If this doesn’t describe your business’s experience with email marketing, you may be leaving money on the table. When done right, email marketing puts the right information in front of the right people at the right time, leading to high returns. The key is to parse, or segment, your mailing lists strategically. This will help you deliver the kind of value that gets people to open your messages.

Create Targeted Email Campaigns Through Segmentation

To begin to understand the value of segmentation, think about the kinds of emails you open right away. These probably come from friends, business associates, favorite companies or respected organizations. If you receive dozens of emails every day, you likely scan the subject lines first to see which ones immediately connect with you.

Marketers understand that people are more likely to open and act on messages that they find personally valuable and timely. Email list segmentation refers to dividing your list of contacts into smaller groups based on certain criteria. Ideally, these segmentation criteria will help you develop different email campaigns for different groups. Each campaign should be highly relevant to its target audience and should encourage readers to take specific actions.

Sample Segmentation Tactics

The Direct Marketing Association reports that 58 percent of all revenue is driven by segmented emails. Very simple segmentation can occur when a retailer divides a list of contacts by age, location, or gender. As you learn more about your prospects or customers, you can use this additional data for more advanced segmentation.

Say a shoe retailer wants to send a welcome email to everyone who has signed up for their mailing list. They could send one email to all of their contacts and feature many types of shoes in this message. But to increase the likelihood of recipients making a purchase, they could divide their mailing list by gender: men get promotions about men’s shoes and women get promotions about women’s shoes. They could also consider where their prospective customers are located. For instance, shoppers in Boston are probably more likely to purchase winter boots than shoppers in El Paso.

Once a prospect becomes a customer, marketers can develop more targeted campaigns based on past behavior. For example, when a person signs up for a shoe retailer’s mailing list, the retailer has no idea who that person needs to buy shoes for. But if the person purchases a pair of children’s shoes, it’s safe to assume they’ll need to buy more shoes as their child grows. Thus, the retailer could email the customer about sales on children’s shoes as well as adults’ shoes.

Creative Segmentation Ideas for Email Marketing

Demographics and purchasing behavior are certainly common and effective criteria for creating mailing lists — but they’re not the only options.

For businesses using a customer relationship management system, the possibilities for mailing list segmentation are endless. Your CRM already contains a wealth of customer data, from preferences to past interactions. By using this data to filter your customers, you can create highly targeted and personalized mailing lists. And if your CRM integrates directly with an email campaign tool like Mailchimp, you can add extra value to your email marketing without extra manual effort.

If you’re looking for new ways to use your customer data for email marketing, here are five strategies to consider. Use them independently, or combine multiple tactics at once for advanced segmentation.

Interest Level

Are you sending the same follow-up email to everyone on your list, regardless of how they treated your first email? There’s a big difference between recipients who clicked through but didn’t make a purchase and those who never opened the email at all.

Try dividing your contact list based on previous level of engagement, then craft separate follow-up messages for these groups. For those who didn’t open the first email, you may want to try the same message with a more engaging subject line. Meanwhile, you might send a follow-up survey to those who did open the first email to assess why they lost interest.

Content Preferences

If you’re in the habit of sending digital content via email, aim to curate your selections based on customer preferences. These days, many marketers have found that videos tend to generate more clicks. Still, some people might prefer text articles because they want to read at their own pace or they have a hard time loading videos on their phones.

Take note of which recipients tend to open which types of content. You could also send a survey to your customer base to ask which content formats and topics they prefer. If you track this data in your CRM and segment your email lists accordingly, you’re bound to fuel more interest in your messages.

Changes in Behavior

Think back to the online shoe retailer. Perhaps some of their customers buy new boots every fall — so what does it mean if those customers don’t return this year? Have they bought boots from a competitor? Have they moved to a snow-free city?

Keep an eye out for customers who have stopped purchasing as regularly as they used to. A customer’s failure to make a scheduled purchase doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve lost them, but it does mean that your business is no longer top of mind. Consider sending personalized reminders or special promotions to this group to try and reconnect with them. Offering an exclusive loyalty program can also be a great way to generate new engagement.

