Email marketing is the most effective marketing strategy. A good email marketing plan outperforms search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, PPC advertising (paid per click), and affiliate marketing, according to Econsultancy’s Email Marketing Industry Census of 2016. Your ROI depends on an epic email plan.
Types of Emails in Email Marketing
There are several types of emails that can be used in email marketing. Try one or all to see which ones work best for your business.
Promotional Emails
We’ve all seen these. Promotional emails, well, promote your products and services. These emails can include discount codes, sales information, or seasonal sales.
Transactional Emails
Transactional emails are those that are triggered by a sale and are customer service oriented. They include order confirmations, receipts, subscription confirmations, welcome messages, or a follow-up email after a sale.
Lifecycle Emails
Lifecycle emails are based on something your customer does, such as abandoning a cart. These emails are based on a customer’s lifecycle, which goes on as:
- Awareness
- Marketing
- Sales Conversion
- Customer Experience
- Product Support
- Retention
- Advocacy and Repeat Purchase
Your lifecycle emails should help customers through the lifecycle.
Create a Goal
Understand why you’re creating this email marketing campaign. You need to know the purpose of this marketing tactic. Some examples of email campaign goals include welcoming new subscribers, increasing your number of subscribers, nurturing existing subscribers, increasing click-through rates, boosting your sales, and more.
Figure out what your email marketing goals are so you can measure your progress.
Building Your Email List
Building your email list is definitely going to be one of your goals. The more subscribers you have, the more people you have to engage. The best way to build your email list is by offering a free incentive in exchange for a website visitor’s email address.
Your email list is a powerful resource you can use to grow your business and boost your revenue. You must build your list in an honest and transparent manner. You have to get permission to save someone’s email address. You must think about why someone visiting your website will want to give that information over to you. The best way to grow your email list is by offering something for free in exchange – an incentive.
Subscribers also want to know how often you’ll email them. They don’t want spam or junk mail. Offer something useful, informational, helpful, entertaining. Let your subscribers know what they will get from your email list and how often to expect it.
Know Your Audience
It’s important to know your target audience so you can create emails just for them. Gather data from Google Analytics and Facebook Insights. You can also gather more data by asking your subscribers to answer a few short questions. Send out a survey with SurveyMonkey. Offer an incentive if you can. Here’s some data to gather:
- Gender
- Age
- Relationship Status
- Education Level
- Job Title
- Location
Your email marketing efforts will be more effective with this information.
Write Your Email Copy
You can do this yourself, but it would be better if you hired a professional copywriter. Email Copywriters know the ins and outs of the email marketing business.
Keep your emails concise, and don’t pitch your offer immediately. Address subscribers by their names because personalized emails get opened and read more often than those that are not personalized. Use a personal story that works with your business to help subscribers see that you are human. They get marketing emails almost every day. Offer something of value to your subscribers. Keep subscribers engaged with videos, GIFs, and polls.
These are just some general rules for email marketing copy. You don’t have to do all of these things in every single email. The last part of your emails will have a call to action, or CTA.
Using CTAs (Calls to Action)
Don’t use this right away in your email, but do use it, at the very least, at the end of your email. You can also use a CTA toward the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of your email. A call to action is asking your subscribers to do what you want them to. It’s a drive to your ultimate email marketing goal.
When to Send Certain Emails
There are better days and times to send your emails. The best day and time to send your emails is during the workweek (Monday – Friday) during the morning and lunch time hours. This is when emails are often checked and opened. You can use your email account to automatically send your emails during these days and times.
Get Read
Avoid getting reported as spam email by following these steps:
- Ask your subscribers to whitelist your emails by adding your email address to their address book. Send instructions in case they need it.
- Avoid sending emails to inactive subscribers. Ask subscribers if they want to continue receiving your emails. Those that don’t get segmented to a different list so you can focus on your subscribers that still want your emails.
- Avoid using spammy words. Email filters target these words. Check your email copy against this list before sending.
Mobile Optimization
Many subscribers will be reading your emails on their phones, so you must ensure that your emails are mobile-friendly. Otherwise, your subscribers might be hitting the forsaken unsubscribe button.
The email template you use has to be responsive in order for it to work with phones, not just computers. Responsive just means that your email will automatically resize depending on which device your subscriber opens it on.
There are more ways you can make your emails mobile-friendly:
- Use short subject lines (mobiles cut off subject lines at 55 characters).
- Use a single column template.
- Use a large font size (14 point works well).
- Separate links (users won’t be able to click on their link of choice when they’re too close to each other).
- Use image captions (many mobile users disable images. Make sure they can understand what they should be seeing.).
- Test your emails on different devices (computer, tablet, phone) to ensure they are readable.
Measure Your Results and Improve
Monitor your email statistics on a regular basis to see how your emails are performing. Use the information to see where you can improve your email marketing campaign.
