Use These Two Critical Models to Create Effective Email Marketing Messages
When creating advertising email messaging, too many retailers use a “one-size-fits-all” approach.
It’s important to realize that your business has both customers and prospects of varying values. Because of this, you can’t message each group the same way — you have to figure out how to most effectively speak to each group.
Two things matter most:
- Where a prospect is in the purchase funnel
- Where a customer is in their loyalty cycle
Here’s how to clearly define each of your customer groups, and how to determine how to effectively engage them.
Much like solving a puzzle, you must determine how important a customer or prospect is and how to effectively engage them.
This is often determined by referencing a purchase funnel.
Retailers are almost certainly familiar with this model, but in case you aren’t, here’s a simple explanation.
A purchase funnel is a model which visualizes the customer journey from their first contact with a brand, all the way to conversion (or purchase). There are different variations, but the basic funnel looks like this:
The concept is useful because it helps you understand and track the behavior of prospects throughout the sales process, and determine how to best engage them each step of the way. A person who has never made a purchase, but has signed up for your email list, would be in the top of the funnel, at the Awareness stage.
This person needs email messages that will help shepherd them through the subsequent levels, until they — hopefully — reach the Purchase stage. Emails showcasing your latest product, linking to content on your website, and other messages designed to get a prospect to visit your site are important in this stage.
Remember that what your specific purchase funnel looks like will depend on your product, customer groups, and a variety of other factors, so take the time to visualize your company’s funnel before determining what types of messaging you’ll need.
While the purchase funnel helps you determine where a prospect is in the sales cycle, a loyalty cycle helps you determine a customer’s value.
A loyalty cycle helps define the value of different customer groups, from recent, frequent customers to past, infrequent customers. To decide where a customer is in this cycle, you must factor in how many purchases a customer has made (frequency of purchase), how recently a customer has made a purchase (recency of purchase), and when a customer last engaged with your brand (recency of engagement).
At different phases in the loyalty cycle, customers have drastically different values to your company.
Here are a few examples.
Let’s say there’s a customer who’s made two purchases in the past two years and rarely visited your website.
Then there’s a customer who’s made seven purchases in the past two months, and frequently visit your website. This person is in your most high-value group, the loyal return customers.
In fact, this group typically accounts for 60 to 70 percent of a company’s revenue.
That’s because they not only make regular purchases, but they also serve as brand advocates who spread positive messages about a company’s products via either word-of-mouth or social media. Therefore, loyal return customers should always be highly valued, and focus should be placed on retaining and rewarding them when building engagement programs. That could mean offering them a coupon, giving them early access to a sale or product launch event, or surprising them with a credit in their account.
Once you’ve determined which segment of your customer base you’re targeting, then you can create a strategy to engage them.
But remember that the process is fluid — your engagement strategy should always be flexible.
Every brand, product, and customer base is different, so finding out which offers and email messages you should be using can’t just be Googled.
However, once you start the process, you absolutely can — and should — use data tools to look at how customers are responding to your emails. If you’re using the right tools, like the ones we use for clients at SellUp, you should be able to see when customers are subscribing and unsubscribing, converting, opening and clicking on ads and products, visiting your website, placing an item in their carts, and more. Look at these numbers, determine what’s working and what’s not, then adjust.
The only way to create email marketing messages that take people from prospects to customers is to understand who you’re talking to, and what they’re responding to.
You can use marketing best-practices to begin that journey, but make sure to use data to guide you from there.
Because, much like a prospect-turned-customer, or customer-turned-loyal-customer, your messaging will always be changing.
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