Sales Pipeline Stage

Some companies track prospective customers based on what stage they’re at in the sales pipeline. Examples of such stages might include prospecting, qualification, and negotiation.

When planning your marketing campaigns, it’s wise to use your sales pipeline stages as segmentation criteria. This is because your prospective customers will have different questions and concerns at different points in the buying process. By keeping your email content relevant to each pipeline stage, you won’t risk boring your audience with information they already know or overwhelming them with details they aren’t ready for.

Satisfaction Level

Hopefully, you have methods in place to collect customer feedback and monitor satisfaction. This is valuable data that can help to inform both the content and tone of your email messaging. After all, you don’t want to send obliviously upbeat messages to customers who have just left you negative reviews.

If you’re tracking satisfaction scores in your CRM, use these numbers to segment your customer list and develop appropriate email campaigns. For instance, happy customers could be courted for reviews or a referral program. Dissatisfied customers, on the other hand, will require a more delicate outreach. You may want to seek their feedback, apologize for their frustrations, offer an incentive to return — or all of the above.

Make the Most of Your Email Campaigns

If you want people to open your emails, you need to make sure those emails are worth opening. Segmenting your mailing lists based on key criteria helps you keep your messages timely and relevant to the recipients. By leveraging the customer data available to you, you can create targeted email campaigns that truly benefit your customers as well as your business.

The post How to Use Segmentation for Successful Email Marketing appeared first on Method.

Luckily, there are plenty of Black Friday marketing ideas you can use to make this happen. 

Keep reading for a step-by-step breakdown of how to build a Black Friday marketing strategy that will boost your sales. 

6 ways to perfect your Black Friday marketing strategy

Start your preparations early

For a lot of people, the time between Halloween and the holidays goes by in the blink of an eye. This often means you don’t have a lot of time to prepare for a Black Friday sale. 

One way around this is to plan your Black Friday marketing strategy sooner rather than later. 

To start, look at what has worked and what hasn’t this year. This will give you an idea of what your customers’ needs are and will let you be strategic in planning the Black Friday deals you offer. 

Next, review what marketing channels have been successful. Then use this information to shape your Black Friday marketing strategy.

Pro-tip: When building your Black Friday marketing strategy, start early and incorporate learnings from past successes and failures into your plan. 

Remember that bigger isn’t necessarily better

A lot of small business owners get intimidated by the discounted deals big chains offer. 

There is, however, no need for this as a little small business charm goes a long way! 

Instead of focusing on hefty discount codes, be smarter and more personal in the deals you include in your Black Friday marketing strategy. To find out what deals you should offer, dig into your historical data to find out:

• What your biggest sellers were last holiday season
• What products kept your customers coming back throughout the year
• What the biggest barriers to purchase are for your new and repeat customers
• What the top reasons are for sales opportunities not closing

Once you answer these questions, you can offer your leads and customers the most enticing offer possible.

Pro-tip: If answering this information is tedious for you, it’s time to invest in customer management software. This way, you can find these answers in just a few clicks. 

Back up your Black Friday marketing strategy with data

Customer data is important for every business. Yet it’s something that many small businesses don’t leverage — so it’s good to include it in your Black Friday marketing strategy.

To begin, rely on what you already know about your customer base such as their demographics, preferences, and transaction history. Next, determine:

• What marketing initiatives worked and didn’t in previous years
• Which types of customers are most receptive to your holiday promotions
• Which of your messages and promotions get the most engagement

Then, use these insights to inform every aspect of your Black Friday marketing strategy — from email campaigns to social media posts and personalized reach-outs.

Pro-tip: Instead of relying on your intuition to shape your Black Friday marketing strategy, let data be the driving force. 

Get on board with Small Business Saturday

Small Business Saturday is a fairly new addition to the holiday shopping season that should be part of your Black Friday marketing strategy.

For context, the day was put into motion by American Express in 2010 and has been gaining ground ever since. It encourages buyers to “shop small” by spotlighting some of the top small businesses in the U.S.A.

To participate, make sure your Black Friday marketing campaign continues through Nov. 28, if not the whole weekend (don’t forget about Cyber Monday)!

