arpReach Team

A good and well planned email marketing strategy should include all opportunities available to contact a customer, ensuring that it is relevant at all times.

Using an automated email marketing solution, such as arpReach, makes this an easy process to manage once you have planned your strategy.

When you sit down and think about all the potential email contact points that could be utilised, you may be surprised at how many opportunities you have been missing, or have not included in your automated email marketing strategy, such as:

1. eNewsletter
2. Promotional email
3. Despatch update
4. Order Confirmation
5. Basket/Form Abandonment
6. ‘Sold Out’ – Email when back in stock
7. Customer Service Contact
8. Registration confirmation
9. Email sign up confirmation
10. Cross sell (alternative complementary products)
11. Occasions (events, birthdays, anniversaries)
12. Product Reviews (triggered email on purchase/download to place a review)
13. Request/update a Password

It is unlikely that a single contact will sit within in all groups. However, if there is a chance that a contact could get multiple email communications through your automation then you should ensure that you limit your contacts to only receive a specified number of emails/week. As a market leading automated email marketing tool, arpReach can create more tightly defined segments to limit this.  It will also stop a user receiving more than one ‘broadcast email’ if the are signed up to more than one list, see more detail on our features page

The following are 7 auto responder programs that should be included in your strategy:

1. Nurture Programs (enquirers across channels)

These are emails to contacts/prospects who aren’t yet ready to engage/confirm a sale. With these contacts you need to gently communicate by delivering relevant content such as news/articles, white papers, or event and webinar invitations.

1. Basket/Form Abandonment

A triggered basket/form abandonment message is an effective way to strengthen engagement and continue moving that prospect through the funnel. The key is to be personal and offer up ways that you can help.

1. Welcome Programs and Activation (registration confirmation, email sign up)

Sending a personalised, automated, welcome email is an excellent way to quickly engage prospects by educating them about your value proposition, asking them to tell you more about themselves, and providing resources and helpful information.

1. Product / Service Reviews and Testimonials

Asking for reviews of your products and services can provide you with valuable content to nurture other prospects as well as being great for SEO. Where applicable, follow a purchase, download or event with an automated message asking for a review.

1. Events/Anniversaries

Use your contact profile to automate personalised events and anniversaries.

1. Repeat Ordering

If you have a repeat business model, use automation to send out personalised reminders to purchase, attend an event or activate another download.

1. Transactional Emails

Transactions that require order status receipts, customer service request updates, shipping notices or confirmations should be used to upsell and cross-sell your business or product.

Above all ensure that you consider segmenting campaigns by stage of the relationship, specifically tuning different email messages based on the contacts readiness to engage/purchase. This generally falls into 3 categories:

• Interested
• Engaged
• Lapsed

Each message needs to be personalised, targeted and the content reflecting the contacts stage in the purchase/engagement cycle.

ArpReach has developed its email automation to handle all of these scenarios efficiently and effectively. So once your plan is set you can let arpReach target and run your auto responders allowing you to focus on growing your business.

For more information click here:

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Landing pages are still under utilised by many businesses. This may be because they don’t have easy access to the tools to create them easily or their importance just isn’t fully understood.

The following aims to explain a little more about them and offers 15 top tips to trial and improve your landing page conversion.

First of all what is the definition of a landing page?

A landing page is a web page that allows you to capture a visitor’s information through a lead-capture form.

Why do you need a landing page?

The answer is that a landing page offers a targeted message to a targeted audience with the ultimate aim of capturing data and increasing conversion.

An example may be an ebook download from an email or PPC campaign or you may be creating calls to action such as requesting a quote.

There are many uses; the most important thing to note is the first statement that it is a targeted message to a targeted audience. As such there are some points in the creation of your landing page that may be worth considering.

Below are 15 Top Tips when creating your landing page.

