10 Steps To Create A Winning Email Marketing Strategy
An email marketing strategy refers to the method of creating effective email marketing campaigns by implementing all the tools available to us online. It also indicates planning and assessing the best practices that we can incorporate in our email marketing strategy to emerge successful in our pursuit of growth and development of the business.
Email marketing remains the most popular marketing channel to disseminate, important information to your consumers. It is the most cost-effective marketing channel that can yield high results with nominal investment. Therefore, you can expect a huge return on investment from successfully investing in a sound email marketing strategy no matter the amount of investment. The only prerequisite is, you have to take all the important factors into account and create a strong strategy.
According to various reports, more than 140 billion emails are sent every day. This invariably makes emails the most used channels for business as well as personal communication especially transactions in the B2B scenario. The key to a successful email marketing strategy is to send out emails that can have the maximum impact on your leads and consumers.
Set some achievable goals and objectives for your email campaign. Your objectives should not only revolve around gaining more leads and getting more conversions but also retaining your existing customers. Customer loyalty plays a very big role in your overall growth. A high unsubscribe rate reveals the problems in your email marketing strategy.
Minimizing the unsubscribe rate should be one of your goals in your strategic approach to email marketing campaigns. Keep a close eye on the number of unsubscribed customers and try to address the grievances that made them take that step in the first place.
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Some important points to consider for email marketing strategy
Today we have several email marketing tools to measure the different metrics and improve our email marketing efforts and carry out an effective email marketing strategy. These different tools give you an idea about the click-through rate, and how conversion rates are impacted by your emails. How much website traffic is generated can also be measured through statistics. These tools have made it possible to identify our strong and weak points and implement measures to rectify our mistakes. Now, you can measure the efficiency of each email campaign and act accordingly.
Email marketing is a very popular method to carry out business in B2B interactions. Studies and reports show different statistics that point to how email marketing remains the most successful marketing channel for businesses houses special small and medium businesses.
According to hubspot.com
93% of marketers use email to distribute content. 35% business professional check Email on their mobile devices. mobile opens account 46% of all email opens. 40% of marketers say email newsletters are most critical to content marketing success. 59% of respondents say marketing emails influence their Purchase Decision. 99% of consumers check their email every single day. 73% of millennials prefer communication from businesses via Email(Adestra 2016). 80% of business professionals believe that email marketing increases customer retention(Emarsys 2018).
The above statistics speak for how email marketing can be a treasure for all your marketing goals and initiatives making your email marketing strategy worthwhile.
Below is the list of 10 tips on how to create a more effective email marketing strategy to grow your business.
Personalization
The various data that you collect through email marketing tools and Data Analytics enable you to personalize the emails you sent to customers. That in turn, reflects on your online reputation. Addressing your customer by a first or last name is a great measure when you want to establish a personal element instantly. But also, provide information that is relevant and adds value to the life of your consumer. It holds even more important than addressing your consumers by name. hence, it is one of the vital parts of an email marketing strategy.
For instance: Your consumer has viewed some Bluetooth earphones on your site but hasn’t made a purchasing decision. Sending them an email that displays a list of the Bluetooth earphones that she has viewed in the past or recommending a certain earphone is a great example of personalization. Personalization can also be based on demographics. Send them emails on products that are available in their region exclusively. This ups the reliability factor for your company and makes a favorable impression on your customers.
Subject lines are an important component of personalized emails, an element that marketers are wary of. You ask why? We will discuss it in detail in the next point.
For an Effective personalized email, do ask for all the relevant details in the signup form. Make sure that the information you ask for is the minimum of only information you need. Formulate your email in a way that websites that you link to your email should engage your consumers. When your consumers respond to your email campaign that is the sign of an impactful email marketing strategy. Provide your contact detail in the email. It allows your consumer to reach out to you when necessary. That increases brand loyalty, their trust in you.
Take for instance:
Amazon or Flipkart. These e-commerce business enterprises keep you updated about your product from the time they are purchased to the time delivered to your doorstep. They give you all the details of the product that are of importance to you. When it is going to be delivered? How to track your order? What are your savings on that particular order? and so on… Automate such messages whenever they are required. Now, think, which medium do they chose to communicate all these details? They choose emails. Customer receipts and information on products purchased have a very high click-through and open rate for emails.
