Ultimate Guide on the Customer Journey in Email Marketing
Guest Post by Donald Domby
Email marketing is an essential aspect of digital advertisement.
Letters have come a long way - once written on paper and delivered by hand, now they go straight to your electronic mailbox via the Internet.
Composing an effective email requires time, practice and knowledge of email marketing. The content, email design, font, imagery, and much more will impact how a potential client responds to your email.
An email campaign may work for a specific audience but fail with other users. In addition, you must be able to transform a person from a potential client to a buyer.
In addition, you must be able to transform a person from a potential client to a buyer. For these reasons, this article will highlight a customer’s journey in email marketing. You will also learn about journey mapping and email strategy.
Customer Journey Mapping and Email Strategy
A customer journey map is a visual flowchart that shows how to transition potential customers not knowing your business to loyal clients who promote whatever you are selling.
To create a reliable journey map, you will have to use data to paint a picture of how customers relate to your business. Besides reliable data, you must conduct extensive audience research to get a plan.
Once you create a decent journey map, you will have an excellent understanding of your clients:
Thought pattern;
Interests;
Needs;
Decision-making process.
In addition, a reliable journey map should highlight ways clients interact with the business and the best marketing tactics for getting a sale.
Each group of customers has a distinct journey map. Below are essential milestones on a customer journey that are critical to all email marketing campaigns.
In this marketing type, you will need to have a segmented list. You will also need to target every aspect of digital advertisement. Doing this allows you to reach a specific crop of individuals. It also lets you send the perfect information to the most appropriate customers.
From this perspective, you can see how journey maps help you determine and follow the customer’s journey and craft an excellent email for targeted marketing.
Below are essential milestones on a customer journey that are critical to all email marketing campaigns.
Business Awareness
Clients must subscribe to your newsletter to know about your brand via email. Getting customers to sign up for your bulletin is nearly impossible if they have no idea what you do. Yet, you may use email in the early phase of a user journey.
You can reach out to social media influencers or brands to promote your bulletin to your type of audience. Or, you can contact editors in your niche who offer sponsorship deals for email marketing.
This way, you do not need to spend a lot of resources to get exposure. Nonetheless, you may have to pay more to reach more people
Creating effective client marketing content requires excellent writing. As such, you should work with experts at Trust My Paper to create qualitative and catchy marketing texts.
This platform has writers proficient in both marketing and educational writing.
Lead Generation
Accessing real email addresses is critical for your email marketing strategy. It lets you transform clients from being aware of your brand to qualified leads. Yet, it is just a start for a user.
Your ability to capture leads depends on how you connect the email strategy with the marketing content. Also, you will need to offer value to leads to convert them into viable buyers for your sales team.
Armed with appropriate content, you will need to optimize your information forms and landing page details. In addition, the collection of qualifying information lets you categorize people appropriately.
It also allows you to create a suitable journey for each lead. Next, you should consider balancing information about products/services with value-adding details. To achieve this, you must do thorough research.
Conduct Research
Social media platforms and knowledge of search engines are the two things you will require the most for your research.
You need accurate data from these sources to direct helpful information to subscribers. However, the depth of investigation you will need to conduct depends on the purchase frequency.
Generally, all customers try to educate themselves about a product or service before buying.
The more expensive a purchase, the deeper a buyer will look. Therefore, you must also put in a lot of work to convince a customer to buy from you.
To pursue a client to consider buying, you should know all the questions they will be asking before they make a purchase.
By extension, you will want to provide all the right answers. The content in your email campaign should provide solutions to doubts, concerns, and ambitions. It is helpful to give information that invokes the right emotions and aids decision-making.
Considerations
Most potential clients need to weigh their options before making a purchase. They will usually compare the information you provide with that of your competitors.
One of the details they consider is pricing. However, the quality of goods or services you sell may be too good to be cheaper than what your competitors offer.
You may consider sending an email with price comparisons to your customers, showing the advantages of your products or services.
You can also go a step forward by offering a free trial or a discount. Additionally, it may benefit you to send out abandoned cart notifications to remind users to complete their transactions.
Also, you may want to make a personal connection with a client. Make sure you show a prospective buyer you can provide excellent customer service by being helpful.
The Purchase
As a business owner, your goal is for a client to make a purchase. However, in the world of email marketing, making a sale is the beginning.
The use of your full marketing strategy should come to life immediately after a sale. At this crucial time, the emails you send give you the chance to make a lasting impression on the buyer.
The moment a customer buys a good or service, they will promptly want confirmation of their order. Right after, they want to know when they will receive value for money spent.
For example, a client who buys a pair of shoes wants to know if you have received the payment. They also want to know when they will likely receive the delivery.
For all these reasons, it is beneficial to use email tracking software, which lets you know exactly when a client views an email. You also get updates from the application whenever they review the message.
