Clarity in communication is fundamental to establishing and maintaining customer trust. It sets the foundation for positive interactions, customer satisfaction, and long-term relationships between you and your customers. What areas of your website can you work on to set clear expectations that result in happy customers?
Misunderstandings, miscommunications, and unrealistic expectations are all recipes for customer disappointment. That’s why it’s important that your online shop creates an experience that ensures customers understand exactly what they can expect from a product or service. When looking over your site, the following areas should be straightforward and easy to understand:
Clear Language
From your customer promise to your product descriptions, the language you use to explain to your customers what you sell and what your products & services could do for them should be clear. Speak to your customers in words and contexts that they understand. Instead of using industry jargon to talk about your products, put yourself in your customers’ shoes and speak from their perspective. What are the things they would want to know about your products, services, and overall business? Sharing the answers to this question in words that your customers use themselves is a key step to creating customer trust.
Clear Prices
A customer could be thrilled by what your product promises to offer, but if the price isn’t what they expected, they may start to doubt your company. When it comes to the prices of your products and services, hidden fees can leave a bad taste in your customers’ mouths. Be up front with any extra charges your customer may run into when purchasing your products and services. From shipping fees to increased charges due to a project expanding beyond the original scope, make sure those charges are shared up front and are located in multiple places on your site during the shopping process.
Clear Process
When it comes to purchasing your products, it should be easy. Browsing products, requesting a quote, scheduling a call, and checking out should all be steps that contain clear visuals and language that make it simple for customers to do. Another aspect to keep in mind is returns: how do customers go about returning a product or requesting changes to the project your team is working on? Having this information in the purchasing process is important to keeping your customers in the know!
Want to Learn more?
Want to explore other areas of your site that are key to establishing customer trust? Listen to our latest eCommerce Made Easy Podcast where we discuss how you can create an authentic and transparent customer experience with just a few tweaks to your site!
For some of you, you have just finished up with Black Friday and Cyber Monday! However, while your shopping deals may have ended, it is not yet time to push your campaign aside. With your completed promotion, it is now time to measure its success and refine your campaign for next year!
When it comes to determining if your promotional campaign was a success, you need two things: goals and metrics. Your goals should reflect what a successful promotional campaign looks like to you while the metrics you track should give that goal measurable numbers. There are many metrics we can consider when figuring out a campaign’s success as well as many ways to track them. Some metrics we can track are:
Traffic
One metric that is always useful to track is traffic: how many people visited your site during your promotion? Traffic can be a great way to measure how well your marketing efforts & special deals attracted users to your site! Tracking traffic can be done in multiple ways. In terms of the number of users who browse your site during your promotion, you can measure “sessions” with analytics tools such as Google Analytics 4. Sessions let you not only see how many people visited your site, but can also give you a glimpse of how long users stayed on your site as well! If you have set up your marketing materials to track clicks, you can also look at those numbers to see how many people decided to check out your deals!
Engagement
User engagement is a great way to track what your most effective content was during your promotional campaign. Overall, tracking engagement means tracking how users engage with your content. This can come in the form of clicks, participation in polls, social media likes, shares, comments, and so forth. With the help of social media & email management tools, for example, you can collect engagement data and compare your marketing material: what did users interact with the most? What received the least interaction? By taking note of what your customers like and don’t like, you can create even better marketing materials next year!
Lead Generation
Lead generation is a lot like engagement, but instead of simply engaging with your content, leads would be users who connected with you in some way. A lead could be a user who subscribed to your newsletter or social media channels, or a user who downloaded a freebie. Leads are valuable to you because they are interested customers who want to continue receiving information about your products and services, even beyond your current promotion. Track what content led to the leads you received to better understand what your customers want to see!
Sales & Quotes
Of course, during your special events, sales are a must have metric when evaluating your campaign’s success! Tracking sales can help you learn a few things about your campaign’s effectiveness, such as what your most popular products are, how effective past lead generations were at nurturing conversions, and even how well you are encouraging customer loyalty. Ideally, when tracking sales during your campaign, you want to compare those sales to your normal sales numbers: do you see an increase in sales? Compare your sales increase with the goals you set for your promotion event and see how you fared!
