How to Make Email Marketing Work For Your Business

Read the full article on the Hearst Bay Area blog here.

As far as digital marketing tactics go, email is one of the only channels that can have a large impact on revenue as a standalone.

Some companies need nothing more than a winning email strategy and a way to collect them checks in order to grow and scale. 

That’s because email is as universal as it is versatile. Almost everyone with a bank account has an email address, and it’s so easy to use for communication that let’s be real, even your grandma does it. 

But there’s no doubt about it - email marketing is a beast of a topic, and there are a thousand or more ways to get it wrong.

There are many things to consider when crafting an email marketing plan. So many in fact, that some businesses who are using email as a communication tool don’t even know how many things they should and need to be thinking about.

From which tools you will use, to how you will segment your list, all the way to compliance legalities of how and what you send, email marketing is complex for beginners and experts alike. 

Ready? Let’s go.

Why is Having an Email Marketing Strategy Important?

If you run a business, odds are, you already know how important email is for maintaining relationships with customers. 

But did you know that most consumers prefer communicating via email rather than picking up the phone, walking into the store, or having a chat over social media?

In fact, 54% of US internet users state that email is their #1 channel for brand communication. Companies that are focused on creating great experiences for their customers understand that they need to consider their customers’ communication preferences if they want to continue fueling their growth engine.

Therefore, it is crucial for brands to have a plan for how they will use email marketing to help achieve the desired business goals. 

How to Create Compelling Business Emails

In this section, we’ll cover your email content strategy so you can deliver the right message at the right time.

What Makes a Good Marketing Email?

A good email is:

• Timely - sent when people are most likely to open and engage, and sent at the appropriate time during the receiver’s customer journey.
• Clear - the recipient can easily understand the point you are aiming to make and the action you want them to take. From the subject line, header text, all the way to the footer, the reader should not have to think too hard about who the email is from and what they should do upon opening it.
• Readable - emails should be optimized for skimmability: no large chunks of text, half-rendered images, or confusing language.
• Delivered - you can’t read something that gets flagged by spam filters. 
• Value-Driven - the content within the email is inherently valuable to the person on the receiving end.

In order to write great marketing emails that take these items into account, it all starts with your audience.

Understanding Your Audience

Knowing who you are marketing to is an easy enough concept to grasp, and is talked about a lot, even here on this blog. But while simple in theory, understanding your audience and then writing compelling content that drives action is challenging for most businesses.

We aren’t going to go too deep into the strategies for building personas, but for any content to have the desired impact, it is imperative to consider the mindset of the person who the content is written for. 

The phrase “speak to everyone, speak to no one” is a widely used marketing cliche for good reason. People want to feel special.

They want to feel that the brands they interact with and the organizations they ultimately give their money to “get” them. 

When you truly understand their needs, have a solution to their problems, and are able to communicate your value effectively to them, people are more likely to make a purchase.

A good place to start is to analyze your customer data and see if you can identify patterns and pull those patterns out into different potential audience segments (more on that in a bit). Here are some additional exercises that you can do to better understand your audience.

Writing Great Subject Lines

When it comes to marketing and in everyday life, first impressions matter.

Every day we process countless thoughts, advertisements, tasks, sounds, and ideas. As a result, some decisions need to be made quickly, and one such decision is whether or not to open an email.

Did you know that 35% of email recipients open email based on subject line alone? This is why having a compelling subject line is increasingly more vital. Essentially, the goal of your email subject line is to “sell” the open.

Here are a few ideas to get you on the path to creating subject lines that drive action.

• Include elements of urgency. Customers don’t want to miss out on exciting events or time-sensitive specials, and creating a sense of urgency motivates people to ‘act now’.
• Make it emotional. Harness the power of positive emotions such as curiosity and joy. Email subject lines that include a cliffhanger or an open-ended question will make readers want to find out more.
• Use personalization. Hubspot reports that emails including the recipient’s first name in their subject line had a higher clickthrough rate than those that don't.

If you find that you have poor open rates, this is possibly a result of having boring subject lines. Try resending your email to those who haven’t opened after about a week or so, and use a different subject line to see if you can increase your opens.

It might also be worth A/B testing a couple of different subject line formulas to see if you can find the one that best suits your audience and go from there.

Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

No one likes making mistakes, and when it comes to pretty much everything in marketing, making a mistake can have a detrimental effect on how customers perceive your brand.

