Since the beginning of the internet era, email has been the key element for trading and identity. There’s a reason why almost every other internet entity requires you to use your email id to take any action on any of those entities. It allows them to reach out to past customers, introduce themselves to future ones and provide people with special offers.
Email marketing takes place when an organization sends commercial messages to a targeted group of people using electronic mail. In simple terms it’s one of the best ways of winning customer loyalty while promoting your business. It may include requests for your commerce, advertisements, offer information, product advertisement or anything which is communicated through email is referred to as email marketing.
Email marketing already survived the rise of social media marketing and it will survive chatbots, too. But, instead of talking about email and chatbots as two opposite marketing aspects that have nothing in common, why not pair them and use their potential to the max?
Here are a few ways to do so.
Looking at the Big Picture: How chatbots can be helpful in email marketing?
1) Collect Email id –
Email newsletter, sale promo or product update only works if you have a qualified email address database to send it to.
Getting people to give up their addresses is not that simple and forms aren’t exactly the most popular among the general public.
Chatbots can help you both streamline and personalize your sign-up experience much more than a CTA button without negatively affecting user experience like online forms.While chatbot does the job forms were supposed to do quite effortlessly, you can get busy preparing more customized content and offers for future email promotions and notifications.
2) Personalize User Experiences –
In today’s customer-centric marketing landscape, just sending out generic emails to anyone on your email list doesn’t work. People expect you to provide relevant and targeted user experiences. Personalized emails can increase your open rates significantly. Moreover, such emails boost customer engagement by 74% and drive 18x more revenue.
This is exactly where chatbots can help in providing more personalized mail. You probably already know that chatbots are one of the most powerful ways to personalize user experiences. Chatbots are designed to ask a specific set of questions and familiarize with their solutions. During this process, chatbot collects a lot of information about customers which can be used to personalize their mail.
3) Qualify/Segment the Leads –
Qualifying and segmenting the leads can be a very long process especially if you are running a B2C business. Chatbots can help you in this process as they can segregate the leads at the initial stage itself.
Using this information, you can send appropriate email sequences to the customer’s state of mind. You’ll be there to say the right thing, whether they’re still just looking around or ready to buy.
4) Remind Customers about Unopened Emails-
There are many reasons why we send emails to our customers. Maybe you’re running a time-sensitive contest or want to share your latest piece of content with them. What about reminding customers about their abandoned shopping carts? Unfortunately, your customers’ inboxes are overcrowded and your emails may go unnoticed. This is exactly where chatbots step in.
Whenever a customer visits back to your website, the chatbots can be used to remind them about their unopened emails. Inform them about the subject of the email and encourage them to read it for more information. This will increase your open rates, enhance your CTR and conversions, and even help you retarget customers effectively.
Conclusion:
Many people claim that chatbots will outright kill email marketing, due to their personalized interactions and ability to deliver customized content to customers. However, email marketing won’t die because of chatbots and chatbots aren’t developed to kill email. In fact, these two approaches can greatly boost each other’s effectiveness in the market. Moreover, chatbots are designed to improve live experience for customers.
It’s always exciting to see how new technologies adapt and perform in the market. However, whenever something new comes out, it doesn’t mean it will necessarily replace something old. Chatbots are becoming widely used by many businesses and email marketing is still as effective as it ever was. Combining these two approaches can improve your efforts and help you reach success more efficiently.