When you have permission to deliver content to someone’s inbox, you have a shot at winning them over. In spite of saturation in the marketplace, email marketing is still an effective channel to nurture customers, drive engagement, and generate revenue.

Email marketing has one of the highest expected return of any marketing channel regardless of whether or not you're measuring B2B leads generated or B2C revenue. One of the biggest areas we've seen change in the email marketing realm has been how easy the tools have gotten to set up and manage. There's really no excuse if your business isn't already using email marketing to communicate with your customers. GRAYBOX, however, is typically engaged when there's an opportunity to grow the channel and we follow a specific process to get you there.

It starts with strategy, and one of the biggest decisions we can help facilitate a decision on is segmentation: in other words, who should get email communications and when. Regardless of whether or not you have 1,000 or 1,000,000 email addresses, understanding how that list (or lists) should be divided up and who should get what kind of communication is critically important. Should it be based on products purchased previously? The recency of the last on-site interaction? Customer lifetime value? There's no right answer for everyone, but GRAYBOX works with our partners to determine what will work best for them and guide the breakdown of the data to segment everyone accordingly.

While email marketing tool sets have become commoditized, finding the right tool for your business is key. It's usually a platform you're going to be living with for years, and the financial and human cost of switching incentivizes picking something and sticking with it. Thankfully, most tools these days are relatively easy to use and report on results within. GRAYBOX has experience with a wide variety of tools, some of which target specific industries like ecommerce, to be able to make a recommendation for something that facilitates the basics and will integrate easily with other systems you already use.

Sending emails is the easy part; sending communications to the right people that encourage them to visit your website and take your intended action is the part that takes trial and error to get right. GRAYBOX advises client-partners on plans to test messages, layouts, calls to action, and frequency to get it right. Any recommended email marketing platform allows for relatively straightforward split testing, which facilitates the breaking down of your list into randomized segments that we can test against. This is a process that is never truly "done," but one that can be immensely effective at driving engagement, leads, and revenue.