You can use these advertising freebies (signs, posters, email templates, web badges, etc.) to jumpstart your promotion. Make sure to use the hashtag #ShopSmall to get the word out about your business to as many small business shoppers as possible!

Pro-tip: Get creative with your Small Business Saturday ideas and celebrate all of the customers who have supported you over the years!

Step up your email marketing game

If you aren’t already using email marketing to connect with your customer base, there’s no better time to start. 

In the weeks leading up to Small Business Saturday, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, customers are glued to their inboxes — truly paying attention to alerts about upcoming deals.

Take advantage of your audience’s willingness to buy during this period by creating email campaigns that are personalized and automated. 

This is a crucial part of any Black Friday marketing strategy because:

• 91% of consumers are more likely to buy when they receive personalized offers. 
• Scheduling email campaigns in advance lets you focus purely on selling during the post-Thanksgiving shopping chaos.

Pro-tip: Segment your email audience into groups based on your buyer personas and offer each segment personalized offers as well as messaging. 

Make sure the early bird gets the worm

As part of your Black Friday marketing strategy, it’s smart to create hidden, gated landing pages that showcase your Black Friday promotions. This way your website is ready to go before Black Friday and you can instantly collect the lead details of interested buyers with a lead gen form. 

And when you consider that 54% of buyers start holiday shopping before Black Friday, it’s clear that this tactic is a great opportunity to:

• Get more eyes on your Black Friday promotions 
• Add leads to your contact database
• Close deals with early-bird shoppers before your competitors do
• Ship orders out the door before your peak season 

“54% of buyers start holiday shopping before Black Friday.” 

— Cision, 2017. 

In light of this trend, you can also offer a few pre-Thanksgiving deals for these early birds. Better yet, you can send special VIP offers to your most loyal customers.

Pro-tip: Let the cash flow in early with a pre-Black Friday marketing strategy that offers exclusive deals to top customers. 

Recap: Black Friday marketing strategy

Here’s a list of simple tips to make this Black Friday your best one yet. 

1. Don’t delay! Get started on planning your Black Friday marketing strategy early in the fall. 
2. Create promotions that are valuable to your target market instead of trying to offer the biggest discounts possible. 
3. Let data be the driving force behind your Black Friday marketing strategy.
4. Incorporate Small Business Saturday into your Black Friday plans. 
5. Leverage personalization and automation in your email campaigns. 
6. Take advantage of early-bird shoppers with pre-Black Friday offers. 

Looking for more ways to increase your sales? Then check out this free ebook! 

Image credit: Ashkan Forouzani via Unsplash

The post How to make your Black Friday marketing strategy successful appeared first on Method.

Yet did you know that focusing your efforts on retaining existing customers is far more cost-effective? Studies show that it costs about five times more to attract a new customer as it does to keep a current one. In fact, increasing customer retention by just five percent results in 25 to 95 percent higher profits! So while landing that new account may yield immediate satisfaction and excitement, focusing on retaining current customers can have a much larger impact on your bottom line.

Read on for four simple strategies that any business can use to improve their customer retention rate.

Build Relationships with Customer Management Software

Reducing customer attrition and increasing loyalty is all about improving customer service and building relationships. Personalizing each customer’s experience is key. But how can a small business with limited resources create a highly individualized experience for each customer?

The answer lies in customer relationship management software. As any sales rep knows, excellent customer service means so much more than simply looking at a customer’s last QuickBooks invoice. Utilizing CRM software allows you to take a deep dive into a customer’s history, giving you the ability to determine which products or services are most likely to meet a customer’s individual needs. Plus, using a CRM makes it easy to predict not only what a customer will need but when they will need it. This ensures that nothing gets missed or overlooked.

Your customers will appreciate receiving detailed and individualized service. These positive, personalized interactions build that all-important relationship which, in turn, increases customer loyalty and boosts your bottom line. When customers feel as though your business makes the effort to know and anticipate their needs, why would they want to look elsewhere?

