Email marketing is a crucial component of any brand’s marketing mix. In fact, email marketing is among the top digital marketing tactics for marketers in 2018 and beyond.
According to the latest eMarketer report, email will continue to be an essential channel for marketers, with its usage growing by almost 20% over the next two years. In this post, we’ll dive into how you can leverage email as a critical component of your company’s broader digital marketing strategy.
From tips on choosing the right software and writing effective subject lines to best practices for segmenting your lists and more, read on to get up to speed on everything you need to know about email marketing—and more importantly—how you can implement these tips in your own strategy.
When it comes to digital marketing, email is still one of the most effective channels. Email subscribers are also the easiest to reach on a consistent basis and can be highly targeted and segmented. There are many ways you can use email as part of your marketing strategy.
It’s an excellent way to drive traffic to your website, build loyalty with existing customers, and sell new products or services. However, many businesses don’t take full advantage of this opportunity. If you want to take your email marketing strategy from good to great, here are seven must-haves that will take you there.
1. A Clear Understanding of Your Audience
Understanding your target audience is key to any effective marketing strategy. You need to know who your customers are, what they’re interested in, and how you can help them.
When it comes to email marketing, the more you know about your audience, the more you can personalize your emails. When you understand your audience, you can also identify areas where you can increase your conversions.
2. Relevant and Well-Written Content
While email marketing is a great way to drive traffic and generate leads, it’s also a channel that can easily be abused. When your audience is constantly receiving too many emails and feels that they’re being spammed, they’ll quickly unsubscribe. They’ll also have a negative view of your business.
See: Amazon marketing
On the flip side, when you send your subscribers the right amount of emails, they’ll appreciate the communication. They’re more likely to buy from you and recommend your brand to others. When it comes to email content, it’s important to think about what you’re sending to your subscribers. Make sure the content is relevant to them. Avoid sending them too much information.
3. Proper Segmentation and Timing
One of the biggest mistakes businesses make with email marketing is not segmenting their audience correctly. You should never send the same email to all of your subscribers at the same time. You should be sending your emails to different segments of your audience at different times.
For example, if you run a blog about fitness, you might have an email campaign that targets subscribers who are interested in running. You might send one email to those subscribers who have recently started running and another to those who have been running for a few months.
If you don’t segment your audience correctly, you might confuse or bore your more experienced readers who have already heard about running and are looking for new information. You also want to keep an eye on your subscribers’ time zones to make sure you’re not sending them emails at times when they’re unlikely to open them.
4. Collaboration with Other Marketing Channels
Email marketing and other digital marketing channels like social media and SMS can work together to benefit your business in many ways. You can share links to your latest blog posts or offer information about new products through these mediums.
When you cross-promote with other channels, you’ll get more bang for your buck. You’ll increase brand awareness, generate more leads, and drive more sales.
See: Facebook Dating Home 2022
If you’re using email marketing, you can also turn social media posts into email blasts. Simply copy and paste the post and change the content to something your subscribers would be interested in.
Using email to drive traffic to social media is also possible. You can create clickable links with the titles of your latest blog posts and include them in your email communications.
5. A Solid Calendar Plan
When it comes to email marketing, consistency is key. If you want to build a strong relationship with your audience and increase your email open rates, you need to have a consistent schedule.
When creating your calendar, you need to keep your audience in mind. You want to send emails when your audience is most likely to read them. Sending emails too early in the morning or too late at night might cause them to get lost in subscribers’ spam filters.
6. Tracking and Measurement
You should be tracking and measuring your email marketing efforts from the very start. You need to know how many subscribers you have, how often they open your emails, and how many click through to your website. When measuring your email campaigns, you want to look at a few different things.
First, you want to know how many people are opening your emails. You can track this by adding a tracking pixel to your emails. This pixel will let you know when a subscriber opens your email.
You also want to know how many subscribers are clicking on links within your emails and visiting your website. You can do this by adding a URL shortener to your emails.
7. Automation
While you want to make sure you’re sending the right emails to the right subscribers at the right times, you don’t want to be sending emails manually. It’s tedious, time consuming, and takes valuable resources away from other areas of your business. You can automate your email marketing efforts by using autoresponders.
An autoresponder is a series of emails that are sent out at specific times to your subscribers. You can use these tools to send emails like welcome messages, product announcements, or newsletters.
While you want to make sure the emails you’re sending are relevant, an autoresponder can take some of the pressure off your team. It can also help you avoid sending emails at times when your subscribers aren’t likely to open them.
8. A/B testing
When you send out your first email campaign, you want to make sure it’s as effective as possible. You can do this by testing different emails on a group of your subscribers. You can send one group a different email than another group.
Then, you can track the open rates, click-through rates, purchases, and other metrics to see which email is more effective. You can also test different subject lines to see which one gets more opens. This will give you insight into what works and what doesn’t.
9. Consistent branding
Branding is important in all aspects of your business, including email marketing. You want to make sure your emails are consistent with your website and social media accounts.
When you take the time to create a consistent branding strategy, it’s easier for your subscribers to recognize your emails. They’ll also be more likely to open and act on your emails since they’re instantly drawn to them.
10. A clear call-to-action
When it comes to email marketing, the call-to-action is extremely important. You want to ask your subscribers to take a specific action. You can ask them to visit your website, subscribe to your email list, or make a purchase on your website. You should always have a clear call-to-action at the end of your emails. Make sure it’s obvious and crystal clear.
11. Responsive design
A while back, when we discussed how to attract new email subscribers, we talked about how important a good design is to engage your visitors and convert them into subscribers. The same applies when it comes to your emails. In 2018, email open rates are the lowest they’ve been in years.
