Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach your audience, but it’s also one of the most complex ways to market your brand or product. A simple email blast can have high engagement rates, but pulling off a flawless email marketing campaign that will actually convert someone to buy your product is a bit more difficult. However, with a little planning and research, you can greatly improve your odds of reaching your audience and increasing sales.
Know Your Audience
When you’re blasting out newsletters, it’s vital to know who you’re targeting and what they’ll value in your messages. The first step to this is to research your ideal customer, or rather, your target audience. You should already know who these people are, but you can gain even more insights from a digital marketing platform like Google Analytics. With this tool, you can set up custom groups based on how users interact with your website or mobile app. For example, you can create a “warm leads” group to see all of the people who have interacted with your content, but are not yet ready to make a purchase.
Set Sender Policy
One way to make sure your emails get delivered is to set a sender policy. This is a special configuration that allows you to identify the sender of an email so that your recipient knows where it came from. You can set a policy for your primary email address or use a free service like G Suite to have a catch-all email address for your business. If you have a business email address (for example, info@yourdomian.com), you can use Google Mail or another service to catch all of your company’s incoming messages and forward them to your primary email address.
Use Personal Emails
Another step is to personalize your emails. A lot of businesses get caught up in making their emails look similar to a big brand’s email. While this may be attractive to some marketers, remember that people subscribe to brands they know and trust. If you want to increase your odds of having someone open and act on your email, use a personal email address.
For example, if you’re sending an email to someone at bobsmith@example.com, they’ll be much more inclined to engage with your message because they know and trust you. They also may be more likely to share your email with their network because they know and trust you as well.
Avoid using your business email unless you’re sure someone in your target audience has opted-in to receive your company’s emails. Otherwise, you may end up in a situation where your business messages are being forwarded to your personal email address, causing you to miss out on important conversations.
Set Up Automated Content
One of the biggest mistakes new marketers make is thinking that email marketing is only about sending out massive, automated emails with no human intervention. While it’s true that you can use marketing automation tools to send email blasts to thousands of people at once, the reality is that these tools require a lot of human interaction to set them up correctly and ensure they’re accurate.
If you want to make the most of your email marketing campaign, you need to set up automated content that’ll produce results without needing a lot of human interaction. To do this, you need to plan out a content schedule, whether you’re using articles or video to promote your product or service. You can use HubSpot to create content schedules that’ll automatically send out content at the right time, allowing you to focus on other aspects of your business. Additionally, you can use automated email campaigns to follow up with potential customers after they’ve subscribed to receive your newsletters.
Use Personal Touch
When you’re making sales pitches to potential customers via email, you have two options: you can either leave your personal touch at home or bring it with you. Naturally, you’re going to want to leave your personal touch at home if you’re trying to pitch a business or brand you don’t really know, but in terms of increasing your sales via email, you need to bring your personal touch.
For example, if you’re sending out an email to someone named Bob, it’s natural to assume that you’re going to use your personal email address, bobsmith@example.com to do so. However, if you bring your personal touch to the table and use a more formal name for the recipient (i.e., Mr. Bob Smith), you’re going to make a much better connection. Additionally, if you use a little bit of humor in your messages, you’ll make the person in front of your screen (or email inbox) more receptive to your pitch.
Measure & Analyze
You can’t make the most of your email marketing campaign if you don’t know how effective it is. Naturally, you’ll want to track the results of your efforts, so set up a Google Analytics account and make sure you’re pulling in the right data. From there, you can run keyword searches to find out which emails were successful and which ones didn’t do as well. This will help you pinpoint the areas in which you could have done better.
For example, if you notice that your email pitches to retirees didn’t convert as well as those sent to people in the workplace, you might want to re-evaluate your subject lines and make sure they are relevant to the individual receiving them. Additionally, you could include a call-to-action at the end of your email, asking the reader to take the next step and opt-in for future communications. This should have been the end goal of your email marketing campaign, and not just to broadcast the message “Hey, we exist.” By including a call-to-action in your blast, you’re making yourself more useful to your customer and allowing them to grow your business.
In Conclusion
Making the most of your email marketing campaign isn’t rocket science. It mostly comes down to being able to plan out a content schedule and use automation to get certain tasks taken care of without needing a lot of human interaction. If you follow these guidelines, you’ll greatly improve your odds of having a successful email marketing campaign and increase sales.