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Get a Quote Today!8 Principles of Effective Email Marketing
Some say email marketing is dead. However, they could not be more wrong! There are 4 billion email users every day, and with the right email marketing campaign, you can target your ideal audience and boost your conversion rates. Email marketing is incredibly useful for customer retention, and depending on your industry, cold email marketing strategies could even land you your dream client.
Every business is different. Working with an email marketing expert can ensure that you nail your digital marketing campaign and maximize your chance of success. For now, here are eight email marketing principles to help you build a killer strategy that works.
Key Takeaways
- Strong email marketing is key to growing your brand. Following the top principles of email marketing can help you design killer campaigns.
- Firstly, you must establish your goals to design a campaign that gets you where you want to be.
- Audience segmentation is a vital tactic if you want to create emails that convert.
- Customers have short attention spans, so it’s crucial to make emails easy to read.
- Mobile usage is still rising, so all email marketing campaigns should be optimized for mobile.
- Email automation ensures you don’t leave your customers hanging and makes life easier as a marketer.
- Creativity is essential if you want to stand out in your client’s inbox.
- A/B testing is the best way to ensure your marketing campaigns work.
Careful planning is the best way to work toward your goals, with content calendars to ensure all the bases are covered.
1. Establish Your Goals
The first principle of any marketing strategy should be establishing clear goals. It’s impossible to progress if you don’t have clear goals in mind to build a strategy around. Plus, without clear goals, you cannot measure your progress or success.
There are many reasons to launch email marketing campaigns. From earning more cash with exclusive content to simply promoting new launches, there are lots you can do with email. The good news is that you can set any goal you like. Provided that you’re clear on it, you can craft a successful email marketing strategy that gets your business where you want it to be.
2. Segment Customer Data
A mailing list is much more useful if you segment it. Your target audience is not homogenous, which means different users will have different interests. The best way to maximize the results of your email marketing campaigns is to target different users with relevant messages.
Segmentation is one of the key principles of email marketing, with 78% of businesses reporting that it’s the best strategy. You can segment your audience in numerous ways, including by age, gender, purchase behavior, or place in the sales funnel.
The best way to segment depends on your business strategy and goals. Either way, make sure you craft compelling email campaigns that target specific subsections of your subscribers if you want to drive sales.
3. Make Emails Easy to Read
A reader will determine whether to keep scanning your email in just nine seconds, which means you need to nail your opening. Aside from snappy subject lines and enticing offers, you must also make emails easy to read.
Successful email marketing means making your correspondence easy to scan. Every message should have clear organization, strong visuals, and fast loading speeds. Make readability a priority, too, with clear fonts that aren’t fighting with the background and images for dominance.
It’s also a good idea to include strong branding in every message. With your tone of voice and cohesive color scheme, readers can tell who the email is from before they even read it. And if you get your email marketing campaign right, they’ll be excited to open it every single time.
4. Mobile Friendly
A large chunk of email users read messages on their mobile devices (41%). It’s essential to incorporate mobile-friendly content into your email marketing campaigns for this reason. Whenever you add images, make sure they are optimized for mobile devices to avoid slow loading speeds.
Furthermore, don’t make your email marketing campaigns too long. Scrolling pages and pages on mobile can be off-putting, so try to deliver your messages concisely.
5. Don't Leave Them Hanging
With any digital or social media marketing, consistency is key, and email is no different. A successful email marketing strategy requires consistent messaging. Consider your goals: if your aim is to increase brand loyalty and encourage engagement from repeat customers, you may need to give them a little nudge every now and then to remind them you’re there.
Email automation is something else to keep in mind. Not only is automation a great way to keep up the consistency, but it also gives marketing teams a little break by sending out some emails automatically to segments of your target audience.
Welcome emails are a great example. Not only are they positive for your brand image and getting you off on the right foot, but it’s also the best chance you have to make a conversion. When a customer signs up, they’re already in the frame of mind to interact with your brand, so following up immediately with interactive emails can help to push them through the sales funnel quickly.
6. Be Creative
Successful email marketing needs a dose of creativity. You can be creative with the content, including graphics, other visuals, and interactive elements. While drafting a flexible email template can save time, make sure you switch it up sometimes and create an email campaign that’s designed to capture (or re-capture) attention.
Depending on the aims of your campaign, you can also experiment with a free download or another lead magnet that will help you boost engagement. Extra elements give your marketers more freedom to be creative.
Furthermore, every email needs a creative, engaging subject line. Most marketers know the importance of subject lines because even the best email campaign will fail if nobody opens it. Crafting compelling subject lines is an art, but it’s one worth perfecting if you want your readers to sift through the hundreds of other marketing emails in their inboxes and click on yours.
Your body copy should be creative, too. Excellent copy is what boosts conversion rates, so make sure you have great writers on hand to craft successful email marketing campaigns.
7. A/B Test Everything
The best practice for email marketing is to A/B test everything. Testing all of your email campaigns helps you ensure that everything works, getting rid of broken links, slow-loading images, and other issues before you send the email out to all of your customers.
Using an email marketing tool that allows A/B testing is the best way to optimize your conversion rates and keep email engagement high.
Alongside A/B testing, make sure you track your analytics and adjust your strategy as necessary. Don’t panic if your engagement seems low: the average email open rate across all industries is 21.33%. You can also segment your subscribers by engagement and focus more on those who interact with your brand frequently.
8. Plan Your Campaigns
Proper planning is essential for any marketing strategy, including email campaigns. An editorial calendar to plan your content is an excellent method to make sure you address all your customers’ needs and send out campaigns at the right times. Plus, content calendars can help you see what you have already made content on and where there are any gaps.
A stellar email campaign should include ways to encourage users to sign up to your mailing list, plans for a follow-up email to re-engage those in your list, and unique strategies for different segments of your audience.
When email marketing, it’s important to be consistent without sending too many emails that users consider spam. Striking this balance can be tough, but when you get your marketing strategy right, you will see a vast improvement in your metrics.
Email Strategies That Work
Hiring an expert in email marketing ensures you can stay on top of everything and get the best results. Get in touch with Bough Digital to find out how we can help you grow a mailing list and achieve your business goals.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What makes a marketing email effective?
Your email marketing strategy is unique to your brand, so there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Generally, though, a marketing email should have an enticing subject line, a strong call to action, and make steps toward your goal. For example, if your goal is to boost conversions, craft emails that encourage subscribers to make a purchase by sending out exclusive offers.
2. How can you measure success in email marketing?
There are many metrics you can use to measure your marketing campaigns. Look at data such as open rates, click-through rates, email list growth rates, website traffic, and share rates. The most important metric may differ depending on your goals.
3. What is a bad email marketing practice?
There are some common mistakes that email marketers should avoid. This includes spam, sending too few messages, not optimizing for mobile, and not segmenting your audience. If you avoid these common pitfalls, you are on the right track to creating a great campaign.