7 Steps To Succeed With Email Marketing

There was a time when email used to be a medium of communication alone. However, those days are long gone. Today it is beyond a mere means of communication with your potential clients or customers - it has also emerged as a reliable marketing channel. Email marketing is one of the best strategies one can follow for driving sales and revenue.

Composing and sending emails facilitate marketers' to strengthen relationships with customers and get an edge over the competition. A successful email campaign will make its recipients engage more with your brand and take action. Ultimately, it will lead to an increase in your sales.

Many said that email marketing would be dead after social media takes off. However, it’s still thriving. That is because of many of its unique advantages; thus, it is far from dying. So, in this article, we'll explain to you the secret sauce of successful email marketing in 7 steps.

Let’s begin:

1. Use catchy and engaging subject lines

Writing an engaging subject line is the first and foremost requirement for email marketing. A headline is the first thing that a recipient sees about an email. Therefore, it has a significant impact on recipients’ choice to open your emails or not. People will click your email only when the email subject line grabs their attention.

Also, you don't have to draft a wordy subject line. The rule of the thumb is to keep it short, crisp, and persuasive. Suppose you can capture the curiosity of the reader, even better. It would help if you spent whatever time it takes to arrive on a catchy headline for your most strategically essential emails.

2. Make your emails Mobile-friendly

The second thing is, of course, mobile-friendliness. Just as it’s necessary to have mobile-friendly websites, it’s essential to have mobile-friendly emails while doing email marketing. People these days read their email directly from the phone. Hubspot reported that 73% of millennials read emails from their mobile phones.

So, it's evident you need to make your emails mobile-friendly. Hence, your email design must be responsive and mobile-friendly to not lose out on this huge market share. You will not achieve your email campaigning goals when your emails are difficult to read on small screens.

Some vital tips for designing mobile-friendly marketing emails are:

• Shorter subject lines and emails alike.
• Segregate the content adding interesting graphics.
• Fonts should be easy on the eyes.
• Do not force the user to scroll too much.
• Make sure the call-to-action is clear and easy to click.

3. Segment your email list

Segmentation enables you to send highly specific emails to your subscribers that have a high chance of converting. Additionally, you can target those leads that did not open your last email to find out why they didn’t open it, so you do not repeat the same mistakes.

Segmentation is done by dividing your email list into a more targeted audience, such as newsletter subscribers, frequent customers, customers interested in a specific type of products, and so on.

It can also be done based on the communication preferences of your customers (i.e. people who want weekly, monthly and daily communication can be combined in separate lists). Once you’ve done this segmentation, you can target subscribers in each of the lists with more specific email marketing campaigns.

You can share the news of a new product launch or sale to interested customers, and you can avoid losing subscribers because of excessive communication.

4. Personalise your email content

Giving a personalisation touch to your email marketing is the next significant move to lure the recipients and turn them into customers. If you are indulged in email marketing for a while, you probably know a few more things about each of your subscribers than their name.

You may know who they are, what they do and what they like based on their activity on your site and in your emails. So, give them what they want.

Some readers may like emails with a combination of text and images, whereas others may prefer them as beginning with "Dear Sir/Madam." When you personalize the email content, you build a better relationship with your prospects.

You owe it to your customers to be accountable and offer the best possible experience because they won't stick around when you don't.

5. Hire copywriters - Not generic bloggers/Article writers

Email content penned down by copywriters is the key to a successful email marketing campaign. Do not assign this job to generic article writers if you want to captivate the attention of your recipients. There is nothing hidden in the fact that people every day receive a lot of emails. You can't convert them into customers with boring email content.

Thus, your goal should be to stand out from the rest. Solid copywriting and newsletter writing skills can prove to be very useful in achieving that goal. An experienced copywriter can provide you with creative, engaging, and persuasive content for your recipients that leads to a high click-through rate.

6. Perform A/B testing

You can also refine your email marketing campaign through A/B testing. In case you don’t know about it, it is a try-it-out strategy to get the best response or results. Basically what you do is you send two (or maybe more) set of identical emails with specific changes in a particular element (i.e. the colour of the CTA button, the images used, the headlines used, etc.) to small subsets of your target audience.

Then you try to gauge which one performed best by looking at the metrics. Until you test the variables of your emails in this way, you won't be able to understand what type of readers make up your email list. That’s why many email service providers build A/B testing into their software nowadays.

It provides you with easy access to compare email results without putting much manual effort. Once you’ve found what works, repeat it to maximize the success of your email marketing campaigns.

7. Dodge the spam folder

No email marketer would like to see their emails lying unattended in a spam folder. Even if you create creative or intriguing emails, they are useless if subscribers do not see them. Unless there is no email deliverability, your email marketing campaign won't be successful.

Your email deliverability depends not just on the email service provider but also on your email frequency, content, and list-building practices. Always ensure that your email marketing campaign is running from a clean IP address. Also, ensure that it does not have any links that are not protected with SSL certificate (i.e. HTTP links). If you need to install an SSL certificate for that on your server, do that.

Also, avoid writing in all caps or adding spam trigger words like click below, order now, download here, etc. Using such a tone in email style enables Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and mailing companies to mark you down.

Wrapping up

As we said in the beginning, email is not anymore, a conversation channel alone. Creating compelling emails for marketing has become a tool for businesses to maximize revenue. Therefore, it’s imperative to extract the maximum ROI from your email marketing campaigns. We hope our tips are given above, when applied appropriately, will help you witness both improved customer engagement and ROI.

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Recommended reading

If you enjoyed this post and have a little extra time to dive deeper down the rabbit hole, why not check out the following posts on email lead generation.

• 10 Ways To Generate Offline Leads For Your Website
• How To Optimise Your Contact Us Page
• 10 Reasons To Avoid Buying Email Lists
• 12 Tactics To Gather More Email Sign Ups

Tags: Email Marketing, Guest Post