Despite the growing trend toward social media, email marketing is still an effective and necessary tool for any business that is trying to build its brand online. Of course, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about email marketing in today’s spam-filled inbox world. Email offers you a direct connection to your customers, allowing you to cater to their specific needs or interests in your marketing. Studies show that email marketing is still one of the best solutions for increasing ROI in your business. If you take the time to come up with an effective strategy, you can capitalize on this resource and get more from your email marketing.
Cater Your Email to Persons, Not People
Customers never want to be just another nameless or faceless asset to your business. Rather than sending blanket emails to everyone on your mailing list, cater your emails more specifically based on the needs and/or interests of your customers. Nothing is worse than getting promotional emails that are completely irrelevant. It makes people feel like they don’t matter to your organization, and will likely cause your emails to end up going unread or ending up in the spam folder over time. You don’t have to send a personalized email to every single person on your list. Just segment your list into different categories and cater your marketing strategy to those groups.
Optimize and Test Regularly
Aside from click-through sales, you can’t really see what your emails are doing without a careful analysis. Email marketing is hard to define in terms of whether a campaign was successful without the right marketing tools. Include testing campaigns as a part of your marketing strategy and make sure that you are constantly optimizing your campaigns for the climate. When you analyze your marketing campaigns over time, you can see what works and what doesn’t, as well as what trends might or might not be helping your campaign. Plus, you will be able to stay on top of emerging marketing demands so that you don’t get left behind as the industry evolves.
Go Mobile-Friendly
Any business that is not already optimized for mobile in every aspect of operation needs to step it up. Right now, there is no time for not providing optimized content to users. Everyone has a mobile device and they are used much more frequently than desktop computers on a daily basis. 66% of emails are opened on a mobile device. If your emails aren’t optimized, you are missing over half of your potential marketing audience. Keep emails brief, don’t use extensive formatting or HTML, and make sure that things are easy to read on any screen.
Give Them Space
No one likes to wake up to dozens of email notifications. What’s worse is finding out that there are multiple emails from the same company or brand within a matter of hours, all promoting something different or offering some type of deal. Not only is this confusing to your customers because you are changing things too frequently, but it is going to get annoying really quickly. The best way to determine how often to send emails to your subscribers is to research what other companies are doing and what they have found success with. Usually, you shouldn’t send more than one email a day at the very most. Of course, there are extenuating circumstances depending on the industry that you are in. To better determine how often to send emails without bothering your customers, consider:
- What they want. When they sign up for emails, ask how frequently they would like to receive emails and what emails they want. If you give people more options, they are more likely to sign up and actually read the emails that you send.
- What competitors are doing. Mostly, look at what your competitors are doing wrong with their email marketing campaigns. If you spot their weaknesses, you can turn those into strengths in your own campaigns.
- Customer feedback over time. Feel free to reach out to your customers and ask for insight about your email campaigns. Take unsolicited recommendations into consideration, as well. After all, your customers are the ones getting the emails. It makes sense to cater your campaign to meet their desires.
Use Automation, But Don’t Replace Yourself
Automated email marketing tools are a great resource for any marketing campaign. However, they need to be used to assist your campaigns, not to take over completely. You can take out a lot of the tedious work by utilizing these automated tools, but that is all that you should utilize them for. Keep your emails personal and make sure that you are still monitoring and managing your email marketing campaign. Again, this goes back to making customers feel like you have a personal connection. Nothing says impersonal like a barrage of automated email campaigns.
The Bottom Line
Anyone can be successful with email marketing. It just takes some time to develop a strategy and put a process into place. A combination of effective planning and using metrics to measure the success of your campaigns over time will help you further hone your skills and create much more effective marketing campaigns in the future. Make sure that you are providing value to your readers, above all else, because if they can’t use the information your email will end up in the trash. Another way to improve your email marketing is to check out practices used by big corporations to increase subscribers and click-through rates. Ultimately, it comes down to research and preparation. Give your email campaigns the attention they deserve and you will get the results you want and so much more.
Consult our professional team at Branding Services Sketchcorp Brisbane for help launching your email campaigns or to learn more about email marketing for your brand.
