Email marketing and CRM
Turn past customers and enquiries into repeat sales, with emails that send themselves.
We write and send your email campaigns, set up the automated welcome, follow-up and win-back emails, keep your list clean and set up your sending records so your mail lands in the inbox rather than in spam.
Available on its own, or as part of The Growth Programme.
In practice
What this actually is
This is talking to the people who already know you - customers and anybody who once enquired. A CRM is simply the record of who they are and what they have done, and email is what you send them because of it.
What we do
- Email strategy
- Who should hear from you, how often, and what each message is for.
- Campaigns and newsletters
- Written, designed and sent, on your own platform.
- Automated journeys
- Sequences that go out on their own - a welcome series, a follow-up, a reminder.
- Segmentation
- Splitting the list so a first-time buyer and a ten-year customer do not get the same email.
- CRM setup
- The system chosen and configured, and your existing contacts moved into it properly.
- Lead nurturing
- Staying useful to somebody who enquired and is not ready yet.
- Retention campaigns
- Bringing back people who have gone quiet, and asking at the right moment.
- Reporting
- What was sent, what it earned, and the health of the list underneath it.
Make the relationship go further
More value from the audience you already have.
A more connected communication system - clearer customer journeys, better-timed messages, and automation that keeps the business relevant long after the first interaction.
Talk to us about email and CRMWhy the cheapest growth you have is already in your database
Nearly every marketing budget we are shown points entirely at strangers. Meanwhile the people who have already paid you once - who know the shop, trust the product and need no convincing that you exist - hear from the business roughly never.
The classic study on this is still the clearest. Reichheld and Sasser, looking across a set of businesses for Harvard Business Review, found that cutting customer defection by five percent lifted profits by between 25% and 85% depending on the industry. Not by finding better customers. By losing fewer of the ones already there.
Email is the only channel where you can reach those people without asking an algorithm for permission. A message to a list that expects you gets opened somewhere between a fifth and two fifths of the time. A post to the same people on Facebook reaches around one in seventy of them. That gap is the whole argument, and it is why we would rather build you a list of four hundred people who want to hear from you than four thousand followers who will not see you.
The discipline
Four things stand between a good email and a customer
Two of these happen before anybody writes a word, and they are the two that decide whether the writing was ever going to matter. The most beautifully written campaign in the country is worth nothing from a domain the inbox providers have quietly stopped trusting.
Delivered
It reaches the inbox at all
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up
- A domain with a sending history
- Dead addresses cleaned out
- Complaints watched, not ignored
This holds it up
Permitted
They asked to hear from you
- Consent you can evidence
- POPIA handled properly
- An easy way out
- Never a bought list
This holds it up
Relevant
It is worth opening
- Segmented by what they did
- Sent when it matters to them
- One thing per email
- In your voice, not a template
They see this
Automatic
It runs without you
- Welcome and first purchase
- Abandoned basket
- Win-back and lapsed customers
- Post-purchase and review requests
They see this
Stage four is where almost all of the return sits and it is the stage most businesses never reach, because it has no monthly deliverable attached and nothing to show off. A welcome sequence written once in March is still selling in November without anyone opening a laptop.
Measurement
How you will know it is working
Email is the one channel you own outright, so an email marketing agency South Africa businesses keep for years is measured on revenue and on list health, never on how much it sent.
What we report on
- Open and click rates per campaign, against your own previous sends rather than an industry average
- Revenue per campaign and per automated flow, where the store can attribute it
- List growth, and just as importantly the unsubscribe and complaint rate
- Deliverability, so the list keeps arriving in inboxes rather than spam
Before you ask
The questions that come up first
What does POPIA mean for my list?
In short, people have to have agreed to hear from you, you have to say who you are, and every mail needs a working unsubscribe. If your list was bought or scraped we will tell you to start again, which is not what you want to hear but is cheaper than the alternative.
Why is my email going to spam?
Usually one of three things: your domain has no sending records set up, your list has enough dead addresses to look like a purchased one, or you are sending from a free address. All three are fixable and we check them before anything else.
Which platform do you use?
Whichever suits your business and your volume. If you already pay for one, we will use it rather than move you for the sake of it.