Email marketing, as the term suggests, uses emails to send your brand’s information or messaging across to customers. It’s an inexpensive way to let your customers know about sales, new products, offers and any other relevant information. Email converts 40 times as many customers as social media. It’s also an excellent way to boost brand awareness and keep the conversation around your brand going. This complete guide covers the most effective email marketing tips to help you succeed at email marketing.
WHEN AND WHY USE EMAIL MARKETING?
Email marketing is a great way to work on maintaining and building your relationship with existing customers and have them up to date with information from your brand. If used correctly, it can go a long way and result in loyal customers and profit for your company.
Its ability to be personalised is a bonus to make your customer feel a part of the brand and its successes.
When should you use it? It is crucial to have a goal in mind before you set out to send emails to your customers. First, ask yourself what your brand wants to achieve. It could be:
- – Brand awareness
- – Marketing a product
- – Build relationships
- – Generate or nurture leads
- – Invitation to an event
- – Increasing engagement and conversions
Once you know what you’re hoping to achieve, you can work back- wards from there on the messaging and other factors related to your campaign.
STEPS TO START
Once you have established your goals, and what you are aiming to achieve through your email marketing campaign, it’s time to get started! Here are the steps you could follow to ensure you’ve got everything necessary covered.
Step 1: Be clear on your who’s, what’s and why’s
This first point takes off from the previous section of asking questions to understand your content and aim better. Many factors related to the actual email content, as well as when to send it will depend on things like whom you’re sending your emails to. Next, understand why you’re sending these emails.
Your email should be beneficial to your audience and give them something no one else is. So what is this? What is unique about your email? Finally, what is the frequency with which you want to send emails to your audience?
Step 2: Do your research
Spending time to do your research well at the start of your campaign can save you lots of time and mistakes. Don’t just shoot blindly in the dark.
Your initial research can include information on your target audience’s needs and preferences, learning what stages of buying your customers are at and very importantly; understanding email statistics in your industry. Use these as a benchmark to analyse your campaign – it’s potential, and how well it’s doing.
Step 3: Email Lists
When it comes to sending out your emails, it would be a good idea to keep in mind to send emails only to people to whom your content is relevant. You wouldn’t want too many unopened emails, or worse, have your emails end up being marked as spam.
Make sure there is a clear unsubscribe button within your email, that makes it convenient for those wanting to opt out to be able to do so.
So how do you get email addresses to send emails out? There are two methods you can use: opt-in forms, and lead magnets.
Opt-in Forms
Opt-in forms get people to feed in their email addresses when they visit your website, or through a form, you put out on social media. To get your audience to sign up for your emails, offer something interesting to them. This could be a gift, coupon code or the promise of exclusive information in your emails – and make sure to deliver.
Lead Magnets
Lead magnets are something that attracts your potential customers to sign up for your email list, in exchange for their email addresses and information. This could be in the form of a free e-book, access to a webinar etc. Ensure that this is something relevant to the potential customer. One way to ensure this is to try and provide a solution-oriented offer that can help them in any way. Also, it should be delivered in an e-format, immediately upon sharing their information with you.
Purchasing Email Lists
What about buying email lists? Is that a good idea? Although it is possible to get email addresses this way, it’s not advisable. This is be- cause people aren’t happy sharing their personal information and might get irritated at getting emails they didn’t sign up for. Also, the chances are that buying email lists will put you in touch with people who are not interested in your product and will just lead to unopened or deleted emails.
Step 4: Content within the emails
When it comes to the content within your emails, focus on making it engaging. Your customers should benefit from opening these emails. Also, try and have them look beautiful and contain information that the audience find helpful and are interested in reading.
One thing that is more important than the actual email content is the subject line. Remember, an engaging subject line is what will determine your email being opened, so work on it.
Step 5: Decide your email marketing campaign type.
You can choose from a wide range of campaign types. It could be a weekly newsletter, product or sale announcements, or merely sharing blog content. Study the many different types of email campaigns that exist, and then pick the one that best suits you.
You can also choose to segment your lists and then use a different campaign for each list. This segmentation can be based on the demographics, buying stage or requirements of each customer.
You can use email automation to send out your campaign based on this information. Check out guide on Marketing Automation Workflows and Marketing Automation Tools.
Step 6: Analyse the results.
Keep track of how well your campaign is doing by studying the results. First, decide what are the key metrics that are important to your campaign, and then study them against the industry statistics to understand the results. Once you have this information, you can decide what areas you need to work on, and what areas are doing well so that you can continue to do these practices.
OUR TOP TEN EMAIL MARKETING TIPS
Here are ten tips that could help your campaign through the research and implementation stage.
- Focus on the subject line. As we mentioned earlier, the subject line of your email is what determines the consumer even opening your email. Ensure it is crisp and relevant and don’t shy from spending more time on it than the actual content within the email. You can split test your emails with different subject lines to see which have a higher success rate.
- Get personal. Using names will make your email feel more personal, and the customer will feel more a part of the team. Using the customer’s first name in the subject line might result in a higher opening rate.
- Humanisation. Have a conversation with your customers, write to them as though you’re speaking to them as individuals and people, not as though you’re merely trying to sell a product or give them in- formation.
- Feedback. Speaking of communication, it should be a two-way street. Allow your customers to give you feedback through polls or short forms.
- Keep your customers need in mind. Stay relevant and specific to your customer’s need. Make them feel heard and valued by catering to their particular requirements instead of continually sharing information that does not interest them or help them out in any way.
- Experiment with user-generated content. Sharing user-generated content is a great way for your customers to interact with your brand, and for potential customers to see the product in use by people like them. You could ask everyone who buys your product to share a photograph of them using it with a specific hashtag. Then use this hashtag to feature their images in your emails.
- Use email templates. There are many existing templates available for your email marketing campaigns. It can be time-saving to use these instead of trying to develop your designs from scratch. There are many resources available online to choose from.
- Your email should have a clear call-to-action. Including a CTA can be useful for your customer.
- Pay attention to timings. As part of your initial research, find out what time of day and day of the week, the customers of your field are most likely to open their emails. Use this to your advantage. Decide the frequency with which you want to share your emails with your audience. A balance is necessary. You don’t want to spam your audience with too many emails; however, you don’t want to send them so few and far apart that your brand isn’t in focus/memory.
- Choose an email marketing service. Finally, you can always try a service that will help you through your entire email campaign. Each company provides its own set of features and tools, so make sure to choose the one that best fits your requirements.
If you need more information on improving email marketing open rates, simply set up a call with our team!
