Have you ever received a promotional email and clicked on it? Do you recall what made you take action—perhaps it was the content, the promo itself, or the compelling way the products or services were portrayed?
Some businesses think that having a presence on social media is enough but there’s another platform that you may overlook: email. Email marketing is not dead. Statistics show that 99% of email users open their emails daily with some of them checking it up to 20x a day.
With a high-quality email list and relevant content, you can turn email into one of your most cost-effective sales channels. How? Follow these simple steps to create a winning email marketing strategy.
1. Understand your audience.
This marketing rule never gets old. If you don’t know your customers, how will you sell to them? Having a clear picture of your customers allows you to segment them better. Some audience segments require different sets of messaging and content, depending on where they are on their customer journey.
Here are some ways to segment your audience.
Engaged for 60 days.
Check who among your customers opened their email in the last 60 days. Prioritize your communication with this audience list and always keep them updated with your offerings.
Not engaging for at least a year.
Remove audiences who have not opened your email in the last year. It’s clear they’re not interested in your products or services.
High value customers/VIPs.
Compared to engaged customers, these VIPs actually bought your product or availed of your service. Create customized experiences for these customers to keep them interested.
Job functions.
You can also segment your audience based on their job functions, especially for B2B marketing efforts. By doing so, you can tailor-fit your messaging to the role of your target audience.
2. Create personalized and compelling content.
Once you know who your audience is and what makes them tick, use that knowledge to your advantage by creating compelling, relevant content. You can keep them engaged with promos, discounts, launches, and exclusive offers.
Here’s how you can make your email stand out.
Use strong, irresistible subject and preview lines.
Hook them with your headline alone. Don’t lose their interest with long, boring headlines. For subject lines, it is recommended to use no more than 9 words or 60 characters. Preview lines are generally between 35 to 90 characters.
Use compelling, concise copy.
Have you ever read an email and forgot what it was about? It’s because the content was forgettable. It likely lacked the right message, wasn’t clear and was too long! Keep your copy as concise as possible.
Add a call-to-action.
What do you want your audience to do? Make sure that it’s clearly written and visible in your email.
Make it visually appealing with images.
Avoid lengthy emails without any visuals that provide more context to your content. Be mindful of the image size and quality so your email loads properly.
Don’t forget compliance.
You have to provide your audience an option to unsubscribe to your emails so you won’t be marked as ‘Spam’.
3. Choose the appropriate email type.
Based on your audience, you can choose from the following email types:
Campaign emails.
These are one-time emails sent manually to a list during special occasions like a exclusive or limited access to a sought-after event or an announcement of a new product or service.
Flow emails.
These are emails that are triggered automatically depending on actions taken by your customers. For example, once a customer adds an item to the cart but doesn’t check out, they will receive an email reminding them about the products they had left in their cart.
Transactional emails.
These are emails related to account registration, product purchase, or updating customer information.
How To Build Your Email List
As with all marketing efforts, you have to continuously invest in your email marketing. Even if you feel like you already have a pretty good audience list, it must not remain static. Some of them will lose interest over time, while others will decide they don’t want to subscribe to so many emails anymore—this might include yours! So, you have to keep looking for leads to grow and refresh your email list.
Here are some list building strategies for you:
Create loyalty and referral programs.
Incentivize your most loyal customers and subscribers and reward them with special discounts and exclusive offers.
Use website pop-ups.
Maximize your website by integrating website pop-ups that offer email subscriptions or registration for new visitors.
Engage with your audience on social media.
Use social media engagement activities to keep luring your customers to sign-up.
While you’re building your email list, you also have to be conscious of permissions and the data privacy regulations in your country. You may have an email list but you can’t just blast to them right away. Check the rules in every country you’re blasting to. For example in the Philippines, you are only allowed to send one initial email to get permissions to send succeeding emails. If your customer does not opt in, remove them from your mailing list.
How to Set Up your Email Marketing Campaign
Ready to start your first email campaign? Here are the 6 steps you can take:
Have a clear goal. Different email marketing campaigns have different goals. From asking your audience to register and subscribe to something--to announcing a product launch or discount, make sure you know what your goal is from the start.
Revisit and grow your list. Don’t just stop once you have a certain number of email addresses in your database. Keep growing your email list by participating in events or holding promos for new subscribers.
Identify the email campaign to prioritize. It pays to know where you are in your business so you know which email campaign is appropriate. If you’re just about to launch, you may want to build your brand first so that your content will be more about educating your audience about your business and establishing trust.
Create a content plan. An email content plan is helpful in plotting what content you’ll be sending out for a certain time and duration.
Maximize email automation tools. Sending emails manually can eat up a lot of time. Use email automation tools to make your life easier. There are automation tools that have systems in place to send multiple emails at once, create flows, and provide you with insights.
Analyze and optimize your email campaigns. Sending your email is just one part of the process. Check how many opened it, how many clicked through your links, and how many converted to sales. This way, you can re-strategize and learn from previous campaigns.
Now, you may ask: how do I measure success? A/B testing is a popular way to test out your
content. Here, you mix and match headlines, images, content, and even audience lists to see what works best. Here are the metrics you should be looking out for:
Open rate—tells you how many people opened your email;
Click-through rate— shows how many actually clicked through any links in your email over how many received it;
Unsubscribe rate— this measurement shows how many unsubscribed; and
Spam rate—unfortunately, you can be flagged as ‘Spam’ by your customers. This will tell you how many emails were marked as spam.
Email marketing is no longer just an option — it is a must for any business. You can use it in many ways – to create awareness, generate leads, and nurture customer relationships.