Keep In Touch with Your Customers

Don’t let your customers forget about your business. Stay on their radar by sending email updates about promotions, special events, new products or services, or any other exciting news about your business. While you want to avoid inundating your contact list with pointless messages, sending regular and relevant updates will keep your company on their minds.

The key lies in personalizing your communications, and that’s another area where CRM software comes in handy. Here, you’ll find a goldmine of information that’s ideal for customizing those emails. You may simply choose to use first names rather than “Dear Valued Customer,” or you could use names and cities to personalize subject lines.

Take further advantage of the power of your CRM by segmenting your email campaigns. Use custom tags to tailor your emails to customers’ locations, interests, age groups, or other personalized data. This helps to ensure that your email messages are relevant, making customers more likely to open them.

Never Miss a Sales Opportunity

You just made a sale… now what? Take advantage of this golden moment when a customer is feeling positive and excited about their purchase! Now is the perfect time to cement their loyalty by offering a discount on their next purchase.

For example: after a sale, send an email offering 10 percent off their next purchase within a certain time period. Alternately, you could include a discount code with each product purchased. Offering a small incentive may be enough to prolong the glow that comes with making a purchase and extend those feelings of goodwill into another sale.

Explore different times when customers may be likely to buy again. Consider using marketing automation software to create a lifecycle marketing campaign that triggers emails when customers take (or don’t take) certain actions. Ideas include:

• Offering free shipping when an online shopping cart is abandoned
• Notifying customers when an item comes back in stock
• Sending “We miss you” emails to inactive customers (those who haven’t made a purchase within a certain timeframe)
• Sending “If you bought this, you may be interested in that” emails after a purchase

The options are endless, but the goal is to take advantage of any and all selling opportunities. There are a number of software options that can automate lifecycle marketing campaigns, making it hands-off for your team.

Engage Through Social Media

Social media offers a great way to interact with your customers. Use your accounts to not only give your brand a voice but allow your customers to have a voice too. Responding promptly and authentically to customers on Facebook and Twitter puts a human “face” on your company, which builds customer trust. When customers know they’ll get a response from a real, live person, they’ll be more likely to reach out — and they’ll feel heard and appreciated when they do.

You may want to monitor your social media accounts to identify especially engaged customers and reward them with discount codes or special deals. This will help to build loyalty and drive repeat business. Encourage your happy customers to continue engaging with you through social media, as satisfied reviews can go a long way toward building your customer base.

Conclusion

Acquiring customers requires an investment of time, effort and resources. Why not take advantage of the work you’ve already put in and focus on retaining those existing customers? Utilize the tools available to you, like CRM software and social media, to maximize your results and make your life easier.

Remember, it costs less to retain current customers than it does to attract new ones. By personalizing your communications and interactions, you’ll build loyalty and increase customer retention, giving your bottom line a boost.

The post From Casual Buyer to Loyal Fan: 4 Ways to Improve Customer Retention appeared first on Method.

In order to generate repeat business through email marketing, you need to write emails your customers want to read. Luckily, you can make this process easier by leveraging the power of your QuickBooks CRM. Between the wealth of customer data and handy features like email campaigns, your CRM is a valuable tool in your email marketing strategy.

Keep reading for four tips on how to increase customer engagement and drive new sales through email marketing.

1. Personalize your messages

If you’ve ever received an email that started with “Dear Valued Customer,” chances are you didn’t feel valued at all. It’s the email marketing equivalent of buying a picture frame and leaving the stock photo in it — it’s pretty impersonal.

Your CRM contains plenty of valuable data, from customers’ names to their purchase histories. Take advantage of this information to create personalized subject lines and messages that speak directly to each customer. It’s harder to ignore something that feels like it was intended for you, which is why personalized emails have a higher open rate than emails without personalization.

Method CRM users: Use merge fields in your email templates to automatically insert personalized data, like the customer’s name or city, into each message.

2. Address specific audiences

When it comes to email marketing, one size usually doesn’t fit all. If you offer a variety of products or services, you likely have different customer segments with unique characteristics. For instance, a tutoring company may have students ranging in age from elementary school to high school.

