Increase response rates by targeting your bulk emails

This article was included in the March 28th, 2017 issue of the LACRM Newsletter.

Maintaining frequent communication is a surefire way to build good, strong relationships with your contacts, so that you’re the first thing on their mind if they ever need the services or products that you provide. One great way to keep up communication with all of your contacts is to send out email campaigns to touch base and check in with them periodically. However, you want to make sure you are sending out relevant, targeted emails that your contacts want to receive and will respond to; sending out a generic email blast to all of your contacts without any segmentation comes with the risk that your email goes straight to spam or the contact unsubscribes from your list.

To avoid this, Ava Chase, owner of Advanced Practice Prep, sends out emails that are only of relevance to the group that she’s reaching out to. People come to Ava to sign up for the classes she organizes all around the country and in her business, frequent communication is key. But the last thing she wants is to bombard her contacts with emails every day, so she chooses to send out emails to groups of contacts based on their geographic region. This way, whenever she is headed to a certain location, she can send out a targeted email to her former students in the area to let them know without bothering all of her students:

“We run our courses all around the country and whenever I, or one of my instructors, travel to a city for a course, we send out an email blast to the group of students we have in that city. This way, they know we are on our way and can sign up for a course last minute if they want.
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This is a much better way for us to target specific contacts instead of sending out an email campaign to all of our students because it means we don’t end up inundating everyone with emails all the time. It’s also good for our open and response rates because our students know that the only emails they receive from us are emails that are relevant to them.”
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- Ava Chase, Owner of Advanced Practice Prep

How the CRM can help

CRMs not only help you keep track of your interactions with your contacts, but also allows you to organize your database. By having your contacts and leads sorted in the CRM based on the data in their fields, you can get a clearer idea of the different types of emails you could send out. Ava segments her contacts based on location, but contacts can also be grouped depending on where you met them, how they engage with your business, perhaps even whether or not they agreed to receive emails from you. Regardless of how you organize your contacts, a CRM will allow you to view these lists of contacts at a glance, letting you know who to contact with a special deal or promotion.

Tip to try: Try out LACRM’s group feature along with our integration with Mailchimp to segment and send out email campaigns to certain categories of contacts. For example, instead of sending out an email blast to all of your prospects, you can send out a targeted email to all of your prospects that were referred to you by an existing customer. This can be divided even further, perhaps an email only to customers who use a specific service or product you offer and so on. Mailchimp has tags that let you organize your audience into smaller lists, so you can send targeted emails that are more likely to elicit responses.

Check out Mailchimp for more information on using tags to organize your audience, and learn more about integrating the CRM with Mailchimp here.