Email marketing is a major part of digital marketing. As businesses get more and more digitized, different forms of digital marketing are getting common. Simply having a website for your brand is not enough. You need to have a mechanism to drive traffic to the site. For getting any conversions from your website, you first need to attract visitors to it, and then inspire them to take the desired action.
Email marketing is one of the methods used to generate traffic for a website. It is done in different ways. The best part of it is that it is very cost-effective. In most cases, email marketing is absolutely free, unless you use the paid version of a software or tool that helps you automate your email campaign.
Without a good email marketing strategy, a company cannot properly use its subscriber list. Websites invite subscribers so that they can send a newsletter or any other form of a reminder about the company’s products and services. If a company does not do such email advertising, it loses its customer base and brand equity.
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Another good thing about email advertising is that it is very subtle. If a user does not want to open an email, nobody forces him or her to do so. It is not like the non-skippable YouTube or other social media ads. This actually increases the importance and effectiveness of email marketing, because it means if somebody chooses to open a marketing email, they are already convinced or inspired by the brand to some extent. Now they only need to be inspired a little more for considering a purchase from that company.
Email marketing strategies have come a long way from being simple text or HTML emails sent to a random group of people to properly designed, email templates with embedded videos that are sent to a very targeted and specified niche. These days, email advertising is used for delivering all kinds of messages to customers. Whether it’s about announcing a new product launch, or showing positive product testimonials to customers, email advertising can do the job.
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Since effective email marketing does not require too much effort, and can be easily automated with the help of the available tools, there wouldn’t be many businesses in the world today that are not using email marketing as part of their overall marketing strategy.
But are they all doing it in the right way? Let’s discuss 10 tips for a company to come up with an effective email marketing strategy.
10 Tips to Conduct Effective Email Marketing
By following certain ways to conduct email marketing, you can make an email marketing strategy even more useful for your business. Here are some good email marketing tips.
1. Learn the Basics of Formatting an Email
Gone are the days when emails were only in the form of text and looked just like official letters. These days, an email can include all those elements that are used in building good website content. This means an email can have text, images, videos, screenshots, stock footage, animation, GIFs, links, and automatically inserted signatures in it. But what’s the point of all these features if you don’t know how to use them effectively? That’s why it is important for every marketer to learn the basics of preparing an email.
If you do not know how to properly mix all the email elements, you will end up creating a messy email that your subscribers wouldn’t want to read. If someone opens an email and finds it unorganized or ambiguous, they will be less likely to click on the next email from your company that they receive. If that happens, your email marketing will lose its value. For effective email marketing, the sequence, layout, and mix of elements used in your emails play a crucial role. Therefore, if you have not mastered the art of creating inspiring emails, you need to either focus on learning this skill first, or hire someone to work for you who’s already good at it.
2. Develop Quality Lead Magnets
A good way to do email marketing is to use your email advertising as good-quality lead magnets. Lead magnets are the source of the lead generation process. A lead magnet is the beginning point of the relationship between a company and its subscribers. That’s why when a lead magnet is of good quality, it creates a strong first impression on the minds of the subscribers.
By creating good quality emails for email advertising, you can show your subscribers how much you value them. Think of free giveaways to include in your email marketing that your subscribers would otherwise have to pay for in order to buy. The simplest forms of giveaways are ebooks and checklists. But you can come up with better and more modern giveaways too, such as a free online marketing course.
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If you are successful in converting your email marketing into quality lead magnets, your entire marketing funnel will become effective.
3. Collect the Data Carefully
There are certain email metrics that need to be tracked properly for conducting effective email marketing, such as the following.
- Open rate
- Click-through rate
- Conversion rate
- Bounce rate
- Spam complaints
- Forwarding rate
These are important metrics for email marketing just like several visitors and conversion rates are important metrics in website statistics.
4. Segment the Email List
Email list segmentation is among the most critical actions that need to be taken for creating a good email marketing strategy. Whether or not you can segment your subscribers properly determines the success of your email campaign.
Companies that create email segments can better target their ideal customers. Customer segmentation helps them to send the right emails to the right people. You can segment your email list based on location, interests, special holidays, or some other similar factor.
5. Send Emails at the Right Time
With email marketing, even the timing to send out emails plays an important role. These days, most people can push notifications on their phones when they receive an email. That’s why even though an email doesn’t demand an instant response, emails should not be sent during odd hours of the day. For instance, if your subscribers receive an email from you at 3:00 am every night, they might get fed up with it and start putting it into the spam folder.
On the other hand, if you send newsletter emails when your subscribers must be receiving too many official emails from their boss and colleagues, your email might still go unnoticed because it will get buried deep down under all the other emails.
The best way is to collect the location data of all your subscribers, and prepare a schedule to send out emails at the most convenient time for each subscriber.
6. Personalize the Emails Like a Friend
People like to read emails and messages that they feel are personalized especially for them. If you include the subscriber’s name in each email and customize your message for each email segment, your subscribers will be more interested to open and read your emails.
7. Create Strong Content
The message and content you use to build your emails must be strong and inspiring. Email marketing can do wonders if you create strong email content. High-quality email content is one that not only inspires the readers to read the email until the end but influences them to take the desired action. The least a good piece of email content can do is make the readers keep on opening and reading your emails until they feel like taking the desired action.
8. Determine Optimal Email Frequency
Sending out emails too frequently can make your customers weary of your email marketing. Sending too seldom, on the other hand, can make them forget about your brand from time to time. The best thing to do is to determine the optimal email frequency. Maybe the optimal frequency for your target audience is once a week, or once in two weeks. Depending on the market you are targeting, you can test and figure out what kind of email frequency works best to generate leads for your business’s landing page.
9. Prioritize Communication
You need to make sure that you respond to each and every email that a subscriber sends back to you. By giving value to interacting with your subscribers, you will make them more engaged with your brand, which highly increases the chances for you to make sales. Prioritize communication with customers over anything else in your email marketing strategy.
Engagement with customers can also be encouraged by building an online community. At Strikingly, we have an idea forum where we invite all our users to share their ideas and opinions about website development.
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10. Keep Optimizing the Tactics
Effective email marketing often requires you to test your tactics through trial and error. Once you find out the optimal email frequency or the optimal mix of text, images, and videos to be used in your emails, do not get content with it for a very long time. Keep testing different ways of creating and sending emails. Continuously keep optimizing your email marketing tactics.
Now that you know how to do email marketing, consider building a website for your business (if you do not have one already), so that you can collect email addresses from your site visitors and make email marketing an integral part of your marketing plan.
If you build your site in Strikingly, you can use our email feature in the VIP Plan and Audience Plan. This feature allows you to draft and send an email to a selected contact. You can access your email audience list from your Strikingly dashboard and keep a record of your contact history with each of your past email recipients. Many of our users are using email marketing to generate leads for their business, and you can do it too!
