Email Marketing Strategies To Look Out For Post Pandemic

Email Marketing Strategies To Look Out For Post Pandemic

One of the aspects of business that the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted is how companies reach out and interact with their customers. In the past, marketing officials could easily meet consumers directly, but now that is a little restricted thanks to social distancing guidelines. Indeed, in the post-pandemic era, digital outreach is on course to become mainstream.

Companies will rewrite their traditional strategies and replace them with those involving the use of automated software. Amidst the tides of change, entities that will use the crisis as an opportunity to create efficient new processes will have the best chances of survival.

If you’re looking to take your business to the next level during these challenging times, below are five email marketing strategies you might want to implement post-pandemic.

Inside Selling

No doubt the pandemic is shifting the traditional marketing model from outside to inside selling. Marketing and sales teams are now connecting with prospects at any time irrespective of location. Remote tools like live chat and synchronous video are becoming the standard channels of business communication.

The ultimate gain from inside selling is an increase in productivity while also maintaining a personal connection that allows outside selling to excel pre-pandemic. Today, traditional outside marketers are now sending up to 9% more emails to follow up on prospects. Post pandemic the trend will prevail considering the increased response rate from the approach.

What’s more, with about 85% of consumers now researching the internet before making purchase decisions, emails are becoming important sources of information. For marketers, this offers an opportunity to build better rapport by providing prospects with rich information. The focus is to shift from overreliance on the in-person interactions to the online outreach.

The inside selling strategy for email marketing is effective but companies have to adopt powerful communication tools. These will not only be user-friendly but also capable of providing a centralized view of customer data.

Online Marketing

Traditionally, email marketing has been an approach that businesses use to create mass awareness about products and services. The post-pandemic era will strengthen that role as marketers realize how effective yet affordable the channel is and make it mainstream.

If you noticed it, the earlier phases of the crisis saw outdoor advertising canvases go blank as people remained indoors. At the time, most businesses were investing their marketing resources into online channels where the majority of consumers spent time.

Post-pandemic, the majority of businesses will likely opt to continue using the online channels, with email marketing becoming the standard. Management of strategies and budgets will, therefore, be by metrics, which offer deeper insight to marketers. With the internet enabling tracking of email open rates, web traffic, and social media engagement, businesses will discover even more effective channels of engaging consumers.

Additionally, salespeople will easily identify and act on rapid shifts in consumer behavior. Adjusting of messaging rates and the budgets put into customers’ outreach will occur within hours. Traditionally, this takes weeks on offline channels like TV and even months on outdoor advertising.

Self-Service Customer Care

Chat volume from customer-initiated conversation suddenly soared at the onset of the pandemic. Businesses coped by leveraging email marketing as the primary communication medium. Additionally, it led to the adoption of automated tools that were capable of offering self-service support. Post pandemic, the trend is likely to persist as consumers begin viewing this as mandatory rather than optional.

The self-service approach is teaching entities to empower the customers, which is a win-win situation. For instance, automated responses to emails are assisting visitors to find solutions much quicker than they would from human support staff. Moreover, it frees the staff, thereby allowing them to focus on complex customer issues.

Moving forward, businesses will position a chatbot in the support system as a strategy to manage queries from consumers. Such tools can answer questions instantly and increase reliability in the resolution of issues. What’s more, they can share web links directing consumers to the knowledge base, which likely offers more guidance on common queries.

All-Round Marketing Model

A research conducted by HubSpot recently showed that the marketing model you adopt significantly influences the feelings of consumers towards your company. Put otherwise, a prospect’s experience while dealing with your marketing team is likely to determine your conversion rate.

Now, the pandemic affected the traditional funnel model that used emails as channels of acquiring customers. It replaced it with an all-round marketing model that focuses on following them up in the course of their engagement with a company.

The model places the retention of consumers at the center of focus by marketing teams and not just acquisition. It changes how entities engage customers as a way to help them achieve their long-term goals. Further, it helps in the identification of communication errors that increase the abandonment of conversations by prospects.

The ultimate gain is that customers will have a delightful experience while dealing with the outreach team. And this will see them market the brand to other people on behalf of the company.

To increase the effectiveness of this model, companies should identify and monitor the core business metrics. Also, parts of the model that impact the key metrics should have more force and resources added to increase productivity. Lastly, there should be a correction of points where friction likely to counteract the efficiency of the model is high.

Less Reliance on Tech Stack

Digital transformation during the pandemic increased the reliance on new technologies by companies. Although powerful email tools are a positive addition, there are downsides that they drag along. For example, businesses that moved their entire operation online invested heavily in tech by acquiring more tools.

Although a heavy tech stack often comes with benefits such as streamlining operations, there’s the risk of the acquired tools failing to work harmoniously. In the long run, this creates complex data silos, overwhelms administrative tasks, and disrupts marketing teamwork.

In the post-pandemic era, companies that rushed to acquire tech tools will shed their collection. The replacement will be a lean suite of tools that incorporate both online and offline efforts of brand awareness. Preference will be on email marketing approaches that centralize data and makes it possible for teams involved to have a single source of information. In turn, this will increase the seamless and contextual experience that customers expect from outreach campaigns.

Are you using email more now than pre-COVID-19 days? How has your experience been like We’d love to hear your feedback!