In this day and age email marketing is a critical, but often overlooked and taken lightly, element of marketing
To do successful email marketing here are some things to be kept in mind when puttng together a campaign:
Your goal: What do you hope to accomplish with your emails.
Timing: how often, time of day, day of the week, etc. Of course emails are available whenever a user wants to view them, but are more likely to get opened soon after they are sent. The better your timing, the better chance it is going to be opened immediately.
Optimise open rates with a great pre-header, the description users see when they check their email.
Make your email easy to read and inviting on multiple screens (especially mobile) with great design (this is worth investing a little bit of your budget; it does make the difference!).
So
what
are
the
keys
to
building
a
successful
marketing
campaign?
Include your sign-up form everywhere: on the home page and each page of your website, in your store, at events, on social platforms... Yep, you got it: EVERYWHERE!
1.
Offer something (a coupon, a special discount, etc) in exchange for signing up for your email list.
2.
Don’t ask for information you don’t need so it’s fast and easy for visitors to sign up. Maybe all you need is an email address and name. Don’t forget you can get additional information after they sign up.
3.
Make your sign-up form obvious without interfering with user experience (popups that block content until you sign up are so annoying). Perhaps opt for a small band at the bottom of the screen that asks for an email address or something that pops up as the visitor starts to scroll away from your site. Remember your website is critical for SEO and you don’t want to mess with anything that reduces visits, bounces, or time on site.
4.
When you send an email include social sharing and the ability to subscribers to forward your email to a friend. These are great ways to build your list.
5.
BUILD YOUR LIST
To have a successful email marketing campaign, you need a good list
(we know it sounds obvious but it is not).
In days gone by, before CAM-SPAM, you could simply buy a list and spam a bunch of people with your message. Knowing which lists to buy was almost a business in itself since good lists meant high returns.
Just as important was selling the lists, and many small businesses kept going thanks to highly targeted subscribers.
Now, of course, you can’t do this anymore, so you have to develop your own lists.
How do you go about building a list?
Here is our advice and suggestions:
Make your content (both text and images) attractive and inviting, use lots of white space and yes...a little humor does not hurt anyone. The more an email looks like a personal conversa1on with a friend, the better it will work.
1.
Personalisation does not end with including the person’s name. The email should look like it was designed especially for each reader.
2.
Don’t waste your readers’ time with nonsense: say what you need and provide links to more information.
3.
STRONG CONTENT
We are very good at this check us out.
Just like everything in marketing,
the message is everything.
TIMING
You don’t want to stress your readers by sending too many emails, instead you want to use your email marketing to build loyalty and engagement with your target audience. This can be tricky! And there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. A good gauge of the right frequency comes from analytics. So these have to be monitored; complaints or many un-subscribers probably mean that you are emailing too often. If you’re not getting people unsubscribing or complaining, you could probably think of sending more emails. The key is to send emails when you have something worth saying/offering to your audience.
1.
Marketing automation often receives a negative reaction because it sounds like you’re treating your subscribers as robots who all get treated the same. But, it is actually the opposite. Successful email marketing requires that you send the right content to the right people at the right time and that means using marketing automation.
2.
No marketing automation platforms works well unless you spend time keeping information up to date to ensure the content the subscriber receives is targeted to their product interests, stage in the customer journey, and other key elements like gender.