Email marketing has been proven to be an incredibly effective means of keep in contact with your customers. However, with more and more companies spamming everyone under the sun with deals and offers, the last thing you want to do is bother your customers with useless, generic information. Fortunately, there is more than one way to keep your customers engaged through these many emails.
We asked ten entrepreneurs how they supercharge their emails to more effectively communicate with customers. Check out their answers below and get your emails back on track.
Project Bubble
We found that our clients respond twice as fast when all communication goes through Project Bubble, the client management solution we use. We set up every client with an account, even for small projects that can be handled via traditional emails. They get a notification when there’s a new message waiting in the portal, and our overall portal communication is twice as fast as regular email.
– Jonathon Long of Market Domination Media
Infusionsoft’s Customized Sales Funnels
You can no longer use one-size-fits-all email marketing. You need to focus your messaging specifically for each client and let them take the lead on the information they want to hear from you. Infusionsoft allows you to set up intelligent sales funnels and automate customized email marketing by clicks. The upfront investment is pricey, but it quickly pays off in retention and higher conversions.
– Nicole Munoz of Start Ranking Now
HelpScout
Most customer service tools are clunky to use and leave the customer feeling like a number. HelpScout is the best tool we’ve found to keep the personal touch of getting a reply from a human and managing requests across a team. Each email looks like it is coming directly from someone within the company, but it is actually tracked in a central dashboard so multiple people can manage requests.
– Nick Reese of Broadband Now
Clear, Simple Information
Communicating with customers via email should be clean, clear and concise. Don’t make grammatical mistakes, be specific about what you are asking the customer to do and create a sense of urgency. No one likes to have his time wasted, so make sure your email contains product, price and purchasing information. Give them a reason to buy, the tools to do so and the timeline to get it done.
– Vanessa Nornberg of Metal Mafia
ActiveInbox and Constant Contact
We use Constant Contact for autoresponder and newsletters. These allow us to reach larger numbers, but of course can’t be efficiently personalized. Once customers respond, we use ActiveInbox to track the status of each conversation. Does that communication require an action, or are we waiting on something? What is the due date?
– Marcela De Vivo of Gryffin
Clean IP’s
People don’t talk about this much, but if your IP is dirty, your email will never get delivered. If it doesn’t get inboxed to your users and goes to spam they will never see it. You could have the best email in the world but a dirty IP address (given by your hosting company) will hurt you. Test frequently to make sure you have very clean IP.
– Peter Daisyme of Hostt
Short, Vague Subject Lines
When you give away too much information in the subject line, people often assume they already know what you’re going to say. They may skip over your email or wait until later to read it. Using short, vague subject lines like ‘quick question’ can increase your open rate because most people are afraid of missing something important. It feels safer to open the email just in case.
– Jesse Lear of VIP Waste Services
A Genuine Tone
Too often, people take on a stuffy business tone that removes the human element. In business, it’s important to understand that, regardless of the transaction, there is a human on the other end of the deal.
– Chris Kelly of Convene
Intercom
Ever since we moved to using Intercom.io for communicating with customers via email, we’ve been adding more customers without growing website traffic, and we’ve been preventing more of our existing customers from slipping away. Everything is really organized in the interface, and the monthly price is a better value than the separate tools we had been paying for before.
– Jared Brown of Talentopoly
Video to Trigger Emotion and Build Rapport
Sure, subject lines and calls to action are important. But are you escalating the interaction with every action? Use video to evoke emotion deepen the connection with your audience. Add a video to the other side of a call to action. It doesn’t need to be overproduced or expensive. Just be real. Your audience will love it.
– Matt Hunckler of Verge
Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. YEC members generate billions of dollars in revenue and have created tens of thousands of jobs.