Will performing email blasts and sending newsletters regularly guarantee conversions?
In short: No, a single blast or a regular newsletter won't guarantee conversions. To convert more contacts, nurture them with follow-up campaigns and automated workflows, offer personalized content, test before you send, keep your mailing list healthy, and practice target marketing. Judge your results by clicks and conversions, since Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates opens.
As a marketer, conceptualizing email campaigns and performing email blasts is part and parcel of your daily routine. Often, marketers tend to believe that regularly sending newsletters and the occasional email campaign will help them achieve the desired conversion.
If marketers follow this approach, they may face these issues:
- Falling short of reaching their conversion goals
- Minimal or no growth for their product/service
- Emails they send may earn a negative reputation and land in the spam folder
This implies that performing a single email blast and sending newsletters isn't sufficient and will not guarantee results. To achieve better conversion rates, you must:
- Send followup campaigns
- Offer personalized content
- Use automated workflows
- Re-target contacts
Additionally, you need to maintain a healthy mailing list, test your campaign before sending, and practice targeted marketing to achieve better results.
Don't worry! We've got you covered. In Zoho Campaigns, we have features called Follow-up Campaigns and Workflows. Within those features, you'll find plenty of ways and templates to choose from. If you haven't checked them out, see how to send follow-up campaigns and getting started with workflows to take a look.
Let's learn a little more about nurturing your contacts with the help of follow-up campaigns and workflows:
Nurturing potential leads/contacts
Contact nurturing is the process of understanding your contact's needs and interests, educating them about your product/service, and persuading them to purchase. When you start pitching your product/service, you must nurture your contacts by sending follow-up campaigns.
Here are a few follow-up campaigns that you can use to nurture your contacts:
Follow-up campaigns
A follow-up campaign is an email that you send to a specific group of people based on how they interacted with a previous campaign. Instead of sending the same message to everyone again, you reach only the people who did, or didn't, take a particular action. Choose the group that matches your goal:
- Unopened: This group helps you re-target contacts who didn't open the previous campaign, so it is mainly used to reach unresponsive contacts and increase the open rate. Your goal is to figure out what your contact is interested in and offer relevant content. You can do this by offering topics and asking them to choose the ones they're interested in, or by trying a different subject line.
- Opened: You can send similar campaigns to keep your contacts engaged.
- Clicked: You can analyze the links clicked and offer relevant content.
- Not Yet Clicked: These contacts opened your email but didn't click. You can highlight benefits, add testimonials, or offer a limited-time incentive.
To send a follow-up campaign:
- From the navigation toolbar on the left, click Campaigns and select Email.
- Click the campaign you want to follow up on.
- Click Send Follow-Up at the top-right corner.
- Select the group you want to reach: Unopened, Opened, Clicked, or Not Yet Clicked.
- Set up the follow-up email. You can edit everything except the Recipients section.
- Click Send Now, or schedule the email for later.
Email automation
Zoho Campaigns's workflows are built specifically to help you nurture contacts. They help you send a series of automated emails based on a contact's activity. Start from a workflow template, or build one yourself by choosing a trigger and adding actions, such as Send Email and Time Delay. To open workflows, click Workflows in the left navigation panel. You can use workflows like these to nurture contacts effectively:
Welcome new contacts
Whenever a contact signs up to receive your emails, the best way to start a conversation is by sending a welcome email and introducing your product/service. You can do this with a workflow that starts when a contact submits a signup form or is added to a mailing list: use the Form Submission or Added To List trigger and a Send Email action, or start from the Welcome Onboard template in the Welcome and Getting Started category. You can then add a Time Delay action and an email series that provides information about your product/service and its benefits. This will create a positive impact on your contacts and help them understand your offerings better.
Nurture with an email series
After you welcome contacts and introduce your product/service to them, you can start pitching by extending the workflow into a series. Craft each message you wish to send, add Time Delay actions to set how long the workflow waits before each next email, and create the necessary followup messages. Contacts enter the workflow when they meet its trigger, so each contact gets the series from their own starting point.
