Email is still one of the most preferred communication channels. In the era of social media and digital marketing, businesses just cannot ignore a tool as valuable as email marketing. Data reveals that there are over 4 billion email users worldwide and is expected to grow to 4.6 billion by 2025. Now that’s a lot of potential customers that you can target.
But email marketing goes beyond just sending the email to your target recipients. Successful email marketing is crucial. Unfortunately, it is often overlooked by many businesses. When done right, email marketing can yield a return on investment of $42 for every $1 spent. We cannot deny the fact that email marketing is still effective. In fact, 90% of adults and 74% of teenagers still use email regularly.
In order for your email marketing campaign to be successful, you need to do some work and optimize your email campaigns for better results. So read on and be guided on the steps on how to succeed with email marketing.
How To Succeed With Email Marketing
- Determine Your Goals
- Target The Right Recipient
- Build A List
- Understand Email Types
- Get Personal with Your Email
- Choose The Perfect Time To Send Your Email
- Be Conversational
- Include A Call To Action
- Measure Your Performance
- Test Your Email Marketing Campaign
Let’s get down to the details.
How To Succeed With Email Marketing
Here are some tips on how you can become successful with email marketing.
- Determine Your Goals
It simply does not make sense if you will launch an email marketing campaign without setting a goal you want to achieve. To be successful with your email marketing campaign, you need to set a goal for yourself. Typical goals could include:
- Welcoming new subscribers and telling them about your business and values so you can start with relationship building.
- Boosting engagement through content or your business through promotions or when making your first sale
- Nurturing your current subscribers by providing something with value
- Re-engaging subscribers who are inactive
- Segmenting subscribers through targeted emails
When setting your goals for an email marketing campaign, always keep in mind the SMART goal framework Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. By setting a SMART goal, you will be able to map out your destination, determine how you will get there, and estimate when you will arrive.
In addition, setting SMART goals will help you easily plan your daily marketing tasks in support of these goals and establish a benchmark for success. At the end of it all, you want to convert a broad, lackluster goal into a more actionable and measurable one. Finally, it will remove any ambiguity on where your team’s focus should be and make it foolproof to measure success.
- Target The Right Recipient
When it comes to email marketing, not all recipients should be treated the same. There is no such thing as “one size fits all.” Regardless of the industry you are operating in, your customers are likely to have unique characteristics from the others. Just because some of your customers were delighted with the email you sent does not mean it will apply to the other customers.
To ensure a successful email marketing campaign, make sure that you send the email to the right audience. Gather as much data as you can about your target audience, from their geographic location to their buying habits. Go over the data and group your list accordingly. For better conversions, you should segment your subscribers for each campaign. You can categorize them according to various factors such as age, gender, location, and interest.
As much as possible, avoid sending the same email to your entire list as this increases the chances of your content being irrelevant. This increases the chances of customers unsubscribing from your list. If your customers love one type of service and your customer could not care less, strategize accordingly.
- Build A List
Having a successful email marketing campaign starts with a good list. Back in the days, it was so easy to buy a list and send a spam message to a bunch of folks. While experts advised against “cold messaging” it proved effective if you were selective in purchasing a list of potential buyers.
Yes, you want a bunch of people on your email list but not everyone should be on that list. You only want the people who can be ideal customers. For this reason, your email list should be focused on those people and not the general population. We cannot deny the huge return on investment that you can get from email marketing but the trick is to create a highly targeted email list.
Your email prospect list can prove vital in shaping the success of your email marketing campaign. Building a comprehensive email list cannot be done overnight but there are other fast and effective methods for growing your email list outside of the traditional email sign up form such as: pop-up forms, sidebar widgets, offer bonuses, and others.
- Understand EMail Types
There are different types of emails that can help you achieve specific goals. Your choice of email type will depend on your goal and target audience. Let’s take a look at some of them:
- Welcome email. This is the first email that a subscriber receives upon signing up to your email list or making a purchase. Welcome emails have an average open rate of 50% making them a great option for introducing new contacts to your brand, products, and services. The main focus is to direct subscribers to the “next step.”
- Cart Abandonment. These are emails that are sent to shoppers who visited your store, put items in their cart, but left without completing their purchase. Studies reveal that abandoned cart emails can make your company $5.81 in revenue per recipient.
- Newsletters. Newsletters are usually non-promotional in nature and brands can use them for sharing industry news and updates, tips, tricks, blog roundups, etc. with their subscribers.
- Re-engagement Emails. As the name implies, re-engagement emails target inactive subscribers to get them to engage with your brand and emails again. For example, you could offer a special discount to customers who have not clicked on your promotional emails lately.
- Get Personal With Your Email
Personalizing your email is very crucial to the success of your email marketing campaign. Sending personalized emails can help with trust building. The more personal your email is, the easier it is to build trust. It also increases the chance of your email being opened and read. While calling customers by their first name, this is just part of personalization.
