How Email Marketing Can Improve Your Revenue

As business owners or managers, communication with our customers is rightly emphasised, but how do you ensure it is done effectively?

Simply sending a blast email to all of your customers isn't often the best option. To the customer, it may feel impersonal, and it's unlikely that all of the information in a blast email is relevant to your specific customer. So how can you personalise your emails while managing your business, running your social media accounts, keeping up with your accounting and managing your staff? Let's look at some time-saving options.

Customer Journeys
A customer journey is much like the name implies; it's the communication journey you would like your customer to go through before or after their purchase. Of course, this will depend on your business offerings, but it's likely to look something like this:

Customer signs up for your newsletter → customer is sent welcome email → one week passes → customer is sent a discount code → customer makes a purchase

Customer journeys can be complex; this can depend on the software you have for your business or the level of touch points you need. Some software may offer other forms of communication that compliment your email marketing, such as pop-ups, banners, chatbots, SMS and email, while others may only have email capabilities.

Automate your communications
Automating how you communicate with your customers can be highly time effective as your customer base grows. Automating your communications can link directly to a customer journey, like sending a review email five days after your product has been delivered or automatically sending a confirmation email once a service or product has been ordered. While automating communications can be initially time-consuming, the payoff can be huge. Automated communications are a great way to up-sell to a customer or encourage a repeat purchase from a customer without much work after the initial set-up.

Communicating effectively
To craft a successful email marketing campaign, you must communicate effectively with your customers... Easier said than done. There are obvious needs for effective communication, such as clarity, easy-to-understand language, explicit imagery, strong sentence structure and excellent grammar, but there's more to communicating effectively. To have a strong email marketing campaign, it's essential to have the basics listed, but beyond that, you need a strong understanding of your customers and what they want to hear. Who is your customer? Have you created a customer persona? Have you created a business persona? If you're shaking your head at this list, you could interview or survey your customers to better understand who they are and talk to them in a way that they connect with.

Make sure your website quality is as high as your emails
So you've just spent all this time improving your email marketing, but if your website isn't matching this standard, you are likely to lose potential customers. Well, what makes a good website? Ahh, this could be a long paragraph if we went into the ins and outs of what you must do to have a high-quality website, but there are a few simple steps you could take that won't take us to 50,000 words. Put simply; you need a fast-loading site, clear communication and creative copywriting, strong imagery of your product or service, customer reviews to back your claims and an easy checkout experience that offers multiple ways for your customers to pay you quickly.

Great so how does all of this improve my revenue?
Great communication = attention = more likely to listen = improve site traffic = increase in orders.

Okay, it's not 100% accurate, but it is correct. More engaged customers will help get traffic to your site, which will most likely increase your chances of making a sale. This theory relies on having a high-quality website, clear product or service descriptions and an easy checkout experience, but it is a strong theory nonetheless.

There is a range of email marketing systems you can use and some offer a range of communication tools that complement your email communication, some are free of charge for you to begin testing what works for your business. Whatever you use, remember to put your customer at the front of your mind, don't over-communicate and concentrate on communicating in a way that would please your customer base. Happy emailing!