Companies have been leveraging email marketing strategies for decades to connect, nurture, and convert leads into customers.
It’s one of the oldest ways to promote services online, but email marketing has remained a popular alternative for a reason. Emails are the simplest and most direct form of communication you can have with your audience. But, they also give marketers the flexibility to design complex campaigns tailored for subscribers that have the potential to become paying clients.
Although emails can be a great way to connect with potential customers, it’s important to understand the nuances that come with this type of campaign. Developing sales emails is different from crafting SEO-friendly content or PPC ads, so companies need to incorporate the right elements to succeed.
Fannit is an award-winning digital marketing agency that specializes in developing robust email campaigns. Our team understands the importance of having superb content, so we’ve developed a unique approach to email marketing that produces stellar results for our customers.
In this article, we’ll go over the definition of email marketing and highlight this strategy’s benefits. We’ll also discuss the best ways to increase the number of subscribers you have as well as other tips to launch a successful email campaign.
Resources: What Is Digital Marketing?
What is Email Marketing?
What is email marketing? How does email marketing work?
As the name suggests, email marketing is the practice of promoting a brand’s products and services through email.
But, even though it has a simple definition, there are dozens of different email marketing approaches you can take to attract more customers.
In an ideal scenario, a business collects email addresses from its prospect when they visit the business’ website.
Then, the marketing team can send out a sequence of marketing emails that promote the business’ branding as well as its solutions. The sequences are also designed to move prospects down the sales funnel, transform them into leads, and, finally, turn them into sales.
Resource: B2B Email Marketing Best Practices: 10 Steps to Customize & Personize
Advantages of Email Marketing Campaigns
Does email marketing work?
Well, that depends on the email marketing strategy you implement.
But, assuming the setup and technique chosen are appropriate for your business goals, the answer is a resounding yes.
Emails have become a part of everyday life for billions of consumers around the world.
That said, the average user receives hundreds of notifications per day, many of which are marketing emails.
This is the reason why marketers need to stay creative and test out fresh ideas to ensure their campaigns attain the level of success they envisioned.
There are many advantages to implementing email marketing.
It’s among the most cost-effective approaches, so companies don’t need to make huge investments to see good results.
In addition to this, some of the best benefits of email marketing include:
Easy Communication
According to recent estimates, there are 3.9 billion active email users around the world.
Moreover, the average professional checks his or her emails 15 times every single day, which is equivalent to logging in every 37 minutes.
In other words, emails are the easiest way for companies to communicate with their audiences without disrupting their routine.
Although emails may be seen as obsolete by some marketers, this form of communication can help you connect with customers at the right time.
Sending out a marketing email at a crucial moment during the decision-making process can be the difference between getting a new customer or losing a lead.
And, given that 60% of emails are opened on mobile devices, it’s safe to assume that this approach allows you to reach potential customers regardless of the device they prefer.
Maximum Control
One of the biggest benefits of launching email marketing campaigns is that they give you maximum control over your promotional plan.
Companies can run branding, lead generation, and other types of campaigns and develop virtually any type of content. You can opt to promote your blog posts, services, business values, and other elements that give you a better image and improve your chances of converting prospects into customers.
Additionally, companies that launch email campaigns don’t rely on additional platforms for support because they own the database of prospects.
Unlike PPC ads and similar approaches, email marketing gives marketers the ability to manage every part of their campaigns.
Sure, there are different tools to help you get started building lists and acquire more email subscribers, but these tools are normally under your full control.
Higher Return-On-Investment (ROI)
As we mentioned earlier, email marketing is relatively affordable, so companies don’t need to make huge investments to set up a successful campaign.
With this in mind, this strategy can help you raise awareness about a new product, boost the performance of your content marketing activities, and increase the number of sales you generate.
Generating more revenue through a small investment results in a higher ROI, which allows you to allocate more resources to growing your business.
According to some estimates, the ROI of email marketing campaigns is higher than PPC, social media marketing, and SEO, which is the reason 87% of companies use this technique to nurture leads.
