Staying in touch with current and prospective customers is smart. Every message you send is an opportunity to remind them you exist. The problem is, if anything about your email, push notification, or text message is off, you risk losing customers. Luckily, there are lots of simple things you can do to make sure your marketing messages always hit the mark. Try out one these five tweaks to improve your next email, SMS, or push notification campaign.
1. Rethink Your From Field
There’s a lot of focus put on crafting the perfect subject line, with good reason. But you have to remember, no matter what type of message you send to customers, the “from” field is the first thing people see. If your customer doesn’t recognize you as the sender or feels the sender name is spammy, a great subject line won’t help much.
Think about it. If your list of 20-something females get an email promoting summer dresses from “John”, it may not perform well. Make sure you put thought into what appears in the from field. Maybe personal messages like the helping hand email or the SMS follow-up message could show “Ashli” vs “Ashli from Autosend”. You can even test “Ashli from Autosend Billings” or “Autosend” for your transactional emails. Just consider the message, it’s purpose, timing, etc. and tailor your “from” field appropriately.
2. Make it Local
Your customers are everywhere, so “localize” your messages. I’m not talking about translation here (but that isn’t a bad idea). If you’re trying to get a point across, make your message relevant to each person. For instance, if you send your customers a text message, send it from a local number. Remember, your users don’t usually have contacts outside of the area they live in. It’s just odd to get a message from someone outside their state or country. Besides, it pretty much screams spam.
The same applies to the message itself. A mention of California’s drought to your Californian customers or getting the date format right in your SMS to your German customers can go a long way.
3. Write Your Message for the Moment
A lot of messages I get are written based on when I get them, not when I read them. Let me explain. Just because your customers got your message ten minutes ago, doesn’t mean they read it ten minutes ago. Unfortunately, your offer to help me integrate Twitter is less interesting than the video my friend just sent. To get better results, write messages for the actual moment your customers will read them. This is why we love event-based messages so much!
Remember, the average email is actually READ 2.5 days after it’s sent. So try to avoid greetings like “Happy Tuesday” in your email campaigns that don’t need it. If your message is time sensitive, send it to customers that consistently open your messages soon after they get them. Send other customers a message that doesn’t focus so much on time. Unfortunately, this may result in a less interesting and less effective message. Just test and measure your results.
4. Segment Your Segments
If you want to improve the conversion rates of your email, push, or text messages, segment your segments. Even with trigger-based messages set up, it’s not enough to send desktop users one thing and mobile users another. If you want to take things to the next level, customize your message for three or four different types of users in one segment. For instance, let’s say you want to send push notifications to your desktop website visitors. You’ll get better results if you create a different push message for the Safari, Chrome, and Firefox users. Why? Because even though they’re all visiting your site from their desktop, each group is different.
For example, more females use Safari than males. More teens and college-aged adults use Chrome. Even if we ignore the demographics, there may be features your Chrome visitors can use that Firefox users can’t. Your goal is to make your email, push notification, or text message as relatable and relevant to your customers as you can. If creating micro-segments will get it done, make it happen.
5. Check If They Still Care
It’s one of the scariest things a marketer can do. But, getting people off your list can actually improve the open rate, CTR (click through rates), and conversions of your messages. I know what you’re thinking, “I did everything but buy them a beer to get them to sign up. I don’t want to risk losing them and never getting them back.”
The problem is, you’re trying to keep someone that doesn’t want to stay. And I hate to tell you…they won’t convert if you keep them. Let’s face it, things change. Some people don’t remember you, some found an alternative product, and some were just curious and never planned on buying. So contact them and ask if they want to hear from you again.
The good news is, there’s no need to reach out and ask every customer if they still want to hear from you. You can just segment customers that haven’t opened your last four or five emails or text messages. Once segmented, send a personal message and ask if they still want to hear from you. Just make sure to have an awesome way to handle unsubscribes.
As you can see, even the smallest tweaks can help you get more out of your messaging. If you want higher conversions, more opens, and higher click through rates try some of these tweaks yourself.