15 Email Marketing Success Tips
Email marketing has been and is still on top of marketing channels for all types of businesses. Building up a trusted email list of loyal subscribers who are genuinely interested in the content offered to them is every marketer’s or business owner’s dream and goal.
That’s why this article is a treasure with 15 golden tips for a successful marketing strategy , covering each step along the way of creating an email marketing plan that is intended to drive sales and increase ROI .
Step One: Building Your Email List of True Subscribers
The first step in the journey of email marketing is to build an email list of people who are interested in what you’re offering.
You want to attract as many leads as you can to sign up with their names, emails, and other valuable information.
Yet, you do not want to attract any kind of leads, you need those who are truly willing to be on your email list and are interested in the content you’ll be working hard to deliver.
Here are some tips to attract genuine leads who will turn into loyal subscribers and then, hopefully, into loyal customers.
Success Tip #1: Hook Your Lead
Grab the attention of your potential leads and hook them with an attractive offer they don’t want to miss:
- an eBook you know that such an audience will love,
- a report or case study if your audience are into scientific thinking,
- an infographic when you’re talking to an audience of marketers,
- or a free template you’re sure will be of benefit to them.
Do not just give away any free material and keep your fingers crossed that people will give you their email address . Provide valuable, practical information ( obviously, in a digital form ) that solves a problem to your audience or makes their lives a little bit easier.
Success Tip #2: Be Polite
Once you’re invited to someone’s inbox, you better be polite and considerate. People do not like to be invaded every day with emails and bombarded with “click now” and “order today” offers; they mark such email addresses as spam and block them.
Instead, think twice before sending out an email and consider how appropriate the timing is and how valuable or necessary the content is.
Success Tip #3: Keep it Simple
Remember to always keep it simple, and don’t ask for too many details or use complicated language or long forms to be filled out; this will only scare leads away.
A first name and an email address should suffice as a beginning.
Take a look at how simple this marketing email is, yet it’s catchy and to the point.
Success Tip #4: Double Confirm
Do not be scared to send a second opt-in email for confirmation instead of the welcome email. In fact, a study proved that customers prefer that 2.7 times.
And by sending a double confirmation email, you are 100% sure that this prospect you have is genuinely interested in what you have and could convert at any time to a buying customer.
Success Tip #5: Grow Your Email List
Never stop adding to your email list and updating it for better results of your email marketing efforts.
Make sure there is a “Sign Up” button or box on different pages of your website: blog page, home page, and wherever you can fit one.
Now that you’ve built an email list to start with (and are working continuously to grow it), let’s move on to the next step.
Step Two: How to Construct Your Emails
To keep the subscribers on your list engaged, and drive more, there are some techniques and tips you should consider in every email you send out.
Success Tip #6: Set Expectations
In you first email, you want to set a plan for what a reader can expect from your part. One email weekly should work for newsletters, but a daily email is to be expected for critical product updates or timed offers.
A subscriber likes to know from day one what you are going to be using their email address for.
It’s a matter then of keeping your promises and living to your readers’ expectations.
Success Tip #7: Amuse with Content
The content you follow through with should be amusing and useful and add a future value to the reader (not be outdated or old by the time the reader is ready to use it).
The content you provide should be easily obtained and consumed by the leads who are interested in it. The more your content is amusing, the stronger people will be attached to it.
Success Tip #8: Mix it up
You want to mix formal with friendly, important with fun, and sell with inform.
For example, start an email for monthly updates with a friendly note, a critical product update with a fun fact that led to that update, or a sales pitch with a statistic info about how many users are having the same problem as your reader.
Engage your reader and lure him/her into what you’re intending from sending the email from the first place by balancing it out with a friendly message or personal memo.
Success Tip #9: Make it Personal
I, myself, love it when I get the feeling that this email is specifically written for me ?
By ways of analytical tools and marketing technologies, you will have all the data and history about each subscriber on your email list. Personalize the offer you’re making so that it’s relevant to this lead’s history with your business.
Those that send blind offers are far more likely to lose permission to keep doing so.
Success Tip #10: Keep away from Spam Folder
Let me give you some tips to keep your marketing emails away from the spam folder, which is every marketer’s nightmare.
