Is email marketing still effective? When executed properly, yes! 77% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months. But in order to achieve such results, you need to stick to several principles and work stages. Let’s have a look at them.
For the sake of this article, let’s assume you’re in square one – you’ve just decided that email marketing might be a good idea. Where should you start?
Start building your email database
To benefit from email marketing, you must have subscribers, so your first step is to build such a database. However, here, we have a word of caution. In almost every country, there are some anti-spam laws. The vast majority of them state the same thing – you cannot email random people on a whim. This is true in the European Union (GDPR), the United States (CAN-SPAM Act), and many more countries.
You need to build your base lawfully, which means you need to have a way of collecting email addresses without scraping them from the websites. The person you’re about to email should give you consent first, and that’s what ethical ways of building your email database are about.
What are your options? For starters, if you have clients, you can assume they’ve given you their consent. There is a clear business relationship, and your clients, in general, expect that you will email them from time to time. But what about potential clients (after all, that’s what you need email marketing for, right?)?
LEAD MAGNET
Create a premium piece of content that will be distributed to everyone who agrees to share their email address and give you marketing consent. Usually, a lead magnet is an ebook or a short online course. What’s important is that your lead magnet should consist of knowledge that’s not easy to find on the internet (if at all). The visual layer is also important – take care of the high-quality of your material.
Next, put the information about your lead magnet in a prominent place on your website, along with a subscription box. To drive more traffic to your website, you can start running ads (e.g., Google or LinkedIn Ads) or invest in SEO. Sometimes, you can also promote your lead magnet on Facebook and LinkedIn groups and in other online communities. Alternatively, you can do the same with newsletters. Here, the idea is very similar – you offer free access to your company’s newsletter (make sure it’s valuable from the reader’s perspective!) and promote it via different marketing channels.
Pick the right email marketing platform
There are dozens of such platforms out there, and some of them are even available for free. However, if you have bigger plans with marketing automation, we recommend ourselves. With iPresso, you get access not just to an email marketing platform but to a whole list of other features, many of which involve email addresses. As a result, you have everything in one place, which makes your work more effective and helps you save a lot of time.
Our platform uses a simple drag-and-drop editor that’s fully HTML-friendly so that you can create compelling emails/newsletters with no coding skills.
Segment your subscribers and personalize your emails
When it comes to email marketing, segmentation is crucial. After all, clients are different – they work in companies of different profiles and have different interests. Tailoring your emails to different segments makes them more relevant and, therefore, effective.
This is something we can help you with – iPresso has two customer database tools that enable you to divide your subscribers by their profile, interests, previous activity with your company, and other factors. As a result, you can create emails that resonate with a particular customer segment.
The next step is to personalize your emails. It’s one step further from segmentation. A segment can comprise hundreds of email addresses, but personalization focuses on a given person. Again, thanks to our tools, you can introduce personalization to your emails with almost no effort.
A good personalized email:
- Greets the recipient by their name
- Is adjusted to their interests and needs
- Takes previous history of communication/cooperation into account
The more personalized your emails are, the better results you can expect.
Send valuable and interesting emails
You must always design high-quality and engaging content for your emails. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re sending promotional emails, newsletters, updates, or invitations – each email should be well-thought-out and not sent in a rush. Above all, think about how you can provide value to your subscribers.
You can do so by providing them with valuable knowledge, offering them something for free, or inviting them to participate in a project that helps them in their work. before you send your next email, ask yourself, “What’s in it for this recipient?” Send the email only if you have a good answer.
GOOD DESIGN
The visual side is also important. People like looking at nice things, and the digital world is no different. Use our editor and start with one of the hundreds of available templates to make sure your email is good-looking and attractive. Put an intriguing headline at the top to encourage people to read more, and don’t leave your readers disappointed.
A good-looking email:
- Uses images and clear branding
- Has a clear CTA (ideally in the form of a button)
- Is easy to read and scan (divide your emails into clear sections just like you do with your landing pages)
- Has attractive headlines
And one last suggestion – forget about clickbait. Be transparent and upfront, tell people what to expect, and aim for brief but descriptive headlines. For example, don’t write “Special offer just for you!” in the title of your email (it sounds spammy); rather try “Get 25% discount for new arrivals in our store”. The second headline is safer – the customer knows what to expect and will less likely consider your email a spam.
That’s what you need to think about – the basics of effective email marketing. Now, let’s have a look at some questions that will help you improve the effectiveness of your emails.
How to make your email marketing campaigns more effective
A/B TESTS
If you have a large enough target audience (let’s say at least 100 email addresses), you can create two different versions of the same email and send version A to 50% of your database and version B to the other 50%. Thanks to A/B tests, you can estimate what resonates best with your target audience. Change just one thing at a time so that you know what made the difference. After several such tests, you will achieve an almost-perfect email template that resonates with your target audience.
SCHEDULE EMAILS APPROPRIATELY
You don’t want to flood your subscribers with promotional emails. In the B2B world, one or two emails per month are enough. Of course, in some situations, you can send more, but always keep the balance between quality and quantity. Also, usually, it’s a good idea to send those emails when your prospects are at work. Again, you can run some tests and see when your emails get the highest open rates.
MONITOR PERFORMANCE
You must know what works and what doesn’t, correct? Almost every decent email marketing tool comes with an analytics feature so that you can track your campaigns’ open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, etc. With such input, you can see when people usually open your emails and what emails get the most interactions. Such knowledge enables you to improve the quality and scheduling of your emails.
MOBILE-FRIENDLINESS
Lastly, keep in mind that many emails are opened on mobile devices. Make sure your emails have a so-called responsive design, meaning they adjust themselves to screens of different sizes. Today, it’s rather a standard solution, and email marketing tools offer that at no additional cost as a default setup.
Wrapping up
With iPresso, introducing email marketing to your company is a breeze. Our platform has everything you need to run effective email campaigns with no coding knowledge. Would you like to test it? Fantastic, you can do so for free today! Just send us this short contact form, and we’ll take care of the rest!
Leave a Reply