If you thought for a moment that the new online marketing tools dethroned email marketing… think again. As simple as it is, an effective email campaign still provides impressive results, allowing consumers to stay in the know about the brands they are interested in.
If you are new to email marketing and want to start integrating into your strategy to reap all its benefits, then it’s best to start with a simple campaign and work its kinks from there. Don’t worry: we’re here to guide you every step of the way and help you understand how you can make the most of your email marketing needs.
Getting Started With Email Marketing
As efficient and straightforward as email marketing can be, it doesn’t mean that writing your message and pressing the send button is enough to get a return on your efforts. Think about it for a second: How many emails do you receive everyday? The competition is quite fierce; prospects must notice your email and find it interesting enough to open it. How can you do that?
Let’s Find Out!
Build Your Email List
Your website is your best resource for building your email list. We’re going to assume that you already have a subscribe button, but you need to think beyond the obvious if you want to see any decent results.
For example, you can require a quick form submission when you give away samples or organize contests. Do the same when you ask for feedback or give prospects the opportunity to contact you directly. Centralize all the data in a list that includes as much information as possible.
Define And Segment Your Audience
The real value of an email list is how well you can filter it by relevant variables: demographics, brand loyalty, location, behaviors, etc.
When collecting the addresses for your email list, don’t forget to ask other things, too – like age, gender, location, and also subscription preferences (frequency, topics). If you have a lot of blank spaces in your database, organize a survey and encourage participation through incentives.
All this extra information will help you personalize your emails and target your audience with a lot more precision. Segmentation significantly increases your campaign results by making your content more relevant to each customer.
Evaluate Your Campaign Constantly
A big part of building successful email marketing campaigns is to test and continuously adjust, as there is no bulletproof method you can just implement blindly.
First of all, it doesn’t matter if you only post once a month on your blog – you need to have a calendar. Schedule your newsletter emails, follow-ups, social media posts, the content on your website, and make sure all the pieces of the puzzle work together seamlessly.
Make time and space in your schedule for testing your campaign, as it is the best way to maximize your results. You can’t pester the entire list with topic changes or repetitions. Create test groups and always observe their feedback before sending your content to the entire list.
Guidelines To Creating Relevant, Engaging Content
While the methods and precautions mentioned before are very important to the success of your campaign, it all comes down to the content itself.
The structure of an email should have these key elements:
- A short, but exciting subject line that has a few relevant keywords
- The body content that should be easy to read and relevant for the person who reads it
- Easy Call to actions
Make sure to optimize your content for mobile devices as well, as more than half of all emails are read using a smartphone nowadays. Also, be aware of the best times of the day for sending promotional emails: studies show that 11 a.m. on a Tuesday is the best time to send them, but experimenting on your audience will tell you what works for them.
Analyze Your Email Marketing Results
If you want to be as efficient as possible when sending content to your valuable email list, then you should make testing your campaigns a habit.
A/B testing is perhaps the most efficient method to see if your efforts are worth it. Change a few of the variables and send multiple variants to separate groups to see how they respond.
Check how many times your email was opened, how many clicks each variant brings, and how many people unsubscribed after a certain update from you.
Do you want an email strategy that generates more leads and transforms clicks into conversions? Contact us today.
