5 Ways Email Marketing Enhances the Customer Journey

Email marketing is one of the most solid forms of marketing in today’s digital age, providing a direct way to reach customers and offering an impressive ROI.

In fact, studies show 72% of people prefer to receive promotional content through email, compared to 17% who prefer social media. The chances of being noticed in someone’s inbox are pretty high, so even if the customer doesn’t open the email, your brand name has been brought to their attention. Email marketing isn’t going out of fashion anytime soon, so we’ve put together some of the ways email marketing can optimise your customer journey.

5 Ways Email Marketing Can Optimise the Customer Journey

1. It feels good to be welcomed

Introducing yourself to the customer using a welcome email sets the scene of your brand and makes the user feel involved. The customer journey must start as it means to go on, and establishing a relationship from the beginning sets the foundation of a great customer experience. You can establish your brand design and language in an email, which gives the customer an idea of what to expect from you further down the line.

2. Reach an engaged audience

With GDPR in force, email databases will more than likely have been filtered down to only those willing subscribers. This leaves a group of people who are happy to receive material via email and will likely engage with it. Email marketing is a way to treat the people in your list as individuals and play up to their wants and needs, as they have likely interacted with your site before, whether to make a purchase or just to browse.

3. Relevant information, relevant audience

The beauty of email marketing is having the ability to segment your audience and create subscriber lists for a smooth, personalised journey. The more information you have about a subscriber, the more targeted you can be with your emails.

Segmentation can be based on:

– Geo-graphics (location related data)

– Demographics and Profile (age, gender, social status)

– Psychographics (lifestyle and AIO, Attitudes, Interests, and Opinions)

– Behavioural (Purchases, opens, clicks, website browsing, etc)

4. Remember Me?

Emails act as a reminder to existing and potential customers that you exist, engages inactive customers and can be a good way to offer incentives for repeat purchase. For those customers who have shopped with you in the past, but haven’t in a while, your brand may be a distant memory. Sending an email can remind customers of your brand and bring it back into their awareness. Best practice in email marketing would be to send an email to customers who haven’t shopped in a while, saying ‘come back and get X% off’, giving them an incentive to purchase again, or at least come back and browse. People act on impulse, clear CTAs and discounts can lead to instant sales.

5. Build up your brand values

Email marketing is a cost effective way to build up your brand values and personality within a consumers inbox. Best practice would be to send regular emails, maybe 4 times a month. You’re aiming for your email newsletters to be a reliable point of call for subscribers, for them to enjoy your content, so they are less likely to unsubscribe.