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Technology advancements in email marketing have come fast and furious, with automation and integrations bringing new capabilities to businesses of all sizes. Some of the major benefits include the ability to automate a series of personalized communications to customers and prospects, which can play a major role in cultivating customers and improving sales conversion rates. These advances, coupled with email marketing's impressive ROI (on average of $38 for every dollar spent) make it a 'œmust' for growth-minded startups.
Of course, the fast-paced evolution of email marketing can be challenging to keep pace with, so here's a quick primer on the email marketing trends you need to take advantage of in 2019.
Startups take note '“ email is not dead, but the days of email blasts are.
Email marketing platforms are leveraging automation and personalization technologies, making it possible to send well-timed, highly personalized emails with relative ease. You can essentially put your email marketing on autopilot (set it once and forget it) and increase engagement with your contacts by delivering personalized, timely and relevant messages.
Some things to keep in mind:
Make your automated content useful. The reader should look forward to receiving every email in your series. This happens when they know they'll be rewarded for taking a moment out of their day to read your message. Think in terms of useful tips, creative ideas or strategies that help the reader solve a problem.
The exact content you'll use depends on the needs of the individual contacts within the group you're emailing. Whether you're collecting contact details through a sign-up sheet or an online sign-up form on your website, you can provide a list of topics so that subscribers can check off what they're interested in receiving.
This will ensure they only receive information that is relevant to them and help you determine what to send to whom. Once you've collected this information, you can segment contacts into different lists and create an automated series of emails based on these interests.
Automated email series are a great way to build relationships with customers while you focus on running your business. The value of this kind of automation, which helps to retain customers and drive repeat business, is highly valuable, given that loyal repeat customers spend about 300 percent more than new customers.
For e-commerce startups, the power of email marketing is undeniable. While Facebook is a good way to find new fans and future customers, email is a great way to nurture relationships and grow sales. And if you think about your own purchasing habits, you'll realize you're more likely to buy from a brand that you are familiar with and feel good about. E-commerce platforms like Shopify integrate with email marketing platforms, allowing merchants to create a seamless communications strategy based on customer actions and interests.
From the small business perspective, sending meaningful and relevant content to customers also results in a huge number of referrals.
Entrepreneurs aren't typically marketers by trade. They're learning as they go, which can lead to hit or miss marketing initiatives. Email marketing platforms now offer AI-enabled recommendations on everything from best time to send, to optimized subject lines, to product recommendations. The best part is, the AI-engine serves to personalize your email outreach in a way not previously possible.
There are some email marketing platforms giving small businesses and startups the option to leverage many of the same sophisticated capabilities that enterprise-level organizations have been taking advantage of. While 'œAI-powered' may sound complicated, it's anything but.
Recommendations can pop-up in the product, making it easy and fast to optimize emails. For example:
As you build out your marketing plan for 2019, be sure to integrate an email marketing strategy into your plans with the confidence of knowing that it's easier to be more strategic and effective with email marketing than ever before.
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