How to do EDM marketing? Here is a complete guide to promotion

EDM marketing is now used by many product operation teams as one of the necessary means to recall users. In fact, email marketing has been used by companies since a long time ago. At the beginning of email marketing, due to the imperfect Internet rules, the mechanisms of major email service providers were not perfect, and people did not pay much attention to the content of emails, so there were almost no restrictions on email marketing (bulk emails) at that time.

However, with the surge in the number of registered email accounts, the number of mass emails people need to send has also begun to surge. But sending mass emails one by one through personal mailboxes is very inefficient, so mass email software came into being. Its mechanism of automatically registering multiple accounts for sending effectively helps email marketing (EDM email marketing) personnel to send bulk emails. At that time, email marketing reached a small peak in the field of email promotion with the help of bulk email software, a bulk email tool .

Among EDM email marketing, the most famous example is hot mail email marketing. Append each email: PS I love you. Get your free E-mail at Hotmail. This brought in 3,000 new users per day in the early days. Six months later it had a million users, and five weeks later it had another million users. Hotmail combines the user's usage scenario and fission propagation scenario into one. The process of users using the product is to spread the product. Therefore, a good email marketing should fully combine the user's usage scenario and product characteristics.

Nowadays, EDM marketing is often mentioned by many operators . The reason behind this is that our user churn rate is getting higher and higher, so we have to take measures to retain them. Therefore, EDM marketing to recover lost users appears in many articles on user retention , but the articles just mention it lightly and do not elaborate on how to carry out the EDM marketing process. So today I will talk about the complete process of EDM marketing.

Pre-planning preparation

1. Clarify the purpose

First of all, we must clarify the purpose of EDM marketing, which must be consistent with the company's marketing strategy. Is it to promote the brand image, verify the business model , obtain seed users , communicate with users to obtain feedback, recall users to active websites, or maintain customer relationships? Determining a clear and pure purpose in this way will provide a strong guarantee for subsequent planning.

2. Determine the promotion theme

To determine this promotion theme is to summarize what the main content of our EDM marketing is? For example, a message that is often sent to you is: There is someone nearby who has a crush on you, so you must make sure that your theme is the push of Tantan to recall lost users. In this way, it can be clear that your copy is aimed at recalling users after they have been lost.

3. Target audience

The target population may not be classified so finely when pushing the message, but generally there will be regional classification. For example, my EDM promotion this time is only for users in Guangdong, and other users across the country will not be pushed first.

4. Collect emails

As for collecting email addresses, I guess every company has its own way of collecting information. But generally speaking, when users use our products, they have already left their information including name, email address, etc. when they register. In this way, as long as we ask our own technology to export it, we can obtain the corresponding email information, which greatly facilitates our acquisition efficiency. Of course, not all products (the products here do not only refer to APPs, but also include some offline physical products) require the target user ’s email address when they want to do EDM promotion so that the message can be accurately sent to their email address. So I will focus on two more channels here.

Collect emails through QQ groups

Through certain software (there are plenty of them online, just compare several and choose a reliable one), find a specific QQ group, join it, and then export the QQ numbers of group members, and you will naturally get the QQ email account.

Use software to grab specific user's mailbox

If you search online, you will find a lot of free and easy-to-use software that is relatively easy to use. You can collect email addresses from web pages using keywords. Many B2B websites, yellow pages websites, and city classified websites have a lot of information that can be collected, and the collection is relatively accurate. You can find the forum communities where your target audience is and use tools to capture their email addresses. QQ and NetEase Mailbox. There are software on the Internet that can search for people by region, gender, and age group. NetEase Mailbox can also be converted into a blog address, so the information you find can be more accurate.

5. Selection of EDM marketing platform

There are three types of email sending platforms. The first is a professional email platform (data marketing) company. They have built a professional email sending platform with a fast sending speed, which can achieve a sending speed of several thousand to hundreds of thousands of emails per hour. At the same time, they sign agreements with major email service providers (ISPs) to release emails from this platform. Therefore, the arrival rate of emails sent through such platforms can be maintained at a relatively high level.

At the same time, information about email subscribers is recorded in marketing databases about demographics, behaviors, and preferences. Through these data mining settings, a promotional email can be sent to each customer that is different from others, an email that can match the preferences, behaviors, and lifestyles of the customers that we know. Relatively speaking, the cost of sending this type of email is also the highest.

The second is small email sending companies, which are mainly concentrated in local EDM service providers. They often have several servers, several IP addresses, and several people, and rely on these servers to send large quantities of emails. The cost of sending emails for such companies is very low, and they can often send millions of emails for just a few hundred yuan. This can easily cause your domain name and IP to be blacklisted, affecting the normal operation of your company's business.

The third is some mass messaging software circulating on the Internet. The basic principle is to send emails in batches at regular intervals through the software. If you send emails too frequently, your domain name and IP address may be blacklisted, and third-party email servers may also limit your sending frequency. It should be noted that the latter two EDM marketing platforms cannot achieve personalized customization of emails and it is difficult to monitor and analyze marketing effects.

