Email best practices
Ignoring email growth hacks? Big mistake
The inbox is a saturated and noisy digital space. What is your company currently doing to differentiate your email from competitors? Use growth hacks.
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There’s a bagel place down the street from our office that we love going to. Now, in New York City you can easily find a bagel shop every two blocks, so why are we so attached to this bagel place? The dancing bagel that rocks out on the curb out front. The unexpected sight is entertaining and his energy is contagious. They’ve successfully growth hacked their way into our hearts (or should I say stomachs).
Much like the bagel industry in New York, the inbox is a saturated and noisy digital space. What is your company currently doing to differentiate your email from competitors? Are you taking advantage of small hacks to attract customers to your funnel and to retain loyal customers? Here are six tips for generating growth through email.
Compelling content drives signups
Creating engaging content on your site will drive people to sign up for your emails, and then the amazing content in your emails will keep people talking about your product.
Your blog is a great place to do this by coding or using a plug-in to add an email opt-in form at the bottom of each blog post. The ease of access can turn a casual reader into a super-user and super-sharer after they subscribe to your emailed blog updates.
Get social with it
Don’t forget that email and social make a good pairing too. Take advantage of Twitter’s Lead Generation Card to seamlessly capture email addresses from Twitter users who are interested in your product. Similar to your usual promoted tweet, a Lead Generation Card is served on Twitter feeds of users who meet the predefined demographic you’d like to target. Users can sign up your email communication through your tweet without ever having to leave their feed.
Then, in your emails, be sure to include relevant social sharing buttons, to extend your reach.
Customer succeeds, you succeed
Once a customer opts-in to receive your emails, the conversation has only begun. Build up customer loyalty from the beginning by using a drip campaign, where you schedule a triggered series of emails to guide the customer through the onboarding process. You’ll want to experiment with the optimal cadence for your business and determine how long it takes a customer to get acquainted with your product. Once you have this timing down, you’ll be ready to schedule your series of automated emails.
Better with friends
Hack the powerful network you already have access to: your existing customers. With just a snippet of code, you can embed a referral widget into your website to empower customer evangelists to share exciting product news and discounts with their friends. Because the email comes from a friend, open and click rates are quite high and can drive serious growth. Proceed cautiously though, these programs can intentionally or unintentionally lead to abuse and require thoughtful creation and close supervision.
Win back those lost sales
Sometimes, a small reminder goes a long way. Recapture potentially lost sales byretargeting customers who have engaged with your product (started making a purchase or partially onboarded) but for some reason didn’t follow through. Collect this informationwith your CRM database and build a triggered email that automatically goes out to these customers reminding them that they might have forgotten to complete their task.
Remind customers why they came to you in the first place
Back to the point we made about email being a competitive space, it’s easy for customers to forget why they subscribed to so many newsletters to begin with. To prevent your emails from making the cut, add a field near the unsubscribe button in your emails that remind customers when and where they first subscribed. So on a bad day where a customer opens their inbox to 120 new messages, yours being one of them, they won’t go unsubscribing from your list in a temporary fit of frustration
Email is a powerful tool for growing your audience and customers and, with these tips, you’ll be the dancing bagel in people’s inbox in no time. What did we miss? What are some of your favorite email growth hacks?
