A quick guide to Email Marketing

Much to your surprise, emails are still relevant in the era of social media. One of the oldest forms of communication can actually be the most helpful for your company. Email marketing has been ranked as one of the topmost effective marketing channels, actually beating both SEO and social media marketing. This may come as a surprise to you, but email marketing is alive and well; you just need to learn how to successfully implement it into your marketing campaigns. Email marketing is the act of sending promotional messages, information, or newsletters to people in mass quantities; this typically generates sales or leads.?

Your Email Marketing Strategy?

Having a clear strategy is important with any type of marketing campaigns, the same goes for email marketing. There are a few key steps that you have to include in your strategy to ensure your email marketing strategy ends up being successful and leading you to the goals you set. As with all types of strategies, set your goals and define your audience. This should be your first step in any type of campaign, or anything you do. Define your audience, look into their buying behavior and gather as much useful information on them as you can. Once you have defined your audience, you want to segment them. You can segment your customers in a variety of ways, typically the most common ways are via customer lists, newsletter subscribes, demographics or interests. You can go back to your landing pages when looking at this aspect, especially if your landing pages include helpful information about your customers when signing up. Then, set your goals. This is simple to do, but highly important. Setting your goals will help you decide what type of content to create, and what you want your content to do for your customers. So, after setting your goals you can begin to think about your content. Keep in mind the purpose of your emails, and what customers signed up for. Some ideas of good content you can send out includes upcoming events, info from previous events, popular posts from social media, news coverage, details about new products, holiday shopping guides. All in all, keep in mind what your customers would find interesting, and treat them like VIP’s.?

A few more things to keep in mind when formulating your email marketing strategy are making sure you show your companies personality. Remember that while you send these emails, you want to keep customers engaged and form relationships with them. Offering incentives, and great content helps you keep customers engaged and interacting with your content. In order to form strong relationships, consider establishing a schedule of when to send out your emails. Typically, sending out emails at least once a month can help keep customers engaged, without annoying them.?

Use your prior knowledge to ensure the success of your email marketing campaigns. A/B testing is handy here, like it is almost everywhere in the digital marketing world. Test out things such as different subject lines, photos, fonts or CTA’s (calls to action). Also don’t forget to use your good friend, Google Analytics, to track data and learn more about where you could potentially be losing customers, most importantly track the following 3 rates. Open rates are how many people open your email; this helps you learn which of your subscribers are even opening your content. Click through rate show you how many people clicked on links within your email, this is one step up from open rate and helps you learn more about which customers are actively engaging with your content. Lastly, unsubscribe rate tell you how many people click the unsubscribe button at the bottom of your emails, this helps you learn if/when customers leave and can help you learn more about why they leave.?

When creating your emails try to avoid the following mistakes

???????????Unrecognisable 'from' names?

???????????Subject line errors?

???????????Irrelevant preheader text?

???????????Too much focus on products?

???????????Too many CTA’s?

???????????Broken links or promo codes?

???????????Too much content

???????????Typos and faulty grammar?????

Marketing automation for your email marketing strategy; is it worth it??

Yes, if done correctly. Marketing automation is the software that automates your marketing for you. Platforms such as MailChimp and Constant Contact are there to help you automate marketing and learn more about it.?

It can help you immensely when working on email marketing, but you have to do it correctly or else you can potentially lose large amounts of customers. Businesses that use marketing automation can grow by 45%, and even increase their revenue by 25%. Marketing automation typically helps you manage and execute your marketing tasks in a more efficient way and can lead to an increase of traffic to your site. When working with marketing automation make sure you send highly targeted, specific content to your segmented audience. Ensure that you also integrate marketing automation with your inbound marketing strategy. In order to not lose customers through your marketing automation, don’t blast customer with general messages, and don’t forget about your customer. Everything you do comes back to making the customer happy in order to convert them, so keep them in mind both when formulating content and implementing marketing automation into your strategy.?