How to Make Your Email Marketing Campaigns More Effective
Looking for a strategy to increase your brand awareness or increase product sales? Email marketing can help you do just that. In this article, you will learn all about the best email marketing practices that will help you get a lot of benefits and build the right strategy.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is an effective strategy for sending transactional and marketing emails to targeted groups or audiences. Email marketing includes sending out advertisements, calls to action, blog news, and more.The long-term goal of email marketing is to increase customer brand confidence and build loyalty.And at the same time, this strategy is also great for attracting new or potential brand customers.As a result, knowing the best email marketing practices can help you not only get existing customers to take action, but also drive new leads and increase sales.
Email marketing is a proven strategy. According to Marketing Charts, 82% of marketers have chosen it as their top lead and conversion strategy.What's more, a report from the Direct Marketing Association says that email marketing has one of the highest return on investment (ROI) rates of any other strategy. These studies prove that email marketing is well worth the effort.
So why is email marketing so effective?
As noted briefly earlier, this strategy helps brands connect with their customers, win over and build trust.Standing out is not easy in a highly competitive industry, but email marketing increases your chances of getting noticed.For example, you can create and send personalized content by segmenting your customers / audience according to certain criteria, taking into account their experience on your site and the person of the buyer.This email marketing feature helps you communicate more closely with your audience, which is an important aspect of building relationships and trust.
While email marketing is a great strategy in and of itself, it's worth understanding which approach makes it work. We want to share with you some tips on how to make your newsletter really effective.
- Collect A Quality Email Address List
First of all, no matter how smart your strategy is, it won't work without email addresses. One of the best email marketing practices is building an organic email list.The best way to create such a list is to voluntarily subscribe to your newsletter. Buying or renting a list of email addresses from third parties and using them without proper authorization will most likely not bring you any results other than potential spam complaints or even legal complications.
The key to a successful mailing is a quality subscriber list. If you reach out to people who previously didn't give you explicit consent or weren't interested in your product or site, your campaign's performance is likely to decline. Moreover, again, users can report your emails as spam.This became especially relevant after the adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), according to which, in order to send letters to European users, you must first obtain their consent to this. Failure to follow these guidelines may result in legal action or fines.
One of the best ways to build a quality email list is through a blog. A blog is a great opportunity to share something new, get to know and attract new readers.There is a high likelihood that your blog visitors will turn into your regular readers. Use blog forms or pop-ups to leave an email to subscribe to the newsletter.
A newsletter consent form is one way to get a quality email address. Ask visitors if they are interested in receiving news about products, services, or other information from you. Alternatively, you can use additional incentives to sign up for the newsletter. For example, offering e-books, free PDFs, webinars, or any useful ideas in exchange for email.
Use social media marketing to speed up the process of collecting email addresses. You can add a sign up form to your Facebook page and thus reach an even larger audience. Alternatively, you can invite subscribers to subscribe to your newsletter on your social media posts.
- Choose a Good Email Marketing Service
Once you've decided on the idea and strategy for your email marketing campaign, you can move on to the next step - finding a newsletter service. After all, the second rule of a successful campaign is a good email marketing service.Email marketing services help you manage your email lists and create engaging newsletter content. They also include an automation feature that makes sending emails to a large number of subscribers much easier.Finally, most of these services have reporting features that allow you to analyze and optimize your campaigns for even better results.There are many email marketing services, both free and paid, offering a variety of features and benefits. To make your search easier, we've selected a few of the best options and briefly summarized the capabilities of each.
MailChimp
MailChimp is a popular email marketing service used by millions of businesses. You can get access to its main functions absolutely free.
Constant Contact is a paid email service with a free 30-day trial. The service offers many features to help you prepare and launch your email marketing campaign, such as list management, campaign builder, and reConstant Contactporting tools.
GetResponse
Another great option to help you automate your email campaign is GetResponse. It boasts a high 99% email deliverability and a built-in customer relationship management (CRM) tool.
- Think Well Your Email Marketing Campaign
Lead preparation is the next step and one of the factors that determine how effective your email marketing will be overall. In this step, you create an email marketing campaign like this. But before you start, you should be clear about what your goals are.Reality is an important characteristic of any goal, especially in marketing.You should have a separate set of goals for all occasions. Some of the common email marketing goals and practices are:
- Welcome new subscribers - for this purpose, you can create a basic campaign that will educate new users about your business, values and culture.
- Networking - start building trust by submitting valuable content or offering webinars, anything that can improve your customer relationship.
- Caring for Existing Subscribers - Offer personalized content based on what you know about the customer and their needs.
- Subscriber Re-Engagement - You can create a campaign targeting customers who have recently stopped being active.
One of the most important email marketing practices is tracking the performance of your campaigns. In turn, this will help you understand your audience and improve your campaigns.In most cases, an email marketing service will do the hard work for you by presenting the available metrics in the analytics dashboard.If your email marketing service hasn't yet collected enough data to show statistics, you can also use Google Analytics or social media analytics like Facebook Insights to better understand your audience.There you will find specific data about your audience, such as geographic location, age and a lot of other information. Use it to expand and promote your future campaigns.Segment your audience to send relevant emails. Below we have shown an example of segmentation of the target audience according to several characteristics.
- Geographic location - you can segment your target audience based on location in order to offer services or products that are available or relevant in a specific region.
- Age - today people of all ages use the Internet and this should be taken into account when choosing the tone of a message or a proposal.
- Person - when you offer a service or product, you will see the buyer persona template. In short, it is a way to understand the different needs and values of the customer. Using this segment, you can find out how valuable your products or services are to customers.
The most important part of a marketing campaign is the design of the email (letter template), text and subject line.
One of the most important factors determining the success of your mailing list is the subject of the message. After all, it is the topic that can attract attention and influence the decision to open an email or leave it unread.
Next, you need good body copy with a hook that grabs the reader's attention and a call to action (CTA).
The next step in creating an email campaign is to design the body of the email. If design isn't your greatest strength, it's best to hire a specialist. And make sure all-important messages are in plain text and not included in an image so that people with disabilities don't have any trouble reading your email.
Finally, given the popularity of mobile devices - 49.7% and this number continues to grow - your email should be responsive and easy to read from mobile devices. And don't worry, all email marketing services by default allow you to create a responsive email.
Finally, you must remember and be prepared that you may not be able to get completely satisfactory results the first time. The strategy needs to be honed, and this will take some time and a lot of experimentation. You will need to A / B test every aspect of your email marketing campaign.
So, If you've decided to start using email marketing to promote your business, be sure to consider these tips. They will help you create a truly meaningful and successful email campaign.