Speed up the Sales Process
Effective email marketing campaigns communicate directly with consumers to promote a company’s product or service via their inbox. Email campaigns can be a hard or soft sell and provide a versatile channel to share content marketing and product information. Although e-mail marketing is an excellent way to acquire clients, it is even better for retaining them and creating recurring revenue. According to online marketing data, you can boost retention rates by up to 80%, so you can earn money without investing anything. If that’s the case, then why do some email marketing efforts feel like unsuccessful spam?
Email Marketing Campaign Issues and Struggles
Poor email campaign performance can be distilled to a single result: No increase in revenue. Admittedly, you may have spent hours learning how to execute an effective email marketing campaign only to be disappointed by non-existent results.
Most often, it’s not the entire campaign that doesn’t work, just elements that need to be tweaked. It really can be as simple as changing the copy. We frequently notice these common issues when eCommerce businesses first try to create email marketing campaigns:
- Email subscribers aren’t growing, or customers are unsubscribing
- Automated emails land up in the spam folder
- The email subject line is weak or confusing
- Small businesses struggle to create original content, or they’re not fans of their current content
- Email marketing content is high-quality, but it doesn’t convert to leads
- Email marketers don’t use analytics effectively or plan campaigns properly
These challenges are easy to troubleshoot with the array of email marketing tools and email marketing software available. The trick is knowing what to adjust and how to do it. We’ve put together some email marketing tips to help you follow email marketing best practices for future campaigns.
How to Do Email Marketing Right
Define Your Goals
SMART is an industry-renowned acronym that can be used to optimize your email marketing. A successful campaign should be the following:
- Specific: Simple, sensible, and significant.
- Measurable: Meaningful and motivating.
- Achievable: Realistic and attainable.
- Relevant: Reasonable and results-based.
- Time-bound: Attain results within cost/time limitations.
Targeted emails can serve several purposes, and they don’t necessarily have to achieve all your business goals at once. Some may be to increase website traffic, while others may focus on obtaining new subscribers, or revenue generation. This is why understanding your goals is so important because it dictates the type of content you’re sharing and the email clients you’re going to target.
Understand Your Weaknesses
To optimize your emails for maximum conversion and engagement, you need to implement a comprehensive testing process. Inexperienced marketers tend to rush through the process and only test one or two variables before running their first email marketing campaign. However, if you want your marketing to improve, you need to test subject lines, CTAs, copy, design, and content.
A/B testing is where you set up two variations of one campaign and send them to a small percentage of your contact list. Half the test group is sent Version A, and the other half receives version B. The result, which is measured by the most clicks or opens, determines the winning version. You don’t have to test a million variables at once, but each campaign should contain some sort of variable you can analyze to better understand weakness that needs improvement.
Understand Your Resources
It’s impossible for everyone to be good at everything. Time and again, businesses struggle to handle operations and marketing requirements. Perhaps you have great ideas for promotional emails, but there’s no time or manpower to execute them, or you’re not compiling campaign reports, so you can’t truly gauge if you’re reaching your target audience, and have no customer data.
The process of email marketing entails; deciding on a specific goal, choosing an email marketing service, building and segmenting an email list, creating a campaign, and then finally using analytics to track progress. Understanding your current resources and what’s required at each of these phases can help you mitigate challenges and achieve a higher click-through rate.
Understand Your Audience
Email campaigns target specific customers groups. So, if you’re a homeware eCommerce store, for example, you may have a campaign targeting couples and another targeting single persons. Knowing your audience results in a higher engagement rate because you’re compiling emails that are not only going to a similar group, but also contain content that appeals to them.
Improving these personalization capabilities ultimately boosts your bottom line. Understanding your audience is at the core of brand growth. It helps to create effective transactional emails, landing pages, drives informed marketing strategies, and boosts online presence. Remember, content marketing is a complex, multiple-step process. Whether you’re sending a newsletter, acquisition, retention, or promotional email depends on who your audience is and what stage of the buyers’ funnel they’re at.
Develop Awesome Graphic Templates
You don’t have to be a graphic designer to send attractive emails. Most email marketing platforms provide user-friendly drag and drop templates. These plug-and-play marketing automation options let you copy and paste content, like a blog post, for example, into the email, while ensuring it reads across devices and email service providers.
The best email platforms usually include graphic templates or their design, which helps save time (when you have a template, you can spend fewer hours designing and more time creating content.) They also help you keep a consistent look and feel and deliver personalized experiences because all you need to do is use the drag and drop editor to plug in the relevant content.
Integrate Conversion Elements – CTA’s
A call to action or CTA is a marketing term for any design that prompts an immediate response, like buttons designed to initiate a purchase, quote, or to find out more information. Before you can implement CTA’s, you need to know who your audience is and the purpose of your campaign. Most campaigns try to achieve one of these five objectives:
- New product promotion
- Follow-up on an abandoned cart
- Stay top of mind with your audience
- Announce an immediate sale
- Clean up your contact list
Regardless of the email you send, it should always continue a conversation between your business and its consumers. An important, often overlooked CTA, is the subject line. Without a carefully crafted, attention-grabbing subject line, you run the risk of your email engagement levels dropping.
