Email marketing and brand reputation.

Many organizations were no longer considering email as an efficient marketing channel, assuming it is somewhat old-fashioned with a dubious reputation for “spam.” However, current technologies are much more sophisticated than those that were used just a few years ago when it all boiled down to sending out cookie-cutter mass emails.
By virtue of email marketing automation systems and more sophisticated CDP (Customer data platform), sending out emails to potential and existing customers has become a tactic that should be included in any sound digital marketing strategy. If integrated into a well-structured marketing plan, it allows you to achieve excellent results both in terms of customer loyalty and actual sales growth.

Let’s set the record straight by listing and analyzing some key features of the modern email marketing engines that work both for your brand and your reputation. Here are the things those platforms will help you take care of:

Reduce the mailing list to only useful emails
Sending bulk emails to a low-engaged customer base leads to spam, reputation damage, and serious technical delivery issues. It’s not just about the open rate (the number of emails opened by recipients), which drops significantly. It is also related to the bounce rate (emails that were not delivered or reported as spam), which directly affects the credibility of your domain.

The good marketing automation platforms integrate with email marketing solutions and email clients, helping you take care of your domain and its authority. We’ve engineered Retainly to integrate with world-top solutions such as Mandrill, Sendgrid, Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, etc., reducing the risk of ending up in someone’s spam box.

Your goal is getting people interested in your content, and the subject line and the quality of your data play a key role here. You may encourage people to buy something from you or view specific content. Should they not click on the button, it would mean that the email itself was not good, or the content was not related to the subject line and, therefore, was not valuable.

And this is where A/B testing helps you determine which of the above is true. The questions you will have answered:

Personalize your content
Efficient email marketing requires a good database. Through the right email marketing automation, over time, you will be able to segment all users who subscribe to the mailing list and ensure that they receive only those messages that are relevant to them. A solid segmentation of users in a database is a prerequisite for sending personalized content.

Ukrainian IT company Saintis, one of the first Retainly early adopters in Ukraine, has implemented several integrated email campaigns to help its existing and potential customers migrate from russian CRM systems to other international solutions due to the war in Ukraine and the official ban on the use of IT products of russian origin. The idea was to conduct a webinar with a local CRM integrator to share the possibilities of a smooth and fast migration.

Thanks to the collective efforts, Saintis did an excellent preliminary preparation of user segments. The contact database of over 2,000 contacts was split into three segments based on several attributes: purchase preferences, recent purchase activity, mailing preferences, brand engagement, and business size.
Saintis team created three different email flow scenarios for their segments in Retainly, taking care of every step of the customer journey.

The company reported a 60% increase in email opens, only 15 unsubscribes, and a fully booked webinar with 10 conversions to sales opportunities.

Katerina Prokopenko, the founder of Saintis, noted that such automated mailings saved up to 40 working hours of Saintis sales managers, as the customer outreach was fully automated and the communication was personalized to the point that most customers did not realize the emails were not sent by real people.

We automated the entire email journey, set up specific events and triggers just once, and the process was up and running. My team took care of real interests, converting them into sales opportunities after the webinar. The demand for this webinar was so high that we had to announce an additional series to cover it. Katerina Prokopenko, the founder of Saintis

Ensure the right timing
To effectively determine the time of sending emails, you need to take into account the time zone and the time itself (including the day of the week or time of the day). Also, you need to consider the frequency to ensure that your audience is able to handle messages. It might be fine for a customer to receive a newsletter once a week, but adding a few other messages via SMS, messengers, etc. might be annoying.

Modern customer engagement and automation tools will let you plan the timing depending on where your audience is on the customer journey. Sending an up-sell message to a customer who just submitted a complaint doesn’t make any sense and can damage your brand’s reputation. Retainly allows you to send product recommendations and discounts precisely when your customer thinks is right.

We’re releasing our new “Best Time to Send” functionality, EO 2022, which will allow scheduling every email based on cohort behavioral analysis of your audience. Sounds impressive, right?

Email marketing remains a highly effective tool. It is still a powerful and effective method of reaching engaged and action-oriented customers. Combined with other essential elements of engagement automation: such as SMS, messengers, web pushes, social media marketing, etc., it may help you increase your sales and become an exceptional advantage to stand out in the market.

Request a demo today, and we’ll help you create a personalized messaging flow that’s fully tailored to your customers’ wants and needs, stimulating them in the most suitable way for getting conversions.
If you are a Ukrainian company, we encourage you to register at https://retainly.app/ and get free access to Retainly Pro functionality till the end of 2022!