Act on how contacts respond to your emails
A contact signs up to receive your emails with the belief that they'll be offered content that is relevant to their needs and interests. You can identify a contact's interest by analyzing the actions they perform on your emails and then send targeted emails based on their actions. Use the Email Action trigger, or the Check Email Activity condition inside a workflow, to send follow-up emails to contacts who have:
- Opened your emails
- Not opened your emails
- Clicked specific links in your email
For contacts who opened your email but haven't clicked any links, send a follow-up campaign to the Not Yet Clicked group. This technique can help you nurture contacts and serve them better, by identifying their needs and interests. See the workflow use cases for examples.
Celebrate special dates
Your contacts aren't just email addresses in your mailing list. They are the pillars of your business. The best way to build a strong and loyal customer base is to empathize with them and value them. You can create a personalized experience for your contacts by wishing them well on special occasions. You can use the Date Field trigger to send personalized emails to your contacts on special occasions like birthdays, wedding anniversaries, festivals, etc. This helps to build a positive bond with your contacts and encourage them to remain loyal customers. See workflow triggers.
Test your campaigns
It's always a good idea to monitor your campaign's performance and learn from it. You can try sending campaigns with different subject lines or email content. Afterwards, you can analyze the campaign's performance to understand what your contacts expect from you and what they're interested in.
In Zoho Campaigns, you can use A/B campaigns to create two different versions of a campaign and send them to a small group of contacts. Then, the winning campaign can be sent to the rest of your contacts. You choose how the winner is picked: Open Rate, Click Rate, or Manual. Choose Click Rate, or pick the winner manually. Using A/B testing campaign helps you identify the pulse of your contacts and achieve better open and click rates.
Maintain a quality mailing list
Mailing lists are the fundamental blocks on which you build your campaigns. The success of an email campaign depends on the quality of the mailing list(s) it's sent to. Maintaining a high-quality mailing list is a three step process that involves properly naming a mailing list, segmenting it and cleaning it regularly.
Naming your mailing list
You must carefully monitor the source of the signups and name your mailing lists accordingly. This practice helps in choosing the right mailing list for your future campaigns. It also helps you identify where most of your signups are coming from.
Segmenting your mailing list
Every contact in your mailing list will have different needs and interests. Therefore, it is not advisable to send generic emails to all of them, all the time. An email that appeals to some of your contacts may be totally irrelevant for others. If you send too many irrelevant emails to your contacts, they might either leave your emails unopened or even unsubscribe.
You can segment your contacts based on demographics like age, gender, location, etc. You can also ask your contacts to choose the topics on which they would like to receive emails by using the Topics feature. Then, you can group contacts based on the topics they chose to create a segment or a new mailing list.
Cleaning your mailing list
The quality of your mailing list determines the performance of your campaigns. If your mailing list has invalid email addresses and inactive contacts, your emails will bounce and your emails may receive spam markings. This will earn a negative reputation from mailbox providers and affect inbox placement.
To prevent this, you need to regularly clean your mailing list to ensure that there are no inactive contacts or invalid email addresses. Cleaning your mailing list is a two-step process. First, you identify inactive contacts, then you re-engage with them by sending a winback campaign.
Target marketing
A successful email campaign is one that is well-received by contacts and generates the desired conversion. The best way to achieve this is by offering content that's relevant to your contact's needs and interests. Target marketing is a technique that involves identifying a contact's needs and interests, and addressing it. You can understand your contact's needs and interests by carefully analyzing their purchase history, which emails they open, and which links they click on. You can either create a segment or a dedicated mailing list for contacts with similar needs and interests. Then, you can start offering relevant content to these contacts to get maximum email engagement and conversion.
Identifying the prevalent marketing strategies and incorporating them into your business model is a solid approach. However, that alone won't guarantee conversion. You must stick to fundamental practices like nurturing your contacts, maintaining a quality mailing list, and target marketing to achieve the desired conversion.