Katelyn Merendino, AMO Marketing, Retail and Bronto

Email has been around for a while, but it’s still king of the marketing world. For every $ 1 spent, email marketing generates $ 44 in ROI.

Today’s consumers expect relevant, personalized engagement from the businesses they choose to interact with. If you’re relying on “batch-and-blast messages,” you’re likely missing out on opportunities to capture your audience’s interest—and consequently, to drive more revenue.

Here are five tools that’ll help take your email marketing program to the next level.

Grow Your Lists with a Pop-Up Manager

Until someone signs up for your emails, you’re limited in the marketing messages you’re able to send to them. Contacts who aren’t subscribers can only be sent transactional emails and most email marketers believe marketing messages in a transactional email should be limited to 20% of the content. While you can encourage people to subscribe at checkout or through a transactional email, those options won’t capture website visitors who don’t convert. For this, you need to consider using a pop-up.

Pop-ups are one of the easiest and fastest ways to accelerate list growth. For example, The Duck Store, the University of Oregon’s book store, increased its subscriber base 71% in just one year using pop ups. All the potential subscriber needs to provide is their email address, so the barrier to entry is low. Yet, having that single piece of information lets you start delivering relevant messages. A pop-up management tool that allows you to control the look, feel, timing and placement of your pop-ups—and deploy different versions on desktop versus mobile—is key to providing value to the customer. With a well-customized pop-up, you can offer incentives, share content or provide information on current sales or upcoming events, all while gathering subscribers.

Recover Lost Revenue with Cart Abandonment Messages

Cart abandonment messages are vital to the bottom line. Forrester Research estimates that up to 87% of consumers abandon their carts, resulting in $ 18 billion of lost revenue annually. However, by automating email sends after a shopper leaves something in their cart, you can quickly, easily and economically bring in some of this outstanding revenue.

Turning abandoned carts into sales is most effective with a tool that can identify abandoned carts in near real time and respond to these shoppers by dynamically inserting cart information into messages.

Convert Online Window Shoppers with Browse Abandonment Messages

 How many times have you browsed a site without making a purchase? Probably more than you can count! According to the Monetate Ecommerce Quarterly Report, Q1 2018, more than 95% of visitors leave your site without converting, but triggered browse recovery messages can nudge them to return.

Many businesses worry that automating these emails will be viewed as intrusive or increase unsubscribe rates, but times have changed. Ninety-one percent of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that recognize, remember and provide relevant offers—in other words, brands that convey value directly to each customer. To ensure a personalized experience, you need to use a browse recovery tool that allows you to configure how often customers receive messages, regulate which SKUs to highlight and capture and match page views to current or future contacts.

Drive Efficiency and Visibility with Seamless Integrations 

As your business grows, using a number of stand-alone applications that each handle short-term, tactical needs creates functional silos and lowers efficiency and visibility. The ability to easily transfer data from your ERP or ecommerce platform to your email platform (and back) is important to developing a more sophisticated approach to email marketing.

If sharing information between your email marketing platform and other systems is arduous or time-consuming, it’s harder to create targeted, hyper-personalized messages. A built-in connector seamlessly syncs contact, order, product and opt-in data between all platforms, enabling you to gain deeper insight into your customers’ behaviors and send more relevant emails that drive them to engage.

Expand on Email with SMS Text Messaging

Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging is an increasingly utilized tactic among marketers now, as 98% of texts are read within two minutes and consumers are increasingly opting in to receiving text messages from brands. Sending emails and texts from a single platform allows you to reach the customers who engage most with each channel while delivering a unified, consistent user experience.

As part of your email platform, your SMS tool should enable you to display dynamic content based on list, segment, or keyword membership and expand your existing automation to include SMS campaigns within the same multi-channel workflows.

Sophisticated Email Marketing Made Easy

 Enhancing your email marketing program doesn’t have to be complicated with the right tools in your arsenal. To learn how the Bronto Marketing Platform can help your business gain subscribers, grow revenue, and drive engagement, check out the on-demand webinar below that applies to your industry.

Watch these webinars to learn more about email marketing for retailers, email marketing for software companies and email marketing for nonprofits.