Customer Feedback & Surveys
As your campaign comes to a close, asking your customers for feedback is a great way to gain insight into what your customers want and to spot areas of opportunity. Through the use of surveys, you can collect poll results for things like customer satisfaction concerning your products, website, customer service, and more. You can also offer the opportunity for free-form feedback, such as product reviews, that can lead to quality social proof and insight into ways you can improve your products and shopping experience.
Want to learn more?
Figuring out whether or not your promotional campaign was a success can be difficult, even with data to consult.Listen to our latest eCommerce Made Easy Podcast where we dive into how to refine your promotion with a positive and realistic mindset.
With Black Friday & Cyber Monday rushing upon us, it’s time to review your strategy! When it comes to preparing your online business for a successful shopping campaign, there are a few steps you can take to not only draw customers in but stand out amongst the competition!
When it comes to major shopping events like Black Friday, standing out online can be difficult. Afterall, in a sea of online businesses, how can you make your deals and website more enticing than the rest? When reviewing your Black Friday strategy, there are a few key tasks that you should pay special attention to:
Offer Irresistible Deals
Shopping events like Black Friday are all about deals! Crafting an irresistible deal requires a deep understanding of your customers’ wants and needs. Once you determine the products and services your customers love, there are a variety of ways to apply attractive discounts to them. Bundle deals, buy-one-get-one-free promotions, limited-time offers, or even time-limited products are great ways to create enticing deals that you share exclusively during your shopping event. With any deal, make sure that the value of your discounted offerings is clear and easy to understand to further make it stand out.
Check & Optimize Website Performance
Major shopping events often result in unusually high traffic for online business owners. Both old and new customers will be browsing your special promotions and deals, so one of the first things you should do to prepare is check your site’s health and performance. Make sure your site is ready for heightened traffic: this includes checking your site’s speed and responsiveness. Afterall, a slow site can lead to frustrated customers and lost sales.
Re-visit your Site’s Mobile Experience
Many customers during major shopping events will be browsing and purchasing products on their phones. On top of making sure your site is optimized for speed and responsiveness, making sure your site’s mobile experience provides a seamless shopping experience is imperative to keeping potential customers on your site. This is especially true for mobile checkout! Optimize your mobile checkout process to minimize friction and encourage quick and easy purchases.
Create a Marketing Plan
Ideally, before any major shopping event such as Black Friday, you and your team should create a marketing strategy. From social media to online advertising, plan out and create your marketing content to create excitement around your upcoming special deals. On both your social accounts and in your email, consider sending teaser emails and posts in the days leading up to Black Friday. If you have different tiers of customers, tailor your marketing material towards their needs and wants, creating anticipation around the deals you created just for them!
Provide Excellent Customer Service
During such busy times of the year, there is going to be an influx of new and old customers. It is important that you and your team are prepared to provide any customer service they may need. From being active on your contact channels to making sure that your deals, shopping information, and return policies are clearly stated, you want to create an experience that customers remember positively. Beyond providing assistance for customers who run into trouble, reaching out to customers post-purchase just to check in with them is also a great way to show that your business cares about the service you provided them, which can lead to good reviews and repeat business.
Want to Learn more?
Looking for more insights on how to make your Black Friday and future shopping event successful? Listen to our latest eCommerce Made Easy Podcast where we further explore how to stand out during these highly competitive times of the year!
Celebrating special occasions with customers is a strategic and meaningful way for businesses to build and maintain positive relationships. From anniversaries to the change of seasons, there are multiple special occasions that can act as a catalyst for customer loyalty and business growth! However, what special occasions should you consider?
Why should I consider celebrating special occasions through my business?
Celebrating events with your customers is a great opportunity to deepen your relationship with your customer base. Through these shared celebrations, you can:
Encourage Engagement – What is a celebration without a party? Special occasions provide an excellent opportunity to engage with your customers. Whether it be through special promotions or just festive content, celebrating with your customers is a great time to encourage customer interaction with your business and content.
Increase Brand Visibility – Celebrating events with your customers is a great time to share who you are as a business! As with any marketing campaign, special occasions can contribute to building a positive brand image. These events can help make your business feel relatable and show that you share similar values with your customers.
