GDF Editorial Thu, 10/10/2019 - 19:46
Email is one of the few digital marketing channels that helps build a meaningful business-customer relationship. Do it right, and you’ll have a customer ready to turn to for future products. Take it for granted and you’ll end up spending much more on other non-fruiting marketing tactics. Emails are relationship signifiers in cementing a sustainable, do-able, and repeatable personalized engagement. They are the tools to externalize the brand image. A transactional exchange is not the only yardstick by which to measure customer experience. It is also evaluated by the value addition that the business offers the consumer and that is where Emails fit best. When you share interesting, customer-centric content the probability to multiply leads multiplies. When leads begin engaging in emails you can market your products. And when you market your products the possibility of referrals and turning a first time customer into a lifetime friend emerges. In a nutshell, when email marketing is done right, it acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy, giving the business what it wants i.e. sales.
If Email marketing ranks so high in import, what comprises a normal day in the life of an email marketer? Perhaps a better question to ask would be, what makes an Email marketer good at his/her trait?
Turns out there are best practices that help them operate as a support function of other marketing pillars. And although it is not a cheat-sheet that promises a 10% click-through rate, nevertheless, abiding by it would ensure gradual results to pour in.
Recommended Email Marketing Tips
The best Email marketing tips constitute defining a systematic course of action right from sending your first email to a lead, to measuring its impact. The whole idea is to weave a scrollable storyline that offers content that customers want to make use of. You can take the following as both a pillar of effective email marketing strategy 2020 and key performance indicators that define the merit of an Email marketer.
Chalk Out the Details
It is not advised that you randomly start shooting emails helter-skelter in a hope that something sticks. You should know first-hand the needs of your Target Group (TG) and then refine the emails. Get the research numbers necessary on your TG-email interaction to goal set your campaign. Before beginning, you should set a fair expectation from your email marketing campaign. After setting your objectives straight, it’s time to define the touchpoints with the customer through which he/she would sign-up for a subscription. There are various ways to allow people the option to sign up and give you the right to reach out to them. This could be either through pop-ups on your website, landing pages, or social networking pages. In a nutshell, this is what email marketing is. Although this is the long and short of it, yet it takes a winning mentality and smart email marketers to create the best campaigns. Here is the structure they adhere to.
Pick an Email Service Provider (ESP)
There is a myriad variety of email marketing tools that you can choose from, some of which we have covered in our list of the best digital marketing tools. Since marketers don’t want to turn into pseudo-programmers, market forces have innovated email marketing tools with drag and drop functionalities to add the professional feather touch to your email layouts. If you feel you’re headed nowhere in shortlisting email marketing services, you must calculate your subscriber base and the frequency of sending emails. Also, consider if the ESP allows you to create emails with HTML code or note for greater flexibility. There’s no point purchasing email marketing services if campaign results can’t be tracked. Analytics support is non-negotiable. Last but not the least, is the service worth the money or not?
Make Your Email Marketable
Just because it's an email, it won't sell itself. The content and the front end has to have a homogenous mix of creativity, tonality, and aesthetics. Successful email campaigns begin with a crystal clear body of the email. There has been empirical research into the subject of around 40 million emails and it suggests an email body with 50 , 125 words performs the best. It is re-collectable and emails of this length had a response rate of over 50%. Please note that the recommended convention is for a sales email.
Choose img as per your brand guidelines that at the same time support multi-device compatibility. Do not overlook this creative aspect as the visual imagery is processed faster by the mind, than text. Moreover, catchy visuals can keep people enchained to the email increasing the likelihood of clicking through. End the email with a clear Call to Action (CTA) button that redirects the customer to a relevant page. An email should be responsive and cross-functional across devices, especially mobile as it is the preferred platform to read emails. The subject line should contain the gist of the email enticing the reader to open the email. Therefore, great copywriting is high in demand.
Group Your Subscribers
Email segmentation is paramount to the success of your outreach campaign and you can fulfil it with email marketing tools. You worked hard to gather emails by intercepting customers at as many stages as possible. Aligning email messages to the interest of the buyer is vital. It has been validated that segmented emails generate 58% of all email revenues.
