Perfecting your email marketing campaigns helps grow and maintain client bases. Not only is email marketing an effective digital marketing strategy for small and large local marketers (ranked as a top-three performing channel), but it’s easy to use and highly cost-effective. If you’re operating email campaigns that can see room for improvement, or you’re considering implementing campaigns for the first time, know your email efforts are not in vain – you’re headed in the right direction, my fellow content marketers. Here’s why.
It’s Cost-Effective
Compared to other digital marketing strategies, email marketing is very cost-effective – if it’s done right. Many email service providers are free, or only around $10 a month with a certain number of subscribers. MailChimp, MailerLite, and SendinBlue all fall under this category. When looking for a low-cost, high-value service offering, consider one of these affordable service providers to leverage company profits with the click of a button.
It’s Easy to Do
Email marketing is easy to facilitate because its technical components can usually be managed within one email service provider. The four main components of email marketing are:
- capturing email addresses
- managing lists and campaigns
- designing email campaigns
- delivering campaigns
Capturing and managing addresses in one place is one of the most appealing reasons to use email service providers. Keeping track of addresses in personal emails (or worse – in documents or notepads) will cause major headaches down the road. Instead, find comfort in handling all important emails in one place. It’s easy, organized, and highly effective.
Cross-promoting your services is also simple with the use of address acquisition products. Privy and MailMunch are two tools that make connecting websites, landing pages, and social campaigns to email lists as easy as pie. And who doesn’t like pie?
But, seriously – there’s a lot of thought that goes into constructing well-informed email campaigns. Make your job easier by consolidating all information and resources into one handy-dandy platform.
And let’s not forget about design. These days, the best emails are created with users in mind. Most users will open emails on phones and mobile devices, so they need to look polished to inspire a response. Email service providers make the design process easy by providing templates and design tools necessary for creating beautiful emails you can’t resist scrolling all the way through.
After you’re done creating your campaign, effortlessly send emails to target audiences with the click of a button. Email service providers make the process fast and easy by offering the tools you need to create killer campaigns.
It Doesn’t Take a Lot of Time
Emailing doesn’t require your attention 24/7. Unlike social media, email marketing can be performed periodically and when you want. Weekly or monthly newsletters may be all your business needs to stay top of mind for customers. Newsletters like these ensure customers stay informed about events happening in the area or once-in-a-lifetime deals. It only takes one nice email to remind loyal customers why they fell in love with your business in the first place.
Plus, sending out newsletters is a good way to reach customers organically. Unlike posting content to large audiences on social platforms, emails are sent to individuals with personal touches. This makes a big difference in the psyche of customers who open emails tailored to their purchasing history, their actual names, and that announces community events they’ll likely care about. Email can be personalized – and customers like that.
It Offers Concrete Feedback
Email strategy relies on sending things and getting things back. These things are 1) campaigns tailored to target audiences offering a unique service or informing audiences of events, etc. and 2) responses by customers in the form of purchases, donations, and more. Because the nature of email marketing relies on the sending and receiving of things, it’s easy to measure successes and failures. If campaigns launch without much feedback, you’re likely doing something wrong. It’s clear to know when you need to go back to the drawing board and re-think your strategy.
One common reason for low response rate is poor content. Want to avoid flat, impersonal content? We do, too – here’s how to leverage email success.
Email Personalization 101
Alongside growing subscriber lists (a topic deserving of its very own blog post), creating personalized content is key. We turned to our friends at Campaign Monitor to better understand the ins and outs of creating quality, personalized content, which can take the form of basic, medium sophistication, and advanced sophistication content creation.
Basic Personalization
From Name
This is a prominently displayed element many users rely on to know who is sending the email. Make sure to personalize your ‘from name’ with your company’s known title. 68% of Americans decide to open or ignore emails based on From Names. Names can even be personalized to show account managers and their profile pictures, allowing customers to associate emails with managers they’ve worked with in the past.
Subject Lines
This line follows the From Name and, depending on its structure, determines user engagement. Research by Campaign Monitor shows that including the individual names in subject lines increases open rates by 26%. Wow! Personalizing one-liners like these prompts customers to open emails. Email service providers make this task easy by storing names and corresponding emails so you don’t have to manually type recipients’ names into every subject line.
Medium Sophistication Personalization
Copy
Now is the time to get a little more personal (or use any personal details you can find) to tailor the content of your email to the individual. Inserting the name of the user into the first line of your message is a common strategy, extending personalization down from the Subject Line. Company names and t-shirt sizes can be stored in campaign builders, allowing for easy access when compiling them into messages.
Images
The same strategy applies to images. Designing campaigns with pictures unique to the users’ city, for example, increased Campaign Monitors click-through rate by 29% in one study.
Dynamic Content
Demographic and geographic data can be leveraged to create dynamic content speaking to subgroups of customers. Select email service providers make this easy with tools designed to send emails to individuals identifying with a specific gender or who live in certain zip codes.
Re-engagement
It never hurts to ask if customers want to keep hearing from you. Send them emails saying you miss them. It doesn’t get more human than that. If they haven’t visited your site in a while or purchased any of your amazing products, ask if they still want to hear from you. If your content is appealing, they’ll remember why they loved you so much in the first place and won’t be able to resist your email charms.
Advanced Sophistication Personalization
Product Recommendations
Rely on customers’ most recent purchases to better understand buying behavior. Then, send them emails with similar products they simply can’t resist. Even if they don’t buy your products, users will be tempted to click on images of apparel or products they want to wear or use. With behavior analytics, you have the key to your customer’s heart.
VIP Loyalty
Reward your best (or highest paying) customers with VIP rewards. These emails offer promotional discounts or never-before-seen products to customers who’ve proven their loyalty. Based on spending threshold and user engagement, systems like Shopify create relevant campaigns specific to the individual’s shopping and spending habits.
Purchase Abandonment
We all get a little online-shopping crazy sometimes. This happens when we fill online carts with more items than we actually want to purchase. But don’t fret. You’ll be reminded of all the items you left behind. Retailers like Birchbox gather individuals’ website behaviors and follows up with relevant emails. Remember those couple of eyeshadows you didn’t end up purchasing? They’ll appear in an email a couple days later asking if you still want them. Strategies like these tempt your most loyal customers.
Multiple Uses, Personalized Touches
Whether you’re a small business owner or a well-known retailer, email marketing helps. Email marketing is a strategy growing in strength due to developments in data analytics and email marketing systems.
In 2017 alone, 90.4% of internet users sent at least one email a day in the United States. That’s a lot of people relying on email as a form of communication. When sophisticated, well-thought-out campaigns are sent directly to individuals, expect to receive awesome results – or at least informative ones because email marketing is predictable and concrete. Really, there’s nothing to lose. Get started perfecting your email marketing strategies today and stay ahead of the game. You and your customers will be glad you did.
