Nearly every online marketer is focused on social media marketing right now. While it’s easy to think that the heyday of email marketing has come and gone, you may be missing out by giving email marketing a hard pass.
According to estimates by market and consumer data company Statista, there were over 4 billion email users in the world in 2020 — a number that’s projected to grow to 4.6 billion by 2025.
Even more convincing is marketing automation firm Delvira’s report that as many as 72% of people would rather receive promotions through email.
If you’ve yet to include email marketing in your marketing toolbox, it may be time to give it some serious consideration.
In this article, we tackle eight of the most common questions we encounter about email marketing so you can make it work for you.
#1. How can I build a sound email marketing strategy?
Incorporating email into your marketing strategy may be easier than you think. Here are three essential steps for creating an email marketing campaign:
- Define your goals and write them down. Do you want to find new customers or build relationships with an existing customer base? Do you want to increase awareness, sales, or drive more traffic to your website?
- Put together your mailing list and divide the recipients into consumer groups. This will allow you to better target customers and create more relevant content for each group.
- Craft compelling and relevant content. If you’d like, you can do A/B testing and compare how different messages, layouts, and formats perform against each other.
Though it has only three steps, you must give each step a lot of thought and careful analysis. An irrelevant and thoughtlessly produced email can cause it and your company to be quickly dismissed. Sound email messages, on the other hand, will establish credibility and could open the door for sales.
#2. How can I test and optimize an email campaign?
There are a variety of aspects that you should test your email campaigns for. Some of the areas you may want to test include:
- Subject lines and the preview
- The “from” name
- Copy length
- Text-to-image ratio
- Links/buttons
- Call to actions
- Layout
- When you will send your email (day/time)
- Links
- How your email appears on different devices
The factors you test can extend to items that are not mentioned above.
Test your campaign by selecting an area you want to analyze like different layouts or messages. You can then use A/B testing to see which one performs better.
#3. How can I measure the results of my email campaign?
There are many metrics you can use to measure your campaign’s success. Depending on your objectives, you can keep track of click-through rates, conversion rates, bounce rates, deliverability, open rates, etc.
#4. How can I use segmentation to target customers?
Segmentation is dividing your market into consumer groups. You can classify them based on different aspects like location, demographics, buying behavior, and more.
Segmentation is a useful tool in email marketing because it allows you to target your messages based on your groups. By delivering more personalized content, you stand a much better chance of delivering messages that are relevant to your readers and will therefore generate greater engagement and better results.
#5. How can I get customers to open my email?
Have trouble getting recipients to read your emails? One of the basic things you can check is the text that shows up in the “from” field of your email. This field should generally be straightforward and encourage credibility.
If the text you use to identify yourself is too ambiguous or prevents them from remembering that they signed up to receive your mail, they’ll understandably be suspicious or refuse to open your mail. The worst case is this can send your email straight to the spam folder.
#6. How can I keep my emails out of the spam folder?
Great question. Here are some easy ways to keep your emails from being marked as spam:
- Take a look at the emails in your spam folder and take note of what not to do when it comes to email marketing. You may notice that some have too many exclamation points, mention money, or make big promises. Check your email against these practices before sending anything out.
- Remove inactive subscribers and get permission to send to those on your mailing list. Don’t send unsolicited emails.
- There are certain tones, words, and phrases that have spam written all over them. Get to know them and don’t use them.
- Ask subscribers to whitelist you in their email apps.
- Include an “unsubscribe” link in your email. Sure, it sounds counterintuitive, but aside from complying with the CAN-SPAM Act, it shows integrity, builds credibility, and demonstrates confidence in the content you’re providing.
#7. How do I grow my email subscriber list?
Read these tips for growing your email list:
- Add a subscribe button to your website.
- Provide valuable content like free ebooks, whitepapers, etc., or offer discounts in exchange for their sign-up and email information.
- Though it entails expense, you can also buy mailing lists from lead generation companies. This, however, doesn’t guarantee quality leads and you won’t be sure if the owners of those emails have agreed to receive random messages.
When trying to grow your mailing list, the best way is to grow it organically by having people sign up through your website or by offering incentives.
#8. What time should I send marketing emails?
The best time to send marketing emails differs from industry to industry and depends on your target market.
Again, A/B testing is an easy way to determine at which times your desired market is more likely to respond. Before commencing with A/B testing, however, you may want to look at previous emails you sent out (if you have any) to help narrow down the time of day when consumer engagement was at its highest. Do the same to figure out the best days of the week as well.
It is also important to send emails at the right frequency. Too many and you risk becoming spam. Too few and your subscribers forget you.
Your Takeaway: Create Value and Address Your Readers’ Needs
At its core, email isn’t all that different from other marketing tools. All you need to do is put the consumer’s needs first and create value.
While the concept is simple, tweaking your strategy and communications as well as finding effective content for your brand will take up the majority of your efforts.
We hope this has helped you get a better understanding of email marketing. Did we answer all your questions on email marketing or do you have other unanswered questions? Let us know in the comments! We’d love to hear from you.