Not another email marketing post, but wait.. hear me out. Email marketing is a hot topic here at Creative Little Soul and Creative Little Soul-utions because we see firsthand how campaigns, features and stats all translate in real time, because of what we’ve set intention wise and we see how the customers click, view and take action.
Incorporating email marketing into your overall marketing strategy should be a standard and at a very minimum you should have the following emails in place and automated
Welcome email
Birthday Email
Re-targeting email
Then we talk about newsletters which go out when you have something specific to talk about or promote.
All sounds simple right? But why are there so many people with online stores, bricks and mortar stores or selling their services that aren’t first hitting up their engaged customers and audiences? Knowing where to start can be daunting, but then there are people like us that live, eat and breathe campaigns and we can guide you thru the process or just straight up create them for you.
When you create a campaign/ newsletter with a clear objective, with calls to action and you are asking your communities to do that thing you will get results. I guarantee it.
But all the above isn’t new and I feel like I sprout it often, so you know where we at if you are FINALLY ready to put in place some automation or send something out.
What I want to talk about though is something in the email marketing realm that’s underutilized but is one of the most powerful tools you have and aren’t even using.
Let’s talk about conditional content/conditional blocks in your newsletters. Conditional content provides a way to target your messages to contacts based on specific custom fields or tags. You can use conditional content in campaigns, as well as emails within an automation, meaning how content appears to a customer at the very top of their campaign is something we know they are going to be all for.
Example – I love Adidas sneakers. I purchase from The Iconic regularly, so based on my past spending habits, items saved or even looked at, when they send me a newsletter based on this historic data the first block in the campaign is a sale on Adidas sneakers or letting me know of new sneakers out. Make sense?
Let’s look at it from a food and beverage perspective. From POS (point of sale) and/or member loyalty you see that I am a Vegan or Vegetarian. Therefore, when I send an email out to you, I’m not going to talk about the new Wagyu beef or racks of ribs we’re serving up, but rather leave that content out of your version in essence of personalised gazette and communication.
The cool thing too is that you can use conditional content in campaigns, as well as emails within an automation.
Conditional content makes messages more relevant and personalized to contacts, which in turn helps you improve email performance, establish a stronger connection with your audience, and nurture relationships with contacts.
You can use geographical data like a contact’s city or country to create conditional content.
Let’s say most of your contacts are geographically located near three major cities, and you’d like to send a campaign email containing an image of one of these cities, depending on your contacts’ geographical location. The purpose of doing this is to further personalize the content of your email by including the image that will resonate best with each contact.
To be able to use all of this data to work smarter for you though, you need to have collected it in the first place OR simply send an “update your details campaign” where you ask your current database to provide you with additional information. A good way to get them to do this is to incentivise with a competition and give away (because nothing ever comes for free).
If you want to work more efficiently without sacrificing the amount of personalisation you use in your content, you will find conditional content very useful. Remember, this feature allows you to craft hyper relevant messaging for your contacts without spending a lot of time creating multiple emails.
If you’d like to find out more about this type of personalisation and how you can use it in your campaigns and marketing, get in touch and let our team assist you in devising a smart email campaign and strategy right for you.