Content production stage

1. How to write an email title

I guess many people have seen the dozens of title writing methods summarized online. You can search directly online, so I won’t go into details here. Here I want to emphasize that the first impression is very important! Studies have shown that a good email title can lead to an email open rate 10-20 times higher than an average email title. Put key information in the front part of the title; create a sense of urgency; provide discounts; personalize fields, etc.

2. How to write email content

The content of the email emphasizes one principle: one-on-one conversation. It’s like making the user feel like you are just sending this email to him, and it’s not some mass mailing with rewards. Make your users feel respected and make them feel that this is a communication method established for them and is exclusive to them. Of course, due to various constraints, it is often difficult to fully achieve one-to-one communication.

Here you need to capture the user's familiar characteristics. For example, if a marketing staff of a communication product sales company can learn that a certain user has been browsing reviews and price information of several mobile phones almost every day, then the marketing staff can make a basic judgment that the user is very likely to intend to purchase these mobile phones in the near future.

Based on this judgment, the marketer classifies the user into the corresponding data category and generates EDM for the user through the database marketing system, including detailed evaluation data, review data, product comparison data and promotional information of these mobile phone products. The user sees the information he wants to see and establishes a circular interactive relationship with you, which plays a very important role in converting sales opportunities.

In short, personalized, noteworthy, and hobby-targeted content is all user-friendly content. Disseminating corporate information while adhering to user-friendliness is an important principle in the implementation of EDM marketing. Only in this way can companies establish long-term and healthy interactive relationships with customers, build customer loyalty, and create a sustainable source of profit for the company.

3. How to set conversion points

There are three principles to keep in mind:

• Prominent and in line with user habits (blue underline means clickable)
• Get users into the conversion path as quickly as possible (click to see more offers)
• The conversion point should be clear and have a predictable outcome (customer clicks to view the offer, and the registration page pops up)

Sending and post- data analysis

After sending emails using the EDM platform, you need to track customer responses and check the effectiveness of EDM marketing. Through these means, you can improve your audience selection and email sending skills.

There are three main types of monitoring tools:

• The backend provided by the email provider (can only provide a rough idea of ​​the open rate and click rate ), so we usually add third-party tools to make the data more comprehensive and the presentation effect clearer.
• If it is a Tencent company list, you can put the GA monitoring code in the website (the campaign is set up, the generated code is mixed into the email, and only the click rate can be monitored)
• Third-party + GA (can monitor click rate and open rate)

Basic indicators for evaluating email marketing effectiveness

When analyzing the effectiveness of marketing emails, you can start with four basic indicators: reach rate, open rate, click rate, and conversion rate .

The arrival rate shows the proportion of emails that have entered the user's mailbox. It is the first step to successfully complete the final conversion and is a fundamental indicator. The formula for arrival rate is: actual number of emails arriving in the user's inbox/number of emails sent × 100%. There are two reasons why valid messages cannot be delivered: one is that the user's mailbox is full and the number of accepted messages is limited; the other is that the user's mail is invalid.

Open rate Open rate is the key to conversion . After seeing an email, the recipient will decide within 5 seconds or even less whether to open it immediately, open it later, not open it, or delete it. The sender's name, sender's email address, title, and the last time the sender received an email are the main influencing factors. A delicate situation then occurs, where brand value and awareness will play a decisive role. Highly recognized brands will help advertisers increase their open rates. Likewise, a clear, provocative, credible, and appealing title will also help encourage users to open your email. According to a study in the United States, 70% of users who place orders make their purchases within 3 hours of opening the email.

Click-through rate Click-through rate statistics can be achieved by tracking user clicking behavior. The click-through rate depends on the overall design style, user needs, and of course the promotional or main content, and whether the call-to-action elements work. The click-through rate of emails is a more accurate indicator for measuring the effectiveness of EDM marketing.

Conversion rate Conversion is the ultimate goal of email sending. The conversion goal of online retail websites is orders, the conversion goal of APP companies is downloads, and the conversion goal of training institutions is form submissions. Of course, you can also customize other specific goals, such as browsing a specific page - an announcement of a holiday event or a specific behavior such as uploading photos, voting, leaving messages, etc.

Note: Use A and B emails to send emails

You can design multiple email templates (A/B templates) and select multiple email templates to send alternately when sending. This avoids sending a large amount of repeated content in a short period of time and can also optimize the push effect.

Off topic

Our mailboxes are filled with spam every day. From its historical origins, early email marketing originated from spam, which made people have no good impression of it and have a rejection mentality. We have now developed a kind of immunity in our brains, and we can tell at a glance that an email is an advertising or promotional email, and we generally ignore it or unsubscribe directly. Therefore, if companies want to use email marketing to gain more attention now, they need to keep up with the times, constantly study the new resistance of users, and then develop new solutions. Instead of using a set plan for thousands of years, timely changes can make this EDM marketing produce greater benefits.