1. Use strong contrasting colours to highlight calls to action.
2. Use visuals to direct the user journey, this could be in the form of an arrow or a character pointing to your form.
3. If you have time sensitive content, such as ebooks to download, then highlight when it was written so that the visitor can see that it is current.
4. Use testimonials to reassure visitors before they sign up.
5. Outline forms with boxes to make the call to action obvious.
6. Make your ‘submit’ buttons in strong contrasting colours to direct the visitor to the action.
7. If you have a long submission form consider breaking it up to be more appealing to the visitor. For example, ask for first and last name with a ‘next’ button which expands into the full form ending with submit/download.
8. Include strategic ‘Calls to action’ throughout the page to direct the visitor back to the to the form.
9. Test keeping the form in a fixed, prominent position as you scroll through the site.
10. Good imagery/style can be as important as your website yet often it is not considered. Think about how the landing page fits with your overall brand.
11. Small details can often make the difference to a good user experience and icons are a great way to achieve this. For example, if you have a PDF to download then use the PDF symbol to manage the expectation of the user.
12. Use strong headlines to attract attention.
13. Consider how your landing page will work on mobile. Where are the calls to action and forms located on different devices?
14. Use bullet points where possible rather than heavy going paragraphs. This is particularly good for targeting your benefits. Try using ticks as they are a positive action that gets the users attention.
15. Finally be careful how much content you put within your landing page. Your website is there for the detail, use your landing page to capture data.

Once you have created your well-targeted landing page your next job is to use this good quality data to convert your visitors from an enquirer to a buyer.

That’s where arpReach comes in!

arpReach allows you to create and run an unlimited number of follow-up autoresponders for one or more websites. Unlike some systems, there are no additional charges for adding extra auto responders, so get your landing pages generating as many leads as you can!

For more information on all the market leading features that arpReach has click here

Email marketing should be part of your marketing strategy for 2 main reasons:

1. Targeted
2. Cost effective

We all know that email is a cost effective marketing channel, however sending out blanket emails to large volumes of contacts is no longer a sensible marketing tactic.

Technology has given us the ability to be more intelligent with our email campaigns by looking at our customer profile and offering relevant, targeted messages.

This can still be done in large volumes, and automated; it just requires some initial consideration on whom you want to talk to and what you want to say.

If you continue to bombard your contacts with generic, impersonal emails they will switch off, or worse, unsubscribe.

This means that you have lost a possible customer (and revenue!) and potentially had a detrimental effect on your brand.

However, target your customer well, they may not engage immediately, but they will be aware of your brand/offer and they will consider staying on your list as you are offering relevant information.

Done correctly this means that your email campaign is potentially:

• More cost effective
• More responsive

arpReach can micro-segment your contacts for maximum response and ROI, making your email campaigns target the individual. This gives you the ability to send your contacts what they want, when they want it.

Tag your contacts interests, wants, and desires and send them timely (even instant) content that is perfectly matched to their expectations

So if you haven’t looked at segmenting your database, how do you get started?

There are layers of targeting and this can start off by the simplest of categorisation:

• Gender
• Geographical
• Job Role/Industry
• Interests
• Purchase history

More sophisticated targeting could be a contact with a combination of the above criteria AND hit a certain product/page on your website.

Everything in arpReach centres around the contact and their list memberships. Each contact can be in one or more lists without any duplication of contact data. Contact categories, custom fields (as many as you like), advanced segmentation and action (or inaction) tracking make it a breeze to run laser-focused campaigns.

The possibilities to target your customer are endless and you will need to understand your prospect and customer profile first before attempting to react to it.

Each business will have a different idea of engagement and purchase behavior of their contact list, however an example of an automated email marketing campaign could look like this:

1. Contact is encouraged to sign up to your newsletter online.
2. Contact receives automated ‘Thank you for signing up’ email.
3. Contact clicks through to your site and purchases a packet of seeds
4. A further email campaign is sent a few days later that links to your latest blog article about gardening.
5. Contact clicks through on gardening email.
6. An email campaign is sent containing your garden offers aimed to upsell further product.

This is just one example of a possible engagement process, which is not only targeted and relevant to the contact, but also promotes further immediate sales.

The potential to make the most of your contact database are endless and arpReach offers a flexible, automated, cost effective solution to take your email marketing to the next level.

For more information click here.