Foster Customer loyalty – By including your customers in your celebrations, you show customers how much you appreciate them. Customers that feel valued are more likely to become loyal to your brand.
Get Customer Feedback – Special occasions are a great time to ask customers to share their thoughts on your business. From success stories to requests for feedback, starting a dialogue with your customers not only provides insight into the future of your business, but also lets your customers know that their opinions matter!
What special occasions could I celebrate with my customers?
Anniversaries
Anniversaries come in a variety of forms. You could celebrate your business’ opening anniversary or even the anniversaries of popular products or services that define your business. If you collect analytics on your customer base, you could even consider celebrating the anniversary of when a customer first started using your products or services! Overall, anniversaries are a great way to acknowledge customer loyalty over the years.
Customer Appreciation Events
Instead of waiting for specific events to celebrate your customers, you can designate a customer appreciation day or week at your business. During your customer appreciation event, you can share special deals and events with your customers to show your thanks for their continued support!
Holidays
Depending on your audience, holidays can be a great way to celebrate with customers and share special promotions. From holidays such as Valentine’s Day to Thanksgiving or Christmas, holidays are full of excitement that can be a great catalyst for customer engagement! However, one thing to keep in mind, especially for online businesses, is that some of your audience may not celebrate certain holidays. When creating marketing content for holiday-related occasions, try to stay inclusive so that all your customers can still enjoy your content.
Customer Birthdays
On a smaller scale, celebrating your customer’s birthday can make your customer’s day! This could be a simple email with a special discount just for them. By celebrating your customer’s birthday, you affirm that you remember them and consider their special day important!
Milestone Achievements
Our customers’ support throughout the years helps us grow as businesses, so it’s only natural to celebrate business milestones with them! From selling a certain number of products to expanding your business to include new locations or services, company milestones are an excellent time to thank customers and get valuable feedback.
Seasonal Events
Changing seasons are an effective time to reach out to customers. Creating promotional events to help prepare customers for the season, whether that be for themselves or for their own businesses, is an easy way to engage with your customers and meet them where they are! Just as with holidays, note that the seasons change differently around the world, so be conscious of that when creating seasonal special events.
Want to learn more?
Interested in celebrating special occasions with your customers, but not sure how to go about it?Listen to our latest eCommerce Made Easy podcast where dive into the variety of ways you can share the joy of special occasions with your customer base. From discounts to simple thank you notes, there are multiple ways to celebrate with your customers!
One way you can stand out amongst the competition is through offering bundles. Bundles are collections of products and services that are grouped together into a single product. These bundles provide added value to customers, simplify their purchasing decisions, or offer cost savings for both you and your customers! However, how do you create an effective bundle?
Bundles can come in many shapes and sizes. They can be a collection of products, of services, or a bit of both! They can also be sold as one-off purchases or turned into a subscription service. Overall, bundles are flexible, but have a few base requirements to work effectively:
Your bundle needs to fulfill a customer need
As with any product, your bundle needs to be something your customers want or need. The products and/or services you decide to bundle together should work together to solve a pain point for your customers. For example, if you are creating a bundle of products that is related to hair care, you may create bundles that target specific issues people have with their hair. A variety of bundles can be created depending on the type of hair problems your customers are facing: a bundle for dry, frizzy hair, a bundle for oily hair, a bundle curly or straight hair; the list could go on and on. By creating a bundle that aims to solve a customer pain point, your bundle can become more enticing and attractive.
Your bundled items should be complementary
The key to creating a successful bundle is bundling products and/or services that work well together. Much like with the example of hair product bundles, your bundled items should be related to each other. This could be like having a hair care bundle that includes shampoo, conditioner, moisturizer, and serum. All of those hair products are related to each other and work together to improve your hair health. Bundles with complementary products and/or services are an excellent way to offer a complete solution to your customers.
Your bundle should be simple
Ideally, your bundle should aim to simplify your customer’s shopping decisions. Instead of having your customer sort through products, determine what products they may need, and add those products slowly to their cart, a bundle should offer them a complete solution to make the shopping process easier. However, a bundle is only as simple as you make it. It is possible to make a bundle that is over-complicated. This could be due to having too many products that do different things, or even just describing the bundle in a complex manner. Keep your bundles focused and easy to understand in terms of what’s included and what the bundle aims to do.
