Sales Tips: 4 Tips to Maximize Email ROI and Improve Business Development

Unless you enjoy a dedicated marketing team to gather customer data on your behalf, we must collect that information ourselves. Yet, as Sage discovered in a recent survey, collecting customer data and transforming it into sales is a common challenge.

With more advanced applications and cloud-based tools promising improved ROI every day, it can be tempting to spend money on the latest emerging technologies for our online marketing campaigns rather than using tried and tested methods.

In fact, despite email being one of the “older” online technologies, email marketing campaigns offer an ROI of 73 percent – larger than organic or paid search results, and content or affiliate marketing.

With such promise of improved sales, here are 4 tips to increase customer subscriptions and optimize your email campaigns:

1.    Increase subscription opportunities

Firstly, place a link on your business’ “About” page, as clients who tend to be interested in the history and people behind an organization are more likely to want to learn later.

Also, inserting an optional pop-up in the corner of your website is an inviting yet inconspicuous method of encouraging customers to sign-up for your campaigns; anything more is likely to turn customers away.

This tactic is also suitable for brick-and-mortar store salespeople and owners. While placing a sign-up sheet beside the tills might encourage purchasing customers to share their contact details, placing those same sheets around the store with purchase incentives to write down their email addresses can simultaneously boost sales and subscriptions lists.

2.    Personalize marketing

In 2016, more than 25 percent of sales were attributed to email campaigns. A key reason for their success is customers feel engaged, which, in turn, means they will be more likely to offer you repeat business and to recommend your services to a friend.

The easiest way to offer customers an engaging experience is to personalize your emails. For instance, use the customers’ names when addressing them, with personalized emails delivering 6 times as many transactions.

Further, segmenting users by their location, age and interests allows you to create targeted campaigns which interest potential buyers, without upsetting those less likely to indulge in that particular campaign.

3.    Mobile ready

In 2017, 54 percent of email campaigns were opened on a mobile device. This is up from 27 percent in 2012. So noticeable is this increase that promotional emails are now more likely to be mobile-centric than desktop-centric, with 55 percent of smartphone users having made at least one purchase via a campaign email.

Take advantage of this trend by ensuring your emails are mobile friendly and responsive, keep headers short so they can be read quickly, and invite users to open them with a call to action.

4.    Automate campaigns

Using automated reminders lessens your own workload as you can create mass, personalized emails, to be received by clients at specific times of the year, boosting sales.

For example, greetings card companies frequently send out seasonal reminders for popular holidays like Christmas and Mother’s Day. Also, by giving customers the option to set reminders, they can remind them of upcoming birthdays for friends and family they have sent cards to in previous years.

With affordable tools making it easy to build email lists and tools helping you track the effectiveness of your campaigns, email marketing remains a crucial strategy for maximizing sales.