How to Develop a Successful Marketing Email Campaign
Now that we’ve discussed the definition of email marketing and its benefits, it’s time to go over the steps you need to take to develop a successful campaign.
This article covers a variety of email marketing best practices, but in this section we’ll go over a quick outline of the different stages.
All companies are different, so there is no exact set of instructions on how to do email marketing that works for all businesses.
You have to take a look at your requirements, budget, client base, and other variants in order to determine the best approach for your organization.
With the above in mind, the general stages that almost all companies go through are:
Setting Short and Long-Term Objectives
The key to succeeding with email advertising is to take an organized approach.
Before developing content or setting your plan in stone, you should create a set of goals and objectives to help measure the success of your campaign.
Focus on setting both short and long-term objectives, including small milestones that will help keep your work team on track.
For example, a good short-term goal would be to build up your email list of subscribers by a set number during the first month.
Milestones can include activities like the implementation of forms on your site and the development of content that’s designed to attract potential subscribers.
As for long-term goals, you should stick to goals that can be measured, but think in terms of 3 to 12 months down the line.
How many leads do you want to generate during this time frame? What elements will you add to your marketing mix? When should you release these materials? All these are questions that should be answered at this point.
But, remember to be realistic with your estimates, otherwise you’ll be setting yourself up for failure.
Learning About Your Target Audience
As with most other promotion strategies, you need to learn more about your audience before you begin crafting your marketing emails.
Effective email marketing strategies capture customers’ attention and use valuable content to keep them engaged.
However, the only way to produce content that your potential subscribers deem as useful is to understand their pain points and develop materials that help solve these challenges.
Fortunately, learning about your audience is much easier than a few decades ago.
Today, companies can rely on a variety of tools to help them understand consumer trends that are currently shaping their industries.
Furthermore, organizations should look at their current base of customers and subscribers to determine what factors encouraged them to purchase or subscribe to your email newsletter.
By reverse-engineering knowledge based on your current customers, you’ll develop great email campaigns that reel in more subscribers and have higher open rates.
Developing a Tailored Strategy
Once you’ve set your objectives and gained in-depth knowledge about your audience, it’s time to create a tailored campaign for your business.
Developing an email strategy is more complex than figuring out what emails to send when.
For starters, you should look at your set of goals and your budget. The first steps usually include implementing features that help capture email address and other pieces of information from online users.
So, determine which basic changes are the most important, calculate their cost, and create a timeline based on the funds you have available.
Use the same technique for all steps until you create a blueprint of your plan.
After outlining your entire email marketing strategy, start thinking about the content you’ll create.
If possible, you should review your previous email analytics and website statistics to find out which content is performing best.
Then, establish a schedule for developing these materials, creating a sequence, and writing out the emails for each stage.
Getting help from an email marketing specialist can help simplify the process and allow you to focus on delivering the best service to your customers.
Choosing an Email Marketing Platform
Now that we’ve examined why email marketing is important, let’s look at the benefits of choosing the right platform to manage your campaign.
There are dozens of different email service providers out there, so choosing the best options is not always easy.
As a general rule of thumb, you’ll want to choose a platform that allows you to send targeted emails, create visually-appealing messages that yield a high click-through-rate, and allows marketing automation.
It’s important to note that some platforms offer unique features, but you should ideally find an email service that has all the basics before looking at these details.
We’ll go over the top platforms to create email campaigns later on in this article, but it’s important to understand that the combination of tools you choose will directly affect the results you get.
You should take the time and research the different options for each activity you need to carry out, from form building right down to content creation and integrations with your other tools.
Determining the Different Sequences
Every successful online email marketing campaign relies on an effective sequence of messages that gently move subscribers down the sales funnel.
But, to develop these sequences, you need to have an in-depth understanding of the buyer’s journey.
The buyer’s journey represents the different steps that the average prospect follows before becoming a customer.
That said, you may have more than one stereotypical customer, which means that you have to develop tailored sequences for each segment of your audience.
