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5 Powerful SFMC Email Marketing Strategies for Startups

5 Powerful SFMC Email Marketing Strategies for Startups

Some 79% of small business owners say that email marketing is “very important” to their business strategy. At least 66% use it to promote their business and communicate with customers. And it’s well-known that email marketing yields the highest ROI of all marketing channels – $42 for every $1 spent.

These facts show that email marketing is an incredibly powerful strategy for all kinds of businesses – even small firms and startups. If implemented well, it can help your startup:

But to achieve these objectives, you need the right CRM – like Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC).

If you are a startup considering email marketing, this article is for you. Read on to learn some strategies to make the most of your SFMC investment, and achieve email marketing success. 

#1: Map Out Customer Journeys

Did you know you can send many kinds of emails via SFMC Email Studio?

A simple email from Zappos to help customers easily change their password

A well-designed email to make a subscriber feel special on their special day

and many more.

But which email should you send to which subscriber, when and why? This greatly depends on where that person is in their journey with your startup. And you can understand this by mapping this journey along various touchpoints and channels. Here’s where SFMC Journey Builder is very useful.

Journey mapping is not only for larger companies. Even startups should map their customers’ journeys to tell a visual story of the customers’ experiences as they engage with the company along many touchpoints over time. Journey mapping is also useful for deriving actionable customer insights that can then inform your sales, marketing, or customer support initiatives.

With Journey Builder, you can:

Ultimately, Journey Builder is a great tool to create personalized, targeted emails relevant to customers at any particular stage of their journey. So if they have just signed up on your website, you can send them a Welcome email. But if they are a loyal customer, deepen the connection through personalized content, offers, or greetings for special occasions. You can even test various  journey paths to identify the best way to reach customers using SFMC Journey Builder Path Optimizer.

Automated welcome email sent out to new Oberlo subscribers

A simple “steal this deal” email – ideal for loyal, long-term customers 

Everyone loves 4th of July sales – especially Joe Fresh customers when they receive such emails!

#2: Target the Right People Through Segmentation

Most startups typically have a small audience for their emails. So should you even bother to segment them? The answer is Yes.

By segmenting your subscriber base, you can:

SFMC provides numerous tools to help you segment your audience and meet the above goals:

With SFMC, you can easily create multiple segments, and send hyper-personalized emails to each subscriber in that segment:

A well-designed upsell email for existing Grammarly users

A great way to garner loyalty from existing customers and get more new customers

You can even automate customer segmentation in SFMC using data extensions.

#3: Implement Email Marketing Automation

With automation, you can set up an effective email marketing program for your startup quickly,  cost-effectively, and at scale. The CRM allows you to set up specific triggers or schedules in order to:

SFMC is so flexible that you can automate many kinds of emails, such as:

Simple email with high-quality photos to encourage a cart abandoner to come back

This email from EIQ is a great way to promote an upcoming event and boost attendance

Automated email sent when the ordered product is dispatched. It features Nike’s easily-recognizable logo at the very top.

A simple notification from Hulu to inform the customer about subscription cancellation. Simple, personalized and timely.

SFMC email automation best practices to follow:

Great layout and content blocks ensure that the message will render correctly on mobile devices

Casper’s uncomplicated message encourages user feedback in a simple format.

#4: Enhance Customer Experiences Through Personalization and Dynamic Content

With SFMC Email Studio, you can effortlessly send hyper-personalized emails to an “audience of one” to enhance their experiences with your startup right from the get-go. Moreover, you can do this at scale, and for virtually any kind of email.

Personalization is a great way to grab subscribers’ attention. Moreover, brands using email personalization generate 17% more revenue compared to other brands. Startups also benefit from email personalization, so do incorporate this strategy into your email marketing program.

Leverage SFMC to create customer personas, understand individual preferences, and review previous purchases. You can easily do this by asking for their name, gender and interests in your website’s signup forms. Use this information to:

Leverage SFMC Content Builder to engage with subscribers through personalization. With this tool, you can:

Amazing interactive elements in this BBC email are sure to boost viewership numbers!

In this email, numbers and data will change and display depending on the user

https://reallygoodemails.com/emails/highlights-of-your-year-100-off-for-2017

Also take advantage of SFMC Einstein AI to further optimize your startup’s personalization strategy:

#5: Leverage Analytics to Improve Email Marketing Performance

Ideally, you should test all campaigns before sends. For this, you can perform A/B testing to compare different versions of an email and leverage Einstein Engagement Scoring to assess how each subscriber reacts to your emails.

SFMC also provides many metrics, dashboards, and reports, so your startup can gauge email performance and take the right steps if there are gaps. You can test multiple metrics, including: 

With real-time tracking and graphical reporting, you can also perform detailed campaign analyses to understand whether your subscribers are clicking on your emails more (or less) than the industry average, which content or design pieces they engage with the most, and which links or buttons do better than others.

Wrap Up

For startups looking to build a captive audience and grow their nascent brand, email marketing can be hugely valuable. It’s easy to implement, scalable, and does not cost a bomb. Further, with a full-featured CRM like SFMC, you can send the right email to the right person at the right time to grab their attention and garner their loyalty.

The Email Uplers team has worked with startups worldwide to set up successful email marketing programs. Tell us how we can help your startup by clicking here.

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