Email is one of the best marketing channels. A well put together email marketing strategy can help you to increase your brand awareness and generate massive profits in a cost-effective way. However, you must know how to use the channel properly and efficient if you want to gain success. A good email marketing strategy can be a game-changer for your business and help you to witness ROIs of up to 73 percent!
Just blasting emails to your subscribers is not the answer. In fact, it can get you in trouble if you don’t follow the legal requirements of your country. Whether you send transactional emails, life cycles, or promotional emails, each one of these should be crafted to achieve your marketing and customer relationship management goals.
A good email marketing strategy should include the following elements and practices:
1. Proper focus on essentials before-the-open elements – Don’t make the mistake of only focusing on the body of your emails. You should also consider crafting the perfect subject lines for each email as these can improve your email open rates significantly. If you cannot get your subscribers to open your emails, everything else becomes irrelevant.
A good subject line should be short and leave no room for misunderstanding. It should not be a click bait. To understand your audience better and improve the performance of the email marketing campaign, you can do A/B test.
2. Audience segmentation – You should segment your subscriber list based on the data you have so that you can send the right kind of emails to the right people at the right time. Segmenting a broad audience into smaller target groups is not as difficult as it sounds. An excellent email marketing service will allow you to segment your list quickly. You want to constantly get a better ROI when your list building for sales.
Segmenting your leads or customers based on their interest, type, location, or level of engagement can help you craft more personalized emails and increase the conversion rate.
3. A compelling body – Your email copy should be able to convince the readers to act on your call to action. Thus, it should meet the promise of the subject line and keep your audience on the hook.
A good body should be appropriately formatted and contain a single offer to simplify the process of conversion. It should be visually appealing and scannable. Thus, the paragraphs should be short and include bullet-points wherever necessary.
You can also add images to add more value. However, the size of the images should be small as otherwise, it can increase the email load time. Make sure the image has good synergy with your brand and the offer.
4. Mobile responsive design – Mobiles account for more than 50% of the email open rate. Thus, if your emails are not mobile responsive, you are seriously missing out. Fortunately, all major email marketing platforms allow you to create responsive emails easily.
5. Effective Call-To-Actions (CTA) – Every email should have a specific CTA that will show your readers what to do next and how to do it. The CTA of an email will depend on your goal behind sending the email. It can be to convince a lead to purchase your product, make sure they review the details of an item they bought, or something else.
There should not be multiple CTAs in a single email as it can distract or confuse the readers. It should contain action-oriented words such as ‘limited stock’ or ‘limited time’ to create a sense of urgency. CTAs should be complemented with big button images to attract attention.
6. Performance measurement – to improve your email marketing campaigns, you should consistently measure the performance of your campaigns. It is not difficult to track the performance of your campaign if you monitor the proper metrics and understand their significance.
Some important metrics that you should measure are the bounce rate, open rate, opt-out rate, and click-through rate.
How to best optimize your email marketing strategy?
Having a good email marketing strategy is not enough to make sure you achieve the maximum conversion rate for selling any product or service. To increase the chances of achieving your business goals, you have to combine it with other solutions that go hand-in-hand with email marketing such as customer relationship management (CRM), webinars, landing pages, and automation.
Here is a brief explanation of how each of these can help you:
1. Landing pages – The goal of landing pages is to convert visitors into leads, leads into customers, and customers into high worth customers. Landing pages are vital as it offers clarity and purpose and removes any distractions. Effective landing pages force visitors to make a decision and take action.
Another benefit of creating landing pages is that you can customize them, again and again, to test your strategies and optimize them to boost conversions. Doing so also allows you to collect prospect demographics and gather information on your leads and customers. This is important as the more data you have, the more effectively you can address the pain points, needs, and desires of your leads and customers.
You can create different sets of landing pages for various purposes to meet your marketing and sales goals.
2. Email Autoresponders – Email Autoresponders allow you to automate essential processes in your email marketing strategy. Thus, these are an incredibly valuable tool. It is not possible to scale your business to sell products or services to thousands of people without an email autoresponder tool. And, on top of that, if you have to keep track of every one of them, follow up, send emails to maintain a good relationship, and promote your products, it becomes a nightmare.
email Autoresponders don’t just save your time, and it allows you to grow your business without hiring more people and complicating things. Thus, these also help you to build long-term relationships with your subscribers without much effort. This is very important if you want to hold on to them and keep generating revenue by selling them products in the future.
3. CRM systems – You may wonder whether a CRM for small business is necessary. A CRM is essential if you want to build a better brand, increase customer loyalty, generate better ROI, gain new customers, and gather new data.
When you keep your customers happy by offering them promotional discounts or solving their queries and problems quickly, they prefer to buy more products from you as they can trust your brand. The opposite is exact as well and can spell disaster if you are a small business.
A CRM system also allows you to observe your customers holistically. It will enable you to focus on your high worth customers so that you know you are managing your time efficiently. You can gather relevant data using a CRM system that you can use to generate new customers more effectively.
4. Webinars – Are webinars worth it? Of course! If you want to increase your authority on a particular topic, establish trust, and increase conversion rate, you should definitely consider hosting webinars. A CRM system that supports webinars can help you to warm up your audience even more and build a new revenue stream without you having to invest much money.
Many marketers don’t use webinars to generate new leads or convert them to paying customers as it takes a significant time commitment and may be subjected to technical problems. However, if you follow this approach, it can make your brand more human and relatable. It can also set you apart from the rest of the competition who are afraid to get their hands dirty.
How can all these solutions complement each other?
A well-optimized landing page can help you to generate leads consistently. A sound autoresponder system will allow you to take care of those leads by automating the email sending process and other marketing-focused actions. In fact, if you have an excellent email autoresponder you don’t need to worry about sending welcome messages, promotional messages, or transactional messages. Thus, autoresponders allow you to scale your business without much effort.
Once your leads turn into customers, you need to nurture them so that you can provide a better customer service experience to increase loyalty, sell more products to them, and improve the results (ROI and conversion rate) of your marketing efforts. To do that, you need a sound CRM system. A CRM can help you to track the customers down your sales pipeline and focus on the right strategy.
A webinar is an excellent conversion tool and can allow you to engage your leads and customers better. You can include a pre-recorded webinar in your landing pages to generate leads or at the beginning of a sales funnel landing page to turn them into loyal customers more effectively. Integrating this tactic with a CRM system and an email autoresponder can help you to up sell or cross-sell new products or services efficiently.
Depending on your niche, audience, and marketing strategy, some sales cycles can take longer than others. To get the most out of your buck, you should combine all these solutions together as these can significantly enhance your email marketing strategy. Otherwise, it can take you longer to reach your sales target and revenue goals.
