Email Marketing Tasks You Can Outsource To Your Virtual Assistant

Email marketing has become a staple of the new digital age and for good reason. It has the power to reach many types of audiences, it feels more personal than social media marketing in some ways, and it gives companies a way to build more meaningful customer relationships. If executed correctly and consistently, email marketing has the potential to transform a company’s revenue stream and build a more loyal customer base.

Current statistics from Hubspot show that:

More than 50 percent of U.S. respondents check their personal email account more than 10 times a day, and it is by far their preferred way to receive updates from brands.
99% of consumers check their email every day.
59% of respondents say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions.
Clearly, there is a strong degree of customer engagement via email marketing. With consistent content and the right strategies in place, email marketing becomes a complementary force with other digital marketing methods such as social media. However, because of the consistency and strategy needed, email marketing can often be difficult to maintain and deploy. And as other parts of the business need more attention, it becomes all too easy to let email marketing fall by the wayside.

To counteract the temptation to let it slide away, a virtual assistant can be a great investment towards preventing that behavior. Virtual assistants can easily take over a lot of email marketing functions ranging from simple to complex to ensure that everything is running smoothly. Not only does this reduce some of the workload for you but it also ensures that your email marketing is being delivered in a timely and regular fashion to customers. Here are just some of the tasks that can be easily outsourced to a virtual assistant:

1) Content creation

Often the hardest part of email marketing can be the content side of it. You have no trouble scheduling campaigns and looking through the analytics, but actually writing and designing engaging content fills you with some dread. If that sounds familiar, this is an easy task to delegate that does not feel like relinquishing a great deal of control.

You can work with virtual assistants in many ways to get the content creation process started. For some people, they like to be completely uninvolved in content creation once they have trained assistants in terms of subject matter and schedule. Others like a more collaborative approach where they work with virtual assistants to review and edit content together and create touchpoints for checking in before sending out emails. Neither of these is the wrong approach, it is all about what is most convenient for you.

You can work with your virtual assistant to decide types of content, length, and layout as well as deciding the frequency by which these should be sent out. Having content creation taken care of reduces a large part of the labour involved with content creation and can make life significantly easier.

2) Implement A/B testing

A/B testing can be a little complicated initially but once it is set up, it provides a lot of valuable insight to improve email marketing and communications. A/B testing is simple, think of it as an experiment. Also known as split testing, it tells you which of two campaign options you set up are more effective in driving engagement such as opens and clicks. It requires a great deal of monitoring in the early days but it is absolutely key to email marketing efforts going forward to ensure that your content is delivering what it needs to for maximum engagement.

Having a virtual assistant to help in the initial set up of A/B testing and monitoring its result will prove incredibly useful as you continue to ramp up email marketing efforts. Plus, being in charge of A/B testing also gives virtual assistants a unique view of what kind of content is needed to really drive up engagement accordingly.

3) Create email segments

Email marketing and a lot of digital marketing is rested on the concepts of trial and error. Email segmenting allows companies to test out different messages based on different demographics and other traits in order to tailor communications while still attracting the right audiences. Email segmenting can be difficult to implement without some help since it requires different forms of copy and some research on which audience segments need to get which kind of email and design different content accordingly.

Although it can be incredibly powerful, many businesses often eschew segmentation if they do not have the time for it. A virtual assistant in this context can be an extremely effective tool since they can design and send different versions depending on demographic data and tweak communication accordingly. Virtual assistants can not only help in the initial research for the segmentation process but they can also be majorly helpful in designing content to fit these different segments and their interests.

4) Respond to email queries from customers

Customer service is a key part of your business and its success, that much is certain. But think about how a lot of your customer queries come in. Chances are, they are all digital…either in the form of email or social media. The time of your response, as well as the actual response, makes a huge difference in customer engagement and loyalty. The latter is often hard to build but it yields great results once established. And customer loyalty is built on how businesses operate their customer service.

For email queries, a virtual assistant is extremely useful because they can often reply faster than you can and ensure that matters are handled. And if things need to be escalated to upper management and other departments, virtual assistants can flag this early on based on customer responses so you can preemptively deal with problems. Customers are very appreciative of businesses that respond well and on time, so why not use a virtual assistant to ensure your response rates remain consistent and no customer feels unimportant or turned away.

5) Track click-through rates and other analytics

Email marketing is all about how you use your previous data to improve your current efforts. While you might be great at pushing out content in a timely fashion and responding to questions quickly, what is your engagement really like? Do you get time to go back and look at past data to see what performance is like? Or do you feel like you do not have as much time to explore your past data and look at trends to understand how content and engagement can be improved? If this is the case, a virtual assistant is sorely needed.

They can set up your analytics and track the metrics that really matter such as click-through rates but also other ones that you identify. And more importantly, they can do this is a consistent fashion. This is important because it allows you to forecast your busy and less busy seasons and prepare accordingly. Analytics is a vital part of a robust email marketing strategy so having someone track this allows you to focus on other parts of the business.

Email marketing has a lot of different moving parts but it does not need to be overwhelming. Having the right virtual assistant in place can help you manage your time more effectively without losing momentum with email marketing. For more information or questions about our services in the area of email marketing, please contact Virtual Assistant Canada today.