You should already have a good understanding of the buyer’s journey from the customer research stage. If you don’t have enough information, you can always develop a few variations and conduct split testing to see which variants give you the best results.
Starting or Growing the Email List
Depending on the features you have on your website, you may already have an email list to start with.
If this is the case, you’ll need to focus on updating your current email list and growing the number of subscribers you currently have.
Some companies may not have the luxury of starting with an email list, so they’ll need to develop a plan to attract potential customers.
In the vast majority of cases, consumers are happy to exchange their email address for information they deem as valuable. Once again, knowing your audience is crucial, but you also have to watch the quality of the content you release.
If the quality of your lead generation content is questionable, you won’t be able to build an effective email marketing campaign.
Creating the Campaign Content
There are different types of content you’ll need to create for your business’ email campaign.
Email newsletters are a must, but you’ll also have to promote your blog posts, pages, and other content on your website.
The good news is that email marketing plays well with other techniques. For example, if you already have an inbound marketing plan in place, you can promote this content through email to boost the performance of your entire digital promotion efforts.
With the above in mind, you’ll also have to develop tailored content to move each segment of your audience down the funnel.
First off, you should determine which materials should be sent to customers in which stage.
Subscribers in the early stages of the funnel respond well to blogs, tutorials, and lighter content.
Potential customers that are further down the sales funnel prefer more comprehensive pieces like ebooks, white papers, and case studies.
When you have a good idea of what content is suitable for which stage, you should write the email sequences that will help transform subscribers into paying customers.
There’s a good chance your subscribers will open your emails mobile devices, so you may need to make some adjustments to your content.
You won’t necessarily have to write new content, but you’ll want to ensure your website and marketing materials can be viewed comfortably by people with mobile devices
Completing the Last Checks and Launch Your Campaign
Even if you feel like you built an effective email marketing plan, take the time to complete the last checks and review the whole strategy one last time.
Verify that the sequence you create makes sense and that your content has been proofed and is ready to go.
Also, remember to test the email address forms on your website to ensure they’re saving the data on your email list.
Take this opportunity to test the different integrations you put in place and make sure that all of them are working properly. The last thing you need is for subscribers to leave their data and for it not to get transferred to your email list.
After reviewing your campaign, you can hit the launch button and send out the first wave of email newsletters and other targeted emails.
Monitor and Optimize
Email marketing has evolved into a complex art form, so blasting subscribers with wave after wave of promotional emails won’t do the trick anymore.
Modern consumers are savvy and they have access to email providers that filter out promotional materials based on the subject line and other elements. Even if your emails have a high open rate, you need to ensure that potential customers are following the right steps after.
Like other forms of online techniques, email marketing allows you to monitor and adjust your campaign based on the results you get.
Remember, your email campaigns are composed of a variety of different parts, so you’ll need to keep a close eye on a set of key statistics that give you valuable insights.
You should always measure your emails’ click-through-rate, but also take the time to determine which other metrics hold the most value for your business.
Then, track these statistics and make tweaks to continuously improve the performance of your marketing materials.
Tips to Grow Your Email List
There are many factors that will affect the performance of your email campaign, but growing your list may be the most important part of this marketing strategy.
Sure, the subject line, content, and website you redirect subscribers to will have an impact on the results you get. But, you will never be able to generate enough income from your email marketing if you don’t have a large number of subscribers.
You may run into companies that sell email address lists that are supposed to help you get started.
In our experience, these lists don’t generate positive results, even if they claim to be ultra-relevant to your audience. Avoid buying lists from third parties and focus those resources on creating a comprehensive email campaign instead.
Below, we’ve put together a few email marketing tips to help you build your list of subscribers.
Craft a Lead Magnet
In order to create a larger email list, you’ll need to lure subscribers with great content.
Remember, consumers know how to differentiate between functional and superficial content, so you’ll need to produce materials that convince each user to leave his or her email address.
