If you are looking to have a successful business, it is crucial to always look for new prospects or potential customers who will then be converted into customers. One of the strategies is to create a robust email database with all potential customer data to enable you to email personalized information to prospects.
According to experienced marketers, email marketing is still very effective in creating a large customer base, especially for online businesses. But it has to be customer-focused and have all of the relevant information that they need, hence the importance of creating it in the right way.
Well, if you are looking for a way to build and nurture a mail marketing database, there is a lot that you should know whether you are new in business or not. Fortunately, this article will give detailed insights that you can follow and get enlightened.
What is an Email Marketing Database?
Simply put, this is a pool of data with the list of names, email addresses, physical addresses, and other information about your businesses’ actual and potential customers. A rich mail marketing database should also contain a lot of other relevant information that will help the marketing team to craft personalized information. Such information includes but is not limited to the following:
- Buying the trend of actual customers – When the data is collected from point of sale, one of the details collected is their buying habits. Smart tools that help in data ingestion can help to create a mail marketing database with information on buying trends of previous customers. Hence, emailing them for promotion and increasing loyalty is easy.
- Age and sex – Precise email marketing should know the age and sex of their prospects. When you address the emails correctly, the potential customers are enticed to consider your products. The same case applies to when you know their sex. Hence, a healthy email marketing database should have this information.
- Physical address – On top of having the email addresses of the prospects, your marketing team also needs their physical addresses. This information will also come in handy when preparing marketing emails since geographical locations can change the needs of customers.
Steps in Creating an Email Marketing Database
Whether you are new or experienced in email marketing, you definitely need a healthy database. The first step is to create one or improve the one that you have. According to experts, a well-nurtured mail marketing database requires expertise and experience to create. Here are some steps that you can follow.
- Setting the goals
The first step is to set goals that your marketing team should achieve. These are also the company’s goals and every person in the management should be involved during the brainstorming session. The ultimate goal of nurturing the mail marketing database is to increase the profit margins across the company.
But the immediate goals include converting as many prospects as possible with personalized emails to increase the loyalty of actual customers. The company might get other prospects through referrals from the customers they email. There is also the goal of collecting feedback from customers emailed for future use.
- Choose the right tools
To collect data and nurture your mail marketing database, you need to have the right tools. Today, there are dozens of these solutions on the web. A mobile-based marketing solution app for your sales and marketing team might have a data ingestion feature that collects client’s information from multiple sources. These include emails and your database will keep getting bigger and bigger.
- Sorting the email segments
Collecting emails and other information from actual and potential clients is not enough. There needs some sorting working to cluster the emails. They might be segmented using age, buying trends, gender, and other parameters like customer behavior. Behavioral segmentation proves to be very effective when it comes to nurturing an email database. Again, sorting out could be easier if you are using a reliable tool. Even if you are a beginner in business, you can take care of some free software and apps that are available online.
- Creating the campaign
Now that you have ready emails to use, it is time to build your email campaigns. Of course, you cannot come this far to send a general email to all of your prospects. Each email is customized to suit the anticipated needs of each customer. But with thousands of emails, how can you do this? Well, some tools allow you to create personalized emails to all of your addresses.
They pool the possible needs of the clients now that they are already clustered enabling you to send hundreds of emails in a day. The good thing is that they track the dates that the emails were sent to avoid bombarding potential clients with similar emails at the same time.
- Automating emails
A rich mail marketing database can be set to have auto emails sent to clients on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. As a matter of fact, this is so common these days since one is sure that potential customers are kept informed.
Likewise, autoresponders can be set, which ensures that the clients get feedback that answers their inquiries quickly. In some cases, the sales and marketing teams or even customer care teams can respond to inquiries that do not need autoresponders.
- Sending marketing messages
It is part of a rich mail marketing database to ensure that marketing messages are sent. Whether you will run this manually through a header, body, and footer template, or use advanced email marketing tools, just have a target of the number of emails to send every month. As mentioned, some people send emails to one prospect on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis.
It is better to have a target for your team and ensure that it is followed to achieve the goals that were set at the beginning. If there are challenges surrounding the nurturing of the email marketing database, you need to address them pronto.
Challenges When Nurturing an Email Marketing Database
When building such a comprehensive database, challenges will always be there, but what matters is how they are solved. And in fact, it is better to prevent them where possible to have a smooth experience.
- Lack of information to personalized emails – The main aim of maturing an email marketing database is to have information for personalized emails. But this can and is often a challenge for many companies. If partial information is collected, marketers might have a challenge personalizing the emails. That is why you need a sophisticated tool to achieve this. Also, ensure that your team is skilled enough and keen on details, especially if they are collecting information and keying it into a database.
- Lack of appropriate tools – Nurturing a mail marketing database might need the appropriate tools. As mentioned earlier, there are many such tools today due to the advancement of technology. Unfortunately, some organizations and businesses fail to find one that suits their needs, while others do not have enough finances to fund these tools. The trick is to look for an appropriate tool carefully until you get one that suits your needs. You could also talk to an email marketing expert to assist.
- Failure to keep up with trends – Although email marketing is as old as the emails themselves, its dynamics keep on changing every day. One must have the right strategy to reach potential customers without looking like a bother. It is good to keep up with new trends that are working as far as this strategy is concerned.
Benefits of a Well-Nurtured E-Mail Marketing Database
As you continue to nurture your mail marketing database, your business or organization will experience numerous benefits. The first one is an increase in potential customers. When many prospects are emailed with personalized information about the product, they become interested. Hence, converting them into customers is a lot easier. They start by inquiring about the products and this is the opportunity to convert them into buyers.
This increases the loyalty of actual customers. When they are emailed regularly, they get attached to your products and they always want to buy them again and again. But you have to give them relevant information as well. When introducing a new product, make sure that this is something they will get interested in.
The ultimate goal of any marketing strategy is to increase profit margins. And an email marketing strategy does this very well. Focus on having a well-nurtured mail marketing database, which you can achieve by following the insights we have shared above.
Lastly, there is the benefit of increased reputation of your company. The more email addresses you have in your database and the more you email them, the more your business and products are known. This is further complemented by the superior products and other great services you offer to the customers. According to experts, email marketing is a personalized way of letting as many people as possible know about your product.
Final Word
That said, you now know the best way of nurturing a mail marketing database, the challenges that come with the process, and the benefits of making it a success. Every business should focus on this and ensure that it works well. For those who are not sure, it is better to consult an expert.