February 16, 2023
Email marketing campaigns are fun, personal, and effective. With a boundlessly widespread reach, you can connect with people in a forum, unlike any other marketing channel. Building trusting relationships allows email recipients to feel comfortable spending money on your brand– always a positive.
The primary benefit of email marketing is the specified analytics you can access, including the ability to keep track of open rates, the number of subscribers, and a wide variety of other insightful numbers. Your efforts become measurable, providing you with the ability to track your company's growth from this personalized channel.
But don’t let all of these numbers excite you too much (we know– it’s hard!) and jump the gun– before you send out your first email marketing campaign, triple-check these five elements.
Find automation tools that work well for your business
Automation tools can increase efficiency, reduce costs, and ensure fewer errors and higher quality. In essence…automation is important. But how do you find the optimal automation tool for your business? Luckily, we have a whole specified blog for that! Check our Top 3 Marketing Automation Tools.
Create a contact list
Grow your business right from your inbox by consistently growing your contact list. Creating a contact list allows you to keep an ongoing cycle of customers and prospects, in turn creating endless opportunities for client growth and conversation starters.
Here’s how to do that:
- Use sign-up forms. Opt-in is everything!
- Collect the right data from the start
- Simply ask people for their email addresses after being on your website for at least 60 seconds. Don’t make the classic pop-up mistake right when users get to your site. They need to get to know you first!
- Use social media to advertise– sponsored/targeted posts, add a strong CTA to your Facebook business page, etc.
- Create free bonus content worth giving an email for.
- Create gated content downloads (think whitepapers or case success stories) and run using your PPC display retargeting or simply link on your site from service pages.
- Provide valuable content to your subscribers. No one likes random crap in their inbox. Can you say…junk mail?
- Create a blog and offer a subscription
- Measure email list health and cleanse your list on a regular basis
Dear reader,
YOU’VE WON YOUR DREAM HOUSE! Just kidding. (That’d be great in this economy though, huh?) But we’re willing to bet that we snagged your attention– which is what you unequivocally need to do with each email campaign that you send out. You have about 2 seconds to grab attention with a creative and eye-catching subject line, as the average open rate hovers somewhere between 10-20%.
Once the email is opened- continuing with personalization in email marketing is key.
Don’t be *that guy/girl* who forgets to personalize copy.
“Hi {first name}. We’re so excited to offer you {insert deal},” will likely automatically sink your campaign, and potentially sever the trust and credibility you’ve built up as a brand.
Quadruple-check for a catchy subject line and personalization!
Know your audience and their interests
More relevant emails = more revenue. Boost customer engagement and loyalty by methodically discovering your audience and their interests. Highly effective marketing campaigns don’t just appear out of thin air or magically deliver to the right recipients. Analytics will help improve your content based on top-performing emails as well as recommendations for optimal send times.
Some ways to discover your audience are:
- Invest time in analytics, A/B testing, engagement, etc. Track open, bounce, and conversion rates
- Send out specified surveys
- Analyze geographical areas
- Determine how much the average customer spends per send
- Analyze past purchases and purchase frequency
Test emails are vital
ALWAYS check over the content before your subscribers do by sending out a test email to your inbox first. Send an A/B test, check for content and grammatical errors, check for personalization, and most importantly, check for broken links.
In the ABCs of email marketing campaigns– don’t think we forgot about A/B testing! A/B testing is a user-experience research methodology that consists of a randomized experiment, usually involving two variants. If you have a list of 10,000 emails, send two subject lines as a test—one subject line to 1,000 users, and the second to another 1,000 users. The winning subject line, aka the email with the highest open rate, should then be sent to the remaining 8,000 emails.
The purpose of your email campaign is likely to have the recipient click a specific link. One of the biggest, we’re talking gargantuan, mistakes that a marketer could make is sending out an email with a broken link. Wham, bam, no thank you ma’am– your campaign is dead in the water, with a side of leaving a bad impression on potential customers. Dramatic sentence? Perhaps. Imperative tip? Absolutely.
Okay, you’ve read over and internalized the five things to do before sending out your email marketing campaign. Now, IF you need our assistance. Contact us today for email marketing services!