Email marketing has been around for several decades, and has been continuing to connect people and businesses in the digital space. However, not everyone recognizes its benefits because it appears to be “traditional” compared to other digital platforms — but it’s not all that. Even small businesses can make use of this tactic. In fact, 64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach their target audience. And as the online marketplace gets busier and the competition gets tighter, businesses would also need to step up their game and come up with effective marketing strategies to properly execute an equally effective marketing campaign.
How Can Email Marketing Elevate Your Business?
Here are some of the ways to help improve your email marketing campaign:
1. Segment Your Email List
Some marketers, especially when they’re just starting with their email marketing campaign, don’t realize the importance of having an email list, let alone building and organizing one. An email list is a list of email addresses of individuals and companies (a.k.a current and potential customers) who have subscribed to receive updates, discounts, and other information from your business. If you want to start doing your email marketing the right way, you should pay attention even to details such as your email list. It’s important to have an email list because it allows you to build connections and relationships with possible customers in a more personal approach.
Since your customers are at different stages in their customer journey, you should also customize your email marketing campaign so that you get to reach potential customers. Your approach should be different when you’re communicating with new customers who have yet to try your product or service, and with repeat customers. Through email segmentation, you can monitor the interests of your customers based on their behaviors, traits, and demographics. Doing this helps you create more personalized and relevant content for your target audience, hence resulting in a more effective marketing campaign.
2. Choose Catchy Subject Lines
When you’re using email as a marketing tool, keep in mind that you have a diverse list of customers at hand, and most of them can be receiving tons of emails each day. You’ll be competing with every email in their inbox, so you have to think of a subject line that will catch the attention of your customers. It should be able to draw their interest enough for them to choose to open your email before other potential competitors.
47% of email recipients click on an email based on its subject line, which means that choosing a catchy subject line is vital if you want to attract the right people to your business. Avoid making a subject line that’s too long and take note of the character count, so that your target audience can understand the message better. In addition, many people use their mobile phones to open emails and your subject line may be too long to fit the screen, which is why it’s ideal to make it mobile screen-friendly — short and to the point as much as possible. Have your subject line in bold as well to easily catch the eye of your target audience.
3. Don’t Use the Same Design Layout for Every Email
Your emails should come as unique to every demographic in your email list. So you shouldn’t use the same design layout for every email. This means that the design layout should be different for updates, promotions, newsletters, and more. Doing this also provides a positive impression to your target audience because they’ll see that you’re putting much effort into connecting with them. Using the same design layout every time can put off your customers, and may lead them to not read any of your emails after that.
4. Image-Only Emails Aren’t Always the Best Option
Every digital platform has its way of sharing information, and unlike most of the popular social media platforms today which are particularly dominated by images — it doesn’t work the same way with email. Images are naturally appealing and attractive to customers, which is why they’re often used in many marketing campaigns to draw people’s attention. However, when it comes to email marketing, image-only emails aren’t exactly the best route to get the results you want out of the campaign.
According to experts, here are some of the reasons why you shouldn’t send image-only emails to your customers:
- Your email won’t be seen if your subscriber has images turned off
- Without live text, your subscribers will find it hard to access your email
- There are limited options for personalization
- The size of the email can cause it to load slowly—or not at all
- Images may not fit mobile screen sizes well
- Your emails may land in the spam folder
- The searchability of your emails may be affected
- Revisions will take longer compared to text
- Image-only emails are expensive to do well
Now, we are not disregarding the effectiveness of images in marketing campaigns, although it’s also equally important that you do them well. Instead of an image-only email, opt for text-only emails. If you plan to add images, make sure that they don’t overpower the text content and that they’re optimized for mobile screens. You need to optimize your email campaigns according to the segmentation of your target audience. Remember that running an effective email marketing campaign would entail knowing how to navigate the platform and how to properly draw your target audience’s attention the right way.
5. Never Be Afraid to Ask for Suggestions and Feedback
One of the best ways to do well on your succeeding campaigns is to ask for feedback or suggestions from your audience. This enables you to properly get their insights on how you can serve them better. With your customers’ insights, you’ll have a better grasp of what they expect from you, allowing you to enhance your content and help them get to know your brand better.
You can ask for feedback from your customers by sending surveys — see that you also personalize your content and make your subject line interesting so that it will be easier for your customers to click through the email and provide you with valuable feedback. Be clear with the intention of your survey and keep it short as much as possible to prevent people from opting to leave the survey hanging.
6. Communicate Properly
You have to acknowledge that your customers are the lifeblood of your business, and without them, your business won’t be up and running. Some companies opt to direct their customers to no-reply emails to avoid flooding their inboxes with irrelevant responses. However, if you want to implement proper communication with your customers, you have to stop sending emails from a no-reply email account. Instead, direct them to a customer service email account or a real email address that will be able to respond to their inquiries and concerns.
7. Go for Personalized Email Marketing Campaigns
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to a diverse list of subscribers in your email, so you have to get in there and make an effort to reach them through a personalized approach. Having your emails personalized allows your customers to respond better to your emails, which can be as straightforward as putting the name of the recipient or customer on the email. Studies have shown that email personalization can increase open rates by 26%, which means that you’ll get a better chance of having your emails opened and engaging the right audience to your business through personalized content.
Email marketing is a powerful digital marketing tool that you can use to drive traffic, increase brand awareness, and grow your business. But without proper knowledge of how it should be used, it will not be able to deliver that much result for your business. So you must learn more about how you’ll be able to utilize the right tools and come up with marketing strategies that will make your campaign stand out from the rest.
Do you need help with the email marketing campaign of your business? Contact us today, and we’ll be glad to help you!
