To achieve your marketing goals online, you need an effective email marketing strategy. It allows you to reach existing clients to ensure repeat business and find new, potential clients that can grow your sales.
Distribution of content is an essential digital marketing function to obtain maximum benefit from it. Creating and crafting emails can be a time-consuming process, and you need to ensure that you secure a return on this investment.
You might have an email list and be sending out emails. But is it enough, and is there room for improvement? Try these ten steps to rejuvenate your email marketing campaign:
Define clear goals
Sending emails with no mindfully intentional objective is like shooting in the dark: you have little chance of hitting your target. Therefore, setting goals before starting your email marketing campaign is essential.
Ask yourself what you hope to achieve by emailing customers and potential clients. Are you raising awareness about an expanded product range? Do you have a target percentage by which you aim to increase your conversion rate?
Do you have an upcoming special offer or launch that you want people to know about in advance? Is there a new page or article on your website that you want to drive customers to view? Goals are not only imperative in determining your strategy and how you will couch these emails. They also let you set benchmarks for measuring success, which allows you to adjust your campaign accordingly.
A management expert says that emails that are a patchwork of company news, tips, promotions, and industry updates come across as disorganized and will not accomplish much. Avoid this strategy by setting specific goals that your email marketing strategy must achieve as an indicator of a favorable outcome.
Fill your email marketing toolbox
Before you start emailing, ensure that you have the right tools to do so. If you plan to make email marketing a substantial part of your business, invest in email marketing software.
Email marketing software options vary and offer a variety of features. Some are free, while others require payment. It depends on how many emails you plan to send and whether you are interested in specialized functions.
The basic offerings on most email marketing software programs include customized email templates, importing and then segmenting contact lists for a targeted email approach, tests to optimize performance, automation, and analytics tools.
While it might not sound like a significant task to manage these tasks as an individual, it can become time-consuming and take time away from other important aspects of your business.
Therefore, most successful email marketers recommend utilizing some software. Experiment with free options but do not hesitate to migrate to paid platforms if necessary. An outstanding email marketing strategy has a potentially significant return on investment (ROI), so the benefit will outweigh any associated costs.
Find your audience
Any digital marketer will tell you that finding your target market is the primary marketing function you should undertake before sending your first email. It involves determining the demographics of people who are most likely to buy your product or service.
Ask questions that include information about their age, gender, socio-economic circumstances, and location. The answers refine who you will target during digital marketing activities, including your email marketing campaign.
Another way to get information about who your target market is can be looking at your competitors and what they are doing. You will not need to copy what they do, but their efforts can give you additional valuable insight.
As various research paper writing services put it, your target audience determines the content of your emails, how they are formatted, and how frequently they are sent. Sending out emails that do not interest them or attract their attention is a waste of time and effort. You will not get the volume of click-throughs and conversion rates you targeted when laying out the strategy’s goals.
Prepare a contacts list
The best way to generate an email database is organically. Buying email lists will not accomplish your goals. Most email software management options set limits on how many emails you can send per month.
Is it worth reaching that cap using email addresses of people that probably do not comprise your target market? Additionally, you face the risk of complaints that you are spamming recipients. This is a legal violation with potentially far-reaching consequences that you should prefer not to face.
Instead, gather email addresses for your database from your website. A pop-up window that encourages visitors to leave their contact details for your newsletters works, but only to a certain extent.
When asked to leave their email address in exchange for something free, you have a better chance of visitors doing as you wish. It could be a how-to e-book, a checklist, or the offer of early-bird notifications of flash sales. What you offer will depend on the nature of your business. Utilize a similar strategy on all social media platforms on which you are active.
Put every email address you gather organically into a database. You can export it into your email marketing software tool when you are ready to start sending emails.
Segment your email database
Group the emails in your database according to what they need from you. Existing companies do not require emails about the benefits of buying your goods or services. They have already made a purchase, so they have got the message. This type of email should be reserved for potential clients who have recently supplied their contact details.
If you are determined to maximize an email marketing campaign’s success, go as far as segmenting your database into groups of people from different demographics. Your email format might need to change to reach each sector.
This is a challenging task and might take a while to accomplish. However, you will soon see the fruits of your labor as more tailored emails have a greater chance of converting into sales.
Another way to segment your database is according to what phase the client has reached in their journey with your company. Create a sequence of emails and send them out to new customers. For example, if you have a set of how-to emails, you will need to start at the first one when someone signs up, even though you created it some time ago.
