Email Marketing Strategy Tips: How To Improve Your Email Campaign

    by Miroslava Vavshko
    17.02.2020

    blog

    Are you new to the world of email marketing and catchy newsletters with a high conversion rate? Then, we have great news for you: in this article, you will be able to find the best tips for email marketing that will increase the efficiency of your campaigns and drive more clicks and conversions to them.

    How to get a hold of relevant contacts? How to create a powerful message to get the attention of your audience? How to gather and understand the results? Review our email marketing tips and techniques to learn the answers.

    What Is An Email Marketing?

    Email marketing is one of the digital marketing activities that implies the process of sending commercial email messages to a selected audience. The purpose of email campaigns is to drive purchases, subscriptions, and appointment booking, increase brand awareness, enhance the brand image or grow customer loyalty to the brand.

    Usually, marketers use email marketing automation platforms that allow sending bulk emails to audiences of hundreds or even thousands of recipients. Moreover, this type of tool can have even wider functionality and include features like an email lead extractor or email logger.

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    How Does Email Marketing Work And Why Is It Important?

    So, before going to email marketing strategy tips, let’s contemplate all the essentials of email marketing. 

    The process of launching an email marketing campaign looks the next way:

    • choosing the objectives you want to achieve with the help of this campaign;
    • selecting the right audience and gathering an email list;
    • creating an email newsletter that will appeal to the recipients and drive them to a certain action;
    • sending the campaign;
    • gathering the results of the campaign and analyzing the efficiency of the campaign;
    • implementing changes based on the conclusions made on achieved results.

    Some specialists prefer to run split testing to test different messages and choose the one that delivers better results. 

    As you can guess, there is a big value behind email marketing, otherwise, it won’t be one of the most popular marketing channels. Emails offer a lot of flexibility to marketers: you can use different types of content within the message, you can build triggered email chains to reach out to your prospects or customers when your offer might be relevant to them, and you can nurture your leads and build long-term, meaningful relationships with your customers. Moreover, when you find a strategy that would be efficient and suitable for you, you will be able to generate high-quality leads.

    Email marketing will work perfectly in combination with other instruments and channels, like blogs, social media marketing, and SMS campaigns. 

    To sum it up, we would say that email marketing is a powerful channel, but as with any other tool, you need to find your way around it and select the approach that will work for your business and your audiences. Don’t forget to test different ideas and be patient: it is quite possible that you won’t get unbelievable results on the first try; but if you analyze your campaigns and improve them, you will be able to generate high conversion rates and high ROI.

    Where To Get An Email List?

    Gathering the right contacts is essential for efficient mailing. There are a few steps you might take, but they are united by one idea: you should use the contacts that people have willingly shared with you. 

    Never buy mailing lists or obtain emails through semi-legal or illegal ways: firstly, you risk losing your sender's reputation by breaking regulations, secondly, even if you manage to launch a campaign that will pass spam filters, you won’t get any good results, as your recipients won’t be happy to see your message.

    So, what should you do to create an email list that will work?

    • Create a sign-up widget or form on your website. Tell the people who are already interested in your business about your newsletter, highlight its value to the customers and give them a chance to join it. 
    • Promote your newsletters through your social media accounts and leave a link to the subscription, so the people who want to opt in will be able to do that.
    • Offer a sign-up list in your brick-and-mortar stores to engage those who come physically to your locations.
    • To drive subscriptions to your newsletter, offer some incentives to new subscribers, like one-time discounts or a bonus program. 

    And a pro tip: use any type of email verifier online to validate contacts. This simple action will help you to detect inactive or invalid email boxes and remove them from your list.

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    How To Create An Opt-in Form That Converts?

    The majority of email marketing campaign tips mention opt-in forms. However, creating a good form isn’t as simple as you can imagine. Just asking website visitors to share their email and name won’t be enough: no one likes to get more emails. Your opt-in form should persuade people to get on your email list. Hence, you need to show the value your customers will get from your newsletters. 

    The best way would be to use lead magnets like checklists, webinars, e-books, reports, etc., basically unique content pieces that would be interesting for your audience enough for them to share their email with you. 

    So, when creating an opt-in form, promise such an incentive to the people, and you will see an increase in sign-ups.

    Which Platform For Email Marketing Use?

    Due to the popularity of email marketing, there are a lot of solutions for it on the market. The tools vary in functionality and capacities, so you can pick software that will be suitable for the needs of your company. While navigating and evaluating your options, consider these parameters:

    • the number of emails you can send within a time period (usually, a month);
    • what type of editor the solution offers and how flexible it is;
    • if it has pre-build templates;
    • the capacities of the analytics and reporting the tool offers;
    • how well the company provides customer support;
    • if the software has some additional features like Whois Explorer or SMS marketing solutions.

