When I use the phrase ‘email campaigns’, what image does it conjure up for you?

Does it make you think of being bombarded with sales emails?  Or maybe an email every day that you very quickly lose interest in?

I understand why those images pop into your mind… they do mine too.  But, if email campaigns are created correctly, they are very powerful indeed.

In this blog, I am using the term ‘campaign’ to mean a sequence, that once someone enters it, automatically sends the emails out, in order, at the frequency you have set.

The different types of email campaigns

There are many types of email campaigns.  Some email marketing software use different terms for them, but I will do my best to make it clear what each one is.

The main sequences people think of are:

• To deliver a download and follow it up
• An evergreen campaign – ongoing, relationship building
• A sales campaign
• A launch campaign

However, there are also many uses for strategic email campaigns, such as to follow up a quote, or to move people from one part of the customer journey to another.

Why use strategic email campaigns?

Keeping in touch with people takes a great deal of man hours.  Now if you have a business where each customer is of a high value in monetary terms, and so you don’t actually have many customers at any one time, then a personal call will always be the way to go.

However, if you have many leads coming in, many quotes going out, and limited resources in terms of people with free time to follow up all your potential leads and quotes, then allowing automated emails to do it for you may be a smart way of working.

Another scenario would be if your customer had a wait between placing the order and receiving your goods or service.  I actually had an example of this recently.

My ‘Tumbleweed’ Experience

I recently purchased a very expensive (£0000’s) garden shed.  We checked the company out thoroughly, checked all their reviews… basically did our due diligence.

I ordered the shed and paid for it through their website (they are located a few hundred miles away from where I live).  I received an order confirmation email and then nothing.

Two weeks went past, and I started to feel a little nervous.

I emailed them though their website and got no response.

I rang them and was told that the person I needed to speak to was on the phone and would call me back – they didn’t.

I left it a few more days and rang again – same response.

Now, when the order confirmation email came through so did a vacation message, from a guy in the business.  The order form obviously was submitted to a number of people by email and his vacation message was an auto responder, so I got it too.

Getting more and more worried I had lost thousands of £s, I decided to email this guy.  Within minutes I had a phone call from the lady who was always on the phone.  It turns out that the guy I’d emailed was the overarching group of companies Commercial Director.  Brilliant.

He emailed me back too and apologised no one had been responding so I suggested to him that it might be a nice idea to set a couple of automated emails up, going to customers waiting for their sheds to be manufactured.  That way they wouldn’t worry the way I had because they’d know the company was in the process of building their shed and they were valued.  He said that would be implemented as quickly as possible.

When is best to use strategic email campaigns in the customer journey?

This is a great question and there is no one size fits all answer. 

When you think about the journey your customers take with you, from the time they find out about your business to the completion of their first purchase with you, are there any gaps?

If I think about my customer journey, someone can ask me to create some copy for them and have to wait a few weeks for me to be able to get to it.  The schedule varies at different points in the year but it’s usually somewhere between two and six weeks.  (If it’s content they’re after writing then that can usually be done much quicker as my team will draft it for me.)

So now any new customer is added to my email marketing software and begins to receive weekly emails from me.

A financial client I work with had me set up an email sequence as they have an initial call with a prospective customer and then schedule a meeting for a couple of weeks later.  The emails in between prepare the prospect for the meeting so they know what to expect and what information they will be asked about, so they can have prepared.

Could you use email campaigns strategically to work more efficiently and/or provide better customer service?