By now, anyone with a business knows the basics of email marketing: you collect addresses, then send out your message to those addresses. The more email addresses you have on your list, the greater the chance for your message to be converted to whatever you’re promoting. The email should look nice and have an effective message. With everything in its place, you should have an open rate of about 5%, and a clickthrough rate somewhat higher than 1%.
I would prefer a 15% engagement rate, wouldn’t you?
Email marketing has been plagued by spammers for as long as I can remember. Nowadays, spam is estimated as high as 72% of total global email traffic. That means for every three email messages you receive, your email provider is catching and discarding seven. Now think about how much spam does make it past the filters. It’s a sobering thought. The good news is that even considering all this, email remains the most effective direct online marketing tool. By giving you their personal email address, your recipient has handed you a powerful means to communicate with them. It’s up to you to make the most of it. So how do you get your subscribers to actually click and open your emails?
Integrated marketing built directing into your CRM
Tools like MailChimp and Constant Contact are very good quality email marketing services. Our platform takes advantage of combining the ease, efficiency and effectiveness of these tools, but makes it even easier, more efficient and more effective. By utilizing the same tools that you may already be accustomed directly within your CRM and eliminating the list export from your database and then uploading it into your marketing tool and then taking that information gleaned from the marketing campaigns back into your primary database we save you time (and also money). The Vertica CRM integrated marketing tools function in very much the same way as other services, but since our marketing tools are integrated directly into your Business Broker CRM, we can take it 1 step father. Enter the Dynamic list.
Static vs Dynamic Marketing
You can create and use contact lists to send emails to existing clients, potential leads, business partners or any other sort of list you can think of they sky is the limit! You can create lists to be either dynamic or static. A Static list has manually stipulated set of members it can send to. This is the same function that you may already be familiar with Mailchimp & Constant Contact. Specify the list of recipients, associate a personalized email, and press send.
A Dynamic list is automatically populated and updated based on a set of filter criteria. So lets say you want to send out a periodic email to anyone who in interested in a Laundromat, located in central New Jersey, with a net cash flow of min. $100,000. With a dynamic list, anyone who at the time that the email is sent out meets those 3 criteria will receive the personalized email letting them know that a new listing is on the market that meets their specifications. So why is this more powerful then Constant Contact? Its simple, yeah is saves you time, yeah is saves you money, but more importantly, it puts the information that the buyers want to see at the time that the buyer wants it and is exponentially more effective then anything that you may have experienced previously. If you make a change in the buyers contact record, the buyer will automatically be placed in the corresponding list.
But wait, there’s more! If this does not help you pull the trigger, then listen to this. We have created a tool for the buyers to update their profile on your website and in real-time update their information in your CRM. Once the buyer logs into their data room on your website, they have the opportunity to change their wish list/profile. Once they do so, your dynamic lists will be automatically updated to affect the buyers interests. Ultimately, a Dynamic email list is much more effective to your bottom line then other marketing solutions.
A/B Email Marketing
You can apply A/B split testing directly to email marketing. By determining which message was better received, you can increase your open and response rates. While most people believe that a 2% open rate is something to get excited over, I’ve had experiences with open rates on A/B tested email of closer to 20% by constantly improving my clients messaging through testing. A/B email marketing should be available as a service from whichever email provider you use. Other tools such as Google Analytics, anti-spam testing, QR codes, signup forms for your website, etc. are available as well, at no additional charge.
Web Tracking
So what do you do once you have the best email marketing integrated with you already powerful CRM? What would you say if I told you you can take it even further? Once a buyer opens an email or clicks on a link within the email and visits your favorite laundromat listing, as our platform is integrated with your website you can also track when a buyer visits a specific page on your website. In other words, as a follow up to your already powerful Dynamic email marketing campaign, you can also automatically add the buyer visiting your specific listing to a follow up marketing campaign. The web tracker allows you to keep track of contacts on your site. An announcement will be made within your CRM activity feed whenever a contact visits your page. You can then send the contact a personalized email saying that you noticed that they visited your website and offer them a time slot to discuss your latest listing that you already know that they are interested in.
Social Media Cross Promotion
The purpose of the email is to focus your recipients on the message you’re promoting, but they’ll also see and respond to other elements in the email. Some of the easier things to promote are your social media channels. Every single email you send out should have links to your social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or wherever you have active social media content. By offering your recipients an alternative way to connect to your business that’s comfortable for them, you’ll still be able to retain them as viewers even after they purge their inboxes.
Using Embedded and Linked Images
Using images in email is a double-edged sword. Use too few, and your email looks uninteresting. Use too many, and spam filters will send your email to the junk folder. Nearly every email client will automatically block images that are linked from your server. If the user wants to see the image, they have to specifically allow the images to be seen. The reason for this is the request for a remotely linked image can be used to formulate email open rates and even track which specific recipients have opened the email.
Embedded images are sent along with the email as embedded code and reassembled when the email is viewed. The advantage to that is users will immediately see the images when they open the email. But since they don’t have to be called from the server, the can’t be counted in your statistics as having been opened.
Here’s a tip: set up your email so that one key content image is a link, not an embedded image. By using one linked image among your other embedded images, users will be intrigued by the missing content and authorize the download of the image to see what they’re missing.
Personal Content
I get an email that has my first name in the subject regularly, and I open it nearly every time I receive it. Why? Because it grabs my attention by talking to me personally. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book, but it absolutely works. By grouping your list into interests, demographics, and even previous email actions (clicked, not clicked), you can personalize the content you send to improve your engagement.
By using these strategies in your email marketing, you can dramatically increase the quantity and quality of engagement with your buyers/sellers.
Joshua Factor is the founder of Vertica CRM. A software company dedicated to helping Business Brokers and M&A professionals work more effectively through technology and earn more commissions. For more information about their main product, Business Brokers CRM and how it is designed with the spirit of competitive advantage at its core, visit www.BusinessBrokersCRM.com or call +1 212 381 4994 in the USA or +61 385 184 759 in Australia.