Make sure that every name on you email list has willingly subscribed to receive marketing emails from you, so that you’re not violating any regulations of user privacy.
Allow readers to easily unsubscribe from your list, because if the unsubscription option is not crystal clear in front of their eyes, the “spam” is.
Success Tip #11: Mind the Format
Give a lot of attention to the format of your email and mind every part in it.
- The “From” line is better be a person’s name so that the email feels personal and gets a high open rate.
- The “Subject” line has to be attractive, relevant, concise, and to the point.
- The “Pre-header” line is very important and should be given the same attention as the subject line. Make the most out of the 100 characters allowed to you for the preheader text to convince your reader to open the email and engage with it.
- The “Body” of your email should keep the reader interested rather bouncing away by being clean and crisp. Include pictures if possible and use proper language and punctuation marks.
- Include a clear “Call to Action” to direct the readers to the next step you want them to take. Make your CTA button contextual rather than using a generic form of “Click Here” or “Buy Now,” like Uber did in the below example.
And last but not least, remember that most users read their emails on a mobile device, so make sure your subject line and email body are mobile friendly and look as good as they would on a desktop computer.
Eventually, your email list will grow and extend to the limit that you cannot handle it manually and sole handedly. Also, you’ll notice that you have different types of subscribers, new and old, potential leads and loyal customers, or locals and foreigners.
This means that it’s time for the following step.
Read also : The Ultimate Guide to Video Marketing
Step Three: Automation and Segmentation
If there is a recipe for failure, it’ll tell you to send the same email to every one on your email list and to send emails whenever you have time!
But we’re here to succeed and come up with an email marketing strategy that drives sales and increases ROI and not the opposite.
Success Tip #12: Segment Your Audience
Split up you email list into more targeted groups, so that you are able to start more personalized conversations with your leads (the more personal it is the higher open rate is).
You can segment your list any way you want; here’s an example:
- Geographical location
- Lifecycle stage
- Awareness, consideration, decision stage
- Industry
- Previous engagement with your brand
- Language
- Job Title
Did you know that segmented emails can generate up to 60% of all revenue?
Success Tip #13: Use Email Marketing Automation
Software programs and tools for email marketing are extremely efficient in handling a growing number of subscribers on the right time in the right way.
Schedule different emails to be sent to new and old subscribers on pre-set occasions, for example, a welcome email for new subscribers, a newsletter weekly, a retargeting email for “long time no see” customers, or a “take me home” email for abandoned-cart ones.
Success Tip #14: Analyze and Adjust
Email marketing tools usually provide you with frequent reports about your email campaigns so that you get an idea about how you’re doing. It’s crucial that you read these reports carefully, analyze them, and adjust your techniques accordingly.
Set a number of KPIs to measure the success of your email marketing strategy. The top 3 can be:
- Open Rate: it explains how many people have opened you email and refers to how well you’ve built your relationship with readers and how much people are excited to read your emails and open them quickly.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): it shows how many people clicked on a link (if you included one) on your email. If your CTR is low, this means that your message is either not targeted enough, or simply not getting through. In this case, focus on improving your copy.
- Unsubscribe Rate: if the rate of people who unsubscribe from your email list is high, in comparison to the opt-in rate, then you need to examine when and why people are leaving and fix that as soon as you can.
Success Tip #15: Choose a Good eCommerce Platform
If you’re using email marketing to reach online buyers and communicate whish shoppers for your ecommerce store (which you probably do if you’re reading ExpandCart’s blog), then you better choose an ecommerce platform that has a lot of built-in features that help you customize and send emails to your customers easily and successfully.
ExpandCart has integrated an email marketing automation tool within the same dashboard to enable store owners reach customers easily with new products, timed offers, reminders, and updates.
Store owners can also segment their subscribers into different categories, personalize their messages, and add pictures and call to actions, all from a single dashboard.
Read also : What Is Cash On Delivery ?
To Sum Up,,,
Email marketing is still on top of the list of marketing channels and a guaranteed way to reach a large base of audience in the ecommerce industry.
If done smartly, email marketing can generate up to 60% of a company’s revenue, as 86% of consumers have said that they would like to receive a promotional email from brands they subscribe to at least once per month.
Following these tips for a better email marketing strategy can work wonders in your business’s favor ?
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