However, if your emails don’t look good, your subscribers aren’t going to click on them. Even if they do click on a poorly designed email, they’re less likely to read it. That’s because people have become used to emails that look great. If yours doesn’t, it’s going to go straight to the spam folder.
13. Scheduled emails
Scheduling your emails is one of the best things you can do to take your email marketing strategy to the next level. This allows you to organize your emails and get your content out to your subscriber base at the right time.
It’s important to note that different types of emails will be more effective at different times of the day. For example, you’ll likely find that sales emails are more effective early in the morning, while marketing emails are more effective later in the day.
If you want to ensure that you’re being as effective as possible, you should schedule all of your emails. If you want to take this one step further, you can also use autoresponders as part of your strategy.
14. A Solid email marketing platform
The first thing you want to be sure of when creating an email marketing strategy is to use a Solid email marketing platform. The best platforms have a variety of functionalities that allow you to create targeted campaigns, run A/B tests, and measure the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts.
Email marketing platforms make it easy to segment your subscriber list and create targeted campaigns based on your subscribers’ interests and past activities. This will help you increase the likelihood that your subscribers will take an action, like clicking through to your site or making a purchase.
You also want to make sure your email marketing platform has everything you need to create beautiful emails. You should be able to include images, videos, and even gifs to help catch your subscribers’ attention.
In general, you want to choose an email marketing platform that has everything you need to create great-looking emails and segmented campaigns, and is easy to use.
How can email marketing effectiveness be improved?
When it comes to making sure your email marketing strategy is as effective as possible, it’s important to identify gaps and areas for improvement. Below we outline five ways you can improve email marketing effectiveness, so you can drive more leads and sales from your email marketing strategy.
Look at your open rates and click-through rates – You can use this data to identify any problems with your subject lines or content that might be keeping your subscribers from engaging with your emails.
For example, let’s say you notice that your open rates are much lower for a particular segment of your list, but your click-through rates are normal. This could mean that your content is fine, but your subject line is putting people off. You can use this information to make adjustments to your strategy and improve overall effectiveness.
Ask your customers – Another way to improve email marketing effectiveness is to ask your customers what they want and when they want it. You can do this by including an email etiquette survey in the welcome emails that you send to new subscribers.
What are the 4 focus areas of effective email marketing?
- Segmenting your list – One of the most important things you can do to take your email marketing to the next level is to segment your list. This means you’ll be breaking down your subscriber base into smaller segments so you can send targeted campaigns to each group. For example, if you have a list of 10,000 subscribers, you can break them down into smaller lists based on things like their interests, the products they’ve purchased from you, or their name and job title. The more targeted you can get with your campaigns, the more effective they’ll be.
- Building a relationship – Another key focus area for effective email marketing is building a relationship with your subscribers. You want to make sure that the emails you send to your subscribers aren’t sales-focused but rather helpful or educational. This will help build a relationship with your subscribers, which will make them more likely to purchase from you in the future.
- Offering value – If you want to take your email marketing strategy to the next level, you’ll want to make sure it offers value to your subscribers. You can do this by providing helpful content like tips and tricks, educational material, or newsworthy articles.
- Building a network – Another key focus area to make sure your email marketing is as effective as possible is to network with other businesses. This can be as simple as joining a few online marketing groups and sharing your content with other business owners. You can also reach out to other businesses in your industry and offer to write guest posts for their websites.
What are three best practices for ensuring that your email marketing strategy is effective?
- Have a purpose for every email – Before you send out any emails, you need to ask yourself why you’re sending them. If you don’t have a purpose for every email you send, you’re just wasting your time.
- Keep track of your campaigns – Another important best practice is to keep track of your email campaigns. You want to make sure that you’re not sending the same email to the same people more than once.
- Conduct A/B tests – Finally, you should be conducting A/B tests as part of your email marketing strategy. This is done by sending two slightly different emails to two different segments of your subscriber base.
How do I engage more emails?
There are plenty of ways to get more emails, but it all comes down to one thing: outreach. You’ll need to start reaching out to people and making connections. To do this, you’ll want to find relevant communities and other online marketing groups where you can share your content and make connections.
You can also reach out to businesses in your industry and offer to write guest posts for them. When you make connections, you’ll want to make sure to stay in touch with your contact list and let them know when you have new content. You can do this by sending out one-off emails or adding them to a mailing list.
How can email marketing increase sales?
When it comes to increasing sales with your email marketing strategy, there are a few things you can do. First, you’ll want to make sure that you’re including a call-to-action in every email you send.
Next, you should be sending emails that offer exclusive deals or limited-time offers to your subscribers. This will encourage them to make a purchase before the sale ends.
Finally, you also want to make sure that your emails are being sent at the right time. You can use software like MailChimp to schedule your emails for the best times and days.
Conclusion
There’s a reason why email marketing is still so effective even though it’s been around for decades. It’s an excellent way to drive traffic to your website, build loyalty with existing customers, and sell new products or services.
If you want to take your email marketing strategy from good to great, it’s important to use responsive designs, use a Solid email marketing platform, and segment your list, build a relationship with your subscribers, and network with other businesses. It’s also important to have a purpose for every email you send, keep track of your campaigns, and conduct A/B tests.
Email marketing is an effective way for marketers to reach their audience and drive traffic to their website. However, not every email marketing strategy is created equal.
To be successful, marketers need to understand their audience, create relevant content, segment their lists, send emails at the right times, collaborate with other channels like social media or SMS, and track their results. To increase their effectiveness even more,
