10 Proven High-Performance Email Tactics For CRM Program Leaders

If used effectively, your CRM email program can be one of the most powerful marketing tools you have for building ongoing, profitable growth. Your program can help you stay in touch with a range of customer segments, providing each of them with unique value, while strengthening their relationship with your brand. To make you CRM email program more effective, here are tactics and strategies that absolutely need to be part of your CRM program.

Avoid DOA customer data. Approximately half of all US companies believed their client data was 75% reliable.¹ That means roughly a quarter of the sales leads, or worse, are DOA.¹ To improve your numbers, you can purchase or lease external data and have your data management vendors maintain and update your data. If you have an internal database, a thorough data-cleaning process identifying and deleting duplicates is essential. Anyone in your organization who enters data may need training to improve data capture for your CRM system. Ideally, you may need to choose or hire a data manager. This person’s purpose is to constantly monitor the quality of your CRM data. For all the time and effort your company spends to develop innovative, high-quality products and services, it would be painfully negligent to lose business to misspelled names, incorrectly populated fields, and flawed behavior information.
Segment your lists: According to the DMA, 77% of email marketing ROI comes from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns.² By collecting data on customer behaviors and interests, you can tailor the content of your email campaigns to each individual market and significantly increase conversions and sales. There are many creative ways to segment your lists. You may even want to brainstorm ideas for your brand and customers. Of course, you can segment by personas, buying frequency purchase interests. The real pay-offs in segmentation will come from exploring and getting to know the customers who flock to your brand. A recent study on list segmentation discovered that it:

Increased email open rates 39%³
Lowered Opt-Out/Unsubscribe rates: 28%³
Increased Revenue: 24%³
Increased Customer retention: 21%³
Across-the-board improvements like this can make all the difference in your campaign.

Personalize or pay the price. No matter the type of business you run personalization makes an enormous difference. For example, by personalizing the service they offer, waiters earn 23% higher tips. In email marketing, personalized product recommendations in transactional emails can generate a 20% increase in revenues because they provide relevant choices to the consumer. In addition, personalized emails had a 29% higher open rate and 41% unique click-through rate.³ With the right personalization technology, you provide each customer, at scale, with rewarding experiences that support your business goals. But it takes more than aggregating data. It’s essential to use that data in context across all desired channels to heighten your brand’s relevancy to customers. Depending on your products, services, and customers, you may want to personalize in real-time, by location, local weather, or time of day—whatever enhances your brand’s relevancy to their needs. For example, Doggyloot, a company that sells pet supplies, added one field to their email signup asking for the size of the subscriber’s dog. This mattered. The email targeting done for large dog owners got a 410% higher CTR than average.¹ If Doggyloot had sent out offers targeting small dogs, their email would have tanked. Also, by personalizing your Websites to specific visitor data points, you can extend the time each visitor stays on the site and increase conversion rates. Let’s say you provide software solutions. Some customers may clearly understand your products and services because they’ve attended Webinars or downloaded white papers. However, other customers who are new to your products will need more introductory information. Tracking visitor behavior across relevant channels can help you personalize their messages more effectively. Mailchimp’s report on email subject lines (based on 24 billion emails) discovered that subject lines personalized with the recipient’s first and last name have the highest open rates. In fact, using the First and last name increased the email impact by .33.¹ The last name increased email open rate by .17, and surprisingly, the first name only had the lowest impact of .09.¹

Create email subject lines and content that avoids spam blockers. Spam filters and ISPs are getting more effective all the time. Accordingly, 21% of permission-based emails end up in junk folders.⁴ More than just your subject line, spammy content included your message body, links, images, and headers can raise your spam ranking. Spammy things to avoid include:

Using special characters in words and phrases, like “Fr3e W!nn@r”
Links to dodgy sites or content
Including attachments
Using URL shorteners, sloppy code and misleading subject lines
Using hundreds of words like “free,” $$$, guarantee, and 100%
All cap sentences, and !!!
Making big claims, like “cures baldness,” “this won’t last,” or “cancel any time”

Keep subject lines short. A recent study found that subject lines with 6 to 10 words had the highest open rates. It’s probably the ideal length to communicate an idea, but not long enough to feel salesy or spammy. Another way to measure your subject line is character count. The length that is read most is 41-50 characters, followed by 31-40 characters. Go a little shorter or longer than these counts and you will start to see a decline in critical KPIs.