Creating a lead magnet is a great way to collect emails for your marketing campaigns.
In simple terms, a lead magnet is a piece of super-valuable content you exchange for a user’s email address. Lead magnets don’t have to be expensive or complex, you simply have to offer something that your audience deems useful.
Some of the digital materials you can provide include PDFs, MP3 files, or any other type of content your audience likes to consume.
At this stage you shouldn’t worry about open rates or the subject line you’ll use on each message, simply create something that will help you build your email list.
Remember, you should make your lead magnet:
Easy to Download and Read
To get access to your content, potential customers have to provide their email address, which already represents an obstacle in their eyes.
Make sure you simplify the process and develop an easy downloading flow. This will help encourage visitors to become subscribers and ensure that your potential customers get access to the content they need.
The average consumers’ reading skills are relatively basic, so you should also make your content easy to read.
This may vary from one industry to the next, so you have to determine the best writing level for your audience based on the results you get. But, you also have to ensure your content still delivers in terms of quality.
You can use online tools to check the level of the content you write or partner with a digital marketing firm that specializes in targeted email campaigns.
Packed with Actionable Information
Although it still delivers amazing results, marketing emailing is a common practice in almost all industries.
To stand out, your business has to develop content that’s packed with actionable information.
In most cases, offering long-form content is a great idea because it provides enough space to address your customers’ biggest challenges.
White papers, ebooks, and case studies are the perfect types of content to use as a lead magnet because they can be downloaded and as comprehensive as you want.
That said, you have to know what challenges customers face in order to create a piece of content that works as a solution. You should compile statistics from reputable sources or conduct your own research and highlight the practical data that your subscribers can put in place.
Immediately Available
Like all other people, your potential customers are constantly seeking for immediate rewards.
While some companies tend to announce their lead magnets before they’re available, this can cause them to lose some of the hype built by their promotional materials.
In our experience, the best method is to make lead magnets immediately available to customers
Potential subscribers are already facing an issue by the time they’re researching different solutions.
In most cases, these users want to find an immediate solution, so making them wait to get access may not create the right effect.
It’s worth noting that this varies depending on the industry.
For example, if your business serves an industry that’s always looking for improvements, like online streaming, you may benefit from promoting your lead magnet before it’s rolled out.
Implement Forms on Your Site
The forms on your site will help you capture each user’s email address as well as other crucial pieces of information that you’ll use during the optimization process.
Your form should have two different purposes, which are to collect contact information and to get email newsletter subscribers.
Think about your opt-in form as a smaller version of your website.
After all, it has a similar goal, which is to convince potential customers to take a specific step. And, like your website, your subscribers will evaluate a variety of different elements when determining whether to fill out your forms or to pass on the opportunity.
Not all forms are the same, so you need to pay attention to the design, placement, and other variables to try to find the best combination.
In our experience, some of the qualities shared by successful forms include:
Attractive and Clear Graphics
To some, forms on a website may all look the same. But there’s actually an almost infinite variety of design elements you can add to the forms on your website.
Each audience is different, so you’ll need to understand the elements that our potential customers find attractive in order to know which variables to implement.
Although the form should be noticeable, it should not stand out in a negative way so it should follow a similar design to your website.
Furthermore, you need to ensure that the font, contrast, and other basic elements follow sound practices. This will result in a clear form that instills confidence in customers and encourages them to leave their email addresses.
Small Number of Fields
Having a convenient form will increase the number of subscribers you get, so don’t bother creating complex forms that require too much information.
While this can be a good strategy in a handful of industries, you should keep the number of fields on your form to a minimum and only request, first name, last name, and email address.
Modern consumers are privacy conscious, so asking customers to leave too many details can have a negative effect on your conversions.
Make sure that your form has a link to the terms of use for your download and also request user consent before signing them up for your newsletter.
Highlight the Benefits of the Content and Have at Least One Call-to-Action
It’s true that the opt-in forms don’t have that much space, but you should highlight the benefits of the content to reinforce customers’ decision to download your lead magnet.