In email marketing, there are a number of faux pas to watch out for. Below, you’ll see in this chart from Databox that most common mistakes are a result of poor quality control:

It’s certainly embarrassing to send an email with a broken link or missing images, but not the end of the world.

However, sending messages to the wrong segment or sending too many emails without providing enough value can not only create high amounts of churn which leads to slow list growth, it can also be damaging to your business.

Here are some additional email marketing mistakes to avoid:

• Not having a clear call to action in your messages
• Sending emails that lack any elements of personalization
• Using broken or wrong personalization tokens (“Hi [FIRST NAME],”)
• Not having mobile-optimized content
• Using “us-centric” copywriting

Measuring Your Success with Email Marketing

With regard to email marketing, there are several metrics that can help you understand how your emails are performing. One huge mistake would be to invest all of this time and money into email marketing, but neglect to analyze the results properly. 

Here, we’ll cover some of the basics for measuring success with email marketing so that you can create a feedback loop that allows you to learn and scale. 

Common Email Metrics to Measure

Open rate

The open rate of your email is the most top of funnel metric to consider. This is essentially the percentage of people who opened your email after a successful delivery. Based on information gathered from 28 different industries, a good open rate is something around 37%, with a little wiggle room depending on your specific industry. 

This metric can give you information about your reputation as a brand that provides interesting and valuable email content and whether your subject lines are compelling enough to drive action.   

Click-Through Rate

Click-through rate is the percentage of people who clicked on a link after opening your email. Click through is a step further down the funnel as it is one action further than opening. This metric helps you track the impact of your content. If they open the email and don’t click on anything, they may not want to open your email again next time.

However, maintaining a high click-through rate tells you that your content is resonating with your audience. A good click-through rate would be anything over 3%.

Sessions Driven by Email

If your goal with email marketing is to drive website visits either to specific content or product pages, one way to measure your performance is to track sessions from email as the original source. 

While click-through rate measures the percentage of people who click on anything in your email, tracking the number of website sessions from an email campaign will tell you how meaningful those clicks are. 

If you aren’t using an ESP that includes website tracking, you can include UTM parameters inside the links you share inside your email so that you can see the full user’s journey inside a web analytics platform like Google Analytics.

Revenue Attributed to Email

At the bottom of the funnel, you have your sales metrics. 

Being able to attribute revenue back to email as a channel is extremely valuable if you plan to continue investing in email marketing. And being able to track revenue back to a specific email campaign is even more beneficial because you can then optimize future campaigns using the same components of the campaigns that were the most successful.

Depending on how people purchase from you, tracking revenue can be as simple as setting up some conversion goals in Google Analytics or as complicated as manually mapping a customer’s road to purchase. Either way, if you want to be able to report on the ROI of your email marketing efforts, you’ll need to develop a system for attributing revenue to email.  

Unsubscribe Rate

On the flip side, there are several metrics that are an indicator of poor performance. One such metric is your unsubscribe rate. Obviously, having a low unsubscribe rate should be a priority if you want to keep sending emails and driving ROI. 

When a high number of people are unsubscribing from your emails, you can tell that something is wrong. While there are many reasons why someone might decide they don’t want to hear from your business anymore, poor performance in this area can hurt your brand reputation, email deliverability, and your ability to continue growing your and scaling your list.

To diagnose a problem, think about things like how often you are sending emails, what you are saying in your emails, and the cleanliness of your list. It is possible that what you are writing is no longer relevant to your subscribers, which means you’ll need to shift your content strategy. 

Or, if your audience thinks you are sending too many messages, you’ll need to reduce your cadence.

A good way to gather information about why people are unsubscribing is to include a mini-survey or questionnaire allowing people to self-select the reason why they are leaving your email list. 

You can then use that information to better understand how to evolve your strategy.

Hard Bounce Rate

Another negative metric you need to keep an eye on is your hard bounce rate. Hard bounces typically mean that the email doesn’t exist or that the ESP decided your email goes against policy or was spam. 

Having a high hard bounce rate will ultimately impact your future email deliverability to make sure you are regularly cleaning out old, unengaged contacts to keep your list fresh and active. 

How to Do Email Marketing: Final Thoughts

As you are now 100% aware, email marketing is a channel worth exploring, regardless of your industry or business model. 

And while there is certainly a lot to keep in mind, armed with the right information, you can use email to connect with your current and potential customers in a way that builds trust and grows revenue.

Looking for more on this topic? Read the full article on the Hearst Bay Area blog here.