Benchmark Email Helps Small Business Owners Grow And Monetize Their Lists Of Subscribers, Leads And Customers

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Below is our recent interview with Daniel Miller from Benchmark Email:

Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Benchmark Email?

A: We help small business owners grow and monetize their most valuable assets, their lists of subscribers, leads and customers, through email marketing and marketing automation.

Q: Can you give us insights into your features?

A: Communication with your contacts is so essential. It’s said that all you need is 1,000 true fans to make a living. Not just pass-by customers but true fans. Fans that come into your restaurant multiple times a month with a new friend each time. Fans that listen to your music and share it with friends.

Our service and features focus on just that, with easy to install signup forms to grow your audience and an outstanding drag and drop editor that doesn’t require you to hire a designer to make it work. Choose a template, adjust it to your colors and brand and hit send. It’s really that easy.
To top it off, for those who are serious about email marketing we offer a strong set of automation tools for our users to create warm welcome campaigns, exciting nurturing series that creates connection with their customers and easy to setup abandon cart automations to increase sales.

And of course, all of this includes live reporting to see who’s engaging with your emails and automations.

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Q: What exactly is marketing automation? What are the benefits of it?

A: Marketing Automation is a way for business owners and marketers to set consistency with their brand and connect with their customers. It’s not intended for lazy, repetitive emails with the same message. That will just drive your brand into the ground as your audience unsubscribes faster than you can send your next retention campaign.

The top 5 Automations we recommend are the following:

1. Welcome Automation. This is probably the most common automation. When you signup to anything your first expectation is to check your email for that warm greeting. Think of this email as your introduction. This email sets the stage and expectations for your brand, product or service, and should indicate the next step for your customer to take.

2. Nurturing Campaign Automation. Some companies combine this automation with their Welcome Automation. I recommend to separate them as it helps focus on different purposes. The Nurturing Automation allows a business to warm up to the new subscriber. Not by sending constant ads and specials but by connecting with the subscriber. Nurturing campaigns tend to be 3 to 10 emails long and can spread over 1 week to 6 months. These campaigns let the business tell their story and show why their new subscriber should do business with them. This last part can be done by showing examples of how your product or service has helped other customers.

3. Post Sale Followup Automation. Just like they do in restaurants, check in with your customers to make sure everything came out alright. Just don’t ask while they have a mouth full of food! Timing is key with this automation. If you have to ship a product, don’t send an email asking for their feedback 2 days later. Time the emails well to allow enough time for your customer to have experienced your product or service. Based on their feedback, this automation can split your customers into two groups.
– Those who had a great experience, offer them to share this publicly.
– Those who had a bad experience, automate an email to your customer service team to reach out.

4. Abandon Cart Automation. Another popular automation, specially for retail businesses. Over 75% of shoppers abandon cart because of various reasons. Most of them because of shipping or unexpected costs. Follow-up emails to subscribers who abandon cart could include Free shipping or other offers that match your brand and get your customer to come back. Similar to the Post Sale Followup Automation, make sure these emails are timed well. Wait too long and you will lose a customer to a competitor. Don’t wait long enough and you’ll be giving away revenue.

5. Re-Engagement Automation. One of the most underrated automations, I think. A few long term customers are better than a bunch of quick sales. It’s 3 times harder and more expensive to get a new customer than to keep an existing one. Setup triggers based on email engagement and website visits to bring customers back. This all varies on how often you send but if customers are losing engagement with your emails or aren’t coming back to your site, trigger this automation. Don’t just use deals for this, you can also ask questions. Something like, “Hey! We noticed you haven’t been back in a while, did we do something wrong?” Use this chance to actually engage with your customer again.

Q: What’s the best thing about email marketing that people might not know about?

A: Something people don’t usually think about is that with email marketing, you own everything about it. It’s your content, your brand, your audience and your choice to send the message you want, when you want it. With social media and other channels, you are limited by their algorithms and policy reasons. Don’t get me wrong, email marketing services have policies to adhere as well, but these are focused on the voice of the subscriber, not by political or moral opinion of some social platform . You get too many spam complaints, you are likely to be educated first, and asked to leave the service second. This is done to protect subscribers from spam and unwanted emails. As long as you are sending what you promised to send to your subscribers, you are unlikely to be in this situation. Either way, you still own your content and audience. With Social Media, you can lose your 20,000 likes overnight by just one post.

My recommendation is to use Social Media and other channels to attract more people but, your main goal should be to earn their trust to create a true connection over email. This is why email marketing has always had the highest return on investment. For every $1 spent, up to $40 can be earned on average.

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Q: Is it possible to use Benchmark CRM and Benchmark Email together to get more sales? How?

A: Email Marketing and CRM go hand in hand. With email marketing you are able to connect with your audience immediately while using a CRM to manage and store your contacts. All Email Marketing service have some level of CRM. The simple fact of uploading your contacts and creating a segment based on subscriber preferences is a way to manage your customer relationships.

We see a need for more though. This is why we created a full all-inclusive CRM that integrates with our Email Marketing platform. With our email and CRM platform you can do things like, automatically create lists in your CRM based on subscriber engagement from the email side. Create lists of subscribers who open, click or even bounce. Then from the CRM, you can automate tasks and calls for more in depth and personal followups.

CRM also gives you the chance to keep a history of all of the actions and purchases from your customers, in an easy way to manage and view.

Q: What are your plans for the future?

A: I often get asked, when will be the end of email marketing? I don’t think that day will ever come.

One of the things that makes us human is the need to communicate and tell stories. People have been communicating since the prehistoric times with writings and hieroglyphics on walls. And now, I bet you can take out your phone and find at least 10 apps that have a communications feature to them.

We want to focus on making it easier than ever for businesses to communicate with their audience by constantly improving our email and CRM service. Improving by making them seamless and effortless as well as open to connect with other communication and audience management products and services.