Email marketing strategy has been around very long time, and for a big reason. It’s the most effective way of directly connecting and develop relationships with potential customers or clients. Also, marketers can turn one-time online buyers into loyal fans!
Why email marketing services are so important?
- The two biggest of email marketing advantages are price and easy to create
- One of the most popular communication channel. Everyone (almost) uses email!
- Increase brand awareness
- It’s an effective way to keep customers informed
- Email has been shown to build a better ROI compared to other marketing channels
- You can track in email marketing tools bounce, delivery, unsubscribe, click and through rates
The main question: how to do email marketing?
So, in this email marketing guide, we’ll explain you how to do this effective to generate sales.
#1 Know your online marketing goals
“People with goals succeed because they know where they’re going”
– Earl Nightingale, American writer
Yup, marketing is all about your brand goals! Without them, you get lost easily. So, marketers who write down their goals and tasks are more likely to make them a reality. With clear goals in place, you can easily begin creating the strategy step by step to achieve them.
Look, here is a list of common goals for an email marketing campaign:
- Develop strong relationships with stakeholders by providing something they’ll value
- Re-engaging the audience that hasn’t been active for a while
- Reach new email list and start to build a relationship with them
- Segment your audience accordingly and send content that is relevant only them
- Grow brand awareness
#2 Understand your email list audience
Knowing your target audience is everything! The more you know about your audience, the more powerful your email marketing efforts will become.
You should this get to know about your audience:
- Values
- Personality traits
- Opinions
- Interests
If you know your audience, that will help you:
- Come up with an accurate list of topics and keywords to target to write your email letter
- Create an effective user experience
- Craft the meaningful message to cause your readers to take action
- Optimize your emailing content
OK, but how get to know the target audience of brand?
Don’t worry, you’ll recognize them soon! Use data from Google Analytics and your social media profiles, like the Facebook, Instagram. It has a data on interests, demographics, and location, also a lot of other things, that’ll give you a view of who your customers are and what they’re interested about.
Plus, there is social media the listening method! It goes with various social networks to discover what is being said about your brand, your competitors, and topics relevant to your business.
#3 Email copywriting
“A copywriter should have an understanding of people, an insight into them, a sympathy towards them”
– George Gribbin
To start with, all marketer wants to create a hook that people want to read on, do you?
So for an effective email marketing, your goal is to communicate. Let’s think of your list as a friend. This starts with everyday language, short sentences and paragraphs. It should be easy to read and super easy to scan. Your task is to make people comfy!
Make it personal
Remember: in this age of overloaded information, everyone is looking for a reason to delete your emails and move on. Really, they aren’t looking for a reason to put attention on them. But if you appeal to them on a personal way, you’ll stand a better chance of getting that email clicked.
Write for People!
Hey, listen, these people have emotions, so don’t treat them only about business and don’t speak logical quotes all the times. Otherwise, that message is just going to end up in the trash… Writing to everyone on your list should sound by your natural voice and aim to connect on emotional level.
Moreover, don’t forget your customers at the most important time! Remember them on their birthday, anniversary or on other special occasions. Send to the email a nice card and suggest gift or discount what they care about. Make sure you’re doing this with the mindset of touching your customer live and let them feel better. They will remember your brand about great experience you provided.
Make them laugh! Lol
Everyone loves to laugh! Calm down, you don’t have to be a comedian in order to pull off a humorous email. If you know their likes and dislikes, it will be easy to pull off a joke or make a tongue-in-cheek comment. By the way, it makes your emails more memorable.
You can always try to send a funny poll, GIF, video or awesome images. All this keeps readers more engaged.
Show the value
Remember that you have to continually show the value to your readers. Feel the passion in your business and use this to your language. Every single message need to say something of real value. The higher value of each email you write, the more loyal your customers will become, and your click rates will increase.
#4 Track email data
Always keep a close eye on your data statistic of how many email addresses were undeliverable or what time of the day people opened your message mostly. These details will tell you a lot important information about your email’s performance.
Also, use Google Analytics on your website to tag your emails with custom campaign tracking. This can show you how the emails are driving traffic to your pages and how those visitors behave once they visit your site. Collected with this powerful information, now you can manage your marketing strategy.
#5 Grow email list
Next, your job is to make sure you’re constantly adding new contacts to your email marketing tools to keep your numbers moving up.
To grow your email contact list, you need to attract people with a special offer that provides value to your web visitors in exchange for email address.
Look, some great examples are:
- Tutorial or education video to learn how to do one specific thing. The best part, videos have a higher perceived value!
- A coupon to give those people what they are looking for
- Challenge. For example, try to fitness, wellness challenge and so on. It creates a strong brand relationship by connecting a community– everyone is doing the challenge together, at the same time
- Free consultation. This could be a successful key if you offer a service
- Use a postcard on a sign-up page (and let people know what they’re going to receive)
- Put a sign-up form on your Facebook Page
- Offer an exclusive access “You’ll hear it here first!”
- Collect through guest Wifi
#6 Make emails mobile-friendly
Firstly think about your own experience when you open an email which doesn’t display properly on your mobile device. Even if it’s from a message that interests you, probably you not want to spend your time to deciphering the message, do you?
Here are advices to make your email marketing more mobile friendly:
- Use smaller pictures to reduce load time. Many mobile users still use 3G or slower connections
- Use a larger font. Small fonts are too difficult to read on mobile screen. A font size of 13 or 14 pixels makes your email substantially more readable on a small screen
- Use a big call-to-action button. Big buttons are easier to press with a thumb
- Don’t assume images will be show all mobiles (Android turns images off by default). First, make sure it looks good without them. Images should illustrate your message and not replace your content
- All in all, must be tested on multiple devices!
#7 Keep your emails out of spam filters
Oh, do you have low email open rates? Well, one of the reasons may be that they fall into junk inbox.
Let us help you! Here are some great tricks to save your emails from falling into spam folders:
- Avoid excessive use of “sales” speaking. These are spam trigger words like buy, clearance, discount, or cash. Also these kind of triggers you better forget as well: congratulations, great offer, guarantee, for only special promotion and so on
- Include your location
- Get the permission to them email and teach subscribers how to keep your emails organized in a special folder
- Don’t use URL shorteners or full URL strings for your links. The entire hyperlink which is containing hundreds of characters into emails are looked from spam filters
- Clean up your email contact list periodically if any subscribers haven’t taken action with your message campaigns in a while
- Include an “Unsubscribe” link. If you don’t, you will get spam complaints! Of course, when someone wants to be removed, you need to process it too
#8 Let’s test before sending!
Finally, this is the last one. Just to make sure, remember those keys before sending your email marketing goods for your subscribers:
First, it’s very important to make sure that your name, address to reply, subject line, and preview text are all optimized well without any errors include.
Double-check that whatever documents you’ve said you’ve attached are actually attached and they work well. Or, if you’ve paste a link to a doc, make sure the link is correct. No epic mistakes needed, lol!
Also, make sure the format looks great on both your desktop and smartphone.
So, this is it. In view of the above, give value, feel passion for your business, hold the pen and create a powerful meaning message to affect people
See you soon,
Dropton team