Design your email template
As mentioned before, your template plays a vital role in the success or failure of your email marketing campaign. Regardless of what you choose, bear in mind that graphics and images are crucial components of a template because they grab the reader’s attention.
You do not need to use images in every email you send. Compelling content with particular words in bold, underlined, italicized, or using a larger font can also do the trick.
Use quality photographs in your emails. You do not need to take them yourself. Several sites offer free photos and images for people to use. However, familiarize yourself with copyright issues and put in photo credits where necessary. The text in an email should outweigh visuals at a ratio of roughly 80:20.
Design elements should be used intentionally to draw the reader’s attention to critical content, such as the call to action (CTA) that you want to be the main takeaway from your email. The template design aims to draw a reader’s eye to the focal components of the content. Experiment with different designs until you find one that works for you.
Focus on quality content
All the research, design, and software in the world will not help you achieve your email marketing objectives if they are not accompanied by great content. This writing type takes skill and experience, and its value cannot be underestimated if you want to achieve the desired effect.
If you know that this is not your area of expertise, use a freelance copywriter to do it for you. Professionally written content offers a better ROI even though it requires an additional financial investment.
An essential part of a well-written email is the subject line. This is the first thing recipients see when they look at your email. If it is not effective and attention-grabbing, they might delete it before opening the email and reading it. Personalized subject lines using recipients’ first names have been shown to generate a greater email open rate.
Furthermore, the subject line should give a concise indication of what the reader can expect when they open the email. A vague subject line is not good enough. While you should ideally keep it short and sweet, ensure that a subject line contains necessary details, such as discounts, latest offers, or the answer to a problem your target market might have that your product or service solves.
Schedule your emails
Timing is everything, and you want recipients to get your email at an optimal time. There is no clear answer about what this time is but apply some logic to it based on your experience.
No one likes receiving emails at 2 am when they have not put their phone on silent because they might receive an emergency call. The notification wakes them, and they associate your name with interrupted sleep. That will earn you a prompt ‘unsubscribe’ from that customer.
When using email marketing software, you can automate when emails are sent out. When segmenting email addresses, lend some thought to time zones. Group the addresses according to location and trigger the email’s dispatch at a time during which recipients should be awake.
People tend to be responsive to emails that arrive during working hours. Many workers turn to their phones for a distraction or while they are on a break. Additionally, some users might provide you with their work email address.
It might take a bit of experimentation to find the optimal time. Send emails at different times and check your open rate as an indicator of success.
Optimize emails for mobile use
As more people than ever own smartphones, your emails should be optimized for mobile use. Fewer people use desktops, laptops, and tablets to access their emails, preferring to use a cellphone because it is compact and more portable.
However, nothing makes them more frustrated than opening an email that they cannot read on their smartphone. Recipients might unsubscribe from your email list for this reason alone. Ensure that your email automatically resizes for a cellphone, including any attachments or links included in it.
Email marketing software should take care of this problem on your behalf. Nevertheless, test it first by sending samples to friends and families with different devices. It is better to delay sending your first email and take the time to send a few test emails to avoid a disastrous email marketing debut.
Monitor and evaluate
There is much valuable data you can access from email marketing software analytics. This includes seeing how many people open your emails. Then you can determine how many of those that opened the email went on to answer your call to action. Monitor how many people unsubscribe from your mailing list.
When they opt to unsubscribe, use a pop-up screen that lets them select a reason why they are doing so as this could offer you some insight into an area of your approach that needs development.
The best part about such analytics is that you can access most of them in real-time instead of gathering the information yourself, which could take days or weeks. When you pick up a negative trend, such as recipients not following through and making purchases, you can immediately begin strategizing how to change your approach.
Few email marketing campaigns are a resounding success right from the start. It takes some experimentation to find a combination of content, design, timing, and other ingredients to perfect your recipe. Continuous evaluation of your efforts allows you to be flexible and make changes to improve the outcomes.
Key takeaways
Email marketing is a highly effective strategy if correctly used. It is better approached mindfully, with decisions made at each step focusing on your target market, what they want or need, and how best to reach them. Email marketing should be persuasive, engaging and make recipients want to find out more about you and your products or services.
Author Bio:
Charlie Svensson is a versatile writer who working for a research paper writing services. He mostly covers college life balance, academic excellence and research writing related topics.