Keeping in Touch with Email Marketing
How Often to Email Your Database
Many companies wrestle with not knowing how often to email their base, and how to find that balance of keeping top of mind with your customers without spamming them.
Some companies such as Groupon email their special offers almost daily, while Loblaws typically emails on a weekly basis. Most B2B businesses, however, email about once per month, often in the form of newsletters with links to interesting articles on their website.
As long as your delivering the kind of content your audience is interested in, you’ll keep your audience engaged and looking forward to your emails.
For marketers, message retention, repeat engagement, and social sharing are pure gold. On top of all that, video helps your search engine optimization (SEO) results too.
Building Relationships with Email Marketing Automation
Keeping in touch with current customers and converting prospects into buyers can be done very efficiently with marketing automation. Automation helps companies improve efficiencies by creating different email streams based on the status of your customer relationship. Unlike one-off campaigns, automation is left running in the background, saving you time by eliminating repetitive tasks.
Here are some of the examples email marketing automation can help streamline your email process:
- Welcome new subscribers
- Nurture leads through their sales journey
- Wish customers a happy birthday
- Follow up with customers who abandoned their shopping cart
- Win back lapsed customers
The ROI on automation can be great, especially if you get a customer to complete their purchase or come back to purchase again, and saves you time by not having to write these emails one by one every time it’s necessary.
Email Marketing and CASL
Since its inception, email marketing grew and grew in popularity with marketers until mass messaging (otherwise known as spamming) became an issue. Public reaction to the unscrupulous use of their email address resulted in businesses taking a more selective approach to emailing their database and, more importantly, using emails for prospecting.
Canadian legislators took consumer concerns to heart and introduced Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) in 2014 to force marketers to take a more strategic approach to email marketing, as well as how they acquire, store, and maintain their database. With the number of email scams filling Canadian inboxes, consumers breathed a sigh of relief.
Businesses, however, suddenly had to email their database to get consent to continue sending messages. The result was a decline in mailing list volume.
In reality, that’s not such a bad thing. Marketers who are more concerned with the quality instead of the quantity of their data actually found CASL gave them a higher quality mailing list. They now had members who were more likely to open and read their emails instead of just ignoring or deleting them, and are interested in building strong relationships with their business.
Tips for CASL Compliance
But what should email marketers be primarily concerned with within CASL’s complex guidelines? Here are three strategies that can help:
Get consent to email: There are two kinds of consent: implied and express
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- Implied consent: Clients who have done business with you fall under implied consent. This means they can be emailed for two years without asking, after which marketers have to seek out express consent.
- Express consent: This covers people who have opted into your mailing list, either online, in writing or verbally. Express consent never expires and is valid until the customer opts out.
Include contact information
The sender is required to provide a physical business mailing address and a secondary way of contacting the sender, including a website or phone number, to the recipient with each email.
Provide an opt-out opportunity
Business must give recipients the option to unsubscribe. Email systems process the request automatically, but if you are fulfilling requests manually they must be completed within 10 business days.
