Do you have a great marketing strategy in mind but wonder how to make the most of the strongest digital marketing channel – email marketing?
Email marketing is one of the best marketing approaches to help lay the foundation of customer engagement while achieving other business parameters. However marketers these days are engaged in the never-ending cycle of strategizing and executing marketing campaigns, and any bottleneck in the process of developing and implementing an email marketing campaign can put all their effort to waste. Thus, it is important to stay aware of the common challenges of email marketing and strategize solutions to overcome those issues. Here is a list of four common email marketing challenges that marketers often face and how they can be dealt with.
Email Challenge # 1 – Achieving customer engagement rate
Effective engagement not only culminates loyalty but also pushes remove purchase decisions and brand advocacy. To successfully build and maintain a long term relation with your clients, you need to create a position of trust within your customers. And trust can only be gained when you know the right way to engage with the target contact list.
The first step to engage the right way with your target market is to create the right email list and segment your contacts according to the customer lifecycle stage. Further, you need to meet customer expectations and understand how they desire to engage. You need to adopt the right email marketing strategies to provide content and information that customers want to engage with that is relevant to their assigned segment of customers. But customer engagement via email marketing can be challenging for marketers, because their email marketing needs to be planned for all the stages of the customer lifecycle. You need to have a strategy for a future stream of emails.
Personalized email marketing is replacing mass email marketing strategies, so modern marketers need to create automated, rich, and relevant emails. The best way to engage with contacts is to identify what they are searching for and connect with them through a relevant and optimized chain of content. Emails that contain information, tips, and content to meet needs and expectations have the capability to nurture their receivers.
To get customers engaged the right way, you need to gather the right set of data through forms or your existing CRM to create personalized, relevant and targeted emails that achieve better engagement and retain customers’ interests. Also, delivering the right message at the right time increases customer engagement.
Email challenge # 2: Customer acquisition
The prime goal of email marketing campaigns is to build and increase customer acquisition. But the biggest difficulties in obtaining new clients are defining the target customer segment and determining the best strategy to build a customer base in that target segment. At the same time, getting new customers can be more expensive than engaging and retaining the existing ones.
With modern marketing automation suites and their lead nurturing capabilities to move prospects through the buying cycle, marketers can acquire new customers at a lesser cost. It also helps them avoid risks of errors by enabling users to automate campaigns with the right content and schedule them well ahead of time.
Email Challenge 3: Enhancing retention rate
Focusing on retaining your old or newly acquired customers is just as important as planning for new lead generation, rather than more. Client retention adds to higher revenue generation at a lower cost as compared to new customer acquisition. Moreover, existing customers can refer your business to new contacts, bring new customers, and become brand evangelists.
Since customers these days have plenty of choices and options to compare before they make the purchase call, customers’ attention span is gradually decreasing. With an overwhelming range of choices they can opt for while they choose a brand for a product or service they need, only the best email marketing strategies can successfully retain existing customers. Marketers need to deliver personalized and relevant content or information to targeted customers. You need to focus on consumers’ needs, issues they face and solutions needed to address those issues.
Marketing automation suites enable marketers to use email marketing in a more streamlined and measured approach in retaining customers.
Automation platforms can deliver scalable relevant content and solutions to existing customers by creating data-backed email nurture programs that turn marketing campaigns into revenue generators. In order to create data-driven email programs, marketers can sync their CRM with the automation platform to source the right data about customers from CRM, online signup forms, sales development reps, customer service team notes and by integrating other teams that generate information on customers’ changing persona, needs, lifestyle habits and expectations from products.
Email challenge 4: Enhancing email personalization
Personalized emails empower marketers to achieve and fix their various objectives and difficulties as it aids in acquiring, engaging and retaining targeted customers. Customer-focused content generates higher click-through rates by creating positive and effective engagement with customers.
Modern marketers are pushing the limit to personalize email content in leaps and bounds using email marketing automation tools to help alleviate challenges of email personalization.
But unfortunately, marketers are not utilizing the full potential of marketing automation tools in creating personalized email content, slowing down the performance of their email campaigns. The reason behind it is that they are unable to source the right data for accurate personalization and lack the right automation tools needed to personalize messages for their targeted segment of the audience.
In the end, we all are aware that technology brings new challenges along with its advantages, but with the right skill set to adapt to the changing technology, the challenges can easily be overcome. In the same way, if you are still unable to cope with the challenges of email marketing, our professional guidance will help you streamline your entire email marketing operation.
