Email marketing campaigns went out of fashion for a while, often branded ‘spam’ by members of the general public, there was nothing worse than email blasts clogging up your inbox.
Fast-forward a few years and email marketing is an essential element of any marketing strategy. With the rise and rise of content marketing, email campaigns allow businesses to deliver their insightful, engaging, educational content directly into the hands (or inboxes) of potential customers. An effective communication tool, email marketing builds relationships with prospective (and existing) customer, gathers important data, and helps boost marketing return on investment.
As important as email marketing campaigns are, many miss the mark completely, failing to deliver return on investment. In order to build, execute and maintain successful email marketing campaigns, you must listen to your audience and distribute valuable content that they actually need. Avoid blasting out self-promotional messages at all costs. This only leads to recipients hitting the unsubscribe button.
So, before you embark upon your email marketing campaign, peruse our handy hints for email marketing success.
Carefully Craft Your Content
Think about the content that your email marketing campaign includes. It should be educational, informative or entertaining. It needs to engage potential customers. It should never be a pushy advertising blast. Give away some of your knowledge, and position yourself as an expert. And don’t forget about the basics: proofread your copy, check for spelling mistakes and embarrassing grammatical gaffes. Spend time crafting compelling subject lines and article headings: they are your only opportunity to convince subscribers to click on your content. Choose relevant, eye-catching images. Use infographics and charts and diagrams where appropriate.
Don’t Get Too Hung Up on the Numbers
The standard metrics (like open and click through rates) reported on by all the major email marketing software platforms are important. Just remember to evolve beyond these basic statistics. Explore data related to subscriber behaviour as well. What areas of your website did they visit? How long did they spend on your site? How many times did they visit? Did they share your content on social media? Once you have more of a subscriber behaviour profile, you can even segment your mailing lists using this data. Then, create targeted campaigns based on the preferences of your subscribers. The more targeted a campaign is, the more successful it is likely to be.
Segment You Subscriber List
Following on from our last hint, make sure that you segment your subscriber list. Apart from using the subscriber behaviour indicators mentioned above, you should also take into account more traditional segmentation criteria to customize email content. Consider demographic factors like gender, age, and geographic location. For instance, the email content you distribute to 40+ women, might be very different to that distributed to men in their 20s. If you have information about the interests or hobbies of your subscribers, use that data to customise content as well. It’s all about enhancing engagement.
Automate Your Email Marketing Where Possible
Automating your email marketing frees up your time to develop better quality content, more creative campaigns, more targeted emails. So, set email content to be pulled directly from your blog posts (which can be categorized to match your list segments). Don’t painstaking create and design a new email every week. That time is much better spent building solid relationships with potential and existing customers.
Always Include Social Media Sharing Options
This is so important, and so easy to do. Just include the little social media icons somewhere in your email. Make it easy for your subscribers to share your valuable content with their networks. It increases your communication network exponentially, and word-of-mouth is by far the most effective (and cheapest) marketing going round.
Check Deliverability
There is absolutely no point in generating all this earth-shattering content, complete with social media sharing ability, if the email in which it is all embedded is never going to reach your intended recipient. So, check on the deliverability of your email. Check for common spam software trigger words like offer, free, and click here. Include a HTML version just in case embedded images are blocked by your recipient’s spam filtering service.
Build Your Audience
There is absolutely no point in creating or curating tonnes of valuable content if you have no audience to read it. So, spend some time building your audience. Make it easy for people to subscribe to your email list: include a ‘Subscribe Now’ form on the homepage (or indeed every page) of your website. Offer new subscribers something for nothing: a free e-book, or pod-cast or downloadable checklist. Push this offer out through all your social media channels, including a link to your website. Offer existing subscribers a free gift if they forward your emails to a friend. Include a link to your subscription form in your email signature.