Email Marketing Tips, but first lets under it. Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations.
Eat, Sleep, and Breath the Fundamentals
Email marketing is a powerful way to turn leads into customers and customers into loyal brand evangelists. Building successful email marketing campaigns is critical for any company, and it is still the best method of reaching people interested in your business and in what you are selling.
Establish the Perfect Frequency
Emailing at just the right frequency is a difficult thing to do. You want to avoid emailing so much that you overwhelm your list and drive subscribers away, but send often enough to keep them engaged in your content and foster a relationship with your brand.
There’s no perfect formula for calculating exactly when to send emails, but this guide to email marketing frequency will help you find the perfect balance for your brand and audience.
Prioritize Retention
When done well, retention marketing will boost ROI, profits, and efficiency. Keeping customers around is an extremely important (and, in today’s digital landscape, relatively easy) element of any successful online marketing strategy.
While the concept is simple, it’s something an alarmingly small percentage of businesses consider a priority. Developing a retention marketing strategy can put ahead of your competition. So what are you waiting for?
Chase Abandoned Carts
As an ecommerce business owner, there’s nothing more frustrating than when an online shopper abandons their fully loaded cart. But what if I told you there’s a simple cart abandonment email system that you can set up to DRASTICALLY reduce your abandoned carts and get your customers to complete their intended purchases?
Email Marketing Best Practices
Building successful email marketing campaigns is critical for any company, and it is still the best method of reaching people interested in your business and in what you are selling.
The top email marketers with the most successful email marketing campaigns follow email marketing best practices just like the ones listed below, so make sure to read through all the way to the end.
#1 – Start By Taking Inventory
As I mentioned previously, email marketing deals with more than just sending promotions to get people to buy. Chances are, your company currently has various email campaigns going on at the same time.
Before you start any new email marketing campaign, you need to identify and analyze what other emails your company is sending and to whom.
You need to know if and when your company is sending emails and the different lists being emailed in order to be successful with best practice #2.
#2 – Don’t Overwhelm Your List
For example, if you are tasked with starting an email newsletter, you need to decide on a frequency for the emails. If your company is already sending out weekly deals or reminders, don’t overwhelm your subscribers, leads, or customers by sending more emails.
#3 – Incentivize Subject Lines to Boost Open Rates
Understanding the value of your email is highly important if you actually want people to open it. Putting the value right in the subject line will help you boost your open rates. Try including strong messages like, “Free Shipping on All Orders” or an equivalent value, and track your open rates.
#4 – Don’t Leave Your Customers Hanging
Don’t let more than a month pass by without contacting your customers. If your emails are too few and far between, you run the risk of customers forgetting who you are. If one day, out of the blue, they receive an email from your company but they haven’t heard from you for over three months, they will most likely unsubscribe.
#5 – Test to Determine the Perfect Frequency
To find the perfect frequency for your emails, you need to test, review, and iterate.
For example: if you’re just launching an email newsletter, select a frequency to start with—let’s say every week—and test it for a month. View the open rates, click-through rates, responses, and unsubscribes.
Were the results to your liking?
If they weren’t, try another frequency. You can always adjust based on the data.
Once you find your ideal email marketing frequency, stick to it. You don’t want to miss an email because you want to develop trust with your subscribers. You want them to look forward to your emails, and if you miss one, you will lose that trust.
For example: during a 30-day challenge campaign we sent emails everyday at 5 p.m. in the subscriber’s time zone. We made sure everyone around the world got the emails at their 5 p.m. We are so consistent with this that now the email subscribers expect to see the emails at 5 p.m. Gaining and not losing the trust of your subscribers is very important.
#6 – Analyze Results
Sending email campaigns is great, but how do you know if they are effective? Make sure you review open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, unsubscribes, and if you were marked as spam! The only way you can improve your emails is if you review the data and learn from the results. Always refer back to the numbers!
#7 – Set Goals and Stick to Them
We can’t talk about email marketing best practices without mentioning goals. Every email that you send needs to have a goal.
Having goals tied to your email marketing efforts will determine the structure, content, success, and promotion strategy of every email. It also makes the email marketing process much simpler. Without goals, you’re left floundering about, wondering what you should write in your next email.
If you have a goal for every email campaign, then you define the direction and that determines whether the email is successful.
For example, let’s say that you own a store that sells bed linens. An email goal could be to “teach current customers the right way to make a bed.” This email is for existing customers, and the email content can be written or you could use a video example of what you’re trying to teach them. At the end of your email, you could add a sentence that asks the customer if your email was helpful and review your responses. Always make sure that you have a goal tied to each email marketing campaign.
#8 – Send Yourself a Test Before Launching Your Campaign
Always make sure that you send yourself, or whoever handles approval, a test version of your marketing emails to proofread and to ensure that everything works.
More importantly, can you clearly understand your call to action within the first few seconds of opening the email? If so, great. If not, do your best to clarify your message and make sure your subscribers understand what it is that you want them to do.
You should review the test version of your email on your desktop, phone, and tablet before you send it to your email list. There are small things that you can miss while in the editing view of your email software.
Since you’re here with me today, reading about email marketing best practices, you most likely have an email list you’re sending to already. However, a hot topic that I need to touch on is purchasing email lists.
#9 – Never Buy an Email List
There are many reasons why you should avoid purchasing email lists, but here are some of the main reasons. If you’re using a reputable method of sending marketing emails, the software company most likely doesn’t let you email people who have not opted into your email list. If you do send an email campaign to a purchased list and receive multiple complaints, you will get blocked, and your account will be flagged as a spammer.
You should never purchase email lists, because you won’t receive any value from the transaction. The people you’re emailing have never heard of you, and if you suddenly start emailing them, they will not like it and most likely spam your email. Not only will they not like it, but they won’t buy anything from you.
Successful email marketing campaigns are created from people who opted into receiving emails, know who you are, and look forward to receiving your emails.
One last point we need to keep in mind when it comes to email marketing best practices is setting clear expectations.
#10 – Start the Relationship with a Welcome Letter
When someone opts into your email list, make sure that you send a welcome email explaining what that person should expect in terms of frequency, content, types of emails, and who to contact if he or she should have any questions.
This process starts the relationship off on the right foot by setting expectations right from the beginning. Also, make sure you stick to whatever you mentioned in the email. If you say you’re going to email them every week, don’t skip a week.
There you have it, a powerful list of the dos and don’ts, a steadfast list of email marketing best practices. Now that you’ve got a solid foundation under your feet, it’s time to start tweaking your methods in order to hone your skills and perfect your email marketing strategy.
