the autoresponder starts running will receive all the emails. Contacts who sign up after the autoresponder has started will get the scheduled emails from the date of their signup. You can also send links of previous messages to contacts who joined after the series had started.
Click here to learn more about the smart series autoresponder.
Email action autoresponder
A contact signs up to receive your emails with the belief that they'll be offered content that is relevant to their needs and interests. You can identify a contact's interest by analyzing the actions they perform on your emails and then send targeted emails based on their actions.
You can configure this autoresponder to send follow-up emails to contacts who have:
- Opened your emails
- Not opened your emails
- Clicked specific links in your email
- Opened your emails, but haven't clicked any links in your email
This technique can help you nurture contacts and serve them better, by identifying their needs and interests.
Click here to learn more about the email action autoresponder.
Date-field autoresponder
Your contacts aren't just email addresses in your mailing list. They are the pillars of your business. The best way to build a strong and loyal customer base is to empathize with them and value them. You can create a personalized experience for your contacts by wishing them well on special occasions. You can use the date-field autoresponder to send personalized emails to your contacts on special occasions like birthdays, wedding anniversaries, festivals, etc. This helps you build a positive bond with your contacts and encourage them to remain loyal customers.
Click here to learn more about the date-field autoresponder.
Test your campaigns
It's always a good idea to monitor your campaign's performance and learn from it. You can try sending campaigns with different subject lines or email content. Afterwards, you can analyze the campaign's performance to understand what your contacts expect from you and what they're interested in.
In Zoho Campaigns, you can use A/B campaigns to create two different versions of a campaign and send them to a small group of contacts. Then, the campaign with better open and click rates can be sent to the rest of your contacts. Using A/B testing campaign helps you identify the pulse of your contacts and achieve better open and click rates.
Click here to learn more about A/B test campaigns.
Maintain a quality mailing list
Mailing lists are the fundamental blocks on which you build your campaigns. The success of an email campaign depends on the quality of the mailing list(s) it's sent to. Maintaining a high-quality mailing list is a three step process that involves properly naming a mailing list, segmenting it and cleaning it regularly.
Naming your mailing list
You must carefully monitor the source of the signups and name your mailing lists accordingly. This practice helps in choosing the right mailing list for your future campaigns. It also helps you identify where most of your signups are coming from.
Segmenting your mailing list
Every contact in your mailing list will have different needs and interests. Therefore, it is not advisable to send generic emails to all of them, all the time. An email that appeals to some of your contacts may be totally irrelevant for others. If you send too many irrelevant emails to your contacts, they might either leave your emails unopened or even unsubscribe.
You can segment your contacts based on demographics like age, gender, location, etc. You can also ask your contacts to choose the topics on which they would like to receive emails by using the Topics feature. Then, you can group contacts based on the topics they chose to create a segment or a new mailing list.
You can click here to learn more about creating segments.
Cleaning your mailing list
The quality of your mailing list determines the performance of your campaigns. If your mailing list has invalid email addresses and inactive contacts, your emails will bounce and your emails may receive spam markings. This will earn a negative reputation from mailbox providers and affect inbox placement.
To prevent this, you need to regularly clean your mailing list to ensure that there are no inactive contacts or invalid email addresses. Cleaning your mailing list is a two-step process. First, you identify inactive contacts, then you re-engage with them by sending a winback campaign.
Click here to learn more about cleaning your mailing list.
Target marketing
A successful email campaign is one that is well-received by contacts and generates the desired conversion. The best way to achieve this is by offering content that's relevant to your contact's needs and interests. Target marketing is a technique that involves identifying a contact's needs and interests, and addressing it. You can understand your contact's needs and interests by carefully analyzing their purchase history, which emails they open, and which links they click on. You can either create a segment or a dedicated mailing list for contacts with similar needs and interests. Then, you can start offering relevant content to these contacts to get maximum email engagement and conversion.
Click here to learn more about target marketing.
Identifying the prevalent marketing strategies and incorporating them into your business model is a solid approach. However, that alone won't guarantee conversion. You must stick to fundamental practices like nurturing your contacts, maintaining a quality mailing list, and target marketing to achieve the desired conversion.
Related Articles
Target Marketing
Target marketing is a business strategy that involves understanding and grouping consumers based on their needs and preferences, identifying consumers whose needs can be met by your product/service, and then focusing your marketing efforts on those ...Getting started with email deliverability
Identifying the needs and interests of contacts and conceptualizing email campaigns around those are part and parcel of a marketer's daily routine. Sometimes marketers may assume that crafting a compelling campaign alone will help them hit their ...Eight common practices that affect email deliverability
Email deliverability is the ability to land emails in the inbox of your recipients. If your campaign's deliverability takes a hit, it might be due to certain email marketing practices you follow. Let's dive deep and learn about practices that affect ...Mailing List Pruning
The success of an email campaign vastly depends on having interested and engaging contacts in the mailing list. Marketers spend time and money to keep their mailing lists hygienic as old and dirty mailing list can directly affect email engagement and ...Mailing list management
We have recently updated Topics in Zoho Campaigns. Please click here for the updated help document. List management is a macro level to deal with contacts and take actions on them at your convenience. This provides a detail view of contacts with ...