Essentially, email marketing is the use of email to promote your company. More than just a sales tool, email marketing is used to build relationships with customers and clients, helping them to recognize your brand and choose you above everyone else in your industry. 

Email marketing can help you nurture relationships with your current customers and grow relationships with new ones. But when done badly, it can damage your company’s reputation in an instant. 

For this blog, we’re going to show you how to avoid the pitfalls of email marketing and start using it to attract new customers and delight current ones. 

Before we get into how to improve your email marketing, first we need to take a brief look at how to get people to subscribe to your emails in the first place.

To have a successful email marketing campaign you need to build a list of people who are genuinely interested in you and your products or services. The best way to do this is by converting any visitors to your website into subscribers. 

One of the most popular ways to grab the attention of a website visitor is with exit-intent pop-ups. This type of pop up recognizes when a user is about to leave your website and flashes on screen to encourage them to sign up for your email marketing. 

These pop-ups work best when they offer incentives in exchange for subscribing to your email list. These incentives can include:

Once you’ve got a healthy list of subscribers, it’s time to start sending them emails!

Addressing your emails to your customers personally adds a level of familiarity. Although it may be the same email sent out to hundreds (or thousands) of customers, an email with a simple “Hey John, it’s been awhile - thought I’d check in with you” line in it can do wonders for nurturing the relationship between customer and vendor. 

Nobody likes being treated like a walking wallet and being addressed as ‘dear customer’. 

Another great way of personalizing your emails is automated reminders/offers at set times of the year. For example, if your customer registered their date of birth when signing up for your newsletter, you could offer personalized offers on their birthday or give them a percentage off their next purchase. As we deal in set seasons and cycles anyway, try to target different ag-related activities at the relevant times of year.

If your customer is used to dealing with one member of staff, make sure their email is signed from that member of staff. If you have a sales team, you can segment your email lists to be sent from each sales person. 

Time is a huge factor in fulfilling a good email marketing strategy. 

Depending on your customers’ online habits, they will be more active at different times during the day. You can track popular opening times in the back end of most email marketing software (like MailChimp or ActiveCampaign). Deal with international customers? Keep in mind those time zones differences! 

You can figure out which times are best to email clients by sending emails out at different times and monitoring the opening rates. You can check which email gets the most traction and continue sending your emails at the most popular time. As a lot of people in the agricultural industry tend to be awake early the most popular time to send an email would be around 9:00am - but it varies from business to business. 

The same can be done with what day of the week you send your emails at. The best days to send emails are usually Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday as they are in the middle of the working week and people aren’t preoccupied with the weekend approaching.

Calls to action (CTAs) are more than just a big red button that says click me, in fact, everything in your email marketing leads up to the CTA. 

A good CTA acts like the climax to a compelling and interesting story. By the time your reader gets to the CTA, they should already be thinking about buying your product or investing in your service. 

When we talk about a clear call to action we aren’t talking about the generic ‘click here’ button. You want something original and something that represents your company. Just like the email itself, the CTA should also entice the customer to click on it and make a purchase. 

A good call to action does exactly that - it’s a call to action. Tell them exactly what they need to do and why.

Your customers won’t read your emails if they aren’t relevant to their needs and wants. You need to consider what your customer wants to read and what they want to take part in. 

If the information in your email is outdated or includes something they already know, then they’re probably not going to open it. They’ll delete it from their inbox without a second thought. 

Create subject lines that entice your readers in and keep them captivated with interesting, funny or unmissable content. 

Want to get your email marketing converting casual readers to loyal customers? Our Marketing Maximizer is just what you need. Get in touch and see how you can improve the return on your marketing efforts.