The basic goal of your email campaigns should be to attract customers to your homepage. Getting stuck in a rut trying to constantly sell to customers is a sure way to turn people off pretty quickly.
Coming up with fresh ways to add value to your readers is always a challenge. Celetex Ltd., an online clothing retailer, did this quite successfully by utilizing a few tricks to add value for their customers.
1) Add value before trying to sell
If you want to add real value to your customers, don’t use the hard sell every single time. Instead, use email campaigns to point customers to your homepage by promising interesting, relevant, and exciting content.
Add value to your homepage by adding content that is useful to your customers. One thing that should NOT be done by anyone is to simply have a sales email or homepage and only use it to announce and sell new products. It’s a waste of potential that will actually repel anyone who visits your page.
There is a time and a place for sales emails and landing pages. These should be used, of course, but the focus should be on providing extra information and content for your customers along the way.
Any salesman will tell you that going straight for the sale without communicating and understanding the other side is a sure-fire way to not sell anything.
Email campaigns and websites give you exposure and are a chance to educate and communicate with your customers.
2) Offer your customers more
Maximize real sales by ensuring that you provide the best overall package for your loyal customers.
If, for example, your company is in the recruiting business, one thing that you could do is email lists of available jobs to your clients. And you should. But there is a lot more you can offer to your clients.
Who are your clients, and what do they really want? Job listings are one thing, that’s for sure. But more than listings, they want a job!
Anything you can do to help them get what they want will encourage them to use your services. So it is essential to find out who your customers really are.
In the case of a recruiting company what else can you do? You can send emails that link to an article on your site about how to create a killer resume, or another article about what kind of questions you should ask at the end of an interview to get a call back.
Add further value by pairing with another business to send your clients discounts on face to face or online training seminars. Offer links to interviews with top industry professionals, and so on.
What value you can add for the people on your mailing list is limited only by your imagination and the time and energy you are willing to put in for your readers. And when you send out regular emails alerting your readers to fresh, varied, and exciting topics that are relevant to them, they will follow the link back to your main site.
And once your readers have clicked on your email link and are on your main site, what then? This is when visitors will see the other content you have and maybe they’ll spend some time reading your other articles. Maybe they’re curious about a product or service that you offer and they’ll spend a bit of time looking at it in detail.
Perhaps all this will lead to an immediate sale, and perhaps it won’t. The key point here is to keep building up your company in the reader’s minds. Every article you publish adds weight to your reliability. Eventually the relationship and credibility that you’ve built up will transfer into profitable sales.
3) Use A/B testing
Celetex Ltd., the online clothing retailer mentioned earlier used a clever trick which soon resulted in a noticeable jump in profit every time they sent out email campaigns. Using A/B testing they crafted several “test” emails on a small sample of their customers, and used the most successful versions on a larger group.
In the very beginning there was no noticeable difference in actual sales for the company, but there was a significant difference in the percent of readers who followed the link from the email to the homepage. Before long this translated into greater sales.
In the end, emails are not strictly sales tools, they are communication tools that encourage prospects to come to your page and have a look around. And that leads to better sales and better business.