Some companies have started including space for a few bullet points as part of their form design, which allows them to mention a few benefits during the fill out process.
Having at least one call to action can also increase the number of subscribers you generate through your downloadable content.
In opt-in forms, calls to action are usually buttons that people have to click on to complete the subscription process. These buttons often have a small text that tells subscribers what to do, for example, “click here to download your guide” or something along those lines.
Drive More Website Traffic Through SEO and Other Strategies
Customers view your website as your online storefront, so you should leverage this channel and try to drive more traffic through different strategies.
Before you start sending more visitors to your website, analyze your most important pages and make sure that all your forms are working.
You should also verify that your servers are equipped to handle a boost in traffic and that your marketing team is prepared for an increase in subscribers.
Once everything is set, you can turn to social media, search engine optimization (SEO), and other techniques to generate more subscribers from your lead magnet.
SEO
Search engine optimization is a marketing strategy that focuses on driving traffic to your website through organic or unpaid means. The main goal of this approach is to increase your website’s rankings on Google and other search engines.
This, in turn, results in a higher number of potential customers visiting your site, which should help you collect more leads.
There are dozens of different elements that affect your website’s SEO rankings, so you need to develop a separate strategy to increase the number of organic visitors you receive. With this in mind, SEO is among the most affordable forms of online marketing and it can help you build a great reputation and grow your email list at the same time.
PPC
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a form of paid marketing that allows you to place ads throughout a variety of platforms.
Google Ads, the most reputable ad network out there, lets companies place paid ads on its search results, which can also exponentially boost the number of visitors you get on a daily basis.
However, PPC is not as affordable as SEO because you have to pay for every click generated.
It’s still more cost-effective than traditional forms of advertising and the best part is that it provides results right away. If you choose to invest in a PPC campaign, you’ll probably have a much bigger email list by the time you launch your campaign.
Especially if you compliment it with good social media marketing.
Social Media Marketing
Social media has become an essential part of our identity as humans.
For businesses, social media networks went from publishing platforms to reliable sources of potential customers, so you can turn to Facebook and other channels to help you get more customer emails.
As with search engines, you can choose to run an organic or unpaid social media campaign.
Paid social media campaigns tend to be more affordable than traditional PPC, plus these platforms give you more targeting settings due to the amount of information customers willingly provide. While this may not affect your emails’ open rate, social media users tend to be more engaged, plus your business will have more credibility if you have a solid social presence.
Email Marketing Platforms: Which One is the Best?
We mentioned earlier that there are dozens of quality email marketing platforms to choose from, so finding the ideal fit may require some research.
Like with the rest of your strategy, you’ll have to analyze your requirements and find a set of tools that give you the ability to create as well as manage multiple email marketing campaigns at the same time.
At Fannit, we’ve worked with a variety of different tools, but we found that the best email marketing tools are the most comprehensive options.
These can often integrate easily into your entire digital promotion plan and help you get started without much hassle.
Below are our top three picks for the best email marketing available for companies today.
MailChimp
If you’ve researched email marketing platforms before, you’ve likely heard of MailChimp.
This powerful tool offers a simple interface that’s packed with great features ideal for starters and experienced marketers alike.
It offers integrations with just about every other email marketing tool available, plus it has a free plan if you want to test the waters and start paying once you see results.
Through MailChimp, you can create sales introduction email templates, develop an engaging subject line for each message in your sequence, and run different tests to find the best combinations. However, you’ll have to sign up for one of their paid plans if you want to have access to the platform’s fancier features.
Constant Contact
For many companies Constant Contact is the best email marketing tool available because it has a robust infrastructure that’s suitable for campaigns of all sizes.
The platform allows you to create professional-looking emails through a drag-and-drop tool.
Plus, you can send out automated emails and track your campaign’s performance through one single platform.
Constant Contact is available for free for a limited period of time before you have to start paying for the tool.
It’s an excellent choice in terms of email campaign creation and management, but it still has a few limitations if you’re looking at your marketing strategy as a whole.