When it comes to email marketing, keep in mind that customers have different needs which is the very purpose of personalization. Using subscriber data, you tailor your subject line, content, and design to each individual contact. Personalized emails involve the following:
- Being relevant
- Sending timely emails
- Anticipating subscriber needs
Personalized emails help increase open rate and engagement. Studies reveal that email personalization can help boost the email open rate by 22.28% and clickthrough rates by 3.32%. When sending emails, it is important to send them from the same email address all the time. According to an Experian research, email personalization drives 6x higher transaction rates with 51% of marketers believing that email segmentation is the most effective personalization strategy.
- Choose The Perfect Time To Send an Email
Frequency of sending emails is also important to ensure the success of your email marketing campaign. You don’t want to overload your readers with too many emails but at the same time, you want to use them for building loyalty and engagement with your target audience. Timing the frequency of your email is crucial to the success of your email marketing campaign.
A good gauge of the right frequency comes from analytics. If you see a drop in open rates or start receiving complaints or some of your subscribers unsubscribe, you are probably sending too many emails. On the other hand, if you see many folks unsubscribing or complaining, you should probably increase the frequency of your emails.
To get the most engagement out of your emails, you need to find the perfect time to send out your email. Data reveals that the best days to send an email are Tuesday, Thursday, and Wednesday and the best time to send an email are 10 am, 2 pm, and 8 pm.
- Be Conversational
Consumers are constantly bombarded with marketing emails on a daily basis. Many businesses make the mistake of talking to customers as business and not as people. Using conversational language will give you the chance to create personalized experiences for your customers. By sending a conversational email, you can reach your target market without being too pushy.
For your email marketing campaign to be successful, you need your email to be friendly, approachable, and conversational. Talking to your customers like someone you know will automatically make your email feel more personal and relatable resulting in more engagement and conversions.
Being conversational with your email helps build engagement, drive more conversions, and give a huge boost to your return on investment. It will make your customers feel that you are talking with them instead of at them. The key is to avoid speaking to them as though you were giving a formal presentation.
- Include A Call to Action
What’s the purpose of sending an email touting your products if you don’t have a call to action asking customers to do something. Call to actions can do many things from asking the customer to click on a link, fill out a survey, make a purchase, and others. Whatever it is that you want your customers to do, make sure to indicate it in your email.
Your CTA is what encourages readers to click on a specific part of your email to bring them to your desired page. It brings them to the next stage of their journey, moving them closer to making a purchase. While CTAs help improve your email response rates, you don’t want to overwhelm them with too many calls to action. By giving them several options, they are less likely to end up in the destination they want.
In most cases, it is best to stick to a single call to action. Different web pages have different objectives and this will determine the number of CTAs you will need. Ideally, every single marketing asset you create must have some sort of call-to-action on the page. For email marketing, a single CTA can help increase clicks by 371% and sales by a staggering 1617%.
- Measure Performance
Measuring the performance of your campaign will help you refine your future marketing strategy. When it comes to the performance, you need to measure the following analytics:
- Opens and clicks. This is the most obvious statistics for measuring engagement, as they indicate how effective your campaign subject line and content resonates with a particular list.
- E-commerce Data. Your e-commerce data provides you a glimpse of your customer’s purchase data, profiles, and account dashboard.
- Website Traffic. Email marketing campaigns can help direct more traffic to your website or online store. There are also some tools that you can integrate to help you track any trends in website traffic or e-commerce activity.
Measuring the performance of your email marketing campaigns will help you initiate changes in your future campaigns. The more you can measure success the better your campaign will be both on a short and long-term basis. By looking at relevant data, you will be able to figure out what’s causing the problem. You can then apply various strategies in steering the campaign back on track.
These marketing metrics will help guide you in making marketing decisions. By tracking performance, you will be able to determine whether your campaign is relevant to your goals and objectives. Also by measuring performance, you will have an idea of which aspect of your campaign is working and isn’t working.
- Test Your Email Marketing Campaign
After measuring the performance of your campaign, the next step is to improve and test your email marketing campaign. Armed with the data from your metrics, you can implement new changes and test everything. From the design and layout, email marketing copy, subject lines and call to action, your objective is to find out which part of your campaign works and needs some adjustments.
You need to be reminded that there is no such thing as the “perfect” email. Testing your campaign not only allows you to improve your campaigns but also get to learn more about your audience– their likes and dislikes and how they interact with your email. In the long run, this will help you improve your business in the long run.
In A/B testing, you test two versions of your email and send each one to a small percentage of your audience. With your audience continuously evolving, testing becomes very vital to help you find out what works best for your campaign.
Email marketing is not just about sending emails to your target recipients. Take the tips above into consideration and you can look forward to a successful email marketing campaign.
Get Email Marketing & Lead Generation Support From airisX
When you have a great product or service, one of the hardest things to do is to find buyers interested in what you’re selling. To fill this gap, airisX offers lead generation – our staff researches your business and targets your end-user and then creates email/contact lists for you to pitch. We offer lead generation for any business model – B2B, B2C, SaaS, consultancies, outsourcing companies (like ourselves!), ecommerce, etc.
Email is still the main tool of choice for companies to manage relationships with customers. We’ve handled email support for many companies, from simple ticketing to complex troubleshooting. We build your email list totally from scratch, or if you already have a list, help you find contact information for pre-targeted companies.