How you can use email to create a closer relationship with your clients.
Email has been around for several decades now and with it came email marketing. Simply put, email marketing is a widely used strategy for sending promotions and useful information via email to your client base. This has created a new communication format to engage with clients and provide them with the information they need to use your service/product, thus creating a closer relationship with your brand.
Using email marketing correctly can be very effective. However, using it incorrectly can also have some pretty negative results. So how can you use this tactic to your advantage?
#1 Make sure you’re GDPR compliant
If you’re based in Europe, then you should probably be aware of the new GDPR compliance rules. Adopted in 2018 by the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) prevents companies from using user data without their permission and protects user’s privacy.
Here are a few things you can do to make sure you’re compliant:
- create opt-in forms where people can sign-up to start receiving marketing communications from your company;
- make sure your website has information about how you’re planning to use your cookies and trackers;
- be clear about what information you’ll have access to and for what purposes.
This is a very complex topic, so make sure you read about it and educate yourself on which steps you need to take based on your specific business. To know more about GDPR and all the steps you need to take, visit this website.
#2 Share useful content and don’t spam your clients
Once you’re certain that you’re complying with all the requirements, it’s time to think about what you’ll be sharing. The best way to do this is to think about what some of your audience’s interests are and what topics your clients might be interested in knowing more about.
When thinking about topics and interests, don’t forget to check if they’re aligned with your brand. Depending on your business area, your audience may have a wide range of interests, so try thinking about those that better relate to your brand personality and mission.
If you come up with a few different ideas on which topics or areas you’d like to cover with your email marketing strategy, then start thinking about format: is it better to divide them into different newsletters and share them on different occasions? Or do they somehow relate to each other, allowing you to create a template that accommodates them all? Either way, try to put yourself in your clients’ shoes and think about the kind of emails you would like to receive from a brand like yours.
Another important thing to keep in mind when thinking about your newsletter’s message and format is how many times you’ll be sending those communications. Weekly? Monthly? Every three months? We’ve all had experiences with brands that send way too many emails and made us feel annoyed at them, so make sure you only send useful content and don’t spam your clients.
#3 Use contact segmentation
Once you gain a good following and have a good number of people subscribed to your emails, it may be a good idea to segment them into smaller groups. There are a few different ways to do that, such as dividing them by business area, by age or even by interests. It’s a matter of analysing different types of subscribers you have and thinking about how you can segment them into smaller groups.
After having your smaller segments, you can then create specific content for each of them in order to share content that they can relate to and that isn’t so generic. Nevertheless, you can always send information to all your subscribers when needed, such as product updates or company announcements.
If you need help with your email marketing strategy, let us know.
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