Your bundle should be valuable
Your bundle should offer value that can’t be achieved when buying the included products separately. Making your bundle valuable can be done in a few ways. When customers buy your bundle, they could get a discounted price compared to buying the items or services individually. You could also offer exclusive services, products, or features in your bundle that customers can’t buy outside of the bundle. It could be as simple as including a hair care planner as a bundle exclusive or could be a small discount. Your bundle should already have a lot of its value through its focused items and convenience, so your last bit of value ensures that your bundle is an easy choice to make.
Want to learn more?
Want to explore even more possibilities when it comes to bundling products and services?Listen to our latest eCommerce Made Easy podcast where we explain why bundles are a win-win strategy for both you and your customers!
Sharing testimonials for an online business is a great way to build trust and credibility with potential customers! However, where are the best places to share our customer testimonials?
When it comes to building trust, customer testimonials re-assure potential customers that they are making a good choice by doing business with you. Testimonials are valuable assets to your online business! Once you acquire testimonials, there are multiple effective places to share them with potential customers.
Home & Landing page
Your home and landing pages are often the first point of contact for new customers. Placing customer testimonials on your home and landing pages allows you to establish trust and credibility with new users right away! Afterall, by showing positive customer experiences to newcomers, you can easily demonstrate the quality and effectiveness of your offerings.
Product pages
By the time a customer arrives at a product page, they may start having doubts. Sharing customer testimonials on your product pages is a great way to address common concerns or hesitations. Rather than relying on the potential customer to trust your words personally, letting customer testimonials validate your products and services offers real-life examples of how your offerings deliver on their promises.
Social Media
Social media is a place for old and new customers alike to interact with your business. By sharing customer testimonials on social media, success stories about your products can both bring in new customers and reinforce your products to existing customers. Through social engagement as well, such as likes, comments, and shares, your testimonials can reach even wider audiences, increasing your visibility!
Email
Customer testimonials in emails can help make your emails both engaging and credible! Customer testimonials can often resonate with existing customers, as well as attract potential customers that are on the fence about your products. Higher open rates can lead to more successful conversions from your email campaigns!
Advertisements
When engaging with advertisements, users often carry a level of skepticism since they are created and paid for by the company itself. Sharing customer testimonials in your advertisements provides a separate source validation and credibility. Instead of relying solely on your own words concerning your offerings, sharing the words of satisfied customers is much more effective and overcomes the skepticism surrounding company ads.
Want to learn more?
Want to learn more about customer testimonials?Listen to our latest eCommerce Made Easy podcast where we explain how to acquire customer testimonials, how to use them, and what other options you can consider to promote customer trust!
One moment your site is working as expected, the next it’s suddenly down and inaccessible: Website disasters can easily sneak up on us. Are you prepared?
What are website disasters?
Website disasters refers to any scenario where the functionality and accessibility of your site is heavily impacted, disrupting business as a whole. Examples of website disasters include your site crashing and going down for a period of time, security breaches, and loss of critical data such as user information, content, or configurations. These events impact both your customers and your business workflow, negatively impacting your revenue and reputation.
How can we prevent & recover from website disaster?
Regular Backups
One of the most important preventative measures you or your hosting provider can take is to make regular backups of your site. This includes backing up your site content, configurations, user information, and so forth. How often you update your site should depend on how often your site grows and changes, but once a month or even once a week can help ensure that, if something happens to your site, you can recover your site in the future.
Security Measures
Security threats are always something you should keep in the back of your mind when it comes to doing online business. From using strong passwords for all website related accounts, to keeping your site’s software up to date, it’s important to be aware of any aspects of your site that could be vulnerable to attacks.
Regular Updates
Keeping all the moving parts of your site up to date is imperative. Whether it be security attacks or just unsupported, out of date functionalities, keeping your software, plugins, and themes regularly updated can help you avoid unexpected failures or threats to your website. If you are using a hosting provider, it’s also important to ask how often they update their own servers. After all, even if you have updated your website software on you end, if your hosting provider doesn’t update their server software often, issues could arise unexpectedly.
