Email marketing, despite popular opinion, is still one of the most effective marketing tools out there. According to research and polling done by MECLABS, 72% of U.S. adults prefer to communicate with companies via e-mail.
A good email is by, for and about people. Emails are NOT by, for, and about robots, so don’t try and take any shortcuts. Keep your emails conversational, imagine you’re talking to a good friend or trying to educate your family member on whatever your content is. A good trick is to read your email out loud in order to check the tone and language. From here, based on what you know about the recipient, you can do some basic segmentation based on language, how the email was acquired, and if there had been any previous action taken.
What do you want to say to your audience? You want to send emails with purpose, that really speak to your subscribers, so always keep in mind what they signed up for. It might be helpful to outline some general content types you can include in your campaigns, so you can refer to it when designing your emails. When you send out emails know who you want to open them, and make sure the content you're sending out provides value to that specific target group. Use their buyer persona to figure out their interests, and provide value based on that.
Today most online content is scanned as opposed to being read from top to bottom. Few people approach reading online text as they would a good book. We sift through a large number of articles, we scan bullet points, paragraphs, titles and graphs. If an article seems interesting we then read the whole thing. If not, we close the browser tab.
So this means that you have about 3 or 4 seconds to convince your reader that staying with you is worthwhile. And you have even less time, maybe a second or two, to make a good impression on the person receiving your email.
When designing your emails, keep these following rules in mind
More specifically, ensure your emails have the following to make sure they are properly suited for the new age of scanning content.
How did you read this part? Did you jump to the bolded text? Did you only read the section titles? Study how you interact and engage with online content to reveal more intricacies of the way we now consume content.
First off, you need to know if people are actually reading the emails you send out. If not, you have to go back to the drawing board and review parts 1 and 2 to further optimize your content to your customer. So what can you use to determine if people are actually reading your emails?
Now that you have some of the basics down, let’s dive a little deeper into Campaign Metrics.
Offer potential subscribers something they value. Figure out what you can offer that will be of value to your readers. Answer these 3 questions to determine what should be driving your email marketing campaigns.
No matter your business, you need to have a clear idea of who your customer is in order to effectively communicate with them. Communicating with 70 year old women and 20 year old men is incredibly different! Analyze your email list a little deeper to identify segments of people within your audience so you can start sending them targeted, personalized emails. These personalized emails will help increase engagement and ultimate generate a greater ROI.
Once you get some sign-ups, these subscribers being to provide a lot of useful information about their interests and buying behavior that you can use to convert them into buyers, repeat customers but also use to identify new potential customers. You can customize email fields to collect everything from age and gender to interests and subscription preferences. The more unique you can make each subscribers experience, the more likely they are to stay a subscriber and eventually purchase not once, but multiple times from your business.
Now that you have all of these sign-ups, how do you get your subscribers to actually read the content you are sending them? These are our top 5 variables to change if you aren’t getting the response you are hoping for.
Treat your subscribers like VIPs. Being invited into someone’s email inbox is a privilege, you need to treat it as such. These subscribers are interested in your content. You need to provide them with benefits that other people who aren’t subscribed to your email list won’t be able to get. Let them know first about new products or sales, or go even further and ask these subscribers to participate in product surveys and reward them by making them beta testers for new products.
Email marketing systems are web-based services that are designed to send mass emails. Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing tools. It is easy to manage, gives you full control and allows you to establish direct contact with your customers. A good email marketing system allows you to engage your customers in a positive way, effecting loyalty and establishing yourself as a credible source of information.
Before you choose an email system, ask an expert or do some initial research on your own on the web. Alternatively, reach out to the community, and ask for their experiences and advice. Make sure to know which features are key for your organization so that you don’t end up choosing an email system that doesn’t include one of your sought after attributes. Finally, be sure it fits within your budget. Don’t overextend yourself on an email system unless you have a specific strategy in place.
Mobile has almost surpassed 50% of total opens while webmail and desktop continues to fall. Ever since Gmail switched to tabs, the number of opens has dropped significantly. However, evidence suggests that engagement is up and unsubscribes are down. This transition to mobile opens has made mobile email optimization increasingly more important. While an email newsletter can look great in a desktop inbox, when squeezed onto a small screen, it can become unusable. Make sure your emails use responsive email design.
Test yourself, how often do you find yourself looking at emails on your phone? Even more so, how often do you find yourself deleting emails on your phone without even opening them? Clearly, mobile responsiveness is important, but if you don't have well-executed subject lines then you'll email will never be opened to begin with. Email marketing is a multi-layered discipline that isn't too difficult to grasp but requires specific attention detail.
Now that we know the basics of email marketing, let’s get more technical.
Not all email lists are made the same, and it has a lot to do with the quality of information you are collecting for subscribers. Prompt potential subscribers to input relevant data like gender, occupation, age, interests, etc.
You can also collect data through third-party integrations and apps, as well as tapping into the power of an API. You can use your data from a CRM, your e-commerce platform like Shopify, amongst other apps to fuel your marketing campaigns.
Segmentation is essential to send your subscribers content uniquely tailored for them based on age, demographics, purchasing history, etc. You can change your content ever so slightly to fit specific portions of your subscriber base to increase engagement. Not only can you change the content you send, but you can change the cadence with which you send it. This helps prevent unsubscribes by not barraging certain customers with too many emails. 99% of companies see a correlation between segmentation and email performance metrics.
A UTM code is a simple code that you can attach to a custom URL in order to track a source, medium, and campaign name. This enables your analytics provider, usually Google Analytics, to tell you where searchers came from as well as what campaign directed them to you.
A/B testing, also known as split testing or bucket testing, works off the same basis of list segmentation. It is a method of comparing two versions of an email against each other to determine which is better. For example, holding everything else equal, A will have a different subject line than B, and you’ll send both to a small portion of your subscribers to see which performs better. A/B allows you to make specific changes to your subscriber experience and determine which impacts human behavior. Testing one change at a time helps them pinpoint which changes had an effect on their visitors’ behavior, and which ones did not. Over time, they can combine the effect of multiple winning changes from experiments to demonstrate the measurable improvement of the new experience over the old one.
Marketing automation will allow you to send individualized and personalized messages at scale. Personalized messages increase open rate and drive conversions. Combining this with the high quality data you have on the customers, you can send emails that truly resonate with that specific audience segment, based on their behavior, to drive intent and action.
Let your customers be the boss. By having an email preference center, your customers will be able to tell you what they are most interested in receiving from you and at what frequency.
Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to reach your customers. Marketing is about building relationships with your customers, and customers have much more control over their email than they do being served a google ad.