The use of email marketing is not going anywhere, and if you’re not prepared to take advantage of it, you’re wasting your time.
With the right tips, tools, and strategy, you can easily succeed with email marketing. Below we’ve provided you with five useful tips that will help you get started.
Set A Budget And Stick To It
Budgeting is extremely important when it comes to digital marketing and email marketing. Decide how much you’re willing to spend on email marketing and then stick to it. This will help you avoid wasting your precious budget on things that don’t bring in the results you’re looking for. In order to effectively spend your money, you need to set a budget and stick to it. Your goal should be to reach a point where you consistently spend the same amount of money on email marketing as you did before you started. Once you get there, you’ll notice that your results are much more reliable and consistent. In addition, setting a budget helps you be accountable for how you’re spending your money – especially if you decide that one or more of your email campaigns aren’t bringing in the results you’re looking for. If you don’t want to spend too much money on email marketing, try and target the smaller markets. The fewer the emails you send, the cheaper it will be.
Avoid Free Email Clients
One of the biggest mistakes that new email marketers make is thinking that a free email client is enough. While it’s true that there are a lot of free email clients out there, that doesn’t mean that they’re all created equal. For example, the free mailer app Sparklr comes with a load of spam traps and nasty tricks that can eat away at your email reputation even if you do everything right. Don’t put your eggs in that basket. Instead, look for a reputable, quality email client that is supported by an established email marketing service. With Sparklr, for example, you’ve got just that – an established service that connects with major email providers, including Gmail, Office 365, and iCloud. As a result, you can be sure that your email is secure, delivered completely polished, and– most importantly – usable. For those reasons, we recommend Sparklr as a free email client for new marketers.
Pro-Tip: Try A/B Testing
If you’re looking to get the most out of your email marketing efforts, try putting together an A/B testing regimen. In A/B testing, you’re basically running two (or more) different versions of the same campaign at the same time, and then measuring which version performed the best. When you execute an A/B test, you’re usually sending out a smaller percentage of the total number of emails for that campaign. This means that the results will be more noticeable and – hopefully – more favorable. For example, let’s say that you’re running an email marketing campaign for a product review site and you want to A/B test a campaign where you review products on the site vs. a campaign where you leave those products for your readers to discover on their own. In the first example, you might want to send out 1 in 5 emails to see if that version performs better; in the second example, you might want to send out 4 in 5 emails to have enough data to draw meaningful conclusions about which version is more effective.
Set Up Automated Email Responses
If you have a lot of people who want to get in touch with you, but you don’t always have the time to respond to every email individually, you can set up automated responses where you respond to certain inquiries with the same content, from, and to the same email address.
This saves you both time and energy, and it gives the person who emailed you permission to get back to him/her without having to worry about whether or not you got the message. The person who emailed you can easily get in touch with you if he/she needs more information or wants to send you an updated copy of the email.
Find A Niche
It’s important to find a niche in life, but it’s just as important to find a niche in marketing. Look for a small group of people (maybe even just a small handful) whose questions you can answer effectively with an email marketing strategy. Once you’ve found this niche, you can use your email effectively to grow your business and to provide value to your target audience.
For example, maybe your niche is parenting and your target audience is other parents. In that case, you might want to design your emails to help guide new parents through the often-confusing first year of parenthood. Or, maybe you’re a fashion brand and your niche is young professionals. You might design emails for your website or social media to help guide people in the right direction when choosing their next piece of clothing. Whatever your niche, you can find a use for an effective email marketing strategy.
Make Sure Your Email Is Delivered
Sometimes people don’t realize that they have to actively check a specific box in order to have their emails delivered. If you ever get an email telling you that someone has tried to subscribe you to something but their email address is not valid, make sure that you check the opt-in box for that email address and then– as quickly as possible – remove that address from your list.
Why is this so important? It’s because if you don’t deliver email messages to people’s inboxes, then they often won’t believe that you’ve received their message. This can lead to a big drop in email open rates and click-through rates. So, by making sure that your email is delivered, you’re essentially assuring people that you’ve received their message and you have their best interest in mind. It’s a win-win situation.
Always check your SPAM/Junk folder as well – as it’s possible that a glitch caused the email to get misdirected there instead of in your inbox. You can also try the “View Sent Messages” button at the top of your Gmail – this will make sure that you see all the emails that you’ve sent out, regardless of whether or not you’ve checked your Inbox lately.
Be Creative
Email marketing can be a bit like art in that the best way to stand out is to be creative. If you feel like you’re at a loss for words, you can always resort to creativity to come up with something unique and interesting to say. Think of other ways that you can help your audience understand and appreciate your product or service, and you’ll be on your way to having an effective email marketing campaign. For example, if your niche is parenting and you’ve designed your email to be helpful, you might want to include a short story or an interesting anecdote about parenting from one of your own experiences. If you do this well, you’ll be able to draw the reader in with an intriguing story while also providing them with helpful information such as where to buy the relevant products.
Measure The Results Of Your Campaign
If you want to know how effective your email marketing campaign was, you have to measure it. Fortunately for you, we’ve got a really useful tool that can help you do just that. Go to https://www.diminishemail.com and enter your email address. Then, click on the blue Get Started button to see your engagement and engagement rate – essentially, this is the percentage of people who opened your email, clicked a link, or took some other action (like purchasing a product) after seeing your email.
As an email marketer, you’ll want to focus on raising your engagement rate – as this will determine how effective your email marketing strategy is – but you should also be mindful of your OPEN rate. This is the percentage of people who actually opened your email – if this number is low, you might want to consider why this is the case. Perhaps you used a free email client that is full of spam traps and other junk. Maybe you used an incorrect subject line for the email. Or, you could be sending mail to people who don’t really want to hear from you (called “opting out”). Always make sure your email clients are free of any filters that could be preventing your audience from seeing your emails.
After you’ve got your engagement and OPEN rates, you can take that data and see how many emails you actually sent out. While it might be tempting to simply input all the email addresses that you got from your marketing campaign and then use a resource like MailChimp to create a mailing list – this is a really bad idea. Doing this automatically imports all of the contacts from your email marketing software into your mailing list, and that’s a lot of people to send email messages to without actually speaking to each person first.