In spite of many technological innovations that allow brands to communicate with their audience (like social media), email marketing is still the leading way to connect with your consumers. As email marketing relies on customers offering their contact information, it’s not spam, which is why marketers shouldn’t treat it the same way. Instead, you need to treat it as a tool that helps you build relationships with your customers, and guide them down a user journey that ends with them purchasing your product. Here is a comprehensive guide that will help you up your email marketing game.
Start by creating an email marketing strategy
As is the case with any marketing effort, email marketing must be governed by an overarching strategy. As a part of building this strategy, you must:
- Define your target audience by creating buyer personas
- Identify your goals and align your communication to facilitate the same
- Make sure people can sign up to receive your emails
- Select the right email campaign type for your needs (informational, newsletters, dedicated sends, transactional, invitational, and so on)
- Create a schedule that aligns with your business efforts
- Measure your results and tweak what doesn’t work
Create an email list
Your email list should consist of people who are eager to hear from you, in order for your email marketing efforts to actually work. One of the most successful ways to build a good email list is by using lead magnets in the form of e-books, infographics, whitepapers, checklists, templates, reports, studies, and webinars. While creating lead magnets, you must ensure that your offerings are value-driven. If a consumer believes that they are likely to get something out of your content, they will willingly supply their contact information for you to use. This trust can be garnered by ensuring your content marketing efforts bring value to the readers.
Additionally, a few best-practices to keep in mind while creating lead magnets include – making sure the content is palatable, solution-oriented, and relevant to the buyer’s journey. This can help ensure that you garner a certain level of goodwill, and that your consumers are more willing to open your emails, rather than ignoring them when they crop up in their mailboxes.
Craft the perfect email
While creating an email for consumers, there are a few key factors that you must keep in mind. These include:
- Copy: Showcase your brand’s voice and stick to only what the subject line offered. Do not digress and fill your mails with endless information about your product or service – this will just put the reader off.
- Images: Images make content pieces more interesting when viewed at first glance. Make sure that you use relevant images that are properly optimized for different devices.
- Call To Action (CTA): Make sure that your email contains a relevant CTA that is quite clearly visible.
- Responsiveness: Most people open their emails on smartphones and tablets, and if your email is not optimized for the same, then it may just look incredibly unsightly.
- Personalisation: Make sure that your emails address the customer by their name, and also include a tidbit of information that makes the content feel a bit more personal, rather than a standard email that is shot out to everyone.
- Subject line: Your subject line introduces people to the content of your email, so make sure it is catchy and enticing.
Should you Automate your emails?
Yes.
Automating your emails ensures that certain types of communication reach their intended audience at select periods of time, without having to rely on a person sitting and facilitating the same. Autoresponders, drip emails that are sent at specific times of the user’s journey, can be a lifesaver for marketers. Creating workflows can also help you optimise the process of optimisation to the fullest. With a yes-no workflow, you can ensure that each action of the customer brings forth a certain communication.
Set meaningful KPIs
Finally, you must set a few KPIs in place to measure your email marketing efforts. The following are a few metrics that you must measure:
- Deliverability – which measures the rate at which an intended email reaches the customer’s inbox
- Open rate – which measures how often your marketing emails are opened by their intended audiences
- Clickthrough rate (CTR) – which measures whether customers are responding to the email as intended and clicking on the CTA
- Unsubscribe rate – which measures how many customers unsubscribe from your mailing list
These metrics can help you gauge whether your email campaigns are having the desired effect.
With these steps, you should be able to craft an email marketing plan that helps you reach your business goals. Make sure that each email offers the customer some value, and isn’t being sent out just for the sake of sending it.
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