Customer Experience in Email Marketing

Elliott, who oversees AUK’s email marketing offering, shares his advice on providing a positive experience for customers.

It’s impossible to overestimate the presence of email in our everyday life currently. If we went back Fifty years, it was a form of communication that hardly anyone had heard of, whereas now, over four billion people communicate via email every day. The widespread use of smartphones is in part to thank for this. People can now check their emails anywhere at any time with just a few clicks.

It’s not surprising that the rise of email also coincides with the rise of email marketing. No matter what industry your business operates within, as long as you have customers, it’s likely that you use emails to communicate with them. And if not, it’s definitely something you should consider. The majority of those four billion emails sent every day are marketing emails – whether it’s an order confirmation from Amazon or EasyJet trying to push their latest flight reductions your way.

Marketing emails take a number of shapes and sizes, just like businesses, and as a result, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to good email marketing customer experience. One of the keys to good email marketing is originality. There are some broad guidelines you can follow if you want to improve your business’s approach to email marketing or want to start-up up a new strategy.

The Aims of Email Marketing

Email marketing is a delicate balance. Many of the rules that you need to follow when developing a strategy for your emails are the same as the ones for other marketing channels, such as Organic Search and Social.

As a result, it’s important to make sure your email strategy isn’t developed in isolation. It’s likely that you’re promoting your business on a combination of other channels already, and so you want to make sure your approach is consistent across the board. For example, you may think about:

The tone of voice: Is it consistent over all the channels? Is your tone of voice for email formal and uptight and your tone on Facebook playful and goofy? Establishing a consistent voice across all channels will help ensure that your customers don’t experience tonal whiplash.
Consistent brand assets: Similar to the above – is your use of imagery (e.g. logos) consistent? If not, then it may signal a lack of professionality to customers.

As you can see, while email marketing is a channel with its own needs, requirements, strengths and weaknesses, it also shares many factors with other channels. They all need to be working in tandem, like a single organism.

What are The Different Types of Email Marketing?

When discussing what effective email marketing is, it’s important to make a distinction between the different types of emails you might wish to send your customers. Generally, these can be split out into two different groups:

Functional emails: These are necessary emails. Think about the sorts of emails that you need to send out to your customers. A classic example can be, a confirmation email after a customer has ordered a product or a newsletter sign up confirmation or an, unsubscribe confirmation. Often these are automated making them less personal.
Promotional emails: These emails are more typically focused on promoting the products or services to customers and getting them to engage with you more. If handled poorly – or sent too frequently – they can also put off customers as well. These emails are more personalised to the client. They might include newsletters, and sale notifications as well as automated ones – such as letting customers know that they’ve left an item in their cart.

As you can see, the scope of marketing emails is extensive. Next, we’ll break down how you can optimise your approach across both of these areas. These mainly involve taking advantage of the different benefits of email marketing as a medium.

What Makes a Good Marketing Email?

Email marketing has a number of unique advantages over other marketing channels. Here are some of the ways you can make use of them to improve your approach.

Take Advantage of Personalisation

One of the key benefits of email marketing is personalisation. This is something to take advantage of, as it helps your customers feel connected to your brand. While many businesses do this on a surface level – for example, including the customer’s name in the subject line – there’s room to go further with this.

You can segment your audience to ensure that customers are only receiving content that’s relevant to them. For example, you might be running a pet brand which sells products for cats and dogs; you want to ensure that dog owners are only receiving dog-related content and cat owners cat-related content. This will help strengthen your customer relationships and add additional depth to their relationship with your company. Sending clients the wrong type of emails can lead to a higher unsubscribe rate.

Don’t Spam

We’ve all had the experience of receiving way too many marketing emails from a company leading us to hit the unsubscribe button. Data shows that 59% of 25-34-year-olds share poor customer experiences online, and 58% of customers will never use a company again after a negative interaction. Try to keep pace with what your customers are likely to want, focusing on quality rather than quantity. They’ll thank you for it by continuing to engage with your offerings.

Track Results

Good reporting is the backbone of any email marketing strategy. If you’re not tracking core performance metrics, such as open rate, click through rate and unsubscribes, how can you accurately measure customer satisfaction? Tracking these metrics and how they’re shifting over time can help you see if your work is driving impact. As a result, it’s an essential part of any strategy.

Conclusion

Of course, this is only the starting point when it comes to delivering a powerful email marketing strategy. Redeveloping your approach – and continuing to monitor and develop it – is a process that never really ends. But at the same time, if done correctly, it can transform the way customers view your company.

AgencyUK has an extensive track record when it comes to email marketing. We have been working with a range of different companies to develop solutions which meet their needs. This includes new creative assets, strategy audits, helping with deployments as well as setting up performance dashboards. If you would like help overhauling your strategy and improving the CX of your campaigns, get in touch with us today.