Email Marketing is a crucial part of a good digital marketing strategy. When used correctly, it can be used to build huge engaged audiences, nurture long-term relationships with customers and generate huge sales figures! Here are our tips on taking your email marketing strategy to the next level.

1. Build an engaged audience

Short-term sales are good, but building a long-term engaged audience is crucial to lasting success in digital marketing. Email is a great way to inform your target audience directly, answer their questions, highlight your USPs and convert them into customers. A newsletter sign-up on your site is a great way to filter in your stronger leads - those who are interested in signing up for your newsletter are by the very act, strong leads.

Use this interest to its full advantage. Nurture them. Keep them informed by sending out news about your brand, new releases and exclusive content to them. You’ll find that those active on your email lists will separate themselves as strong customers, and eventually, long-term, loyal customers.

2. Nurture long-term relationships

Email is a powerful way to nurture your customer leads into brand-loyal, repeat customers. You can use your email campaign and flow results to find which members on your list are your VIPs & repeat customers.

You can further segment these audiences by their behaviours and base your messaging on these factors. Email platforms have options to separate these audiences into segments, so you can prepare a flow based on your relationships and make the recipient feel special. Keep in touch with them throughout the year and watch your customer relationship grow!

3. Boost your sales

And of course, Sales! Email is HUGE for conversions. We use email campaigns for our clients and see HUGE percentages of sales come from these. Across the industry, for every 10 add-to-carts, about 7 of these are abandoned. This means that when we advertise and optimize for add-to-carts, only approximately 30% will follow through on the purchase.

That’s 70% that went to purchase and simply didn’t follow through, for whatever reason. But email is a powerful way to recapture some of this 70%. Use an abandon cart flow and remind your customers what they’re missing. This is often enough to pull through another amount of customers to finish their purchase. Still have a few incomplete purchases? Why not send a follow-up to your follow-up and offer 10% off. Who can say no to a bargain?

Email is one of the many platforms we at Social Media Elite use to push our clients marketing to the next level. Want that for your company? Check out what we do, or contact us for more information.

CASE STUDY 6

OBJECTIVE

After the year that was 2020, our client wanted to have an especially strong Black Friday weekend sale. To accomplish this, they offered 30% across their entire product range. We moved quickly to ensure our client had the necessary content required to accomplish their Black Friday targets.

APPROACH

Being a highly competitive time for ad placements, we paid extremely close attention to the time of day our ads were scheduled for, their run time and the actions of our clients competitors. 

• We optimised all of our ads for purchases 

We started out the weekend campaign with three graphics of varying styles and designs, different colours, motion graphics and static graphics. At the initial launch of our Black Friday campaign, each of these were allocated equal budget and targeting the same audiences. However, as time went on we continually reviewed ad performance and optimised accordingly. 

• The weakest performing variation was paused and its budget allocated into the strongest
• We made this decision based on engagement, clicks, and of course, purchases

The process of optimising these ads also provided valuable insights into the creative process and idea generation of what we might do for this particular client in future campaigns. We learned what colour and text styles and variations we could utilise to ensure our performance improved with each subsequent campaign. 

RESULTS

The Black Friday campaign was a resounding success for our client. Over the course of the weekend our graphics generated over 13 times return on ad spend! 

The strong result for our client was only made sweeter by the learning into our audience we obtained through optimisation, we look forward to delivering our client even stronger results with this knowledge in the future. 

Check out Our Client Results Page

CASE STUDY 4

Objective

In the face of Covid-19 and shadows of Brexit, our client wanted to put a huge emphasis on supporting local Irish Brands alongside their multinational offerings. Rather than be an aspect of a campaign, we decided to run this as a separate “Support Irish” campaign with only Irish products included to ensure businesses were benefiting especially during the busy gifting period.

Approach

There has been a huge surge in online support for small Irish businesses has been seen amid recent Covid-19 restrictions, with hundreds of thousands of comments and posts using hashtags such as #BuyIrish, #ShopLocal and #SupportSmallBusiness posted on Facebook and Instagram over the last couple of months, our client wanted to play their part in this.

Our client created their in house “Proud To Be Irish, Proud To Support Irish” marketing campaign that we supported through paid social media ads.

We began with building awareness through video product reviews that reflected the importance of supporting small Irish businesses during trying times.
To develop our audiences Interest, we crafted blog posts that acted as Gift Guides for the Irish products that were being highlighted throughout the Support Irish Campaign.

• Each level of engagement was retargeted with Irish Product Carousels
  We also included - “Support Irish Brands Online Today ☘️ “ into all of our Christmas gifting campaigns to further promote this country wide campaign during the online busy season and do our part to help small Irish businesses transition to the online market.
  We expected very strong results for the campaign based on initial engagement and interest, but we could not believe how the national community got behind our message.

Results

The Support Irish Campaign brought in roughly 25 times return on ad spend! This whole campaign provided us fantastic insight into our audiences. We decided that this messaging resonated so strongly with Irish People it shouldn’t end with this campaign or client. We adapted the messaging to suitable clients and were again rewarded with strong results.

Check our Client Results Page

CASE STUDY 5

OBJECTIVE

Gather new audiences from different avenues by providing free value. We worked with our client to create free content spread out over a week just before Christmas, starting on December 15th, targeting our clients Instagram following exclusively. 

