Today, there are numerous social media and communication networks, yet e-mails have to be there for official communication, discourse and conveying information.
E-mail is also an incredible way to market to your audience. Rather than trying to catch a ‘once in a while’ visitor on your page or website (who come through the search engines), you can actually cater to many more prospective subscribers who are waiting to hear from you. There are 3 kinds of official emails- Marketing emails which can be promotional or informational messages based on customer interests, like offers, discounts, press release news etc.; Transactional email which is generally automated or triggered by a purchase, like payment confirmation, order confirmation etc. and Operational emails which generally convey important information/crucial news about your business like ‘closed on holiday’ or ‘shutdown for repairs’ etc.
Here we will discuss some methods and strategies which will upgrade your email marketing skill.
1. Choose Your E-Mail Marketing Software wisely- Of course, when you are messaging to a huge crowd, you cannot be sitting and writing emails individually. You have to have a software which will do the task as instructed or programmed by you. There are different types of software, and you have to know which works best for you. If you have a small business or start-up, ‘MailChimp’ may work for you, which is simple to use, will send out nice looking emails in bulk, and will capture leads from subscription easily. If you are ready for a complex marketing strategy, you may need something like ‘ActiveCampaign’ which will be able to automate the content of messages based on how a customer deals with your website. E-commerce business models require to track their potential customers and visitors and hence they require a different type of software. You need to be aware of your objective before you decide which to choose.
2. Build Your Subscriber List Carefully- You may have a list of prospective customers, but you need to keep building over it. Make the subscribing process easy through your website, blog, or blog post etc. Use subscription forms which encourage people to leave their email ids to you, without having to give out a lot of other information, or waste much time.
3. Striking Subject Line – Now the most crucial part of the game is the actual message which goes to your customers; the content. With so many emails in our inbox, we tend to overlook promotional emails or just hit ‘delete’, rendering them unimportant. Don’t you do them yourselves? Hence, you need to practice and improvise on your subject lines. Just like newspaper headlines lure us to read further, your Subject line should be catchy, attractive, entertaining and relevant to your buyer persona, so that they will open up the mail. ‘www.subjectline.com’ can be helpful for marketers to decide the proper subject line.
4. Personalise Your Content- Use your customer data to create personalized messages. The most e-mail marketing software allows you to drag in the actual name of the customer while addressing him/her in the text of the message. Direct individual address gives a personal touch and immediately draws the attention of the customer. They feel you are specifically speaking to them. On the other hand, use personalize sender name instead of any organization name. This will create a direct personalize connection.
5. Always Insert A ‘Call To Action’- Best if you are including buttons for a call to action in the body of the message, but use them in several places, definitely one above the fold, so that customers don’t always have to scroll down to know where to click next. Also, end your email with the call to action button which should be designed well with excellent graphics.
6. Segment Your Email Database- This will help you understand your prospective buyers and send emails in a more channelized way. Segment your email database on various factors like who have purchased from you, how often they have purchased from you, demographics, location, interests, email engagement and many more. Segmented campaigns on that platform get 14.64% more opens and 59.99% more clicks than non-segmented campaigns.
7. Socialize More- You can invite your subscribers to like you on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, you can use social media icons to boost the popularity of your website. You can also use links to your personal blog page in the email. This way you widen your horizon and you are visible everywhere.
8. Indulge in Real-Reply Emails- Avoid using ‘do-not-reply’ email addresses or texts to market your business, which eventually takes away the authenticity of the organization. When people can read and actually reply to your emails with queries, then you are actually successful in engaging them.
9. Be Prompt in Response- You need to response those who reply to your emails and that should be prompt because your audience is standing with a question and no one wants to wait for weeks for an answer. Otherwise, good email marketing may end up with an unsuccessful one.
10. Trigger ‘Abandoned Cart’ Emails- If you are in an e-commerce business, this is important for you. There will be many who will add items to the cart and leave without purchasing. Be sure to send them emails with promotional offers and discounts on their chosen products. Research proves, abandoned cart emails can recover up to 15% of the revenue that would have been otherwise lost. In some case, implementing an abandoned cart email has increased online business revenue by 50% and recovered hundreds of thousands in sales.
11. Product Follow-Up Messages are Also Very Helpful- After a customer purchases from you, do send a product follow-up mail to acquire a feedback on the product. This ensures customer satisfaction and the buyer knows that you are not just done with getting money.
12. Promotional Offer Emails are Must- You have to be prepared with the content of your next email at least a month before you release it. The ‘End of Season Sale’ email has to reach your customers before actually, the sale ends. Discount notifications often lure customers into buying goods; you have to make sure you are sending saree-sale emails to women and not to a man; segmenting your emails will help you in this.
13. Be Prepared Ahead- Emails need to be triggered before occasions, like Diwali, Halloween, Christmas, Labour’s day, Memorial day or Black Friday. During these times, people are looking for offers and discounts to purchase. You have to develop a great attractive content with an incredible buying bargain, to seal the deal, and that needs to be prepared beforehand, and scheduled such that they automatically get sent on time.
14. Do Not be A Spammer- Do not keep sending the same emails again and again to the same customers. This eventually loses potential buyers for your company. Customers can mark your email as spam or unsubscribe your email list which will lead to a disaster for your online business.
15. Be Sure Your Mails Do Not Land Up In Spam- Your well through emails can bring returns only if they are opened and read and not get into the junk folder. You need to protect yourself from the CAN-SPAM Act. Make sure the emails you send are to proper subscribers who want to hear from you. Also, avoid a few things to prevent accidental entry of your mail to spam. Do not use all caps in your text. Do not use too much exclamation marks/question marks etc. Do not send your mail without a subject. For more, you can check out https://mailchimp.com/resources/guides/avoid-spam-filters/ on how spam filters work.
16. Check Your Grammar- At last the most important perspective for any communication. The Grammer! Badly formatted texts or those with spelling errors and grammatical mistakes can be treated as spam, or customers may also tend to ignore them as unprofessional. Proofread your email content before sending them always.
17. Email Template- In the case of email template we need to keep in mind that you need to showcase your brand’s personality and culture through your emails. Your readers want to see something that looks like it came from a human being, not a machine generated one. Structure of your email template should be easy to understand, colour should be appealing and design should be easy-to-read. These factors will decide whether your email will be read or just plain deleted.
18. Landing Page- To get the optimum result of your email marketing you need to design a perfect landing page with a call to action (CTA). An email campaign-specific landing page is much effective for email marketing. Based on the marketing objective you can design lead generation landing page or click-through landing page.
Lastly, remember, email marketing is a great strategy for present day business success; however, it takes time and patience. Keep your mails precise, state the intention clearly in the first two sentences. You have 10 subscribers or 100 of them, pay equal attention in following up and converting them to regular customers.