Monitoring and Alerts
If your site goes down or is about to face a crisis, you want to know as soon as possible! With the help of monitoring tools, you can stay on top of changes in site performance and uptime. Even an analytics tool such as Google Analytics 4 can help you catch issues before they happen, such as large influxes in traffic that your site may not be able to handle. It is important that both your website and the hardware that your website uses are monitored and capable of alerting you when downtime or unusual activity occurs.
Disaster Recovery Plan
Sometimes, even the most prepared sites can run into website disasters unexpectedly: what do you do? Having a disaster recovery plan for when your site goes down is key to speeding up your site’s recovery time. A disaster recovery plan contains guidance on how to respond to various types of incidents, including data breaches, server crashes, and data loss. This plan should detail how to restore your website from backups and who is responsible for specific tasks. By having these plans written up and available to your team, your team can quickly start working towards recovery!
Secure Hosting
Sometimes, your site can go down due to an issue with your hosting provider, blindsiding your personal efforts to keep your site up and running. When choosing a hosting provider, it is important to ask them how they go about keeping your site safe! How often do they make backups? How often do they do software updates? What are their security practices? Ideally, you want your hosting provider to also be taking preventive measures and have disaster recovery plans in case something disastrous happens to their own servers that host your site.
Want to learn more?
Want an insider look at website disasters and website recovery?Listen to our latest eCommerce Made Easy podcast where we share our own experiences with client website disasters and our key tips on how to prevent them!
Ever feel like you aren’t using your work time effectively? Having trouble finishing the tasks you set off to do? Let’s get you back on track! Losing focus or getting distracted can very quickly cause your work week to pile up or worse, fall behind. Lucky for us though, there are a variety of methods we can incorporate into our day-to-day routines to keep us on track for success.
When it comes to setting yourself up for a productive work week, there are a few proven strategies we can use to maintain focus and get our tasks done! One way to prepare yourself for the workweek is to utilize the following routine:
Set clear goals
When it comes to preparing yourself for the word day, work week, or even work year, determining what you want to achieve is important. Having a clear sense of what you need to accomplish helps you stay focused. While thinking about the far future, such as the work year, is a good place to start, it’s important to break your goals up into smaller time frames. Yearly goals can sometimes feel so far away that you may start putting them off without realizing it. Break down your major goals into steps that you can then set as weekly or daily goals to keep you on track.
Prioritize & delegate tasks
It can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the number of tasks and goals we may have set for ourselves. To manage our tasks better, review your tasks often and prioritize them. Which tasks are most important to complete first? While reviewing your tasks, take note of any tasks that may not suit your skill set. Is there someone better for the job? By prioritizing and delegating tasks when you can, your task list will become more focused, making it easier to follow.
Set Deadlines
Setting deadlines is key to creating a sense of accountability in yourself to complete your tasks on time. Many of us have large, daunting tasks lists that contain all sorts of important jobs to complete. By giving each task a deadline, you can better pace yourself as well as clearly see which tasks you need to be working on!
Organize your tasks
Just as having an organize desk can encourage focus at work, keeping your tasks organized can help you quickly and easily process what you need to do. It can be easy to get lost in a large list of tasks, so consider organizing your list in a fashion that makes sense for your workflow. You may prefer organizing your tasks by the day they need done or organizing them by the kind of task they are, such administrative or client tasks. To organize your tasks, you can use a calendar or task planner, which can be physical or digital!
Review and reflect
Whether it be the end of the work year or even the end of work week, its important to review and reflect on your progress and productivity. How much did you get done? Did you complete more than you did last week? What did you do differently? Refining your workflow can take time, so reflecting on your progress routinely can help you find what works for you when it comes to completing your tasks efficiently.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a must for online businesses and content creators. However, do you ever feel like your search engine ranking just won’t budge? As search engines become more advanced and the tools available to us evolve, its important to make sure that your SEO strategy is still effective.
In order to stay visible in search engines, your site needs to be optimized for searchability. However, there are common mistakes we can make when creating our SEO strategies:
1. Keyword Stuffing your Content
One easy mistake you can make when trying to optimize your content for SEO is to use too many keywords in your content. In the past, the more keywords you had on your website meant better SEO results, and thus better positions in search queries. Keywords are still important today, but search engines have grown smart enough to tell when you are stuffing your content with keywords for the sake of SEO. Today, if Google finds that you are keyword stuffing your content, your SEO score will be negatively impacted, bringing down your search positions.