Get emotional in your subject lines. It’s the basic truth. Emotionally charged subject lines also perform better than those that appeal to our rational thoughts. There are a number of emotions you’ll want to test for how they work with your brand and message. For example, urgency is emotional. Remind people they are on the clock. Another good tactic is appealing to your audience’s curiosity. Tease them by saying there’s something they need to know. You could try something like, “John – You’ll love this,” or “YOUR NAME Company is killing it!” You can also simply express excitement and enthusiasm. Send something positive or joyful. These kinds of appeals feel more human and interesting than salesy or spammy.

Sending emails without testing the subject line will cost you. No matter how great the offer or valuable the content, if the subject line doesn’t work nothing else matters. Running A/B tests are useful, but there’s so much more to measuring the effectiveness of a subject line. The goal is to collect specific facts that can be repeated until the subject lines no longer work. Consider testing whether to include a first and/or last name in the subject line. Does including an offer improve open or click rates? Do lines that tease get more clicks? So much of this has to do with your brand. If you have an inherently playful brand, your audience may be more open to that kind of message. There is also a myriad of subject line testing tools. Some like Subjectline.com are free while others like Litmus.com are available on subscription. These high-tech solutions will enable you to determine how likely a prospect is to click on a given subject line before sending – this reduces some of the risk associated with traditional A/B testing. You can also use them to get important second opinions on subject lines for critical mailings (which ones aren’t?).

Make sure your emails are compelling to click through. In a crowded inbox, your email subject line, message, and visuals need to stand out. This point would make a great stand-alone article but, until then, here are ideas you can use right now. For starters, make the customer feel warm and fuzzy with a friendly “welcome” email, and include an exclusive offer. For example, Backyard Burgers gave away a “FREE” Classic Burger to new customers. This will set the tone for future emails from you. Try grabbing recipient interest with interesting visuals. Southern Proper, a regional clothing company, used a GIF that featured a fun range of long-sleeve shirts. It made the point that they offer lots of clothes without cluttering their email with tiny shirt images. Let’s also remember that CRM is about relationships. If a customer does something nice for you, say “thanks” with a discount or something that offers value. After all, that’s what customers signed up for when they agreed to receive your emails. Whatever you write, remember KISS. A recent study also showed that emails written at a grade-3 level performed 36% better in terms of open rate than those written at a college reading level and 17% better than emails written at a high school reading level.⁵ The study also indicated that free-flowing informal emails had higher response rates.

Aim for scannable designs with a clear call to action (CTA). Chances are, your email will be hitting busy inboxes. More often than not, they’ll be seen on mobile devices. A fussy design may look great on a big computer screen, but will look cluttered on a phone. Imagine if recipients were reading the email and had only one hand to scroll and respond to it. For these reasons, make sure your emails are highly scannable with a clear call to action. To create visual interest, try an animated GIF, but try to keep the file from getting too big. Just animate the part of the image that will benefit from the animation to ensure the email stays below 1 MB in size. Static images generally don’t attract the same interest. If someone is interested in your offer or product right away, make it easy for them to respond with a call-to-action (CTA) button at the top and bottom of your email.
Automate your email marketing campaigns. The ideal marketing automation platform can save your business time and money, and increase your conversion rates. There’s more to automation than making the sale (which is nice, too). It’s also about engaging potential customers on every step of their journey to becoming loyal customers who account for significant repeat business. Software automation solutions such as, Brandfolder, can help you identify patterns in behavior that lead to purchase. You can set up workflows to nurture clients who are making a buying decision, onboarding or renewing. For example, Brandfolder automated sequences send a targeted email to prospects who download two or more pieces of a company’s content. Once determined which information and service the lead is interested in, the software executes a preconfigured workflow to encourage the lead to take the next step closer to conversion. When handled effectively, email automation tools for lead generation and follow-up can improve results for companies when they don’t have to rely on humans to do all the lead follow-ups and tracking. A recent Harvard study found that customers who were contacted within one hour of their initial engagement were six-times more likely to purchase. That’s a number worth paying attention to.

This is just a sampling of tactics you can use to rev up your email CRM program. For a customized evaluation of your current email marketing, work with an agency that has proven strategic and tactical CRM expertise. Contact.KERN, an Omnicom Agency

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[Footnotes]

CRM is nothing without Reliable Data! https://www.sparklane-group.com/en/2016/12/06/crm-is-nothing-without-reliable-data/
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/email-list-segmentation

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