Subject line
Subject lines can be regarded as one of the most important elements for email marketing strategy. They are also the things marketers are jittery about. In any email copy, the subject line is the first thing that a consumer notices… The advantages of an interesting and appealing subject line cannot be emphasized enough. The main utility of a subject line is to create buzz about your brand and the contents of the email copy. Interestingly, subject lines are also the hardest to craft. You need a compelling mix of creativity, innovation, and simplicity sprinkled with just the right amount of persuasion to arrest the attention of your readers and consumers.
Make sure your subject line introduces your consumer to the core element of the email message. If your email copy has no connection with your subject line that speaks of unprofessional attitude and would result in a trust deficit. You are likely to gain negative reviews and might lose your subscribers in the process. There are a few sure-shot steps you can perform to better your subject lines. Carry out A/b testing to measure the efficacy of each subject line and decide which influences your consumer the most based on the results. According to marketing land, the subject line comprising 6 to 10 words or a song lyric resonates more with focus groups. But it is different for every target audience.
Tips
Over the years email marketing has evolved. It is not as it was a few years back. With so much research and a study showing how important email marketing is for the overall growth of the business, emails have taken precedence over other marketing channels. Enticing subject lines are an integral part of it. Try to communicate the key message in your subject line with as much brevity as possible keeping the interest intact. Make sure you send your test examples to a small group of your subscribers. The results you get can help with making a more optimized copy for better readability as well as response.
Frequency of emails
We do believe in the proverb “out of sight out of mind” but, over-use it or over-optimize it and your email loses its impact. Today with several companies coming up and clamoring for attention, leads and consumers are inundated with redundant messages all the time. Most of the time these messages are irrelevant to the consumer. The only thing it does is to turn your consumers off from your brand and its features.
Now, it makes absolute sense to be right at the top of the mind of your customers when they think of a certain product or service. It helps in keeping ahead of the competition. But a barrage of emails will do you no good in this matter. What you need is highly optimized emails with all necessary and important details carefully delineated. Send your emails 2-3 times per week or 3 times every 2 weeks. That will separate you from the clutter that an inbox of a consumer is most of the time. It will get you noticed and your consumer will most definitely pay attention to everything to the core message of your email copy.
Timing
Timing is again one of the supremely important elements of creating an optimized email marketing strategy. Your consumers might not be from your region. You might have a set target audience that is in a different demographic time zone. So, what do you do? Send bulk emails to everyone irrespective of where they are? No. You should be able to optimize and send out emails considering the most appropriate time for your consumers based on their time zone. According to various reports, the optimum time to send emails from 8 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. contrary to the norm that states sending emails from 9 to 5 is ideal. Some say the best time is from 6 pm to 12 a.m. All these reports are based on scientific pieces of evidence.
Think about this.
Your consumer is most probably busy during office hours(9-5). They will hardly have the time of opening your email let alone read it. But after their day’s work is over, they will have the urge and the convenience of going through your emails without skipping or without opening your emails. This is the highlight of the timing factor in the email marketing strategy. Send out emails to your consumers taking into account the time zone at their place and your consumer’s preferences to see improved results. Calculate what can be a convenient time for them to give attention to your email. Also, past statistics indicating patterns can really help with sending out emails keeping in mind the most effective time.
Re-connect with dormant consumers through Email
You should always aim to get more customers. But in a bid to get more leads and turn those leads into conversions do not forget the customers who have been inactive for some time now. Make an effort, write an appealing email, give them an incentive to take a call to action. Sometimes our subscribers simply move on from our brand and not due to dissatisfaction. We should make it a point to engage with them communicating our objectives and addressing their grievances if any. You should instill a sense of trust in your inactive dormant consumers as well. Brainstorm and think of an innovative email that can get their attention back to you. It is important to gain new leads but it is equally important to retain your existing customers for an improved return on investment and overall digital online performance and goodwill.
Segmentation
Segmentation allows for better targeting of your more than one focus group. When you segment your consumers you know that relevant messages are sent to the people they are intended for. When small and medium business houses are your target group make sure that you send out the emails to the relevant section of your target group. If a matter solicits the presence of a big business enterprise make sure that you segment your target group in a way that your email is sent to only these business houses. That way you can optimize your marketing campaigns.