Hubspot
In our humble opinion, Hubspot is the best platform to manage email marketing campaigns.
The reason for this is that it doesn’t only allow you to manage email marketing campaigns, but it serves as a central hub for your inbound promotion plan.
Hubspot can help you create rich templates and email sequences, plus you can measure how well they’re performing through the platform’s in-house tracking system.
Incorporating an email strategy into Hubspot and your inbound plan will have a positive effect on all of your marketing activities because it will create a more holistic promotion machine.
Identifying Segments and Separating Client Groups
If you’ve launched any type of promotional campaign before, you understand the importance of identifying the segments you want to target.
Client segments refer to the stereotypical groups that make up your customer base.
In other words, these are the different audiences that you’ll be sending emails to. And, they are important because different segments find different content elements engaging, so knowing about the different user groups will help you create better marketing materials.
Even if you want to broaden your reach, you should always start by creating different segments based on the email marketing analytics of your current client base.
These are the segments you are currently attracting and profiting from, so you should capitalize on these and slowly develop additional campaigns to attract other audiences.
How to Create Different Segments
Understanding why it’s important to create segments is one thing, but learning how to divide your client base takes a bit of practice.
For starters, you have to identify the similarities in customer behavior patterns and create different groups based on this information.
This process is similar to creating buyer personas, which are fictional representations of your ideal customers.
You should aim to include as much detail as possible, like age range, potential company titles, and other pieces of information you get from your current customers.
Some of the similarities you should look for during the segmentation process include:
Status
The most basic way to categorize your segments is depending if they’re new or current subscribers.
New subscribers should receive a series of welcome emails before receiving the same materials as people who are already getting your newsletters and other marketing materials.
Make
Depending on the complexity of your email marketing plan, the series of welcome emails can serve as a simple introduction or start moving people down the sales funnel right away.
Email campaigns designed to move prospects down the funnel immediately may include call to action buttons that trigger different email sequences depending on which ones people choose
Interests and Preferences
Companies can also segment their email list based on people’s preferences and interests. In your contact form, you can include a small checkbox for customers who are interested in getting updates about your blog and similar content.
Then, you can divide your list based on which customers want to get information about your offers and people that want to hear about your new blog posts.
You can also use additional techniques to collect more information about your target audience and create other subgroups based on interests and preferences.
For example, flower shops can send out email surveys to find out which customers are interested in specific species, then create segments accordingly.
Location
Companies that serve the local community can also segment their lists by location.
If your business serves Seattle and surrounding areas, you can segment users by city, like Edmonds, Redmond, Kirkland, Bellevue, and so on.
If the bulk of your sales come from cities around your area, you should focus on promoting your services to your local audience.
Email segmentation is a good start, but you should combine this strategy with local SEO and other techniques that help you connect with people in your immediate community.
Activity Level
The first few days after making the initial contact is crucial because subscribers are “warm,” which means they’ve recently engaged and are more likely to respond to your marketing emails.
As people’s activity levels begin to decline, they become “cold” and are less likely to interact with your materials.
Instead of blasting both user groups with the same emails, you should create an additional segment to people who haven’t reacted to your messages in a while. You can remind these users what steps you want them to take in order to re-enter your funnel while you gradually nurture the rest of your leads.
Open Rate
All effective email marketing strategies include open rate optimization, but this doesn’t mean that all of your potential customers will interact with your messages at the same level.
People that have higher open rates are easier to engage, so you may be able to move them down the funnel faster with more direct marketing.
The group of people that has a lower open rate will be harder to convince, but these users can still be converted.
You may have to play the long game on these, but be patient, stick to your strategy, and you’ll be able to transform them into sales.
Lead Source
Knowing where your leads came from can give you an advantage because you will understand what path they’re more likely to follow.
The people on your list that came in through search engines and other organic sources are likely looking for a solution, but they tend to follow traditional buyer journeys.
Social media leads, on the other hand, tend to have better engagement metrics.
