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Learning to use email marketing effectively can be a lucrative strategy for increasing sales and broadening your customer base. Not all methods will work exactly the same, however, and you should be aware of the differences within your industry.
For retail establishments in particular, getting more targeted and personal can improve your email open and response rates. According to recent data, only about half of retail industry emails are opened by consumers.
At the same time, mobile device use has increased significantly to become the main channel for opening email. Taken together, a retail email strategy is becoming a mobile strategy as well. While tricks like using email verification software ( Never bounce or Email Verifier from Hunter ) remain the same, here are five additional tips that retail businesses can use to improve their email marketing strategy for demonstrable results.
1. Make Usable Offers
Sending out deals and offers is a great strategy for inspiring loyal email customers. If they cannot use these promotions, though, your emails will eventually go unopened and deleted.
Use your local demographic data to send the right offers to the right people. You can use email platforms that target people near your local store or business. That coupon you send is more valuable if the recipient has a convenient place to use it. Taking the time to find your targets will give you an edge over competitors who don’t.
2. Be Personable
People like to feel a connection to the businesses they patronize, so getting a little more friendly appeals to their emotions. Generic business emails sound like generic business emails. Try writing in a user-friendly style that takes advantage of a conversational tone rather than stiff, overly professional emails. Make personal connections through your email strategy. By sending the message that your email subscribers are like friends you care about, your brand can form stronger social bonds within local communities. Follow up initial sign-ups with notes thanking people for thinking about you.
3. Be Shareable
Email should be viewed as just one channel of your overall marketing plan. Having a website, running PPC campaigns, and having the right social media presence can create a synergy with your emails. If you sent out a newsletter via email, highlight components of that email on a blog with an email sign-up prompt.
Encourage sharing of your emails via social media linking and vice-versa. Offer client referral deals to existing clients who post about you online and emphasize the community aspect of your business.
Surprising to many, email has a better client response rate than social media posting. That doesn’t mean you should abandon social media. Platforms like Facebook enable you to localize your post sharings by geography, income, gender, and more. By becoming more savvy in the use of social media, you can form links to your email contacts for stronger and more valuable customer retention.
4. Localize and Expand
Localizing your email campaign increases response rates. With localization, you make reference to local identifiers as much as possible in order to bring your messages closer to home. When carving out your demographics, mention specific cities and towns where you offer goods and services.
Pay extra attention to the subject line, which is the first actual piece of content people see in their inbox, by including those place name mentions.
Also, you could use Tomba to find email addresses in seconds.
5. Speak The Language
An often overlooked opportunity, especially among small businesses, is crafting emails in languages other than your native tongue. Whether it’s German, Spanish, French, or the growing Asian demographics like Chinese and Tagalog, you can push the envelope by providing content in a foreign language.
Language service providers (LSPs) specialize in this type of marketing translation. They provide affordable help to guide your foreign language content for clients. And, bridging the language barrier can result in serious boosts to your website traffic and ROI.
These five tips are just the beginning when it comes to unlocking the full potential of email marketing. Making these minor adjustments can have impressive results for your campaign.
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