Email marketing strategies for acquisition and onboarding purposes

Why email for acquisition purposes?

When we talk about user acquisition we might think that paid search and display channels are a priority to be activated, as they will be effective driving traffic and reaching out to audiences.

This might be true if we are looking to deliver growth through digital channels. However, it is as important that we also allocate resources and focus on setting up email automation as part of the acquisition and on-boarding strategy.

Email will quickly prove to be a significant complementary channel, specially relevant for those situations where we’re trying to sell products or services where customers have to provide considerable amount of information or the decision making process is long and complex.

Examples of this can be B2C services such as advertising to rent your property online. For B2B, accountancy online software and many other Saas examples will probably be relevant.

Email shouldn’t be mandatory, but given the opportunity it will be a way to start building the relationship with your customer.

In some cases marketing campaigns will spend significant amount of budget with lead generation activity, that is fed straight into sales teams. This is not a bad practice, but it can be if the approach is to aggressive and there could be missed opportunities as decisions might require some maturation process.

Focus on your customer

If we think about it, in some cases people will go through a decision making process that can take time, we need to adjust our communications to this timings. By understanding our customers we can adjust our strategy to make this process more seamless.

Map out their decision making process, who is involved, what are the barriers and through process they have to go through.

Map out in a calendar any sequence of events that might influence this decision making process, note any events that might also have an influence. A simple example would be anyone planning to book a holiday online. There are obvious seasonal cycles in summer Vs winter that will influence the behaviour.

I will share with you a very common approach used by many online business today that has proven to be an effective way to engage and onboard new customers.

Design a journey that will atract, convert and retain your customer with the aim of generating the maximum value.

One first step to take is understand our customers and think about a process we can use to guide them through different stages that will add value to the business and to them. I would summarise these stages with:

Dividing this in 2 broad audiences: New customers and Existing customers.

This process is focused on bringing the customer closer to our product and brand. Our customer will go through the whole process, email is a channel that will play a key role on driving this customers through this journey.

By using email we have a way to engage with customer at any time. We can develop automation to drive this customers through the process, using data and customer feedback to adjust our communications.

To do this we have to develop cycles (series of emails) that will be deployed over time and with relevant content depending on the stage where our customer is, it’s preferences and behaviours.

First of all we have to map out what this cycles can look like identifying the level of interest, engagement of our customers and signals that we use to flow through.

• Generate awareness

We can use different publications to engage with customers, distributing content through partners.

• Engage with the customer and educate

This can be a periodic email that provides relevant information to our customers with specific topics. This doesn’t have to be a sales approach but more of a content or educational/un focus. This type of cycles are known as lead nurturing cycles.

• Convert

We can have specific cycles that will have the purpose of converting our customers. To do this we can develop promotional campaigns with discounts or incentives that will drive interest in the purchase of our product or service in specific periods of time.

• Onboarding

Some business will have complex products or services that require customers to be onboarded. This can be done with a cycle that can welcome the customer and guide through the process. An example could be different touch-points that can introduce the business, guide how to set up an account and make the most out of the product or hilghighting relevant features.

• Referral

Once our customer has converted, used our product and showed signs or satisfaction we can incorporate a referral program that should be part of our cycle of communications. A way to boos the effectiveness of referral is to use some kind of incentive. Good examples are the ones that would provide a discount to referrer and referee.

• Up-sell cross sell

This will be the focus of any business when trying to increase the value of their customers, by providing additional products and services.

Time to put your strategy into action:

Define touch-points and messaging

Plan every tactical communication having in mind who will receive it, when and what messaging this will contain.

Using diagrams can be a very useful way to illustrate the flows of your cycles of communication.

Test and learn

Email is a channel that will give us the opportunity to test different hypotheses. From headlines, to creatives and incentives. Make sure you’re using a significant amount of users and you’re looking at the right metrics.

Use data to learn about your customer

– Performance data

Once you’ve set up the different journeys, you’ll be able to understand what are the weak points of this by identifying what what works and what doesn’t. Look at engagement metrics and conversion rate:

• Open rate
• CTR (Click through rate)
• CR (Conversion rate)
• Time of week and hour of day

– Qualitative data

There is the opportunity to use email as a source to run surveys, which is a very powerful tool to understand your audience and also to further qualify them based on their answers.

– Programmatic and personalization

Use the data to automate and be relevant, if someone is not opening your emails for some time, it’s probably better to reduce or stop your communications.

Personaliza content based on their interests, profile or persona. You will improve this as you have the opportunity to develop the flows and content. Sophisticate this further integrating your communications with your website, Saas product or other media activity.

Choose a marketing automation platform

Choosing a marketing automation platform can be a complex task as this channel will require the integration with so many areas of the business such as media, marketing, sales, product, customer service. Ideally it will be as integrated as possible.

Choose the one that adjusts well to your needs and integrates well with other IT infraestructura and you can afford. There are so many options out there with different purposes. I will highlight a few:

1. Mail chimp – best for small business
2. ActiveCampaign – best for small businesses & enterprise
3. Moosend – best for small agencies & non-profits
4. Hubspot – best for B2B service companies
5. Omnisend – best for eCommerce
6. Rejoiner – best for managed email marketing
7. ConvertKit – best for bloggers
8. SendinBlue – best for transactional emails
9. Autopilot – best for marketing automation
10. MailerLite – best for personal projects
11. Moonmail – best for developers

Make sure you are managing your data responsibly

If you are running marketing automation campaigns it is quite likely that you will be storing some sort of personal data. It is key that you follow the due diligence and store this in a secure way.

Make sure that you follow the regulation that applies to the countries where you operate. In Europe we have GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). If you’re not doing things the right way significan fines will apply.

Do you need to focus on CRM to reach your business goals?

To answer this question, you need to identify what are the user segments that will drive the growth to the business. Follow the “Source of growth” methodology to identify where you have to focus on first.

I hope that this summary will be helpful for you. Let me know in the comments below if you have any questions or additions. Let me know how you are building a strategy for your email automation.