    How To Measure Your Results?

    Tracking the results of your campaign is an important part of your email marketing activities. Without it, you won’t be able to adequately evaluate your efforts, comprehend if you are going in a right direction and adjust your strategy if needed. 

    There are several common metrics you need to track with your every campaign:

    • delivery rate: what percentage of emails were successfully delivered to their recipients;
    • open rate: what percentage of emails were opened;
    • click-through rate: what percentage of users clicked on the links included in the message;
    • conversion rate: what percentage of users converted;
    • reply rate: what percentage of users replies to your message.

    Having this data will help you understand if you are reaching your goals and how the audience perceive your messages. Usually, email marketing solutions have in-built analytics features that automatically track the metrics we mentioned. You can also use other tools like Google Analytics to obtain this data. 

    How To Improve Your Email Open Rates?

    If you ask what email marketing metrics you should focus on, we would name open rate. If your recipients don’t open your newsletter, it doesn’t matter how good it is. Hence, you need to work not only on your email content, but on the appearance of your email letter.

    To ignite the interest and ensure that your message would be clicked on, try the next effective email marketing tips:

    • create a catchy subject line; you don’t need to use more than ten words, but you need to make them win the attention of the recipients; hence, appeal to their needs and pains, and try not to look too spammy or suspicious;
    • use the right name for the mailbox you use to send campaigns; it is better to send newsletters from a certain person that just from the general name of your company;
    • try to use personalization in your subject lines and add names or titles of the person you are mailing;
    • choose the right time of day to reach out to your audience and look valuable and interesting instead of annoying and intruding.

    Tips To Start Effective Email Marketing Strategy

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    So, let’s go through the most successful email marketing tips you should follow when creating any type of email campaign. 

    Identify The Target Audience

    Always think about who you are writing to. Take your time to study your audience, and their pains, needs, wishes and habits will be obvious to you. This information will help you to come up with the right messages to appeal to the audience, and hence, it will be much easier to build long-term relationships with them. 

    Divide Your Mailing List Into Segments

    When you have successfully gathered your email list, don’t rush to send the same email message to them all. Your different products and services might be tailored to different audience segments, and it makes sense to diversify your email campaigns by the same logics. 

    You can go further and segment your audience even more and try different approaches on how to appeal to them and offer your services. Deeper diversification means deeper personalization, and it might increase your chances to hit the mark and trigger the action you are hoping for.

    Identify The Types Of Emails To Send

    Emails have a lot of flexibility, as there are several types of messages you can send out. The most common are:

    • newsletters in which you can share the news of your business, including new blog releases, event announces, seasonal special offers and discounts etc.;
    • nurturing emails you can launch to warm up the leads and push them further through your sales funnel;
    • promotional emails to promote any of your product or services with a special offer or a valuable content piece;
    • milestone emails to mark a significant date in the life of the customer (birthday, birthday of a child, wedding anniversary) or in their journey with your brand (an anniversary of subscription or first purchase);
    • surveys to request feedback from your clients on your services.

    You can use all of them, or choose one or two; it depends on the goals you are chasing with the help of email marketing. But remember not to overwhelm your customers with the constant flow of emails. When it becomes annoying, the customers would prefer to unsubscribe, and it would undermine all the efforts you dedicated to your email strategy.

    Create A Schedule For Sending Emails

    Email marketing tools allows you to automate the schedules, which will help you not only save your time, but ensure that no message was lost or missed. With this feature, you can also make your campaigns' management easier, and your delivery timing won’t be restricted to work hours or timezones.

    Format The Email Content

    Email marketing solutions gives you a lot of tools to make the content of your messages interactive and catchy. Whether you prefer to use templates or build an email yourself, always focus on creating quality and converting letter.

    Monitor Email Performance Reports

    We have mentioned the importance of tracking the performance of your campaigns previously. Don’t neglect analyzing the results of every campaign, otherwise, you risk to make the same mistakes all over again.

    Optimize Your Emails

    When you regularly generate data on your email performance, you can easily find your bottlenecks and fix them. This process is constant, so don’t stop yourself after the first or second fixes: every time you might find a way on how to make your message more converting or create more precise offer. 

    Conclusion

    In this article, we collected the best email marketing tips there can be. Use them to sharpen your email marketing activities to drive better results and remember: it is always about testing, evaluating and optimizing, so don’t be afraid of downfalls, just use them as an opportunity to improve and try other hypothesis or idea.

    Written by:
    Miroslava Vavshko
    Back to blog
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