How to fix: Use keywords strategically & keep readability in mind
Search engines are now smart enough to judge whether or not your content is easily readable for your users. This means that, if your content is stuffed with keywords, search engines will deem you’re your content hard to read and “spammy,” bringing down your SEO score. When it comes to using keywords on your site, you want to make sure to incorporate keywords where they make sense rather than stuffing them everywhere you can. Your keywords should be logically placed on your site without impacting your content’s readability and value.
2. Not using Meta Descriptions
Meta Descriptions are short snippets of text that tell search engines a summary of what your web page’s content is about. These snippets help search engines understand your content as well as give them a short description to show to users in search queries. Despite being very important, meta descriptions sometimes are not as optimized as they should be or are outright missing. Neglecting meta descriptions can not only negatively impact your SEO score, but are a lost opportunity to share what your online content is about with potential customer’s during search.
How to fix: Go through your pages and make sure they have meta descriptions
For all of your pages, make sure that the meta description field or tags have quality descriptions in them. These descriptions should describe the content of the page succinctly and are also a great place to use some keywords and call-to-actions. Remember that users may see your meta description when searching for your content, so make sure your meta descriptions speak to the needs of your customers.
3. Images don’t have Alternative Text
Oftentimes, it can be easy to forget to add alternative text to your site’s image assets. Alternative text is brief, text descriptions of what your image, video, banner, etc, depicts. From blog banners to homepage featured images, alternative text is very important not only for your SEO score, but for customers with visual disabilities. Without alternative text, search engines will put your site lower in search queries and a pool of people your content could help may be unable to experience your content to its fullest.
How to fix: Add alternative text to all of your images
Alternative text can be added to your images through editing your images in graphical interfaces such as WordPress or through adding the “alt” attribute to your image’s HTML string. One thing to note about alternative text is that its important to be descriptive and concise: What is the image depicting? Is there text in the image? What does it say? Why is it important? Answer these questions as needed in your image’s alternative text.
4. Your Site has Broken Links
As your site grows, so does the number of pages your content is linked to. However, links can become broken if not kept up to date. Link URLs can change, or the page the link led to can be removed, leading to users arriving at dead ends when clicking on them. Search engines take broken links into consideration when ranking your site. Not only do broken links reflect badly on your site to search engines, but it also means that there is potentially valuable content search engines are able to read and serve to customers.
How to fix: Keep an update sitemap of links and monitor for broken links
It can be hard to catch every broken link on your site, but as your do, make sure to update them and note that change on your site’s sitemap. A sitemap is an organized list of all the pages and content your site contains. This includes the links to those pages and content. Make sure to review your sitemap sometimes and consult it during major changes, such as URL updates, page migration, and so forth.
5. Lack of SEO Monitoring
Many SEO efforts can be in vain if there isn’t a way to monitor your SEO changes to your site. What keywords are working? What pages are getting the least visits? What search queries is my content showing up in? How high is my position in search lists? These questions can’t be easily answered without using a monitoring tool of some sort to analyze and report on your SEO strategy’s effectiveness.
How to fix: Analyze your SEO strategy routinely with monitoring tools
Having a way to monitor and collect data on your SEO efforts is key to improving your website’s visibility in searches. Some hosting platforms come with built-in solutions or plugins for SEO monitoring. Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console also come with ways of monitoring your SEO progress, collecting data and creating visual reports. Whichever tool you choose to use, check it routinely so you can stay on top of your SEO strategy.
Email is still one of the most effective ways of communicating with your audience. From sending newsletters to sharing new promotions, consistent email marketing keeps your audience engaged with your content and products. One way to ensure success when it comes to your email marketing strategy is to create a content calendar.
What is a content calendar?
An email marketing content calendar is a way of planning and organizing your emails in advance. Whether it be planning weekly or monthly, having a strategy for what content will be sent and when it will be sent can help create consistency in your communications. Having a content calendar also helps you and your team stay on top of your marketing as well as work ahead, giving you some breathing room for other important tasks. Overall, through a content calendar, you can clearly map out email strategy!
