Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that allows businesses to send personalized messages to customers with the click of a button. It is one of the most effective and simplest ways of getting the word out about your business without paying for expensive ads. When used effectively, email marketing can boost your business’ presence online and even help you develop meaningful relationships with your audience.
List Building
Whether you have a massive list of customers or just a small one, it is essential that you have a list of email subscribers from which you can send messages. A list of email subscribers is typically known as a list in the parlance of digital marketers. You can build and grow your list using several tactics, but the most effective ones are listed below.
- Get the word out there about your business
- Grow your email list using free methods
- Use email marketing to gain brand recognition
- Measure the success of your email marketing campaigns
Content Experiments
To maximize the effectiveness of your email marketing program, it is essential that you run A/B testing on your content. This stands for two methods. The first is A/B testing, which allows you to compare the effectiveness of two different approaches toward a single goal. For example, you might A/B test a promotional email with a sale email to find out which one converts better. The second method is multivariate testing, which involves testing several different variables at the same time in order to achieve the best results. For example, if you are running an email marketing program to promote your new mobile app, you might test a few different taglines as well as different email subject lines in order to find the combinations that produce the best results.
Dedicated Account Manager
An important aspect of any relationship is the level of dedication that each party shows toward maintaining it. In the world of email marketing, this can be reflected in the level of service that you receive from the company. It is essential that you select a provider whose account managers are dedicated to your needs and understands what you are trying to accomplish. Some dedicated account managers will even argue about your needs with other departments in the company in order to produce the best results. They will listen to your feedback, revise their approach as needed and continue to offer assistance until you are satisfied with the outcome.
Personalized
Another important factor that determines the level of dedication that you receive from an email marketing service is the level of personalization that they employ. The more personalized the better, as it makes the experience much more convenient for your subscribers. Some providers will segment your list into groups based on the content of your emails in order to make targeted suggestions and offers throughout the interaction. For example, if you are marketing a weight loss aid, you might receive dietary advice or offers for gym memberships tailored to your interests.
Frequency Of Emails
You cannot make the same mistake twice. When you send too many emails, your subscribers will become annoying and unsubscribe. You want to send just the right amount of emails at the right time in order to produce the best results without upsetting your audience. To determine the optimal frequency of your emails, you need to analyze how often your subscribers open and click on your content. If you notice that your average click-through rate is between 3% and 5%, then you are probably sending too many emails. Begin reducing the number of emails that you send out every week, then test again to see if the frequency improves the open and click rate. If not, then you can raise it back up.
Unified Marketing Channel
An important aspect of any successful marketing campaign is the use of a unified marketing channel. While social media allows you to target audiences on multiple platforms and websites, none of these platforms connect data from one area to the next. As a result, you cannot simply pull in data from one area to provide customers with the best experience on another. With a unified marketing channel, you can maintain control of all your customer data and make better, more informed decisions regarding the customers’ interaction with your brand.
Personalized Content
Your email marketing content should be personalized for maximum effectiveness. One way to do this is to use templates, but you should never, ever use a pre-made template as your basis for an email. One of the primary reasons for this is that everyone’s needs and interests are a little bit different, so you cannot simply mass email customers with the same offer. When you use a pre-made template, you are restricting yourself to only the choices that the template provider decided was suitable for all their customers. This reduces the flexibility that you need in order to provide the best possible service to your different audiences.
Dedicated Blog
Blogs are an essential part of any digital marketing strategy. If you cannot convince your customers to subscribe to your newsletter, then the next best thing is to convince them to visit your blog and read your content. If you have a relatively small audience, then you might not need to worry too much about driving traffic to your blog from your email list. Instead, you can use social media to attract potential customers to your blog. Once they are there, you can use several different methods to convince them to enter their details into your database and become a paying customer. Some of these methods are listed below.
- Regular blog posts
- Regular press releases
- Monthly e-newsletters
- Product reviews
- And the list goes on…
However, if you have a fairly large audience, then you might want to consider using a CMS (content management system) to build and manage your blog. Some of the benefits of a CMS are
- It makes creating and editing content easy and accessible to everyone
- Reduces the amount of time that you need to spend on content preparation
- Improves the amount of time that you can spend on other parts of your business
- Facilitates the publication of content, allowing you to drive more traffic to your blog
Offer Discounts
If you think that your customers will be more likely to purchase a product or service if you incentivize them with a discount, then you might be right. Offering discounts is a common practice among online retailers and their brands, as well as among some brands and retailers that operate in the digital worlds of e-commerce and social media. Some brands, such as Starbucks, provide customers with unique discounts that are only available through specific online portals or at specific physical locations. These types of offers drive sales and encourage customers to explore these portals or locations to discover the offers that they can utilize.
Geo-Targeting
Many e-commerce and digital marketing platforms allow you to target your messages to specific locations. While you might want to encourage all your customers to visit your website and purchase your product, you might also want to target some of your efforts toward a specific region in order to improve your conversion rate. Geo-targeting can be used to provide relevant content to users based on their physical location. There are several different methods that you can use for geo-targeting, such as
- IP Address geo-targeting
- Lat/Long Geo-Targeting
- Nearest Location Geo-Targeting
- And the list goes on…
Some e-commerce and digital marketing platforms will allow you to target your content toward specific locations. For example, Shopify’s Commerce Cloud can be configured to target content toward specific locations based on the IP address of the user. If you decide that you want to try out geo-targeting, then you should begin with a small region, such as your own city or state, then test the water and see how effective it is. If not, then you might want to look for another option.
Content Calendars
In an increasingly digital world, content creators, such as bloggers and journalists, can be scarce resources. Inevitably, things will come up that you need to schedule to ensure that you have enough content to meet the needs of your audience. Content calendars allow you to plan out a schedule for your content creators that spans across several months. Essentially, content calendars make sure that your content is prepared at the right time. To ensure the greatest impact, your content calendar should be shared with the key people in your organization, such as your manager and senior staff.