Tag: Email Marketing Tips

5 Email Marketing Tips during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 Pandemic has forced online businesses to modify their email marketing strategies. The ongoing crisis has put them in a dilemma whether or not they should send promotional emails to their clients or customers.

When you have a pre-planned strategy, it’s difficult to make sudden changes and adjust the email program accordingly. The schedule gets disturbed, besides you also have to figure out what needs to be done.

If you are being too promotional instead of being supportive in this time, it can spoil your brand image and you may lose out on some loyal customers.

In this write-up, I have shared a few helpful email marketing tips that you can apply in your business and retain your customers during this COVID-19 pandemic.

Email Marketing amid Coronavirus outbreak

One of the major problems marketers are facing currently is communicating with the subscribers. Email marketers are finding it tough to analyze how to keep the communication going. While some do have a plan, they are struggling as to how they should approach their email subscribers.

Let’s try to understand what changes you should make in your email marketing strategy.

1. Regular Communication

When an outbreak or pandemic happens, a lot of chaos is created not only among the businesses but customers as well.

At this time, you need to be calm and make your customers calm as well. And for that, you need to communicate frequently with your customers via email.

The last thing you would want is to bring in the communication gap, which can break down the credibility that you have built over time.

Your customers need to be informed at regular intervals about how you are responding to the current situation and what sorts of changes have your brought or planning to bring into your business.

When you communicate often, you can land some promotional emails as well in their box, but the percentage of it should be less. Do keep an eye on the open and click rates and other important metrics.

2. Change the tone of your Emails

The lockdown has taken a toll on people. People are getting frustrated and even depressed sitting at home and thinking about the current situation of the world.

During this pandemic, the way you communicate has a lot of significance, and this is why you need to adjust the tone of your emails.

Identify the pain points of your customers. Add an emotional touch to your emails. Be motivating and empathetic. Create a friendly conversation and ask them how they are doing.

Never forget to lend a helping hand. Tell them you are with them in this difficult phase. Do whatever you can from your end to make your customers happy.

3. Express Gratitude

Customers love to be appreciated. A thanks message is always a great way to express gratitude to your customers for their continued love and support.

Reach out to them in their inbox and thank them for being a valued and loyal customer. Tell them that it’s all because of their continuous support which has kept them going.

We all are going through a rough patch, be it businesses or consumers. So it is important to create a cheerful environment and put a smile on your customers’ faces.

If you ran a donation campaign, you can let your customers know about it, like how much amount you collected and how you are trying to help the needful.

Again, do not forget to thank them for their contribution. They will also feel happy knowing that they could contribute to helping poor people.

4. Educate Customers

Apart from informing your email subscribers about the impact of COVID-19 on your eCommerce business, it is also important to educate them and tell how critical the situation is, how they can get themselves going and what precautions they should take.

Though consumers would be very well aware of it, it is your responsibility as well to show concern towards your customers so that they do not get carried away.

Besides, if you could relate your offerings with a message, that would make a great email. For example, we at knowband, have a Free Covid-19 Information Popup for PrestaShop and Magento 2, through which brands or marketers can educate customers as well as specify their offerings on the popup.

For more details, you can click here.

5. Inspire People

People are frightened, demotivated, and whatnot. They are fearing about their survival, their jobs, and their family. Be a pillar of strength for them.

Inspire them with motivational thoughts and boost up their energy. Give them peace of mind.

The confidence that seems shattered needs to be rebuilt. Console them that we would be over the COVID-19 pandemic soon and everything would resume to normal.

This can build a strong bond between your brand and your customers, and they will remember you for the lifetime.

Final Thoughts

If you haven’t given serious thought to email marketing during the COVID-19 pandemic, you could miss out on some loyal customers. It is still not too late.

Your current email marketing strategy will decide how customers interact with your brand in the future.

But, as of now, let’s just hope we get rid of this Coronavirus soon. Plan your email marketing tactics and do keep in mind the above-mentioned points.

I hope you enjoyed reading these 5 tips for email marketing during COVID-19 pandemic.

What we know about email marketing and what we don’t know

Email has been in the game for a very long time. It is a valuable resource for marketing of the product and services. Though it seems to be a very simple task to use emails as a marketing tool, there is actually lot more than what it looks on the surface. Despite all these, it is the most simple and most accessible marketing tool one can always have by his side.

