MARA is all about marketing automation, as you know it. You might be already using our 20+ automations scenarios or any other email marketing automations solutions, which probably increased your revenue already.
Some other very effective strategies that work together with automations can be used to increase revenues even more.
Optimizing campaigns from time to time is the only work you need to do after setting things initially. The top revenue added comes with very small costs from your side, which is the main reason for having a solid email marketing strategy in place.
Settings our top 20 automation scenarios will bring you a 10-15% increase in revenue and will be delivering new sales every day… forever.
The thing is that automations are only half you can do on the email marketing part of your business. And you want to maximize e-commerce revenue from email, right?
To push the increase if email marketing revenue to 25-30% of your total sales, you need to combine it with some manual campaigns, a tactic easily to forget when you have the automations in place.
How to maximize email marketing results for your business?
A good email marketing strategy has 2 parts:
- email marketing automations
- smart manual campaigns
The manual part is equally important with the automations. While you might think that the effort to manually send campaigns doesn’t bring similar results with automated scenarios, the effect of having this strategy increases overall email metrics and discovers the potential of your email database.
If you have 15% of your sales from email automations, you can grow this metric to 25% by adding some manual tactics. Manual campaigns are different for each business, so you need to test which are the best for yours.
Depending on your list size, sending manual newsletters can be done once a week, or once a month. If you have time or a dedicated person for this task, is recommended to try also sending them 2-3 times a week, only to the most engaged subscribers.
Only sending emails with promotions, sales, offers containing products has a few negative effects for your business:
- a higher unsubscribe rate because of the hard-selling techniques you are using.
- email marketing effectiveness will decrease over time, because people know what to expect from your emails: offers, vouchers…
How to create a smart email marketing strategy?
To have a clever email marketing strategy you need to balance automations with manual campaigns to the most engaged subscribers.
First you need to segment your list into engaged subscribers (active in the last 3 or 6 months) and non-engaged. For those that are not engaging with your emails you can try to reactive them or unsubscribe them after a while.
It’s important to stop doing only hard-selling emails, and to think email targeting in “customer groups”, like business niches.
Some ideas for manual email marketing campaigns
On the long term, having these kind of campaigns being sent regularly, will bring more revenue compared to only pushing promos and offers.
1. New items or exclusive products
While this one has a selling message, it’s self explanatory.
2. Products that will launched soon
New product on the market? Tell everybody about release date, pre-sale registration or whatever else you’re doing. You might link the newsletter with a landing page to collect extra information about subscribers.
3. Blog articles
Are you building a company blog and you don’t send articles to your shop list? That’s the biggest mistake, and you’re losing a lot from email subscribers. Blog articles are good for more than SEO and can increase email revenue by a few percents.
The title, a short paragraph and an image is simply enough to be added at the bottom of the newsletter.
4. Industry news, how to articles
Every industry is changing constantly. You are already following news websites or blogs. Their content might be important for your subscribers, so you can simply add the links to a blast email campaign.
Another example, which many of the DYI shops are doing is sending how-to articles related to the products they are selling.
5. Customer reviews, social proof
Social proof is one of the reasons people are more inclined to buy. Collect the best reviews for your store or products and include them in a newsletter. Maybe there is one very funny, or weird.
6. Products of the week
If you’re already using MARA, you can set recurring campaigns with specific algorithms. But there are times when you are so proud of a product that you will create a manual email and send it as a blast. Just add a free shipping or a voucher code and you’re done.
7. Company news
You move to a new office, hire a new marketing intern or sponsor a youth action? Share it with your subscribers and make them part of the whole family.
8. Key dates or seasonal events
It’s Earth day and you’re selling organic food or LED lightning? Than you must celebrate and tell your customers about it. Or maybe there is a very warm season so you might want to help your subscribers with some advice.
Combination of all of the above
Our advice is to mix campaign types and do whatever fits your business better. Add product to email content as dynamic blocks in the footer (you can do it using our advanced email editor).
There are tons of potential variations, and you must test the results within your subscribers list. Also, it’s very helpful to have them surveys being sent so you know what to send.
Always remember that sending too many emails is similar to spamming, regardless the content of the emails!
These are just a few ideas, but keep in touch following our blog to find some other ideas.
Final thoughts
It’s easy to consider your work sending manual campaigns won’t bring the same results with automations. You’ll consider this work as being useless, especially with all the non-sale emails
In the end, what’s the point of all these informative emails that do not bring revenue after being sent? On the long run, if you’re consistent, the effect of keeping customers engaged with these kind of campaigns will pay off. They are very connected with the rest of campaigns, improving their metrics and driving sales in the end.
Do not forget: email marketing is a channel which mastered correctly will bring you up to a third of total sales: it’s cheap, easy to scale and brings fast results.