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63% of marketing decision-makers utilize automation in their email marketing. But are you using email automation in the most strategic way that benefits your business? Without a clear strategy or rooting in data-driven insights, you could be missing out on how email marketing can improve the customer journey.
When looking at the role email marketing plays across the customer journey, it plays a dominant role due to its effectiveness and value. But to really make it work seamlessly, you’ll need a deep understanding of consumers in their buying journeys to send them relevant emails. Before we dive in, you’ll want to have our free customer journey map on hand.
HOW EMAIL MARKETING IS USED ACROSS THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY
Got your customer journey map ready? Then you’re off to a good start!
Start by auditing your existing emails across the customer journey and write down a list of all emails being sent. First, look at the strategy, purpose, and performance of these emails:
Where do these emails sit in the customer journey?
What is the purpose and who are you targeting?
Look at key performance metrics to assess what is and what isn’t working.
When choosing what KPIs to focus on, these should be achievable, relevant, and time-bound to help track your progress and gauge the success of your optimization efforts, e.g. open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, and revenue generated.
Next, look at the actual email content send out itself:
What day of the week and times do these emails go out?
Are these triggered emails, e.g. basket abandonment?
What is the content and subject line itself?
How have these factors affected those key metrics and is there a seasonal influence, for example?
This data will help you understand what needs optimizing, what KPI to focus on, and what to do next. But rather than optimizing and hoping for the best, A/B testing is a strategic and data-driven way of seeing whether these changes have any impact at all.
A/B Testing and Growth Hacking
A/B testing is a methodical approach that helps fine-tune your email marketing strategy by comparing two versions of an email with one key difference to understand what resonates with your audience. A/B testing ensures each email aligns with your strategy, optimizing elements like subject lines, email content, and call-to-action buttons for better engagement and conversions.
In fact, our Lead Data Consultant, Marco Haerter, wrote an article about how growth hacking your email marketing improves performance.
EXAMPLES OF USING EMAIL MARKETING IN CUSTOMER JOURNEYS
Now, let’s explore the best practices in using insights to understand where to put your email communications in the customer journey.
1. WELCOME EMAILS
Welcome emails boast a transaction rate x9 times greater than other promotional emails, and their per-email revenue is eight times higher than other emails. This is an important first touch so you need to ensure your welcome emails are impactful. Start by:
Asking your readers to ‘double opt-in’ to confirm their subscription
Including an ‘opt-out’ link – users who have created an account may not want to receive promotional email content from you
This improves the quality of your subscriber lists and email deliverability, as this confirms these people actually want to hear from you. Once confirmed, you can send an automated ‘thanks for subscribing’ email right away once they’ve confirmed.
WHERE DO YOU GO FROM WELCOME EMAILS?
Develop an onboarding funnel to create a series of emails. This enables your new subscribers to know what kind of content they can expect and how often they’ll receive it.
You’ll want to get this right during this crucial introductory period to let them know about special benefits, loyalty programs, and social initiatives. It’s also important to give them the freedom to choose what they want to hear about and how often they want to hear. This reduces complaints and disengagement significantly, especially if you send emails regularly.
Having a unified customer view of all channels helps you understand products of interest, so you can deliver appealing content. With your customer insights, you can personalize your messaging to establish strong relationships. Where appropriate, request additional information to expand on your subscribers’ profiles. The more you know about them, the more engaging your email content will be!
2. ABANDONED CART
There’s lost revenue sitting in your shoppers’ abandoned carts. In the UK alone, eCommerce stores lose a combined £18 billion to cart abandonment every year. By formulating an effective abandoned cart email strategy, you can prompt customers to revisit your website and complete the purchase. Here are some tips for creating a solid cart abandonment program:
Timing is absolutely crucial. The sooner you send the email, the more likely they’ll still be interested and remember what they considered buying. Many brands send follow-up emails 24 to 48 hours after the purchase but feel free to embrace that growth-hacking mindset and experiment with different timings to see what works best for your audience. However, it’s important not to overwhelm customers with too many emails, as this can have the opposite effect and lead to unsubscribes or negative brand sentiment.
Personalization is rewarding, especially when it comes to abandoned cart emails. For example, you can make your customers feel special by addressing them by name. To encourage them to complete the purchase, you could include personalized discounts or other product recommendations based on their preferences.
Email Content: Now’s your time to grab their attention. Spend some time crafting a catchy subject line that they can’t ignore, such as “You left something behind!” or “Don’t miss out! Your favorites are selling fast”. Along with a compelling subject line, include a conversion-led CTA and eye-catching images to make your email stand out.
Offers: To give those who abandoned their carts an extra nudge, offer a time-limited discount or free shipping to reel them back in. Creating a sense of urgency will make it more likely they will complete their order.
Tracking and Analysis: It’s crucial to track how abandoned cart emails perform to measure effectiveness. Metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and revenue generated can provide insights into the campaign’s success. Analyzing this data allows businesses to continually optimize their email content, timing, and incentives for better results.
Watch the video below to learn more about how Mapp Cloud allows you to target and automate marketing messages to enable an abandoned cart program to have maximum impact.
3. RE-ENGAGEMENT EMAILS
When a customer becomes quiet, the best thing to do is take steps to re-engage them. However, only 15% of the companies Mapp surveyed sent out a re-activation email to re-engage the customer with the brand. This is a missed opportunity to re-engage with your customers and build an even stronger relationship. It can be a good option to clean up your database to remove users who no longer interact with your brand. A smaller but engaged list is better than a large list full of inactive users.
Subscribers could stop engaging with your email messages for different reasons. So, what can you do to re-engage them? Start by finding out why they lost interest. Surveys are a fantastic tool for this, but you could also test the waters by offering special discounts, coupons, or next-day delivery and tracking who responds. Those who do not re-engage with the offers might be better off removed from the list to keep it ‘healthy.’
Email Marketing in the Customer Journey: Mapp’s Campaign Management Services
Far from being a shot in the dark, an effective email strategy is data-driven, guiding your leads from subscription to loyalty. If you do it right, you may even create brand advocates in the process! By focusing on key metrics, getting into the growth-hacking mindset by testing tweaks, and tailoring your content to your audience through personalization, you can boost your email campaign performance significantly!
If you need help, the Mapp Campaign Management team is on hand! By building and delivering campaigns on your behalf from the Mapp Cloud platform, we can help you engage your email subscribers wherever they are in the customer journey. Reach out to our experienced Campaign Management team today to unlock the full potential of email marketing in your customer journey!
This article was first published by Mapp. Permission to use has been granted by the publisher.
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