Sending a Message is a simple way of communicating with your groups of contacts, customers, clients, or members etc through email. Think: monthly newsletters, flyers, coupons & promotions, to press releases, club announcements, event invitations, thanks you notes and reminders - you name it. Here are 3 easy ways you can make your Messages effective:
1. Look after your customer database
When you add a new contact to your database, or invite people to sign up for your e-newsletter - collect as much info as you can. Besides the obvious first name, last name & email address, what other information is relevant to your business? Would it be useful to know their region, industry, organisation type, areas of interest, or how they heard about you? By gathering this information you can sort and search through your database to send out personalised messages promoting only the products & services relevant to your contacts.
2. Use category groups
A category group is a list of your contacts who share something in common. You can arrange your contacts in whatever groups you need - e.g group by location, level of customer loyalty, birthday month, warrant of fitness/warranty month, member anniversary etc. Contact cans be in multiple groups. Once sorted, you can easily send out messages to one or more specific group of people.
3. Add links
Including links within your email marketing messages is a great way to understand your customers that much better. Links enable you to drive traffic to your website, facebook page or any other relevant online presence - providing another avenue for promoting your business and encouraging participation and interaction.
With the Message Report, you can see which links are clicked most frequently, gaining insight into what is relevant and of interest to your customers.
BUT ... JUST TO BE CLEAR- it's not emailing to just any random group of people (we call that spam!); it's promoting your products and services to those who have opted-in or given permission to hear from you. The difference is that the people you are emailing have an existing relationship with you, implying consent, or they have signed up to receive your emails.