Emails should be skewed to the respective stage of the buyer journey. But is that the only factorization involved. Certainly not. Provided you have a rich database of B2C subscribers, you should begin segmenting them as per their demographics such as age, sex etc. If you are a B2B company, then the demographics change to a metric such as the financial standing of the company. Other parameters to be considered while clustering your user base into groups could be
- The geographic location of the user
- Their purchase history on the eCommerce website
- Their professional standing in the career
- Prior engagement with the emails or their browsing pattern on your website
- Elapsed time since they made their last purchase from the business
- Their interest indicated to the business through a signup form.
The mantra central to your email segmentation should be to cater to the individuality of the consumer. People are much likely to respond to your requests if you share content that they are looking for.
Personalize Your Content
Personalization arises directly from segmenting your emails. It’s all about honing your message. If you have already picked minute details such as the ones mentioned in the previous section, not adding this last touch of refinement could undo it all. The best email marketing tools for small businesses (or large) allow you to customize such aspects beginning with the subject line. Include the first name of the receiver in the subject line. Try and connect the subject-line with the last action of the consumer such as,
"Hey Alex, thanks for being a customer! Here’s your Welcome discount Coupon!"
Make use of the current affairs to strike a spontaneous chord with the reader, wherever relevant. Leverage occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries or completing another year as a customer, in which case there must be a loyalty bonus. Close the body with a personal signature than an official one as it enhances the overall effort. The last point is non-avoidable. Include a Call to Action button channelling the user to the next phase of the lifecycle.
Automate Your Email Marketing
As humans, we can only plan for so much further up ahead. Assuming that you continue to groom your email marketing strategy and grow your user base, you would face an uphill climb to adhere to even basic email etiquettes, let alone advanced. The need to compute the plan of action for emails or automate them completely is highly recommended. Marketing automation gives vendors the flexibility to set triggers based on user action on an email. These are called Autoresponders for drip marketing. They are emails sent automatically by the ESP as it tracks user activity.
For instance, you might have shared an e-book with a subscriber who downloaded the attachment. As a business owner, you can follow up on this within a week or 2 asking for feedback. Not only would this exercise ensure you care about servicing your customers but also that you want to up your game while at it.
Such planning wouldn’t have you rush to create 11th-hour mailers for a response. All the users that you grouped can receive the same emails, with personalization as per their respective stage within the sales funnel.
Use Templates for Email Marketing
Email Marketing Templates are pre-designed formats for creating emails that save you the time and energy otherwise spent with a designer or a developer. You can customize the designs as per your brand guidelines and maintain visual consistency. Email marketing services or in other words an Email Service Provider and their template repository, you can and must experiment to see which option is responded to best by each customer segment. It’s about discovering the user experience elements, most appreciated by your consumers and once you do, go on repeating it.
Measure Email Marketing Results
This can easily be one of the most crucial email marketer responsibilities of all. You should take stock of the situation after each round of email marketing. What was the open rate and did it carry onto the click-through rate? Did people unsubscribe? If so how many and does it correspond with the industry average? What type of subject line got maximum attention? Was the marketing collateral suited to the target sub-group?
These are some of the questions that’ll help you figure out risk-mitigation in email marketing. For instance, A/B testing is used to identify the best version for quality control. This includes testing emails for one variable at a time. Other than the content of the email itself, professionals with excellent email marketer skills play around with the email sending time to know when their users are most active online. Additionally, it is also a good practice to remove inactive subscribers from your email marketing list.
All Set, Get Emailing
Email marketing is an important component that makes marketing digital and which you cannot afford to miss out on. It takes time and does not offer a one-time fix but regular inputs towards it go a long way in creating lasting customer relationships. As you continue work towards gaining ground on email marketing job skills do not lose sight on things like Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Management, Content Planning and Client Management. Expand your knowledge in each vertical with as much training and real-world projects as possible. And if you have a lack of both, then join GDF’s Program in Digital Marketing and Branding. With 400+ hours of online learning sessions with remote access, multi-device compatibility and 24/7 study material support, GDF will take the lead to chisel your digital aptitude and make you industry-ready.