You may’ve seen in my chatbot I ask for email addresses? You’ll also have noticed that you can’t outright say “give me your email address”. This is not dissimilar from walking up to someone in the street and doing the same. It’s always best practice to get buy-in (tease what you want to send them) and make sure you’re polite but explicit in asking for an email But we’ve already got these users as subscribers to our chatbot, why do we need an email address at all?
A couple of reasons
1. Your email subscriber list is one of the few things you can exclusively own. Think about it, your subscribers are housed in, for example, ManyChat. And this is yours – your competitors do not have access to this
2. Another reason, and while we nobody believes it can happen, one day for certain it will and that’s an outage or a shutdown of the host or servers where your subscribers are
3. The third reason today is that which I want to focus on, remarketing. A bit like fishing with two hooks in the water, not one
So why email remarketing?
Email is still incredibly powerful marketing tool, often not used to its full extent. Too many times I’ve seen a business scramble together an email distribution list when they don’t have sales coming in, doing more damage to their subscriber base than anything else (real estate agents during a lockdown, anyone?) A good retargeting strategy should go beyond the first impact. To become a loyal customer, a user must go through multiple contacts through various channels.
How can you improve your email marketing program?
If you want to make a real difference with your email program, take the time to analyse your database and define your strategies. Like I said earlier – this is yours, your competitors don’t have access to this powerful database. They will not know what you’re doing or how.
What are five strategies to better leverage your data?
1. Don’t be random in your creativity Aesthetics are important but think about the action you want your user to take. Is that a download? To view a video? To make a purchase? Designing emails to match the stage of the sales cycle is important
2. Align creativity with segmentation Like above, the design of each email should fit with the target, time it is sent and intended result. Of course – your email should also match your brand
3. React quickly A good email campaign should have some smarts attached. A well-designed campaign will reinforce buyer decisions too. Someone had something in your cart but didn’t visit your success page? That’s a good time to email. Someone did land on your success page? Have you thought about triggering a thank you message or request for review?
4. Use smaller campaigns, In other words, divide and conquer. Small campaigns segmented according to interests often do better than large campaigns or mail outs
5. Find the perfect moment to Adapt to each consumer. Evergreen content and lead scoring mean you’re targeting your customers when they’re most receptive. Tools like AudiencePoint or even your own email delivery system can help you achieve this.
How do you Retarget?
Email retargeting is a cookie-based tool (think Facebook Pixel or similar) that records visits to your website and can send a personalised email based on actions taken. This can greatly increase the effectiveness of emails and help eliminate the dreaded abandoned shopping cart. Have you thought to put the cookie in the email itself? This means when a user opens an email, it can trigger a campaign for that user as you know they’re already receptive to your content. You can send recovery of shopping cart emails, create customised newsletters or make product recommendations.
Basic Steps of a Remarketing Plan
- A user visits your website and fills out a form
- Their contact name and details are automatically added to your email tool
- Create a series of custom emails to convert that user into a customer
- Send an email introduction first and measure the answers (was email opened, where any links clicked or pages visited?)
- Depending on step four, now you can create custom emails for any situation
- Segment these users from step five based on their interactions
- Step by step users consume your content and are increasingly ready to become a customer
Seven Ideas to Customise your Campaigns
- Customise emails based on google searches your users make
- Personalise emails based on products they’ve viewed (or left off)
- Create different campaigns based on the channel your customers found you by
- Offer rewards or special offers to those who consume your content the most
- Email users who visit sites affiliated with yours or that are designed with similar solutions
- Focus on “like” consumers – those who are similar in profile to existing customers
- Create a specific campaign for individuals who have interacted with your chatbot