As such, you should ensure users receive regular updates that inform them about their order, thereby keeping them satisfied with your services. To update users effectively and establish lasting communication with potential clients, it is best to use email scheduling software.
Such aids will help you automate your email campaigns and ensure that your clients are always aware of their order details, delivery, any deals you have, etc.
Scheduling software will also help you secure deals with customers more effectively, reach leads when they are ready to engage with your company and otherwise boost your email marketing efforts.
You may think, “that sounds great, but what software should I choose?”
Well, there are numerous options out there, but there are also time-tested, effective digital devices many companies use, like CalendarHero and ActiveCampaign.
The combination of these software solutions will bring the experience customers have with your brand to the next level. Integrating these solutions into your system as a bundle is the best option for successful automation and, ultimately, business growth.
Initiation
Having a user purchase a product or service is not the end of the road. Instead, it is the start of a relationship that will hopefully involve several purchase cycles.
Since your new clients are beginning a journey with your brand, you will want to help them ease into the process.
You must also educate them about your business, services, and what they should expect. The more you do this, the more you can meet their expectations.
One mistake many business owners make is leaving new customers without proper initiation. When you do this, you risk losing a client simply because they do not know how to use your service or product.
You can significantly reduce the customer attrition rate by providing relevant information at the right time. In particular, you must provide precise details about a product.
Upselling and Cross-Selling
Once your client is settled in nicely, the next thing you should aim for is improving their experience. You can achieve this by encouraging a customer to try other products.
In particular, you should point a client toward products or services that complement what they have purchased already. One thing you can do is push to either upsell or cross-sell products and services.
Upselling means offering customers a more expensive item. For example, if a user buys a hosting service that accommodates 3 websites, you can encourage them to go for a higher plan that hosts 10 sites.
On the other hand, cross-selling means encouraging users to buy add-ons and applications that make their work easier.
You can cross-sell and upsell to a customer through personalization and segmentation. Segmentation means separating your clients based on certain criteria - age, sex, occupation, etc. Some emails should be based on user action, while others should be triggered by:
Life events;
Seasons;
Duration of being a customer;
Updates to products/services.
Customer Retention
If you can keep a customer long enough to keep buying from you, you must take active steps to retain them and minimize the possibility of churning. Therefore, you should interact with your clients regularly to keep them informed.
Doing this improves customer loyalty. Effectively using user experience mapping and email marketing can help you design strategies to retain customers.
However, keeping users informed does not mean bombarding them with meaningless content. Instead, you should be proactive enough to provide information that dissuades them from thinking of churning.
For example, you can retain a customer by encouraging them to renew their subscription before it expires at a lower price. Many users will jump at the opportunity of purchasing services at a reduced rate.
Advocacy for Your Business
Your primary goal as a brand is to turn potential clients into buyers and then into loyal customers. Once this is achieved, you can go a step further to transform loyal users into advocates of your brand.
Creating this sequence should be an objective when running a customer journey map for an email campaign. The moment clients become advocates for your business, you will quickly start to get more leads.
Many leads will turn to buyers because people usually trust referrals from friends and family.
Although review sites and social media are the most common channels through which modern Internet users learn about a new product or service, you can use an email strategy to encourage customers to become your advocates.
You can use three email strategies to encourage advocacy. Firstly, you can link to your social media profiles in all user messages. Doing this makes it easy for a client to post about your business.
Secondly, you may send emails that prompt users to join a robust referral program. Many customers will gladly invite their family and friends to buy from you if they get some benefit in return.
Finally, you can use a call to action to encourage readers to forward emails to others.
Reengaging Leads and Customers
No matter how good your email marketing plan is, you will lose leads and clients periodically. Customers disengage from the user journey map at different points. As such, some people stop subscribing to your services.
Others reduce the number of add-ons they use. In some cases, individuals stop engaging with your emails. If this has never happened to you, it will eventually occur. The good news is that there is a solution to this problem.
In most cases, the generic emails that try to plainly pursue a client to buy do not work. For this reason, you will want to be creative with your messaging.
One of the best strategies you can use is highlighting what a user is missing by not buying from you. You should use the preview text and subject line to tempt users.
Offering gifts, offers, and discounts to customers are sometimes reason enough for them to return and continue their customer journey with your brand.
Conclusion
Effective management of customer journeys through email marketing is an essential aspect of running a successful business. If you follow our tips, you can design and implement a complete email marketing strategy that sells products, retain customers, and encourages advocacy.
In addition, it will also help you bring back clients who stopped buying from you. Start working on boosting your email marketing strategy today and see the results tomorrow!
ABOUT THE AUTHER
Donald Domby is a financial and marketing expert with years of experience. He also writes articles for several online and offline magazines. Donald also offers a course for email marketing newbies.