Do you want to learn how to use email marketing to get more sales? Email is still the most direct and effective way of connecting with your leads, nurturing them, and turning them into customers.
What Is Email Marketing? Email marketing is the highly effective digital marketing strategy of sending emails to prospects and customers. Effective email marketing converts prospects into customers and turns one-time buyers into loyal, rambling fans.
In this post, we will walk you through the Importance of Email Marketing and Effective Email Marketing Strategy so that you can acquire leads and generate sales.
The Importance of Email Marketing
Despite the rise of social media and unsolicited spam email remains the most effective way to nurture leads and turn them into customers.
Although there are many reasons you should make email marketing one of your top priorities, here are the 3 main ones…
1. Email is the #1 communication channel. Did you know that at least 91% of consumers check their email on a daily basis? That can’t be said of any other communication channel.
2. You own your list. On any social media platform, your account could be suspended or deleted at any time, for any reason, without notice. However, you own your email list. No one can take those leads away from you.
3. Email converts better. One of the big advantages of email marketing is that people still use email widely. In fact, 90% of adults and 74% of teenagers still use email regularly.
This makes email marketing the perfect tool for building customer relationships to help you generate leads and sales. But before you run a successful email marketing campaign, you’ve got to do some prep work, so you’re primed for success when you finally send that first email. Here a few tips that guarantee success
Build your subscriber list
Even if you’ve already got a long list of emails for clients and prospects, you should never stop adding to it. Especially since it’s not nearly as hard as it sounds. For example, make sure your list is always growing passively with a signup feature on your website. Subscription forms should be on your home page, blog page and everywhere else you can fit it without taking away from more important content. You can use a WordPress email marketing plugin to build an attractive form and integrate it into any of your website pages.
Understand Email Types
It’s also important to understand the different types of email that you can send. People group these in different ways, but here are the three key email types.
We’re all familiar with promotional emails, which talk about offers and sales and are self-promotional.
Then there are relational emails, which give subscribers what you’ve promised, like a weekly newsletter, a free gift, relevant information they can use, and so on.
There are also transactional emails, which include: Subscriber signup confirmations, Welcome messages, Order or purchase confirmations, Acknowledgements of changes to subscriber information.
Transactional emails are usually triggered by subscribers’ actions and relate to an action they’ve taken on your site.
Personalize your email without using their name
Personalizing emails with the recipient’s name may work against you according to research. Given the number of phishing, identity theft, credit card fraud, etc. many people are wary of emails with personal greetings.
While relationships need to be built via personalization, it needs to be conducted in a meaningful manner. For example, emails that refer to a recipient’s past purchase patterns and suggest associated or related products have been shown to trigger positive responses in 98% of recipients.
How can you create effective email marketing campaigns that are personalized to recipients? Consider implementing the following:
- Track email campaigns and create records for each.
- Track and keep records on customer purchases and needs.
- Use the data and information to personalize emails based on the data and needs.
Work on your subject lines
According to research subject lines with 60 to 70 characters shows no increase in email open rate or clickthroughs. They also found that subject lines with less than ten characters had open rates of 58%. A helpful email strategy is to squeeze out more words or cut back just a bit to avoid that 60 to 70 character dead zone.
Focus on Email Marketing Design
Email design matters in any successful email marketing campaign. If your emails look terrible, that reflects badly on you and can make people stop reading. With more people than ever reading emails on mobile devices, it’s important to use a responsive email template so your email resizes automatically whether people are reading it on a phone, tablet, or desktop.
Most good emails have more text than images. There’s no denying that images make your email more attractive, but know that many people disable images. That means your email still has to work even if people can’t see them.
Our tip: avoid hiding information in images, because that’s bad for email accessibility. And remember to use alt tags to describe images so people who’ve disabled them know what they’re supposed to see. A good description might make subscribers enable images, which will make your emails look even better.
Give away something
Bluewire Media tested various types of email content to see what led to the highest rates of opens and clicks. The found that templates and tools were the clear winners.
Why does it work?
Because giving something away for free reduces the friction involved in initiating engagement your audience.
A popular way of increasing email leads and increasing email opens is to use contests or giveaways. Incentivibe, for example, increased their email subscriptions by 200% by doing so.
How do you do this?
- Create landing pages specifically for each of your special offers.
- Test different offers to find what gains the most opens and subscriptions.
- Develop a series of emails based on your audience’s product of interest.
Ensure it is optimized for mobile
What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? Many people reach for their phone. In fact, 66% of email opens occur on smartphones or tablets. If your emails aren’t optimized for viewing on these devices, you’re potentially missing out on a huge number of clicks.
Reward Your Most Loyal Customers
For most e-commerce websites, an 80/20 relationship exists between customers and total revenue. That is, a large proportion of revenue is typically driven by a relatively small number of loyal customers.
The research found that by categorizing their customers into five categories based on engagement and loyalty and targeting certain categories with gift card incentives, there is a way to increase revenue.
Make it easy to unsubscribe
It may seem as though you are cutting off the ‘conversation’ by giving clients the chance to opt out, but if a user wants to remove their name from your lists and can’t do so easily, they’ll flag emails as spam which will cause you problems in the future.
Address inactive subscribers
Research shows that on average 63% of an email list is inactive. In other words, these people are less likely to follow up with your follow up emails. So how can you re-engage these subscribers? Re-engagement campaigns are a good place to start.
How do you re-engage inactive subscribers?
Identify the inactive subscribers on your list.
Re-ignite interest in your inactive subscribers by sending them an email. Let them know they’re missed, and you want them back with a subject line that says just that. Consider giving them a special offer or discount.
Move those who respond to the active list. Let those who don’t respond know that they will be removed from your list if they don’t respond within a specified time frame.
Remove the non-responders from your list.
Use A/B Testing To Optimize Open & Click-Through Rates
Don’t send any emails without testing to make sure it works. Some email marketing services or tools provide screenshots of emails in different email clients including mobile devices.
Also, consider how you can collect data from campaigns so you can test elements and find out how you can better future campaigns by noting what works well and what not so well.
A/B testing also plays a key part in testing. Consider running tests around subject lines, calls to action, and content works best for engaging with your audience.
Conclusion
As with most marketing efforts, being able to create effective email marketing campaigns is a process. It requires a combination of good strategy, planning and analyzing data to make improvements to your campaigns. However, the only way to learn and improve is to start emailing.