To maximize customer engagement, prepare messages that specifically address the needs of different groups. Consider the tutoring company — this could mean sending college prep information to parents of high school students, while promoting after-school activities to parents of younger students.

Considering that segmented emails generate 58% of all revenue, it pays to ensure that your offers are relevant to the recipients!

Method CRM users: Use advanced search to filter your list of email recipients based on location, keyword tags, or other criteria.

3. Inspire action

If you’ve ever purchased furniture from IKEA, you probably recall the overwhelming feeling of opening the box and seeing a million disjointed pieces. Similarly, people can become overwhelmed while skimming dozens of emails in their inboxes.

Make life easier for your customers by writing actionable subject lines that make it clear what to expect from your message. This could mean using action verbs (like “buy” or “save”), announcing a special offer, or even asking a question. The point is to inspire customer engagement by letting customers know what they can do with the email.

For example, compare the subject lines of two emails I recently received from food delivery apps:

I’ll let you guess which one I clicked on immediately. (Hint: It was the one that promised me discounted food.)

Method CRM users: After crafting the perfect action-oriented email, use it as inspiration for future campaigns. Save the email as a custom template and share it with other users in your Method account.

4. Don’t be afraid to experiment

Every business is unique, and so are its customers. To determine what types of emails drive customer engagement for your business, experiment with different strategies and see what succeeds. In email marketing, this is called A/B testing.

The premise is to run two nearly identical versions of an email campaign and compare the performance of each version. The campaigns might differ on variables like subject line, layout, or email send time. Once you learn which factors lead to higher sales, you’ll be able to create more effective campaigns in the future.

Method CRM users: Use Method’s free integration with Mailchimp to improve your email campaign performance. Upload your Method contacts to your Mailchimp account, then set up and manage A/B tests within Mailchimp.

You’ve already done the hard work of acquiring customers — now the goal is to maintain customer engagement. With these tips in mind, you’ll be well-equipped to write effective emails that capture attention and drive repeat business.

If your email marketing strategy still needs a boost, Method CRM is here to help. Sign up for your free trial today!

The post 4 Ways to Increase Customer Engagement Through Email Marketing appeared first on Method.

Between generating leads, creating quotes, fulfilling orders, invoicing customers, and managing employees (if you have them!), it can be hard to find time to eat or sleep.

And some other tasks — like sending email campaigns to existing customers — may fall off your to-do list entirely. When you have limited time to devote to email marketing, your instinct may be to focus on marketing to leads.

However, the cost of acquiring a new customer is 5 to 25 times higher than the cost of retaining a customer. To maximize the ROI of time spent crafting email campaigns, your best bet is to focus on driving repeat business from your existing customer base.

In this post, we’ll cover three essential email campaigns that keep customers coming back, plus tips on using your QuickBooks-integrated CRM to streamline the process. (As an added bonus: once the repeat business starts rolling in, save time by entering new sales directly in your CRM, rather than opening QuickBooks.)

1. ‘New Offering’ Email Campaigns

When you introduce a new product or service, chances are some of your existing customers will be interested in it. However, your customers are busy people and likely aren’t checking your website daily.

Share the good news by sending an email campaign that highlights key features of the new release. You can even include a special deal to encourage people to try it out.

For instance, when the creators of a VPN service developed a password manager app, they sent existing customers an email inviting them to try the new service for free.

Source

Method CRM users: There are a million things to do when you’re launching something new, but don’t forget about the email campaign! Create an activity to remind yourself to send the campaign when things calm down.

2. ‘Celebration’ Email Campaigns

For many people, reading emails is a monotonous task — so why not inject a little joy into the process? Special occasions, such as birthdays, are great opportunities to reach out and send customers a small gift, like a discount or free item.

In the example below, Pizza Hut sent customers a limited-time offer to receive free cinnamon sticks with their next order.

Gestures like this will make your customers feel valued and appreciated, which helps build long-term relationships. Plus, birthday emails have a 481% higher transaction rate than other promotional emails, so you’ll also reap the benefits of celebrating.

