Email marketing is the subtle art of sending tailored offers directly to the target audience. Given that the total number of emails sent and received daily is approaching 300 billion (yes, billion), email marketing is considered as the most effective tool to both develop relationships with customers and to generate leads and sales and leads. Read on to discover some simple tips that will help you build an effective email marketing campaign and make your bottom line look more healthy!
Effective Email Marketing Campaign Starts With Goal(s)
To plan an effective email marketing strategy, you have to start with defining its objectives. Some of the usual suspects include enhancing brand loyalty, boosting sales, and improving brand visibility. Increasing website traffic, especially if it has a high conversion rate, can also be a goal, although in this case make sure to monitor the engagement metrics as they can give many hints into the needs and predilections of your customers.
Leverage Organic Email Lists
An organic email list is vital to the email marketing campaign’s success in the long run. The infamous tendency among web marketers is to purchase email lists, which could seem as a very cost- and time-effective solution. However, there is a hefty price for that. Purchased, scraped and borrowed list are full of fake addresses, and if the real people start marking you as spam this can easily damage the reputation of your brand and have even greater implications with email delivering services. An effective email marketing campaign requires precise targeting of those who have an interest in your products or services, and no audience are better qualified than those who submitted their email addresses to you willingly.
Segment Your Email Lists
Once you have built your email list, segment it, following the relevant parameters: this becomes progressively crucial as your database grows in size. Segmentation plays a vital role in making your marketing strategies more effective and organized, and it is good news for you that many companies completely overlook this tip, sending irrelevant offers to customers who could have easily converted otherwise.
Some of the key parameters to consider during email list segmentation are: user engagement and behavior, demographics (age, location, gender), and buying frequency. Precise segmentation allows to increase conversion rates to stratospheric heights while improving your brand image: after all, who doesn’t like being offered what she wants at the time when she needs it?
Clean the Email List
The subscriber list is the most vital asset of the effective email marketing campaign. Thus, you should ensure to check the list frequently, keeping it up to date and weeding out the garbage. Anybody who unsubscribed once should not be getting another email from you: at least to the same address. Furthermore, removing inactive users will improve your engagement and open rate. The good news is that most of the email providers can remove the inactive subscribers automatically.
Write Eye-Grabbing and Irresistible Subject Lines
The subject line is the first thing that your audience is going to see, and it often becomes the last one, so if you want to see high open rates you better put some heart into this. The ideal subject line compels the recipient to find out what the next line will say, and you will most likely have to experiment a lot before
Stay away from phrases like earn money quickly, fast and free, etc. as they make your email look spammy and greatly increase the likelihood of immediate deletion.
Choose an Attractive Design
A beautiful, eye-catching design is a secret weapon for driving conversions for your brand. While laying out the email template, stay away from the cardinal sin of bad designers who try to put everything in the same place for maximum visual impact (and top it all with red). Your design should be, above all, clean and easy to read. Don’t distract the potential customer with excessive pictures, no matter how cute. Also, don’t forget that formatting how the text looks on the page is part of design, too.
A/B Testing
Maybe we should have led with it, but don’t get us wrong: most of the time the difference between a successful email marketing campaign and a flop is in A/B testing, so it is essentially impossible to exaggerate its importance. Basically, everything that can be tested, should be. This includes (but, naturally, is not limited to) subject lines and design templates from the previous bullets (here you can let your creativity loose experimenting with various wordings, fonts, colors as well as shapes and sizes of that “CLICK NOW” button that haunts you in sleep.
However, amidst all the excitement don’t forget about the content: an effective email marketing campaign is all about the message, so getting it right is the key objective of you A/B testing.
Scheduling the emails
No matter how devoted you are to the subtle art of email marketing, nothing can beat the regularity of automatic sending, which takes away the headache of manual scheduling. As with many things in life, consistency of your campaign is paramount to success, so make sure your optimized emails follow a nice pattern that gently reminds your customers how invaluable your brand is to them. However, by all means do refrain from sending too many emails: here again you are to strike the elusive balance between reaching out often enough but not too often.