Here, I am going to break into points discuss why email marketing is still the kind of digital marketing and what we need to know about emails.

1. Email is comparatively cheaper than other marketing tools-

Companies spend billions on print ads and internet advertising. However, when it comes to email marketing only a small proportion of their budget is specified for emails. It doesn’t mean that companies do not take emails seriously, it’s just email marketing is cheap and you do not have to reserve a huge budget for it.

“compared to other media, email messages are dirt cheap to send. With TV you are spending on ad agencies, creative studios, and cable channels. With print ads, you are helping to keep newspapers and magazines alive. Direct mail costs more than $600 per thousand pieces. With email, there are almost no costs at all. But its low cost only makes the argument stronger that email marketing is the most cost-effective advertising method available today”– hbr.org

E-Commerce stores use emails to notify customers on various event, send offers and discounts, send account related data, send newsletters and abandoned cart serial reminders. For sending large volume of emails at a time, merchants implement features to integrate email marketing vendors such as MailChimp and Constant Contact on their stores, while some choose to just use these tool independently.

Leveraging emails for sending abandoned cart reminders to the customers

You don’t have to believe my words for it. Just look at this joint study from shop.org and Forrester Research that says ” 85 percent of US retailers consider email as one of the most effective tools for customer acquisition”.

Email might have become the oldest online marketing tactic, but it still remains a vital one. It’s relatively easy to perform an email marketing campaign rather than spending fortunes on print and internet advertisements. Undoubtedly, email marketing cannot replace the print and internet advertising, but it is always something that is more easy and cheaper.

2. Email is a better tutor of Marketing skills-

If you do not have enough experience, you often rely on trial and errors to learn more. Marketing, for example, is a similar field which teaches you various lessons in every success and failure. With some of the means of marketing, you can never be sure whether the money you invested is paying off.

With modern email marketing, there is no need for trial and errors in most of the cases. You have tools backing your marketing campaign which can be used to forecast the trends and requirements. They can suggest the right time to send emails when there would be better chances for better open rates. You can also measure the click-through rates and see if the emails are doing their jobs.

For example, with tools for Abandoned cart reminders, you can send automatic emails with offers, coupons, and simple reminders to those customers who have abandoned your carts for any random reason. It is a handy way to recover lost sales due to shopping cart abandonment.

Email analytics to discover the performance of the campaign

In email marketing, you can discover exactly which emails have been clicked, by whom, what links were clicked on, and what part of your message was working. Thus, providing a greater insight into your marketing campaign and teaching you lessons in very campaign.

3. Emails are the mainstream and used by everyone-

If you ask anyone in your market if they use email, they will say yes for sure. Social Media marketing is a widely popular environment, but it cannot be said that every potential customer in your domain in on a social media channel.

With everyone not on a social media channel, email becomes the mainstream. Nearly everyone in your domain is believed to have an email account.

Moreover, 91 % of the email users check their emails at least once daily. It makes clear that ROI from emails could be comparatively as greater than social media marketing which is more costly than email marketing.

4. Emails are more direct way for broadcasting to relevant population-

Social media allows multi-way conversations between many to many users. Most of the time a broadcast through social media ends up with a huge population of audiences who are not even directly relevant.

Email, whereas is a more direct conversation that usually connects relevant people and does not involve additional participants. It might be considered as a drawback of email that limits the audiences for your broadcast. However, considering your efficacy to collect relevant email list and data, it cannot be a limitation. If you have effective tools to collect email data for your marketing, you might see that it is better to connect with few those who will be interested in your business, instead of a huge number of audiences who doesn’t even know about your business.

5. Emails are the driver of online and in-store sales-

Email marketing is so popular not just because it is easy and cheap, but because it is effective and drives sales. A study by Nielsen says that:

“28 percent of online shoppers subscribe to store or product emails simply to stay informed. 27 percent of online shoppers subscribe to store or product emails to save money.” 

A similar stat can be seen in a data from Deloitte that say 65 percent of customers find email coupons important in online grocery shopping.

Online stores get a fair chance to attract customers through offers in emails

Email marketing is an effective way of reaching out to the customers and having a chance for bargaining with them. Even the biggest brands believe in email newsletters and reminders to attract customers towards their stores. So, email is everywhere and it cannot be ignored for sure.

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