Email Marketing- it is one of a few digital marketing methods that businesses have full ownership over. No one can take your email list away from you, and with each new email added to your list, comes the opportunity to create a new customer, nurture an existing customer and develop a relationship with real people and businesses.
Email marketing is all about giving delightful and valuable experiences that keep existing customers engaged and make potential customers want to become one! Throughout this blog post, we are going to go more in-depth about what is email marketing and suggest some best practices as well. We will also give you more information about how you can benefit from FREE Effective Follow-Up Email Templates that you can use for your car rental businesses, so stay tuned!
What Is Email Marketing?
For those unfamiliar with what email marketing is, it is a form of digital marketing whereby you send newsletters via email to those that have provided their email address in exchange for becoming part of your email list. Now, these newsletters may contain offers, freebies or other forms of valuable content. The best email newsletters aim to provide lots of value for the reader, in order to keep them a part of the email list, from which the business can nurture them into a customer over time.
Email Marketing Best Practices
We’ve put together some of our best email marketing tips to help you improve the performance of your campaigns and turn more of your list into paying customers!
Implement Exclusivity
Exclusivity is a way of increasing an offers perceived value. By limiting an offer to a certain group of people, you can suggest that the product or service being offered is in short supply, and position it as scarce.
For example, rather than marketing your offer as open to everyone, you could make it exclusive to those that have purchased before or are part of your rewards/loyalty program. This is a compliment to those that have already interacted with the business, and a way to encourage potential customers to purchase so they can take advantage of such offers in the future.
Introduce Social Proof
Social proof, such as customer reviews, ratings, and user-generated content can help show credibility for your business and encourage your customers to make a buying decision. With so many businesses trying to sell on their strongpoints and why they are better than others, social proofing is something that speaks for itself.
Let your existing customers do the talking and develop that trust for potential customers, to help move them along the buyer's journey. The example below from Revolution Tea shows how you can incorporate reviews and customer testimonials into your email newsletters.
Humanize Your Brand
In a world that is so very corporate, people are constantly surrounded by professionalism, and often want to see the human side of a business and know that it is run by real people, with a real team, not just a bunch of robots punching numbers into a keyboard. Humanizing your brand is a way to not only develop trust within your email list, but also to showcase things such as, the story behind the brand, a passage from someone who works on the team, maybe even a video of a recent company trip everyone went on.
By adopting a friendlier, conversational tone, it can help transform the way your prospects perceive your brand. A good place to start, is with an email from the founder themselves. This shows that they care about the people that entrust their brand and their existing customers. A great example of this is in the email below from the founder of Headspace.
Be Generous To Your List Members
This is often one of the most overlooked email marketing practices. It is not that hard to make people happy. Think of how many assets you have that could be used to make your customers' day better? It could be something as simple as a nice blog post to read, or something like a free coffee on their next visit. Whatever it is, think of whether or not it can bring a smile to someone's face...and if it can, provide it. You will see the benefit in time to come.
A great example is this email from Starbucks. Notice how it not only incorporates generosity, but also exclusivity. Take notes! A good newsletters employs a combination of practices.
Use the Inverted Pyramid Method
This model can help you to keep your emails focused, clear and concise. By adopting the inverted pyramid, you can make sure that your emails grab attention, build anticipation and finish with a strong call to action.
A great example of this method in effect is when an email includes a strong headline (grabs attention), shows the product or service being used (builds anticipation) and then has a “Shop Now” button at the bottom of the email (call to action).
This three step process helps guide the reader through the content of the email from start to finish, and this water-like flow increases the chances of the call to action being clicked. Try this next time when you are using an email newsletter to showcase one of your products or services.
Get The Timing Right
The timing of an email can be crucial to achieving good open rates. Experts generally agree that 121 business emails are sent and received each day. This means that if you send your email at the wrong time, it could easily get lost amongst the tens of others people receive every single day. And let's not forget...that's the average! Some email accounts will receive far more emails per day.
With that being said, what times should you be sending your emails? Well, the infographic below provided by Coschedule indicates exactly that.
As you can see, the best days to send your emails are on Tuesday, Thursday & Wednesday (in that order) and the best times to send your emails are 6am, 10am, 2pm, 8pm, 10pm and 12am.
If your email list contains people that are in different time zones, don’t worry. There are plenty of email marketing software out there that allow you to send newsletters and automated campaigns to users in their own timezone. So, instead of sending an email at 10 am in Los Angeles and 6 pm in London, your emails can arrive at 10 am regardless of the user’s location. Amazing! Right?
Personalize With Dynamic Content
When it comes to dynamic content within email newsletters, it can turn into a “rabbit hole” of a topic, so we want to give you the core four levels of content personalization:
1) Segments and Static Content
Split up your lists into segments and make sure to send content based on the group’s common interest. This is the baseline for personalization when sending your email newsletters.
2) Insert Basic Customer Merge Tags
A customer merge tag is a placeholder that upon an email being sent, will replace the actual content with content specific to that individual. For example, Hey {{user.name}}! becomes “Hey Claire!” when the email is sent.
3) Collect and Insert On-Site Data
This type of data is great for sending emails such as abandoned cart emails. By recording an event such as viewed cart you are able to display the products that were in someone's cart within the email you send them. You may need external software to do this as it involves tracking events.
4) Pull Data From Your Own Database
This is where dynamic content gets really interesting. You can set up certain events to be tracked on your website so if that event is or is not triggered, it will customise the email accordingly.
For example, let’s say someone visited a real estate agents website and looked at a few listings in a particular area. They also input their email to join the newsletter and be notified of other listings. This agent can now email them and show them other listings that they did not see on the website, and the reason they are able to do this was because they tracked what events that person activated whilst on their site. In this case, the event is what properties they did or didn’t view.
Conclusion
So, are you ready to up your email marketing game? We hope so! and we hope that you have got some valuable information from this blog post.
Just to summarise, here are our 7 tips for dramatically better emails:
- Implement Exclusivity
- Introduce Social Proof
- Humanize Your Brand
- Be Generous To Your List Members
- Use the Inverted Pyramid Method
- Get The Timing Right
- Personalize With Dynamic Content
Moreover, if you are currently a VEVS client in the car rental industry and are interested in benefiting from our newest offer of FREE Effective Follow-Up Email Templates designed specifically for car rental companies, we invite you to visit our FREE SEO Services page and fill out the contact form provided below. Additionally, we encourage you to explore the wide range of other FREE SEO services we provide, all of which are completely free of charge.
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