Email marketing is, in my opinion, the best way to grow and nurture your customer base. It is a direct form of marketing that can use a personalized approach to educate your email list about your product or services. It can be used to encourage your list to take a specific action, such as making a purchase, joining a course, signing up for a trial, registering for an event or booking an appointment.
Inboxes are full of emails on a daily basis, offering promotions and sales, and they can often seem spammy. But there really is no denying the impact an effective and well thought an email message can have on your consumer base. To put some stats on it, according to Constant Contact email marketing has a return on investment (ROI) of $36 for every $1 spent. When shoppers are looking to buy something, they will often look for emails from their favourite brands. Email notifications are also likely to trigger a click and purchase. OptinMonster describes email as the number one communication channel, with at least 99% of consumers checking their email on a daily basis. By 2025, Statista predicts that there will be 4.6 billion global email users. Email marketing makes money.
If you want to attract new customers or win over the ones you have already, then you need a strong & effective email marketing strategy. Here are my top tips to take your email marketing strategy to the next level and create campaigns that convert.
Build Your List The most important aspect of email marketing is your email list. After all, you can have a killer strategy and beautifully designed templates, but if you have no one to send them to then it won't make any difference. The other important thing to remember is that email marketing won’t work if you don’t have the right people on your list. You need to capture leads to grow an email list filled with your target audience. To do this, create a signup form on your website so that when people visit your website for the first they can easily choose to stay up to date with your brand. Create a form for newsletter sign-ups and install a pop-up or have it in the footer, to collect consumer data from your visitors. You can also drive sign-ups through your social media channels.
Creating a lead magnet is another super effective way of building your email list. A lead magnet is essential something that you provide to your audience for free, enticing them in, in exchange for their email address. Some popular lead magnet examples are:
A quiz or self-assessment
Downloadable checklist
eBooks
A cheat sheet of tips or resources
A webinar
Free trials or samples
A free quote or consultation
A coupon
Use an Email Service Provider
There are heaps out there, but some of the most well-known ones are Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Flodesk, Hub Spot and Campaign Monitor. They all offer a very similar service, so it's up to you which you feel the most comfortable using, and they provide everything necessary for your business marketing requirements. In terms of pricing, they all generally offer different levels depending on your number of contacts or the number of emails you want to send.
An email service provider will allow you to segment your audience, organize your list, create branded templates, and send out custom-designed email campaigns to your audience. As well as sending out one-off email campaigns as and when you need, you can use an email marketing platform to set up automations and email sequences for your business. For example, creating a welcome journey email sequence is a brilliant way to nurture new leads and increase conversion. You can also take full advantage of the analytics feature on these platforms to track conversions and behaviour, using this to implement changes and improve future campaigns.
Create Beautiful and Converting Content
A good email marketing strategy is nothing without a beautifully designed email design. When designing your email campaigns, I would suggest that you create personally branded templates first to work on with each campaign. That way, your branding stays consistent and it also minimizes the design process each time you want to create a campaign. Apply the same colour schemes and logo you use in your marketing materials to your email marketing.
Focus on your message and keep your design straightforward. It can be aesthetically designed but you need to keep it simple in order for it to convert. You also want to make sure that you use an easy-to-read font so that subscribers can scan the information in a go. The simpler the font, the more effective.
Make sure that you include the most important takeaway of the campaign toward the top, so if people are quickly scanning through their emails they see it immediately. Include imagery as well as text. According to HubSpot, 65% of users prefer emails that contain mostly images vs. 35% who prefer text mostly. It's important to use small, compressed images that speed up the loading of the email. Ensure your email campaigns are mobile friendly as well as looking good on your desktop.
Optimize your CTAs (call to action). Play around with using buttons and text CTAs and focus on making sure the words that you use are clear and compelling enough for subscribers to want to click them.
Provide Value
Having a customer open your email is just the first part, you need to make sure that you are providing them with valuable content every single time. If you are consistently providing value, then your subscribers become more likely to open and read your emails. They may even start anticipating your messages landing in their inbox if you stick to a regular schedule.
What does your customer want and need from you? Use this to build your email strategy. You need to be arriving in their inbox, solving a problem for them and providing them with a solution.
The key is to make sure that you aren’t sending emails just for the sake of it. Every single time you email your list, you need to be delivering something of real value in order for them to engage with it. The higher the value of the email, the more loyal and engaged your subscribers will be, therefore increasing the conversion of your overall analytics.
Statistics and Analytics
Do your research! Email marketing can be trial and error, and it's a great tool for learning as you go. Following the performance of your email marketing campaigns is an important part of learning how to improve them. Factors like unsubscribe rate, bounce rate, and cart abandonment rate all have important implications for your overall email marketing strategy.
Your email campaign metrics includes:
Bounce rate Monitor your bounce rate to get insights into what's affecting your conversions, such as delivery issues caused by technical glitches.
Email open rate Track the number of opened emails to assess your reach and compare the performance of campaigns sent to different audience segments.
Unsubscribe rate Check this metric to review how your subscribers respond to your campaigns and identify which content didn't succeed as well.
Email signup Regularly monitor the growth of your signup rate to track the effectiveness of your email campaigns in driving visitors to your landing pages.
List growth rate Use this to refine your lead generation and communication strategies to increase your conversions.
Define your metrics based on your email marketing campaign objectives to determine what you're doing right or wrong, and refine your strategies to improve your results.
Not sure what subject line will get the most opens and clicks? Think there might be a certain time of day your customers are most likely to engage with your campaign? Run an A/B test to find out. A/B testing campaigns test different versions of a single email to see how small changes can have an impact on your results.
There is no perfect formula for successful email marketing, but considering these basic tips and refining your campaigns is a good starting point. If you are new to email marketing, or you would just like some help with your existing strategy, I offer a content marketing package that covers email marketing and newsletters. You can find out more here.
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Laura Mackenzie
Creative Virtual Assistant at Kelp Collective
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