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By Suvrajit Sarkar – Product Manager at DIGITAL HARBOR
While growing a brand, your email list is the most valuable asset that you can have. It is something that always remains with you and you can utilize it to reach out to your customers again and again. The major disadvantage of using other platforms like Facebook and Instagram is that you do not have direct access to customers. Even if you do have temporary access to them through fan pages, chat and blogs, you don’t have access to them permanently. For example, Facebook may decide to block you one day and all the fans and customers that you have access to will be gone. Moreover, these days, even if you do have access to their fan pages, and you post regular content, they don’t necessarily reach out to all the customers. Also, you do not have control over where and how the post appears.
On the other hand, you have 100% control over the email list that you have. You can reach out to them again and again with your offers. Although, you do need to ensure that they do not appear too intrusive otherwise they have high chances of going into the spam folder.
In this article, we will discuss the importance of email marketing, expansion of product marketing and different types of email sequences.
Initially when the product marketing began in 2008, product managers were more focussed on demonstrating the features of the product. For example, marketing for mobiles meant showcasing their memory, storage, camera quality, etc. But later when Blackberry came out, the marketing was more focussed on how business owners and tech-savvy professionals could communicate using a phone that was secured by the entire Blackberry system. Finally, when the iPhone was released, a huge paradigm shift happened. It became a symbol of wealth and luxury. People were suddenly more concerned about their status quo as compared to the features of the phone. It was marketed as a “thousand songs in a pocket phone” and a “day-to-day use” phone.
The main takeaway from these examples is that when you are designing your email content, it should be done in such a way that you can entice the users with your offerings and really hit the point. It is important to highlight not just the features, but also the benefits.
Easiest way to effectively market a product is to come up with an Excel sheet, which has three different columns for features, benefits and hooks. Let us go through some examples to properly understand this concept.
For example, for a home workout, you can have features like “30 extreme workouts”. The benefits can be “complete high-intensity workouts in the comfort of your home”. But the hook here is most important and it has to be captured in your email marketing content- “get fit in 90 days without facing the glaring eyes of the grim crowd”. The hook is something that hits the user right away. This is also called framing which basically means putting them in the future state. This is something that they aspire to achieve.
Another example, for baby showers you can put features as “a detailed guide to baby showers with 50+ ideas”. Benefits can include “a complete guide to baby showers that speeds up your creative planning”. Hook can be “plan a memorable event that will make your friends jealous.” The hook is something that will entice the users right away. This puts them in a frame of mind that this is something that they want to achieve.
Let us take the third example of fitness training videos. Here features can be “a complete list of cardio and strength training exercises that take just 5 minutes to execute”. Benefits could include “detailed fitness videos with quick and simple exercises”. Hook can be “easy exercises that will melt away abdominal fat in just 5 minutes a day and leave you looking great in time for your vacation”.
According to the speaker’s experience in Shuddh desi, when they first started trying out email marketing, they gave a lot of free content. They would do it without even asking them to go to their website, check the products and try to sell them with some great offers. They understood that the people were engaged with their emails, because they were opening them and going through their free content. But eventually, this put them in a very dicey situation. Later, when they started promoting their products through emails, they witnessed a lot of people unsubscribing from their email list. If you try to understand the situation carefully, what actually happened was that they got friend-zoned in the beginning. Their initial emails did not have any purpose of selling the products. Hence, it is of prime importance for the business owner to be clear from the beginning. It should be understood from your email marketing strategies that you mean business.
Email sequences are nothing but a series of emails that you send to the users as part of your mailing list. Email sequences usually start from an initial welcome email, which basically means 1-2 emails that you send right after users subscribe to your email list.
Second type of emails in the email sequence is called a low-value offer sequence. These include emails in which you build up a relationship with your potential customers. It is essential to not bombard them with a very high-value offer because they don’t know or trust you yet. But don’t be surprised if your user does not go for the offer right in the first email. The conversion of users into regular customers requires that you send a series of emails to ensure that they are slowly tuned up to purchase the offer. There is a saying in digital marketing that says that it takes 7 different touch points for someone to actually make a purchase from you from the point they become aware of the offers that you have. For example, if you are planning to sell a digital camera, the first time you introduce it to the market, nobody is going to buy it. They might like the content, they might be interested to know more, but they won’t be ready to buy it. Slowly after 7 different interactions, they might actually subscribe to some newsletters or other content from your website.
Third sequence in the email marketing sequence is called a warm-up sequence, which basically involves warming up the users. For example, if you have a very cold audience who has come to your email list, then it is the time to warm them up a bit about what the product is, what the business believes in, what is your brand about, and finally also to tell them about the offers and products that you have. This process usually needs 4-5 emails. The warm-up emailing sequence could go in parallel with the low-value sequence. For example, if you are sending out 4-5 low-value offer sequences, then every alternate day can be used to also send warm-up sequences. This ensures that the users not only get to know more about the brand, as well as your offers.
The final sequence used in email marketing sequence is called a high-value offer sequence. It is a common myth that digital marketing cannot be utilized to showcase the brand’s high-value offers? This is not true because once you have a set of customers who are engaged with your brand and believe in your value, you will be able to sell any product. These kinds of emails have to obviously be given after all the initial, warm up and low-value email marketing sequences.
Despite the high growth of social media, email marketing still remains a very effective tool to have access to customers. To be successful in this strategy, it is important to use relevant content and hit the right kind of audience. The potential of email marketing is further highlighted by its high ROI and cost-effectiveness, with studies suggesting that email marketing can be up to 40 times more effective than social media. It’s the secret weapon for giving personalized content, increasing sales, and communicating with your customers effectively.
About the Author:
Suvrajit Sarkar – Product Manager at DIGITAL HARBOR
Email marketing is a strategic digital marketing strategy used by businesses to communicate with their potential customers through email messages. It usually includes sending personalized content, promotional offers, and product updates to a targeted list of subscribers.
The main benefits of email marketing include cost effectiveness, targeted messaging and the ability to build and nurture relationships with customers.
Sequential emails include a series of 4 types of emails used for marketing purposes. They start with a welcome mail, a low-value offer mail, a warm-up mail and a high-value offer mail.
According to several studies, email marketing has been proven to be very effective for product marketing. It is much more effective than social media marketing. It is something that always remains with you and you can utilize it to reach out to your customers again and again.
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