With so many emails hitting our inboxes, we sometimes question if email is still a viable tactic, or if email’s best days are behind us. Fortunately, research shows that email is still one of the most effective marketing tactics to communicate a specific message to a targeted audience and to stay top-of-mind. Another benefit of email is that it’s very inexpensive compared to other marketing tactics.
If you’re struggling with email marketing, here are some tips to get your email marketing up to speed.
First, Build Your Email List
The best email lists are built organically—you never want to buy an email list.
Start by assembling your teams’ contact list in an Excel or Google Sheets file, then de-dup to eliminate duplicate contacts.
Next, create an opt-in email form on your website. When people come to your website for the first time and like what they see, they’ll want a way to stay up to date about your brand and your offers.
Share your sign-up form on your social media channels. Again you’ll need to make it compelling to your users as to what benefits they’ll receive by signing up. Too many company websites fail in this area because they just add a form without listing the benefits.
Other ways to increase signups:
- Host a contest or offer a discount. We’re big fans of giving people an incentive to sign up for your email list—and we know that contests work. Try offering a prize for some lucky new subscriber or a discount code for a first purchase.
- Make your emails easy to share. When you create compelling emails, with a lot of valuable information people will want to share them.
- Build a landing page around a specific topic or solution and include a signup form.
- Offer an email series. If someone signs up, they will receive a series of emails that will address a topic or problem that they’re dealing with.
10 Email Marketing Tips to Get Your Campaigns Clicking
1. Define your audience
No matter what you sell, you need to have a clear idea of who your audience is in order to effectively communicate with them. Segment users within your audience so you can send them personalized and targeted emails that help increase engagement, build trustful relationships and generate greater ROI.
2. Signup sources
Some of the most valuable data your signup form has to offer is how and where subscribers sign up for your list. If you’re an e-commerce business, knowing where your customers joined your list can give you a better idea of how to communicate with them and where you might want to focus your marketing efforts going forward.
3. Segments and groups
Once you’ve identified smaller collections of people within your larger audience, you’ll be able to create groups and segments to send more relevant and personalized emails to your recipients—and the more relevant the campaign, the better the results. There are times when you’ll want to send to your entire list, but by segmenting users and taking advantage of segmentation tools can significantly increase the click-through rates and e-commerce orders your campaigns generate.
4. Decide what to write
Now that you know who you’re writing to, it’s time to think about your content. What do you want to say to your audience? What is your content marketing strategy? You’ll want to send emails with a purpose, that really speaks to your subscribers, so always keep in mind what they signed up for.
5. Establish your sending frequency and goals
There’s nothing set in stone about how often you should email your customers, but if you send too often, your subscribers are likely to tune out what you have to say or unsubscribe altogether. Some users that run a blog or news website might choose to send daily updates to their subscribers, while other users only send them twice a month so subscribers stay excited about their emails. Choose to send your email campaign at your own pace, and check the unsubscribe rates and the click-through rates to adjust the frequency if needed.
6. Make a schedule
One way to make sure you’re staying on track is to create a content calendar to schedule your campaigns, blog posts, social media posts, and more .Your email marketing schedule will depend on your industry, the types of content you send (content marketing strategy), and your sending frequency.
7. Design
When designing email campaigns, focus on your message and keep your design straightforward. We suggest laying out all the elements for your campaign in a hierarchy, putting your most important information or the main takeaway toward the top so people can quickly scan your email if they’re short on time.
8. Test
Test in different mobile and desktop email clients (Gmail, Outlook, Mac Mail, et. al.)
All email clients are created differently, which means that the campaign you designed might look slightly different in your subscribers’ inboxes. Be sure to check the emails on mobile devices as well as they can look different in responsive designs.
Send test emails to friends and coworkers
If you have any friends or coworkers who can check your email for typos and give you some feedback on the layout, you can send them a test email so they can preview the campaign directly in their inbox.
Find the best version with A/B Testing campaigns
Not sure which subject line will get the most opens and clicks? Think there might be a certain time of day your customers are most likely to make a purchase through your campaign. Running an A/B test lets you experiment with different versions of your emails to see how the changes you make impact your results.
9. Use marketing automation
Automation software is usually included in most email marketing platforms and handles customer communications or behind-the-scenes business processes that would otherwise be handled manually. Automation can help small business marketers bring their strategy to life without taking up their resources and headspace. This technology works best when you have an established audience and a nurturing strategy
An example of email-driven by automation would include a welcome email followed by a series of emails to nurture the user through the buying process. Emails can also be sent after purchase to reward your customers with a special incentive, automation helps you streamline your communications with customers so you have more time to focus on creating content and increasing return on investment.
10. Measure
Most email platforms include analytics that shows you opens and clicks, E-commerce data, and website traffic.