While an aggressive tactic may not pay off, being casual and taking a lighter tone can yield stellar results.
Shopping Cart Status
Keep in mind that segmentation doesn’t have to occur at one exact stage.
If your prospects almost always follow the same path until they enter the bottom of the funnel, you can start segmenting your list in this phase.
For ecommerce companies and other businesses that offer shopping abilities online, segmenting their list by shopping card status can yield a higher number of conversions.
Just remember, people who added items and abandoned the website without attempting to check out should have a different sequence from prospects that changed their mind on the payment screen.
Strategies to Improve Email Open Rates
The first hurdles that you’ll have to overcome are building your email list and getting people’s permission to send them regular updates.
But, this doesn’t mean that it’s smooth sailing after that. Unfortunately, spam filters are among the biggest challenges that your emails will face before making it to your customers.
Below, we’ve put together a list of tips to help you overcome some of the most common challenges you will face.
Focus on Avoiding Spam Filters
How often should you send marketing emails? Is there such a thing as sending too many sales emails? What happens if you send too many emails too regularly? There is no exact formula to know the perfect frequency, so you’ll have to look at your company and figure out which is the best combination.
But, one thing we know for sure is that blasting your subscribers with low quality emails will likely get you tagged as spam.
Spam filters work automatically, so they rely on a set of rules (and artificial-intelligence in super-fancy platforms) in order to categorize all incoming mail.
The goods news is that there are different steps you can take to reduce the chances of being sent to the spam file, where your emails will never be seen by your target.
To avoid being categorized as spam, make sure to:
- Only send emails to customers who have opted in
- Send all messages from verified domains
- Have your technology team clean out your emails’ code
- Don’t send emails too often
- Include a how-to that helps subscribers whitelist your emails
- Avoid using aggressive sales language
- Never bait and switch!
- Include location information
- Let users easily opt out of your emails
Eliminate Inactive Subscribers from Your Email List
If you’re thinking about email marketing ideas, removing users from your list is probably not the first thing to come to mind.
But, the only way to maintain a fresh list that accurately represents your customers, you need to eliminate people who are not interacting with your emails anymore.
After you segment it, your email list will help you take a variety of marketing decisions.
However, if many of the users on your list are not active anymore, you should remove them in order to keep your list up to date.
Leaving inactive subscribers will skew your analytics data and likely send you down the wrong path.
Study the Buyer’s Journey to Deliver Content with Better Timing
One of the worst ideas we constantly see in beginner campaigns is to use email to promote a gimmick.
Not only is this type of marketing obsolete, but modern consumers may actually take offense to it.
Instead, your potential customers would rather see you showcase the quality of your solutions and how these can be of use to them.
By studying the buyer’s journey, you’ll have a better idea of the challenges that prospects face at different stages of their decision-making process. This will help you create more engaging materials and send them out at crucial times, which will likely increase your open rates.
Create an Engaging Subject Line
The vast majority of successful email campaigns employ engaging subject lines that work like hooks, capturing readers’ attention the moment they are viewed.
In the majority of cases, subject lines that spark curiosity, include statistics, and use a friendly tone tend to produce great results. This may vary from company to company, to run a few tests before choosing one specific style.
The subject lines you use will make or break your email marketing campaign, so speak your audience’s language and pay attention to the small details to increase your chances of success.
Address One Person in Your Emails
For consumers, there is nothing worse than companies that use email like an old-school billboard ad.
That’s the feeling that cookie-cutter, non-personalized emails create.
Instead of simply saying “hi” or addressing all of your customers, make sure to address each individual by the name they provided.
Everyone knows that you’re sending the same emails to hundreds of other users, but no one wants to feel like they are just a number.
Talk to one single person, use the subscriber’s name, and make them feel like they’re getting a message from a friend rather than getting materials that are clearly part of your email marketing plan.
Be Casual (If Possible)
It’s common to see companies using a casual tone in their marketing, especially in email.
