Email marketing has long been one of the most important ways of staying in front of your customers. The key for many marketers has been to stay within industry guidelines when it comes to approaching new people and manage to make their email effective when it is sent out.
Here are some tips for getting repeat traffic using email marketing:
Outsource: In today’s busy office world, you probably will want to focus on running campaigns and let the busy work be done by outsiders. Unless you are a one or two-person company, you will likely find that you will achieve a cost savings by doing so. SolidCactus.com is a good example of a company that provides a complete software package for e-mail marketing that allows them to use their customer service agents to create, maintain, and send messages that you want to see according to your schedule. The added time that you save in-house and the new-found synergy should allow you to bring better programs to market.
Target: The best way to get repeat traffic to a website is to develop a dialog with those who are purchasing from your website. Maintaining a tone that isn’t pushy, but provides relevant products or services for them in the form of a weekly or periodic update will give them the information that they need to purchase again. If your retail or website fulfillment processes are good, they should be primed to repeat the good experience again. A study of online purchase and pickup at retail stores by Imaginot showed that repeat customers currently make up the bulk of the business in some regions. Cultivating these people by creating a program that shows the things that they want to buy should help.
It’s the website!: One of the biggest potential bottlenecks to gathering repeat customers on your website is actually the performance of the website itself. To optimize your site for traffic, the first thing that you can do is make sure that the website is easy to login to and that cookies are set so that a customer does not need to drill through a maze in order to use an email link to get started on a purchase. Another thing that is important is that there is a solid relevancy engine in place. This type of task can normally be performed by those doing email marketing campaign services. The idea is to have your products and your categories so well categorized that when a customer does see products related to the one that they looked at, they will be more relevant than your competitors’ websites. The relevancy engine should also take into account the scenario where a customer browses for certain products and then does not buy. Those products should be folded into subsequent campaigns for that customer obliquely and well in order that they might receive the best information.
Email marketing: if implemented well, and in concert with your team, can make a positive difference on the number of return customers that you have. Choosing your partner wisely should therefore get you closer to your goals sooner.
