Email marketing has changed significantly since its beginning, but it is still one of the best ways to communicate with your customers. In fact, 78% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months.
With that being said, the same email marketing practices don’t work anymore, like “batch and blast” strategies or casting a net and seeing what you catch. Highly personalized email marketing is the new frontier, and the key to accomplishing it is heavily dependent on using the right tool. When you have the right tool, you can build very specific audiences, set up sophisticated templates, and create automations to run in the background. Ultimately, the right tool saves you time, builds better customer relationships, and leads to more sales.
Build your audiences
In order to personalize emails to match your customers’ varying needs, you must start by using customer data to build targeted segments. For example, you might want to filter your customers by gender, location, the types of products they purchase, how recently they purchased from you, or a combination of these factors. According to HubSpot, marketers who use segmented campaigns see up to a 760% increase in revenue.
Consolidating all the customer data from your point-of-sale or eCommerce systems can be messy and time consuming. But with a data-driven marketing platform like Ascent360, that data is automatically ingested, aggregated, and cleansed for a crystal-clear view of every customer. From there, the comprehensive but user-friendly drag and drop dashboard allows you to easily build the audiences you want to reach. For example, you can build an audience of all customers who purchased a particular product seven days ago and follow up with a post-purchase email.
Set up your templates
Once you have targeted audiences, the next step is to build your emails. However, building emails again and again from scratch is also time consuming and difficult. That’s why it’s important to have ready-to-go templates that you can plug and play easily. Templates are fundamental — one template can be robust enough to create about 80% of the emails you want to send — and it takes the technical work out of building an email.
Within a template, you can pre-program all the necessary components, such as headers and footers, logos, fonts, colors, product sections, category sections, special offers, and more. Then, all you have to build out from there is the message you are trying to convey to the customer. For a post-purchase email, you might want to include a product section for associated accessories. For an email to a prospect, you might include a category section that directs them to your different subsets of products.
In the Ascent360 platform, setting up these templates is incredibly simple. You can easily drag and drop sections, add images to a library, and even import all of your product lists directly from your POS system. It also allows you to utilize dynamic content by setting rules — for instance, changing an image for a different demographic or personalizing the emails using customer names.
Create your automations
Now it’s time to automate. You can set up a wide range of automations to trigger when a particular action is taken, such as when a purchase is made, when someone uses a sign-up form on your website, when a customer has lapsed over time, and so much more. Ascent360 even has an integration with your website that tracks browsing behavior and can trigger a “browse abandon” email.
It’s critical for business that you reach the right customers at the right time and doing so without automation can be tricky (and, again, time consuming). Automating campaigns allows you to “set it and forget it” while you focus on customer service, sales, and other essential business operations.
At Ascent360, our platform is built to make these components of sophisticated, personalized email marketing as simple and effective as possible. Having the right tool in your arsenal makes all the difference in developing campaigns that will increase long-term customer loyalty, enhance engagement, and boost sales.