According to research by Hubspot, all the key performance indicators always perform better when you segment your email list. It improves all areas starting from revenue, deliverability, transactions in open rates as well as sales leads. For B2B transactions, you can segment your consumers based on the size of the business enterprise, the capital invested, the different sectors in the industry, sales, etc. In B2C you can always segment them into age, education, jobs, products surfed on your website, inclination towards products based on surveys and polls. Segmentation ensures that optimized email content is sent to more targeted industries and people for greater click-through rates and open rates.
Make sure that your email content is an attractive mix of images and write-ups. It is important to strike a balance between the images, gifs, and written content. Too many visuals will make the copy overwhelming to look at and two little ones might bore the reader. Make sure you have a very interesting and exciting call to action. Most consumers and readers gloss through your content in the email copy and assimilate as much important information as possible from that copy. Make sure you have the important points delineated very carefully with bold letters italics or a different font so that the reader automatically can get to it.
Optimize your images so that the email copy doesn’t take much time to load. In this regard, make sure that your image size doesn’t impede the experience of reading the mail. Use image tags that help to comprehend the relevance of the images at first glance. You can write a descriptive email copy when the occasion demands it, but make sure that you don’t make it too long. Otherwise, the reader will not read through the email content.
As reiterated time and again, the attention span of your customer is less. Try to be concise for maximum effect. Keep the most pertinent points in the first paragraph itself so that the most relevant information is disseminated in the very beginning. The concentration is intact then, does not waver. Check all the CTa buttons so that they work optimally. When you link a blog, website, or landing page, optimize those for user experience.
Optimize your content for all devices especially Mobile devices
It is essential to optimize your email for all devices more so for mobile devices because most emails are opened on mobile devices. They are convenient and can be seen on the go. The number one rule is that you make your emails mobile-friendly. According to Adestra in July 2019, 61.9 % of emails opened were on mobile devices. Smartphones have changed the way we use our electronic devices for commercial purposes. Now with everything available on Smartphones in optimum quality, mobiles have become a major avenue for marketers to market their products.
If you notice in our day-to-day activities, most of the time we open our emails on our phone because it saves time and effort. You must put extra effort into making your email campaign mobile-friendly. Make the necessary changes in the font size in your image, have an optimized call to action that is touch-friendly. See to it the contents on the copy do not overlap each other. It is best to incorporate responsive web designs that work with all devices optimally. Make sure you can maneuver to the desired pages through the CTA. Tailor your content keeping in mind the limitations of your web design if any. Litmus, Putsmail, Mailtrap, Email Reach, Inbox Inspector, Previewmyemail are some of the best email testing tools that you can use to test and decide which email suits you best.
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Incentives in email copy
An effective email content copy has an important element of surprise to the consumers. Whether they are free tickets, the promise of a gift like a phone or a tablet, or simply an informative ebook or white paper, incentives make opening and reading the mails worth it. It helps to build a strong rapport with your customers. Compiling a list of consumer journeys or providing a link to your compiled case studies in your email will definitely generate interest in your consumers. Again, your subject line should hint at what is inside. These don’t cost anything but can lead to a strong foundation of trust between your consumer and your business.
Credible information
Whether you are conducting a giveaway, giving discount coupons, cashback, or preview sales, make sure the information sent out is authentic. E-mails have a certain credibility factor which is a lot less in most of the other marketing channels. emails are almost an organic way of promoting your product and its features. There are personal elements to a compelling email copy. Companies should provide ample details of ways the consumer can reach out to them. Emails should come with genuine information regarding your business. That establishes a bond between your consumer and your company. Also, emails are looked upon as credible sources of information from trusted brands. Therefore, incorporate all the best email practices that make for persuasive, trustworthy emails. It will lead to a very successful email marketing campaign rendering your strategies successful.
Conclusion
An email marketing strategy can yield excellent results if done with clear goals and positive intent. Make sure that you have considered all the data and relevant statistics available. Survey your consumers, test your copy, your visuals, and the language of your content to optimize it for your consumer. Successful email strategies not only give you a large number of consumers but also have a very positive impact on the online reputation of your brand, business, or product when executed correctly. Cultivate strong relationships with your consumer whether it is a B2B business or B2C business. Lastly see to it that you have a well-thought-out, planned approach to your email marketing campaign.
