In 2015, Dell Nurture conducted an email campaign that was personalised to each customer.
They identified the pain points relevant to the contacts and came up with specific solutions based on their prior interactions with the brand.
In consequence, the contacts received a more tailored customer experience and the flexibility to view the content they prefer.
If they did not engage, another email followed with broader alternatives.
In case there was no response from the contact, they were automatically removed from the Nurture program.
The study resulted in the creation of over 800 email versions, and a 300% improvement in the engagement rate.
Fast forward to 2020; emails continue to dominate the marketing strategies.
If you are looking for business growth hacks, you need to step up your email marketing strategy first.
Build a Contact List
Ensuring a healthy audience is the first phase of any marketing campaign.
There are a few ways that you can generate an email list. One is to encourage users to subscribe to your website. You can entice them with great content, promotions, newsletters, or updates.
This is where copywriting comes into play. Content needs to be bold, clear, and concise with your CTA.
And make sure that you always secure permission to send them emails. Your lead generating methods have to be compliant with the terms of use.
Unsolicited email marketing campaigns are unlikely to intrigue your contact.
Whatever incentive you are offering for the customers’ contacts, be sure to be clear, concise, and make it bold.
Pin Down your Goals
Email marketing has the potential to get you a ROI of $42 for every $1 spent. However, in order to measure your return, first, you need to establish what you hope to achieve through an email campaign.
Depending on the type and scale of your business, these goals could also vary.
Here are some objectives that you can accomplish through an effective email marketing campaign:
- Welcome new subscribers
- Boost engagement
- Foster customer relationships
- Retarget customers
- Re-engage inactive users
- Conduct helpful surveys
Ultimately, the aim is to increase your traffic and sales by ensuring that your customers remain happy hearing from your brand.
Segmenting the Audience
If you send emails with a personalised subject line, they are 26% more likely to be opened.
Segmentation and personalisation is one of a marketer's sharpest weapons when attracting a user's attraction.Click To TweetSurveys have found that segmented campaigns gain a 760% increase in profiting from an email campaign.
The different goals we mentioned above target a different set of audiences.
For instance, you have to treat your new subscribers differently than your old subscribers. You could even reward consistent engagement with coupons, or lure in inactive clients with attractive promotions.
In effect, the tacts you apply should be unique for each audience segment.
Crafting your Emails
Email marketing is an art in itself.Click To Tweet Copywriting has to be on point – not too desperate or detached, with the right balance of visual elements to make it a quick read.Nobody wants to waste their time reading promotional emails. Creating emails that can guarantee engagement is not an easy job.
Here are some tips on developing email templates:
- Neat and straightforward design, with enough white space to attract the eye to the critical points. Do not hesitate to use images or animations to spice things up.
- Focus on delivering a consistent brand image through all marketing channels. You might combine social networks and emails for promotions. So you need to ensure that your voice remains the same.
- Do not go overboard with emails. Too many emails will only drive your customer to unsubscribe.
- Experiment with designs. If you think that a particulate content or design is not working, a different approach might be refreshing for your audience.
- Use subject lines and previews wisely. These are the first ways to get your contact’s attention. But be sure not to make it clickbait; otherwise, you might lose the client.
If need be, you can find email templates for all scenarios online. But you need to customise them to reflect your brand identity and personalise them for your clients.
Use Automation to Your Advantage
75% of marketers are already using marketing automation techniques to gain a competitive advantage.
Email marketing automation comes with a myriad of benefits. 30% of users agree that it saves time, while 22% owes it for lead generation.
The merits also include customer retention, analytics and segmentation.
One of the best applications of automation is to trigger emails. Once you set your parameters, the automation tool will initiate an email when the setting is met. A few of the examples include:
- Subscription emails welcoming new customers;
- Abandoned-cart emails to retarget your customer;
- Milestone emails for anniversaries, birthdays, and such;
- Affiliation emails encouraging you to invite a friend with a promotional coupon.
Furthermore, you can also set when to send emails based on location, services or industry.
Personalisation is another way to use automation tools. You cannot send bulk emails and manually fill your contact names.
Instead, such tools will take care of that part while scheduling the emails based on each customer’s journey with your brand.
Create Customised Landing Pages
After scrutinising the content, it would be a shame if the emails are not connected to a dynamic landing page.
Create landing pages that can appeal to the customer and deliver a seamless transition between different interfaces.
Getting this right will help your create landing pages boost conversion rates.
Measure Your Campaigns with Analytics
One of the best advantages of email marketing is that its results are measurable. You can find out whether your efforts are working and use the stats to drive your next battle.
There are three main aspects you should focus on:
Behaviour Analysis
- View rate of your emails
- Open rate of your emails
- Highest converting links
- What time do people open the emails
- Unsubscribe rate
Outcome Analysis
- Conversion rate of your emails
- Average revenue per campaign
- Lead generation
- ROI of each campaign
Experience Analysis
- Why do different email segments have higher open rates?
- Why is the revenue lower in particular months?
While behavioural as well as outcome analysis could be done with the help of analytical tools, experience analysis is more of a thought process or lessons to learn.
You might need to use additional tactics such as surveys and customer evaluations to get an answer to these questions. However, these could be a crucial component in improving your campaigns.
These key performance indicators will help you rework the message and align it better with your audiences’ expectations. In the long run, you would be able to analyse how to drive your campaigns.
Optimise!
If you find that your campaigns are not yielding the results you hoped for, here are some bonus tips to help you climb that steep mountain:
- Straightforward subject lines have the most impact, but do not give away the content straight away. Intrigue the reader just enough to open your emails. Read more tips in how to sell your emails.
- Spam filters might be responsible for your slow stats.
- If you have a high bounce rate, then it is time to update your contact list. If there are soft bounces, then the contact might be temporarily unavailable. If it is a hard bounce, it means that the email address failed, or a spam filter worked. If you get the same results for a few consecutive emails, proceed to check for spam filters before you update your list.
Summing Up
We hope this article gave you a better understanding of how useful emails are for marketing.
From building your contact list to analysing your campaigns, you now have all the relevant information on getting started.
Once you have dipped your toes, you will feel more confident about trying out the different approaches we have mentioned in this article.
In a few attempts, you will be ready with an effective email marketing plan in place that can benefit your subscribers, customers and business.
