In the past, email marketing was a one-size-fits-all solution. However, customers are now tired of seeing the mass email advertisement that brands send and often ignore those emails. Email marketers are aware of the problem, so email marketing 2.0 is born – introducing customer segmentation and data-driven targeting.
Today, email marketing software tools allow marketers to create campaigns that use segmentation and personalization. Marketers have access to analytics, such as click rate and open rate, to improve marketing efforts.
With these improvements, customers find it more fun to check emails than it used to be.
Email marketing becomes more effective and critical to the digital marketing efforts of any business. McKinsey & Co study shows that email marketing is 40 times more effective at reaching your target customers than Twitter and Facebook.
How Email Marketing 2.0 Provides a Better Customer Experience?
1. Better Subscription Experience
In the old days, people subscribe by inputting their email addresses but have no control over what they receive, how often they receive, and don’t even know how to unsubscribe.
People received lots of emails from the company, many of which don’t enjoy reading. Soon enough, subscribers become tired of receiving loads of promotional emails they have no interest in. This badly impacts the entire customer experience.
Today, with email marketing 2.0, subscribers have better control over what they receive and when they receive. It’s easy to unsubscribe as the opt-out button is available at the bottom of every email.
To make the subscription experience even better, opt-in forms nowadays usually offer an incentive.
The incentive could be a coupon, an ebook, or a 7-day email course. Visitors are more motivated to subscribe when they are obtaining something valuable in return.
2. Focus on Providing Valuable Content
In the days of email marketing 1.0, emails are full of promotional offers that provide no valuable content for subscribers. Companies are sending too many emails, and subscribers are frustrated.
A Salesforce study reports that 76% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations.
Fortunately, email marketers now understand customers expect more values. So email marketing 2.0 has embraced content marketing, emphasizing creating, and delivering meaningful content to email subscribers.
To provide a better customer experience, marketers strive to create content that solves customers’ problems and what might interest them the most. This helps to establish a meaningful relationship between the brand and its customers.
Furthermore, email marketing tools now provide responsive email templates that are better designed and easily scannable to enhance customers’ experience in reading emails.
3. Email Automation
Automation is critical to the development of email marketing 2.0. Targeting and timing are made possible by automation. Email campaigns now run smoothly because of automated workflows.
Automation allows marketers to send subscribers emails when they need it and are most likely to read it by analyzing their behaviors and preferences.
Also, when your email list expands, automation can save much valuable time while achieving better results. Imagine if you have millions of subscribers, providing personalized email messages can be made possible with automation.
4. Customer Segmentation
Relevance is what makes marketing efforts effective. Customers are tired of mass advertisements and only interested in what they find relatable.
In email marketing 2.0, subscribers can be divided into different groups based on demographics and behaviors. Segmenting customers allows you to send them relevant emails that can convert the most. Research shows that 39% of email marketers that adopt email list segmentation see higher open rates, and 24% see increased sales leads.
Therefore, segmenting your email list provides a much better customer experience and improves sales.
5. Analytics and Insights
Tracking the analytics of an email marketing campaign was difficult in the past. There wasn’t many available data, and the analytics dashboard was close to non-existence.
Today, email marketers can track not just click rates and open rates but also seeing real-time analytics and have access to more data like click-through rates, forwarding rates, unsubscribe rate, etc., that helps them learn and enhance their email campaigns.
How to Adopt Email Marketing 2.0?
Email marketing 2.0 has enabled a better customer experience by offering personalized, timely, and targeted information.
Although there are many challenges email marketers face, the availability of cost-effective email marketing software has made marketing efforts more effective. To adopt email marketing 2.0, get started by reviewing your current email marketing strategy – are you providing a personalized experience to customers and offering them valuable content in your emails? Can you segment your customers into groups and automate email workflows?
Do it step-by-step, and you’ll be able to provide a better customer experience in your email campaigns!