Question 1: The most frequently asked question I get from entrepreneurs or marketing managers considering Retain to run their email marketing channel for them is —
How many emails will you send in a month? Or what is the frequency of monthly email sends?
And honestly, I wish I could stop disliking this question. There are many reasons why this is the wrong question to ask. It assumes that the more emails you send, the more sales you make. You don’t.
It also focusses more on volume rather than quality.
This means, you’re ignoring the most important reason why email marketing is the most successful revenue channel for businesses and has been so for decades. And that reason is relationship building. When you’re asking this question, you’re not thinking of building a relationship with your list. No matter what business yours is – real estate, finance, law or e-commerce – people don’t like it when you treat them like humans. That is what we focus on in our work – building good relationships with your list.
And this is why, segmentation of yout list is so important. THAT is what we focus on. Not the number of emails sent every month.
At the beginning of each month, we make a calendar to map out what segment to email and when, what to say to them and how, and how to build our emails up to ripe them up to click the buy button.
This takes time and this takes respect for your audience, which is key in marketing, no?
We nail down the right frequency over a few weeks of sending emails to see how your audience is behaving, which days and times work best, and eventually we have a much better idea of what works best for your business. Just because sending daily emails works for one business does not mean it will work for you too. One of the biggest dangers in marketing is when people hit the “unsubscribe” button – and they tend to do that when we bombard them.
Now I will go into the rest of the questions I get asked so I will answer them concisely. I promise I won’t go into a rant like the first question above. 🙂
2. What is your approach to developing an email marketing strategy?
We start by understanding your list’s behaviour and what segments they can be broken into so that we really send them relevant emails only. And then we make the monthly calendar to map out what to send and when to which segment.
3. How do you measure and report on campaign performance?
We upload regular reports in an excel detailing metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversions, and return on investment (ROI).
4. Can you provide examples of past work and client references?
5. What is your experience with our industry or similar businesses?
Ah this one. Don’t go into a rant again, Reema! Don’t go into a rant again. Breathe.
Alright. While I understand your concern here, as email marketers who have worked with service businesses and e-commerce business, with B2B and B2C, across the globe, whatever your industry is, we know how to work with it.
That’s because deep down, it’s all about the same fundamentals –
- Treat your audience with respect.
- Focus on building a relationship.
- Talk to them based on what stage of the buyer’s journey they are.
- Keep at it. It takes time.
- Don’t push for sales all the time. People will unsubscribe.
- Lead from their pain points.
- And a lot more.
So whatever your industry, trust me, we know how to do email marketing to them.
6. What is your process for creating email content and design?
Very deep so I’ll give a bird’s eye view here.
For the first 2 weeks as our contract begins, we create fundamental content which includes tone, approach, basic research on the audience like their pain points, culture they engage with etc. We prepare some emails and share them with you for your feedback to make sure we are on-brand.
Same with design. We want to make sure we are on brand with design so we create some templates based on your brand guidelines, your website and share with you.
7. How do you ensure email deliverability and compliance?
We do deliverability checks which include testing via Glockapps etc.
We do SMTP and DMARC checks and optimization.
We are very careful with our language to avoid spam words.
And the rest? Is about the relationships we build which train the servers over time.
8. What tools and technologies do you use for email marketing?
We use your emailing platform, so we will need access to your platform via our email id.
9. How do you integrate email marketing with other digital marketing efforts?
You can keep us in touch with your social media team and upload their visual elements into our shared folder. The rest of “keeping an eye” on your socials, we do ourselves.
Plus, our monthly calendar helps with exactly this – aligning our efforts with your other efforts to make sure launches and announcements are smooth across channels.
10. What are your pricing structure and contract terms?
One rate only. We don’t do packages because in email marketing, it’s all or nothing. We’ll talk about it. Reach out to me.