We know that this isn’t necessarily a great approach for all companies, but you’d be surprised by how much consumers love to get casual emails from a company.
It makes them feel as if they’re speaking to a friend rather than a brand that’s promoting a product, which changes the entire interaction.
We believe that being casual (while still keeping it professional) is a great option for your email marketing strategy — as long as you can pull it off. And, if you’re in doubt, you can always run a few tests to gauge your audience’s sentiment.
Dazzle Your Audience with Outstanding Content
Remember the no gimmick rule? Well, we’ll double down on that advice and strongly suggest you attempt to dazzle your audience with amazing content instead.
From the email design right down to the functionality of the content, you should use email to deliver value, which will gradually help you close more sales.
Although emails give you a lot of space to include content, having ultra-long emails doesn’t necessarily mean that users will read your content.
On the contrary, you should use your email marketing strategy to give readers a taste of your content and send them to your blogs, pages, and downloadables instead.
Use Humour (Again, When Possible)
Injecting humor into your messages is also among the most common business email ideas.
But like casual tones, you need to ensure you can get away with it first.
B2B providers and companies in relatively orthodox industries have to test the water and implement little humor, if any at all.
However, some industries lend themselves to this technique, so it’s worth trying if you think your company can benefit. But, regardless of your specialty, always stick to more innocent humor and avoid anything that can be seen as offensive.
Optimize, Optimize, and Optimize
We’ve already covered the importance of general optimization, but you can create a process that allows you to improve open rates specifically.
Getting higher open rates should boost the performance of your campaign or allow you to see which is the biggest obstacle that steps prospects from moving down the funnel, so in either way you’ll get something good out of it.
Automating Your Email Campaign
We’ve finally gone over all the basics you need to understand in order to create a bigger list, design a campaign, and start to send your emails. But, there’s a variety of techniques you can employ to make the email campaign management process a lot simpler.
Email marketing automation is the process of automating various steps in your campaign.
The most common form of automation is auto-replying to people’s emails, but you can set up a system that automatically sends out sequences that are triggered by specific actions.
Here are the steps you need to take to implement email marketing automation.
Choose an Automation Tool
There are dozens of email marketing automation tools out there, so you’ll have to find an option that has all the features your company needs.
Hubspot is the most comprehensive solution in terms of overall marketing strategy, but you may find other platforms that also work for your business.
Just make sure you choose a platform that allows you to create sequences that include attractive call to action buttons and other key elements.
Set Objectives for Your Automation Strategy
Like your marketing plan, you should create a set of goals for your automation strategy.
You don’t have to settle for one either — you can create automation sequences to welcome people who recently subscribed, move them down the funnel, and to help with any other step you want them to take.
Create a Detailed Blueprint of the Email Sequence
Even though the email sequence will be automated, you still have to create an outline of the order of each message.
This will give you a better idea of how logical and effective your marketing automation strategy will be. And, you can also figure out the best email subject lines for every message.
Write Engaging Copy
It doesn’t matter if you’re developing an email or text message marketing strategy, before you start to send automated notifications, you also have to write the contents of each message.
People will react to your subject lines, but if the emails contain low-quality content, your prospects will lose interest in your materials.
In addition to the copy, also include links to the resources on your website and social media channels in case subscribers want to learn more information right away.
Optimize Your Sequence Frequently
Remember, people won’t always take the steps you want them to when you send out an email.
If you notice a negative pattern developing, there’s no reason why you should stick to a strategy that’s not providing the right results.
If you notice your emails are not having the desired effect, change variables like the tone, subject line, and other content before you send it to people on your list.
Start Your Email Marketing Campaigns Today!
Creating an email strategy that works and crafting an effective sequence takes a lot of time, but this technique can become a valuable source of leads for your company.
We hope that our email marketing guide helps you understand the different benefits of this approach and gives you the information you need to get started and send out engaging emails today.
If you want to learn more about working with a seasoned marketing firm that can help you develop and manage your strategy, contact Fannit today and our team will be glad to help.
