In today’s digital world, your customers are more reachable than ever. Gone are the days of bidding for space in a newspaper or a billboard. Thanks to social media, smartphones, and other devices, you can reach your customers wherever, whenever (just like Shakira).
Email campaigns are just one example of the effective marketing tactics available to businesses today. They’re effective and direct, and allow you to message your customers on their personal devices. The problem is that everyone is doing it. This means that simply sending an email isn’t enough. Your customers will be countless emails on a given day, which means they will ignore every email that doesn’t catch their attention.
If you don’t invest enough time into your email strategy, you’ll be wasting your time and missing out on potential sales. So, how can you step you your email game and use this tool to your advantage? Keep reading to find out.
Generic marketing simply isn’t effective anymore. Today, your customers will interact with multiple content streams in a day through social media, TV, the internet, and more. All of these streams will be filled with ads and messaging, so you need to be able to cut through the noise.
To keep your emails out of your customer’s trash folder, you need to make your messages personal. In fact, emails with personalised content – such as a subject line – are 26% more likely to be opened. Although sending generic emails may certainly be easier, it is also a guaranteed way to harm the success of your email campaigns.
There are multiple ways to personalise your campaign, so don’t be afraid to get creative and find what techniques work best for your audience. So long as you remember that if you don’t personalise your campaigns, you won’t get the results that you want from your marketing.
Let’s be honest, no one likes ads. This is the entire sales model of subscription streaming, pay Tv services and more. If your messaging is interesting, compelling, or of value, your customer may be willing to listen. However, if you spam your email list with countless “sales”, meaningless deals, and whatever else you can put into an email, your campaigns simply won’t work.
Strength in numbers is an excellent philosophy for survival, but it’s a terrible methodology for your email marketing. So, shift your strategy from spam to specific, targeted messaging.
Pro tip: A sale or discount isn’t really interesting if it happens all the time.
An effective call to action is crucial for conversions. This applies to websites, social media ads, and emails. For an effective email campaign, you need three steps:
Getting customers to agree to your emails is easy enough and there are multiple ways that you can do this. The real challenge lies in steps two and three. If you don’t provide an incentive for people to open your emails, all of your hard work creating them is wasted.
There is an art to creating a compelling subject, but one key thing to include is an incentive. This could be time pressure, a unique offering, or anything else that gives the recipient a good reason to open your email. A higher open rate increases your chances of getting higher conversions.
Do you remember the feeling you had in high school when you were stuck in a class learning about something that you knew you wouldn’t need to know or use later in life? This is the feeling people get when they receive irrelevant content in their inboxes. Irrelevant content will lead to lower open rates and even a drop in your mailing list numbers – neither of which are conducive to campaign success.
As part of your email strategy, ensure that anything you send is relevant. Doing so requires a strong understanding of your target market, their needs, and how your products and services meet these needs. If you aren’t able to send content relevant to your customers, you won’t see much success in your email campaigns.
Testing your emails allows you to see what elements of your content work and what don’t. For example, you can trail different CTA’s, subject lines, images, and more to ensure that your campaign is as effective as possible. Unless you’re an email marketing super genius (which if you are, why are you reading this?), testing can help you to produce more consistent and positive results in your email campaigns.
To avoid losing time, allow room for testing in your campaign planning.
The internet is smart, and email providers like Google and Microsoft do everything they can to make their email service great for their users. However, you can’t expect them to do all the heavy lifting for you. When creating your emails, you need to ensure that they are optimised for different devices. This is because you don’t know what device your customers will use to read your content.
Emails that aren’t optimised have a very high chance of being ignored, which isn’t good for your campaign performance. To avoid this, ensure that your emails are optimised for different devices such as phones, computers, and tablets.
Before planning your next email campaign, keep the tips in this post in mind. In doing so, you’ll be able to improve the results of your campaigns moving forward! If you’re looking for digital marketing support, the team at Zudu is on hand to assist you.