Source

Method CRM users: Add a custom field to the customer screen to track birthdays or other important dates. Then, streamline the process of sending celebratory emails by creating a custom template to reuse and share with your team.

3. ‘Personalized Recommendation’ Email Campaigns

When tasked with making a decision, many people turn to friends or family for advice. The logic behind this behaviour is sound.

Your loved ones know your personality and preferences, so they’re more likely to give recommendations that align with your interests.

To generate new business from existing customers, put yourself in the role of an insightful friend. Use demographic and purchase history data to identify other items your customers might like, then send emails highlighting these items.

In the email below, Dollar Shave Club wisely presumes that someone who has ordered razors is interested in personal grooming, so they suggest other shaving products to add to the purchase.

Source

Method CRM users: Use tags to categorize customers by age, location, purchase history, or other key characteristics. Then, use advanced search to filter by tags and send recommendation emails to targeted subsets of customers.

If you’re ready to build stronger relationships with your existing customers, why not try one of these email campaigns?

With a built-in email campaign tool and a free Mailchimp integration, Method CRM is here to help you generate repeat business. If you’re not yet a subscriber, sign up for your free trial!

The post The Best Email Campaigns to Keep Customers Coming Back appeared first on Method.

“Social media may be the young whippersnapper nipping at email’s heels, but the content king of the inbox still holds sway in social influence, according to a study by SocialTwist. Over an 18-month period, SocialTwist monitored 119 referral campaigns from leading brands and companies. The results showed a significant advantage to email’s ability to convert new customers compared to Facebook and Twitter.”

The trouble is, most small businesses don’t have dedicated marketers on their teams, but it’s still important to have an effective way to communicate with leads collected at a trade show, or leads with outstanding quotes. So let’s take a look at how you (yes, you!) can leverage your email marketing potential using your CRM.

1. Create Specific Email Marketing Campaigns by Segmenting Your Contacts

One of the first lessons you learn in marketing is the more specific the message, the better the result. Focusing on the needs of your customers in a granular way lets you address specific concerns and get to the root of their pain points. That means you need to be able to segment your contacts list into groups in order for you to tailor your marketing campaigns to each group individually.

Mailchimp, an email marketing service provider used by millions (and one of Method’s proud app integrations!) demonstrated the impact of segmentation in this report. After sampling 2,000 Mailchimp users and some 11,000 segmented campaigns, what was their conclusion?

“By narrowing your focus and sending messages to targeted groups within your lists, your recipients will find your campaigns more relevant—and relevant campaigns get better results.”

Mailchimp’s study saw more favorable results (especially in terms of click rates) for users who chose to segment their email lists by making use of merge fields that automatically segment your contacts based on criteria you set up.

Your Takeaway

Segmenting your contact list when sending out email marketing results in higher click rates (tweet this)

Now It’s Your Turn!

Segment your email list using Method’s mail merge functionality to create a list based on Contact Type (Customer, Lead, Vendor). To get even more specific with your segmented email list, make use of Method ‘Tags’, which are similar to the tags you use in Gmail or other social media channels.

2. Personalize Your Emails for Higher Open Rates

Even if you’re sending out a mass email, there’s no harm in making it feel more personal to the recipients. In fact, there are huge benefits to this tactic!

Research by Temple’s Fox School of Business found that “…product personalization, in which customers are directed to products that their past purchasing patterns suggest they will like, triggered positive responses in 98 percent of customers.”

Customers like to feel appreciated, and the easiest way to do that is to create a personal relationship with them. Who do you think feels more cared for – Customer 1178 or Bob Crenshaw? If you guessed Bob, you understand why it’s so important to personalize interactions with your clients.

Your Take Away

Personalized emails receive higher open rates. (tweet this)

Now It’s Your Turn!

Address your leads by their first name when you email them by using the function “Firstname.Listbuilder” to pull their first name from your contact list in Method.

If you’re looking to generate new business from existing customers, personalize an email acknowledging a customer’s past puchases. You can also take a look at the Activities with your customer so you can speak directly to their experience with your company!

The post 2 Simple Tactics to Successful Small Business Email Marketing appeared first on Method.