One of the earliest forms of Digital Marketing is E-Mail Marketing. If done properly it can do wonders for businesses.
E-Mail Marketing is very effective to build a loyal customer base who can become your repeat customers and also market on your behalf to new customers as well.
While it sounds easy, the response rate of e-mail marketing is not high and marketers invent new ways and means to make it successful.
Proper targeting, landing page, and content along with timing is key to a successful e-mail marketing campaign.
With the advanced e-mail applications like Outlook and GMail it’s not surprising to land up in the spam folder.
Also with new laws like GDPR it’s risky to send e-mails without having proper consent from recipients or customers.
So it’s not an easy task to run an effective e-mail marketing campaign, but if one understands all key aspects and focuses on optimizing using available tools and creativity then e-mail marketing can be a huge success.
In this blog, we will focus on various key aspects of e-mail marketing and how those can be optimized for better outcomes.
Current trend and Challenges for E-mail Marketing
With the attention span reducing day by day from readers in the digital world, it’s becoming difficult to hold readers focus on e-mail marketing campaigns.
Compared to earlier days more analytics, effort, creativity, and innovation are required to get desired results from any e-mail marketing campaign.
The emergence of social networking sites and messaging applications reducing the usage of e-mail day-by-day and thus reducing the scope for e-mail marketing.
With all these challenges, e-mail marketing still got a very high return on investment (ROI) if done properly with end-user needs in mind.
Key aspects for a successful e-mail campaign
Below are the key aspects of any e-mail marketing campaign and need special attention and effort to make it successful.
- Goals
- Contact list
- Segmentation
- E-mail Content
- Landing Page
- Testing
- Frequency
- Measure
- Tools
Contact List
A contact list is the starting point for any E-Mail Marketing campaign. Proper attention and effort should be given in creating an exhaustive yet responsive contact list or database along with details on like sand dislikes.
Regular review and update of the contact list are essential in order to keep the relevant contacts who are interested in your products or services so that the response rate is higher for e-mail marketing campaigns.
Read this if you want to know how to create a responsive contact list for your e-mail marketing campaigns.
Segmentation
Sending the same e-mail to all in your contact list may not work well because the interests and preferences differ from person to person.
So a customized e-mail per person of a group of a person based on likes and dislikes is very much essential for a better response rate and success of any campaign.
To create a group of contacts among many with similar likes is called segmentation.
Segmentation can be based on various parameters for example age, gender, location, interests etc or even previous responses to the e-mail marketing campaigns, etc.
It becomes easier to target and create separate e-mail campaigns for each group or segment of people with similar interests and this way, the effectiveness of each e-mail campaign becomes better.
Goals
Setting goals for yourself for your e-mail marketing is key to creating a successful campaign and related activities.
For example, goals can be to send useful content to engage readers and make a bigger user base and also collect their preferences for better targeting or goal can be providing valuable eBooks, how-tos or cheat sheets to gain reader confidence on your knowledge and authority on topic or areas of blogging or goals can be selling products or services.
Frequency
how soon you need to send e-mail campaigns is an important aspect and there is no one rule fit for all for this.
Depending upon responses, campaign type, goal, the frequency can be determined. Over a period of time, it has to get refined based on responses.
One schedule will not fit all as each individual is different and they prefer different ways to receive e-mails to consume and response.
While the initial plan could be the same interval but creating a personalized or at least people with similar interests over time is highly essential for a better open rate.
Tools
E-mail Marketing without proper tools is very time consuming and not advisable.
There are numerous tools available for free as well as paid in the market such as MailChimp, ConvertKit, etc to help automate most of the e-mail marketing activities.
These tools can do most of the manual work and in quick time, for example, the most important part that is maintaining the Contact database can be easily achieved by these tools.
They can also bulk upload, create beautiful and effective landing pages, come up with valuable customer insights to alter the future e-mail campaigns and much more.
Choosing the right tool based on the usage and functionality is very helpful in executing e-mail marketing campaigns. Please read the tools for e-mail marketing to choose the right one for your needs.
Landing Page
This is the page you want your readers to spend time and buy services or products or subscribe to newsletters, download eBooks, etc when they click on the link inside the e-mail.
If not done properly readers will leave this page making your e-mail campaign a failure.
Tools such as mailchimp, Constant Contact can help here to a great extent and can help you to create an effective yet simple Landing page.
Have one to one relation between the e-mail subject. content with that of the landing page.
Provide more information and useful content over the e-mail body on the landing page so that the reader will be interested to browse through for better engagement and action.
E-Mail Content
The key to any e-mail marketing campaign is, how to make readers read and act in the e-mail.
There are various aspects to look at in order to create an effective e-mail to increase the conversion rate, they are as follows
- Overall Design – Simplistic design is taking over heavy and rich content e-mail marketing. For a better open rate create a simple yet powerful e-mail page.
- Subject line – Keep it short and catchy and simple
- Call to Action Links – Make it clearly visible where you want readers to visit. keep it to only one link if possible
- Length – Keep it short don’t make it long and boring
- Number of Ideas – Keep it to one idea per e-mail, do not combine multiple ideas into one e-mail campaign
- Mobile friendly – More and more people check e-mails from mobile these days so it’s important to optimize the e-mail as well as the landing page for mobile.
- Engaging & Persuasive – Be creative to come up with an engaging body text to generate interest in the reader’s minds.
- Formatting – Very important aspect, even if you have all the above correct but the look and feel of the e-mail or landing page are not taken care then the bounce rate will be higher. Keep e-mails simple, readable, easy to understand.
- Option to Unsubscribe – Always provide a link to unsubscribe and if someone does that then update the contact list so that in the future campaign it will be excluded from the e-mail distribution.
Testing
Testing e-mail campaigns are very critical for success and there are various ways to test your campaigns using e-mail marketing tools, one such testing methodology is called a/b testing.
In A/B Testing we divide the user base or readers into 2 parts and send 2 different e-mail templates for the same campaign and see the response.
Landing pages should be tested properly with engaging and accurate content related to the e-mail marketing campaign.
Make sure the links are redirecting to the appropriate pages, more importantly, the landing page.
Test for all device types and sizes, browser compatibility to make sure users don’t face any issues while using different devices or browsers.
Measure
Analytics helps Digital Marketing to refine the strategy over time based on previous results.
Using Analytics Tools we can come up with various KPIs and Metrics to understand the effectiveness of each e-mail campaign.
Measuring performance is important in order to make e-mail marketing campaigns more successful. To understand which aspects of the campaign are working and where we need to tweak or improve.
Modern e-mail marketing tools such as mailchimp, Constant Contact, convertkit etc come with various analytics by itself.
Apart from that tools such as Google Analytics can help to get more insights into the e-mail marketing campaign for regular reporting and action.
E-Mail marketing Metrics
Metrics are key to measuring the effectiveness of any campaign. E-mail marketing tools and also specific web analytics tool such as Google Analytics helps in this.
below are few key metrics related to E-mail marketing
Finally…
E-mail marketing is still very key to digital marketing and we recommend you to keep this in your digital marketing strategy.