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If you want to do email marketing, I bet you already know the two statistics below. If you don’t, I bet you will also be more motivated to launch your first email marketing campaign as soon as possible. The statistics are:
- A report made by DMA in 2015 shows that the ROI on email marketing campaign is 38 euros. Which means that every euro invested generated, on average, a return of 38 euros on the campaign.
- The second statistic, from the same organization, shows that 9 out of 10 customers believe that email marketing is an important channel to achieve their business goals. You can download the full report of this study here.
Of course, we cannot, when we see the first statistic, convert the price from euros to reais and come to the conclusion that the ROI will reach the 3-digit place. But what we can infer is that the average yield was 1 in 38. Pretty impressive, isn’t it?
Disclaimer: 38 euros was the average ROI obtained by the campaigns. Just as we have, on the leftmost point of the graph, income that varies between 1 and 10 euros, we also have, more on the right, income that exceeds 70 euros. (In 2014, 1 in 5 marketers achieved a return in excess of 70 euros)
As for the second statistic, I believe there is no need to comment on anything. It doesn’t matter if you are involved in a B2B business or an e-commerce, email marketing should be considered as a revenue-generating strategy.
The only person who responded that he didn’t trust this strategy must have done everything very wrong, getting no return. It just can, isn’t it?
During the survey they asked the following question: How do you rate your team’s competence in email marketing. Below is the chart that compiles the answers.
The farther to the right, the greater the competence level of the team in email marketing.
What we can conclude is that email marketing is very easy to learn, since the vast majority of respondents judged themselves above the basic level. Almost 80% of marketers judged their technique as intermediate or advanced. And you feel like you’re falling behind, don’t you?
Exactly why creative team of Nova city made this text. It’s for you to start getting the hang of email marketing. I believe that these two graphs are the most important points to take from the survey, but I’ll leave a link for you to check this report briefly.
Finally, someone might say: -” But this report is standard for Europe.” Yes, it is likely that the reality in Brazil is not yet at this point. What I make a point of remembering is that if we dream big with our results, we must also seek to achieve the best performance.
Despite the situation in the country today, we still have to consider the size of our market and the fact that we have competent professionals present in it. I see this every day with our customers and even those who are not our customers yet. Seriously, one day team members of Capital Smart City are going to teach Europeans and Americans.
Going back to the subject of the text, I believe that you reader has a certain knowledge of metrics related to emails: mainly open rate and reply rate. If you still don’t know, you can check our text about prospecting emails.
If you already know these terms, we can get right to the main reason for this article. It is a method, in fact, strategy is the best word for doing email marketing. Come on?
A proven method for email marketing
Imagine the following situation, you really want to play field football in an amateur league, but the team needs two people. Your friend, who is good at the ball, doesn’t want to participate because he knows that to play this kind of championship you need a boot that costs 300 reais.
What do you as a marketer do? You bet with your friend that you can, by writing a few emails, raise the amount needed to buy the boot. Simple, isn’t it? Plus, after 60 minutes, you win the bet.
It seems absurd, but this is the Brazilian adaptation (created by me 😉) for the story of Ryan Deiss, author of the book Invisible Machine Selling. However, exchange cleats for golf clubs and championship football for golf games every Friday.
This is the situation of a person with resources very similar to what we all have today: Internet, computer, mailing list and intelligence.
But it is exactly the method used that makes all the difference. Email marketing based on “attempts to contact” is useless and will not convert almost anyone. Believe me, it is a very common scenario and it generates a great waste of time.
The method used by Ryan Deiss is based on five phases, with five distinct objectives. He has trained entrepreneurs and consulted in different types of industry using the Invisible Selling Machine method.
Before Capital Smart City delve into each of the 5 phases, we want to give you the name and objective of each one of them to show the overview. Are they:
- Indoctrination or indoctrination: Introduce new leads to you and your brand, turning strangers into acquaintances.
- Engagement or engagement: Talk to your leads about what interests them and encourage them to buy a product or service relevant to their situation.
- Ascension or Ascension: Welcome your customers and encourage them to improve their experience by purchasing something again.
- Segmentation or segmentation: Finding out what they want to hear more about and what they might want to buy next.
- Re-engagement or re-engagement: Bring them back when they have lost contact or if the relationship has cooled down.
And for you to have an overview of the process, check out this image that shows the path a lead follows within your email marketing campaign:
Now that you have the big picture of what we’re saying, let’s delve into each of the parts as promised.