How to create your email marketing content calendar
Establish your goals
When it comes to your email marketing strategy, you need to figure out what it is you want to achieve through it. Increasing sales, growing your subscriber list, boosting engagement, or educating your audience are just a few goals you may consider. By setting a goal, it will be easier to determine what kinds of material you want to create and send out to your audience.
Think about your audience
In any marketing strategy, you need to consider what your audience wants to see in emails. What do they like to read? What do they want to know? Answering these questions can help you and your team create emails that resonate with your audience.
Note: Consider segmenting your audience
Depending on how large your audience is, you may find that you can divide your audience into differ groups. These groups all may want different kinds of emails. If that is the case, consider segmenting your audience and selecting tailor email types for each group. An example of this could be new customers and existing customers. New customers may not know much about your company, so they may need to receive some introductory emails that older customers do not need. By segmenting your audience, you can meet your customers where they are and create better experiences for your variety of customers.
Plan out the kinds of emails you want to send
Before you look at your calendar, you and your marketing team need to determine what kinds of emails you want to send out. Some common types of marketing emails are newsletters, promotional emails, product announcements, event invitations, education content, and so forth. What type you choose will depend on the products & services you sell, as well as your audience. Choosing a handful of email types can help create variety in what your customers see, which can keep your emails fresh and interesting.
Set frequency and timing
One of the most important aspects in your email content calendar is creating consistency. Each email type (for example, let’s say you are doing newsletters and promotions) should have set days and times associated with them. Perhaps your newsletters and promotions are sent biweekly on Tuesdays at 12PM and they go back and forth: one Tuesday you send the newsletter, the next a promotional email, and so forth. Ideally the times and days you send your emails will be determined by the days and times your audience is most engaged, which can take time to figure out. The key though is to make sure that you send consistently so your audience knows when to expect your content!
Note: Identify key dates & events
While establishing your routine emails is important, don’t forget to mark your calendar with other special marketing events! For example, your company’s birthday or a new product don’t happen that often but are valuable marketing opportunities.
Create content & content templates
Email subject lines, image assets, call-to-actions, and the bulk of your message all need careful thought. Your audience receives hundreds of emails a day, so you want your emails to stand out and be remembered as worthwhile reading. For each type of email, you may consider creating a template that you can use for that email every time so that the structure is constant. Templates also make creating future emails easier.
Note: Brainstorm content themes & topics
In the beginning, creating content may come easily, but as time passes, you may find yourself running out of creativity. Create a list of content themes and topics that you want to write about. This list will not only help you when writing future emails, but also can be a way of testing what kind of content your users engage with if you use an email platform that has analytics involved. Depending on what is popular with your audience, your list may change overtime.
Schedule & send
To send your marketing content calendar emails, you can either manually send them, or use automation tools to schedule them to send automatically. At BCSE, we use AWeber*. AWeber is an email marketing software that allows you to create, schedule, and send your emails out to audiences. You can segment your audience through it as well. In terms of creating an effective email marketing content calendar, email management tools such as AWeber help streamline the process!
Note: Consider testing different content methods to better serve your audience
When sending your emails, you may want to experiment with certain aspects of your emails. For example, figuring out what subject lines or Call-to-Actions resonates with your audience can take time, but with the help of an email management software, you can “A/B” test them on a certain percentage of your audience and see how well they do!
Analyze & Revise
When your emails are finally sent, it’s time to track how well they do. Having a way to report and analyze your email marketing strategy is important to improving it overtime! Through an email management tool like AWeber, you can keep track of important metrics, such as Open Rates (how much of your audience opened your email) or Click Rates (How much of your audience clicked a link). Through such metrics, you can gain a better understanding of what works for your audience and what doesn’t.
Want to Learn More?
Want to learn more about how you can up your email marketing game?Listen to our latest eCommerce Made Easy podcast where we interview Tracy Beavers. Tracy is an expert in marketing, sales, and business growth and has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs gain business visibility through organic marketing strategies. Tune in to learn why email marketing is not just a good-to-have but a must-have component of your business strategy.
