Email is an important part of CRM. That makes effective email a central factor in successful sales campaigns.
Effective email requires a strong message targeted to the right people. It also requires avoiding blunders. A poorly conceived or badly delivered email will do more than not sell. It actively turns customers off.
Here are some dos and don’ts for an effective email campaign.
Send it to the right people
An effective email campaign starts with the right audience. Make sure your emails are going to the people who will be interested in them and are likely to act on them. A misdirected email is more than an email wasted. At best it will be ignored. At worst it will irritate the recipient and turn them off on you and your company.
Carefully prune your email list so your message only goes to the right customers. Shotgun emails are out.
Clean your list
Sending multiple copies of the same email to your recipient is a turn-off. Make sure your email list is clean and free of duplicates. Also make sure the customer’s name is spelled correctly. Misspelling a name is another sure turn-off.
Proofread your emails.
Misspellings and grammatical errors make you sound illiterate or careless and don’t encourage prospects to deal with you. Make your emails as clean as possible.
Strike the right tone
Generally there are two types of emails. One is a direct call to action, usually containing a sale or offer of some kind. The other is a more personalized message designed to try to build a relationship with the prospect.
The first kind should be straight and to the point with personalization distinctly secondary. The second kind is all about personalization and should aim at a more social tone.
It’s usually a bad idea to mix up the two approaches. It tends to confuse the customers.
Too Much Information
Your CRM database should contain a wealth of information on customers and prospects that you can use to personalize your message. However use it sparingly, too much information can come off as stalking and is a definite turnoff.
Watch your placeholders
Placeholders are the words or phrases your email program uses to mark where personalized information is to be inserted. Theoretically the recipients of your emails will never see the placeholders. In practice all too often a few of them slip through into your emails. If you haven’t chosen appropriate placeholders the results can be anything from ridiculous to insulting.
Be especially careful of ALT tags. These will show up in the email if for some reason the image or other information isn’t available. This is irritating at best and it could be a lot worse if the ALT tag’s wording is poorly chosen.
Too much too often
To be successful, an email campaign has to observe a certain cadence. Too few emails and the message isn’t likely to get through. Too many emails too close together and you are likely to turn the customer off. Consider how many emails and how often you are sending them to the customer.
Emails are meant to engage customers, not turn them off. A little careful consideration and extra work can make your emails more attractive and more powerful sales tools.