Indoctrination
This is the first phase. A prospect enters this phase when he submits your email (turning into a lead), for example, when downloading material or any other action that requires an opt-in.
Remembering that we all receive a lot of emails and this scenario should be similar for your lead, what we need to ensure is that the lead really has a different view of your company. Indoctrination is the phase used to:
- Introduce you and your company.
- Establish what expectations they can expect from you.
- Remember the benefits of being subscribed to the list as a lead.
- Try to get small compromises.
- Establish a curiosity loop (so the lead expects to receive the next email).
It is very intuitive as to what should be done in the first two topics: present yourself directly and positively, and make it clear what they will receive.
As for the benefit, it’s every advantage that leads can receive, such as promotions for list members only.
Micro commitments are small actions that must be performed by the lead, for example, authorizing your email as safe to never fall into the spam box.
And finally, the curiosity loop, which is nothing more than a promise you make and will be fulfilled in the next email you send. For example, I’m going to send you our newest eBook that covers [useful subject].
engagement
At the end of the indoctrination phase, after sending some emails to the leads, the transition to the engagement phase will occur. As at the end of the engagement phase there is already a real purchase intention on the part of the lead, it is necessary to make a change of speech before a salesperson tries to make the sales contact.
And this is done with what we call the Lead Magnet and it characterizes the entry to phase 2 of your email marketing strategy.
Lead Magnet is basically a type of value (usually content) offered to the lead that solves a specific problem for a specific industry in exchange for a new opt-in.
How specific this material should be will be delimited by the segmentation phase. That’s why understanding the pains of your audience and the industry you’re in makes all the difference.
For example, consider the two focuses a salesperson can use to better position and get the sale:
- Focus 1: On increasing lead generation.
- Focus 2: On shortening the sales cycle.
Now imagine that, during your email marketing campaign, a lead has downloaded a material called 4 Ways to Increase Your Lead Generation even if you’re marketing and sales team has less than 3 members. It’s easy to see that when selling to this lead, focusing the sale on topic 1 will be more effective and will increase the chance of the sale happening, right?
Rise
The third phase starts from the following premise: once you’ve got the first sale, the second and so on becomes easier. I think it’s easier to exemplify by talking about the types of ascension:
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- Immediate upsell: Offering the customer a new version of your product or service, which solves the same pain as the previous version, but with a higher price and added value.
- Cross-sell: It is offering to the customer, products or services that are additional and complementary to yours.
- Premium Membership: After offering a free version of the product, try to upgrade to the premium version of the product.
There are also 2 other types of ascension, but that do not fall into the category of businesses focused on B2B. Simply by the reader’s conscience they are: Packages or kits and product affiliation.
Segmentation
Email marketing is a part of marketing. It sounds obvious and it is. But the implication of this means that some kind of segmentation is needed. In marketing, we would segment the market and in email marketing we would segment the email list.
The big question is:
How do you determine what you send to your leads during your email marketing strategy?
The truth is, if you keep sending emails that don’t engage your lead (whether it’s opening or replying to the email or performing micro-commitments), your lead will end up forgetting about you or leaving your list.
Thus, the objective is to segment leads according to engagement. And within engagement we have subcategories. For example, if you sent a Lead Magnet about sales cycle, but your lead showed no interest, it is likely that it will not fit in this subsist (in this case sales cycle or [choose a category according to your business]) .
The secret to properly segmenting your email marketing campaign is to know what your customer’s most common pains are, create Lead Magnets to address and really test what category your lead is in.
New Engagement
This is the last phase and it has a focus on leads that have cooled off when they stopped interacting during some part of your email marketing strategy. The first activity to be done is to separate them from the leads that are engaged.
Once they have lost engagement, a new series of activities must be proposed to try to regain contact.
For example, an interesting activity to segment your contact list is to send all disengaged people a digest of what happened in the last few months and evaluate what they clicked to re-target. Okay, we already have a first segmentation.
Use more interactive content at this time, such as survey forms to understand what happened to it or excel sheets that, through automated operations, facilitate an operation that was previously manual and tiring.
Lastly
It’s always good to be here bringing the most up-to-date information for you marketing and/or sales professional. We invest every second to make your work really achieve the results you dream of.
If you recognize that this text is of value to you, make sure it can be of value to someone else as well. So if you can share, amen. ;D
