Email marketing, for most of my clients, delivers the maximum return for minimum investment. Like most marketing endeavors, email marketing is a divine mix of art and science. Maintaining a connection with your audience and what they want to see and keeping a close watch on the metrics will ensure that your email campaigns are successful. A few basic strategies outlined below are a great “check in” for your email campaigns.
Double Check The Basics:
1. Send emails to those who are engaged with your product and your message.
If you have email lists with low rates of engagement activity, you should stop sending emails to them. Your prospects get tired of wading through and deleting unwanted emails and have a high probability of unsubscribing from your list. When you send to a list with low engagement rates, it damages your domain reputation and lowers the odds of connecting with your target audience.
2. Send Emails from a person, not an “info” or “no reply” email.
Don’t send emails from an “info” or “no reply” email account. Be sure to personalize the “from” email address to drive replies from subscribers to an actual person.
3. If people mark you as spam, immediately stop sending email and re evaluate your email list and strategy.
If potential clients designate your emails as “spam, your domain reputation can be damaged, and you could become blacklisted by email providers. The spam complaints can be caused by a new source of leads, a business or domain name change, an over aggressive opt in campaign, or content that does not engage the user, the best strategy is to stop sending emails until you identify and rectify the problem.
4. Have a goal for each email campaign.
If you don’t have a clear call to action for a product you wish to introduce, a case study you wish to share, or a landing page to promote the recipients of your email will be left wondering what the point of emailing them might be. Have a clear goal for your email campaigns and you can define success by tracking conversions to that goal to measure the true level of engagement you have achieved with your audience. Consider giving a number of options for CTAs (calls to action) in your emails to measure the engagement of different types of CTAs. Take care to avoid overwhelming your audience with too many options. More than two options for next steps can be overwhelming to an email recipient.
5. Personalize your emails.
It has been proven time and time again that personalized email has higher open rates. Keep it simple and personalize according to recipient names and company names.
Techniques to Try:
1. Experiment with sending emails on different days of the week.
Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are the most popular days to send email. If you want your emails to stand out a bit more, experiment by sending them on Mondays and Fridays. Emails with calls-to-action to purchase items or view items of general interest often perform well on weekends. This is a viable option for consumers, but I would avoid this for business recipients. The weekend email will no doubt get lost in the rush of Monday morning.
2. Put some time into the subject line.
Make sure that your subject line is not misleading. Customized and personalized subject lines are the best policy. Many email marketers are experimenting with emojis. Please carefully consider the subject matter of your email and the target recipient before employing the emoji strategy.
3. Adjust the frequency of your emails
Make sure that you have something of value to say or announce before you send an email. Just blanketing an email list with the best idea you could come up with will likely lead to lowered open rates and engagement. Waiting for valuable information to share will make you stand out from those competing for attention in a prospect’s email inbox.
Conclusions:
Email marketing gets tougher every year as the public tires of being bombarded with offers to buy frivolous products that force them to waste time deleting and unsubscribing from unwanted email. This doesn’t mean that email marketing is not a viable platform, but it is more competitive. The solution is to invest the time and effort into refining your email campaigns to keep your subscribers engaged.
Eric Van Cleave is the Managing Partner of Zenergy Works, A Santa Rosa, California Based Online Marketing, Website Development and SEO Firm.