How to achieve success with email marketing

12 Tips to Achieve Success with Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to make potential and current customers aware of what your business has to offer. However, due to the popularity of this medium, your message has to stand out from the ‘noise’ that now populates most people’s inbox. For this reason, above all other concerns, you need to ensure your email is well targeted and highly relevant.

So, how can you maximise the visibility and responsiveness of your emails? Here are 12 tips that will save your email campaigns from the trash and turn them into cash:

1. Set Clear Goals – Define specific objectives for your campaign and set up goals and objectives that are clearly measurable.
2. Segment Your Audience – Make sure your message matches what your audience wants. Segmenting your audience allows you to test different creative approaches, which you can then measure against each other.
3. Grab Your Headline – Be clear and concise: you’ve only got seconds before your message ends up in the trash folder. You should look to avoid using capital letters and exclamation marks, as this looks unprofessional and may appear as spam to the recipient.
4. Timing – Do you know what the optimum time is for your audience to see your message? It’s different for different businesses, but you need to see what works best for you.
5. Branding – Make sure the ‘from’ includes your brand name, sent from an email address that’s your recognised domain. Use your logo and brand colours so your email is in sync with your brand. You should also ensure the language and tone is consistent across all your marketing collateral to maximise impact, and prevent brand confusion and dilution of message.
6. Design – Sometimes very simple, uncluttered, text-based emails work best; but it depends on the objectives of the campaign. Test and test again – remembering that the message should be compatible across all devices. Images often don’t display, as they are stripped for security reasons – so you need to ensure your call to actions have text links to improve the click-throughs.
7. Personalisation – When used in an appropriate way, there is nothing more powerful than personalisation for engaging with prospects. Using the name of the business or the contact, or indeed referencing the location of the business, all add an element of engagement and help your message stand out.
8. Call To Action – What’s the point of your email? Make sure the action is clear and the response required simple. You are unlikely to elicit reams of information, so don’t include a long form for prospects to fill in (unless you incentivise completion).
9. Effective Landing Page – Landing pages are a great way to measure your email campaigns. The best landing pages are distraction free, so just include the information required.
10. Sharing – Make sure that you allow your email to be shared, by including links to social media and encouraging referrals. You could also try offering an incentive such as a discount for future purchases, if customers forward your message to spread awareness of your business.
11. Tracking – This goes way beyond opens and clicks. Often the email is the starting point that may end in a purchase or some other ‘action’. Tracking these can help you to improve targeting next time around. It is also important to monitor social media to know what is being said about your business.
12. Testing – The beauty of email marketing is the flexibility to test every aspect of the campaign without incurring huge costs. Everything can be tested to improve impact - from the audience, copy, creative, message, position of key calls to action, frequency of sends, timing etc.

Final thoughts

So there you have it, 12 tips to achieve success with email marketing. When it comes to B2B email marketing, the magic formula is simple – give the right audience, the right message at the right time. However, getting the combination right isn’t always straightforward.

To learn more about how your business can achieve success with the help of email marketing, check out Market Location’s resource section – which includes free guides, case studies and more.