APPROACH

We began with an email campaign. Through viewing Instagram Story content, viewers would “Swipe Up” to opt into a free group consisting of live workouts for a period of one week to get people feeling great before Christmas. 

• We asked for their name and email address
• We sent them a link to a private group where they could access the workouts 
• All live videos were saved and could then be accessed by members at a time that suited them 

RESULTS

Through the Instagram campaign, over 250 people swiped up to take part in the live workouts! 

Since then over 45 people have signed up to full extensive plans with our clients and become valuable customers representing a conversion rate of 18%. 

Check Our Client Case Results

CASE STUDY 3

OBJECTIVE

Our Client wanted to provide value to their customers, engage with new potential audiences and build up a personalised messaging system to recommend suitable products and drive traffic to their website. 

APPROACH

We had noticed that some of our most engaged videos and ads we’re “How to use” and “Product Guides”. We knew we had to utilise this to resonate with this audience on behalf of our client. 

• We worked with our Client to create a checklist of all essential items 

This checklist was to make sure everyone felt confident and prepared that they have everything covered. 

The next step was getting this Guide out to our audience. We decided on a chatbot messaging campaign where the Checklist could be received to the customers phone straight from Facebook Messenger. 

• Hit Send – Receive Free Guide
• Once consent was granted, we asked the customer what their favourite products were

Then we were able to group people based on their responses and tailor follow up messages to suit the person who had opted in, providing them with more value and product information depending on their needs. 

RESULTS

We had over 8,000 people opt in to this checklist driving huge amounts of traffic to the website over the course of a couple of weeks, in which our retargeting campaigns could pick up at a later date, creating a really strong funnel for our client. 

Check Our Client Case Results

CASE STUDY 1

OBJECTIVE

We wanted to spread awareness of our clients services and locations while delivering actionable results that would generate leads and see a substantial return on investment.

APPROACH

Social Media Elite are big believers in the marketing funnel, a means by which we can guide customers through the customer journey from first contact with a brand, to engaged and active customers. For this, we needed to convey the results our client could achieve for customers, and the positive effects and value it would bring to their lives.

Awareness Campaign in lead up to promotional event 

This stage of the funnel allowed us to show prospective customers the results our client can achieve. 

Messenger Ads – retargeted awareness video engagement 

This Interest level of the funnel allowed us to gauge the interest in our clients service existing in the market and respond accordingly.  

Following our Messenger Ads, we moved to the decision level of the funnel. This activity consisted of videos and testimonials from previous customers of our client to relay the impact the treatment has had on their confidence and share the experience of working with our client. We also utilised an Influencer (one of Ireland’s most prominent Influencers Keilidh MUA) to reach out to an even wider audience and convery the results our client achieved for each of their customers. 

The Decision level was optimised for conversions 

We ran a competition alongside our other activities that supported the awareness stage of our funnel, but targeted a “Luke-Warm” rather than fully cold, high relevance audience. Entrants who did not win were emailed and given the opportunity to opt in to future communications and competitions. 

This email component represented the Action Stage of our overall funnel.

The more engagement each stage of the funnel received, the more we anticipated strong results from the campaign, but our end result was another story completely. 

RESULTS

By the time the campaign had come to a close, we had achieved for our client over 7,000 results with a 50% attrition rate.

From an ad spend of €40,000 over the course of the campaign period, we returned and estimated revenue of €1,200,000, a return on investment of over 300!

Check Our Client Case Results

Success Through Teaching.

CASE STUDY 2

OBJECTIVE

Our client wanted to run a 30% Off weekend promo in October 2020. The hope was this would help us help them achieve their monthly targets of €17,000 in sales.

APPROACH

We ran ongoing awareness ads throughout the year. Utilising the marketing funnel, we could turn awareness into results by guiding the customer along the purchase journey.

• We built awareness throughout the year with tutorial videos on how to use the clients product. 
• These videos were optimised for ThruPlays and Link Clicks. A ThruPlay is when a video is viewed for at least 15 seconds.
  

The awareness of the brand and engagement developed through these videos had to be utilised to develop a stronger interest level in the product offerings and start to warm up our audience. 

We suggested that a competition might be the best way to accomplish this, so in the weeks leading up to the promo weekend, we ran an event giving those who had followed our “How To” videos a chance to win over €500 worth of products.

• Each person to enter the competition was also given the chance to sign up to our newsletter to be first in line to hear about future promotions, events & giveaways 
• This competition generated over 600 leads
  

When the time came to launch the 30% Off Weekend Promo, the customer had been guided by us from awareness of the brand, to an active interest in its activities. We now introduced the decision making level of engagement to our audience.

We knew by this stage we had a warm and interested audience, so we expected the momentum and engagement to follow through. The sale was advertised via Facebook, Instagram Feeds & Stories while customers who signed up to our newsletter received advanced notice the day before.

RESULT

The weekend sale was a huge success! Remember when I said our monthly targets were €17,000 for the month?

We hit €17,500 in that weekend alone! Of that over €8,500 was generated through our Paid Social Ads, 49% of our clients overall sales. Not bad for a weekend, but this is a fantastic example of how the work for a great weekend is done far in advance.

Check Our Case Study Results