Email marketing can be one of the best digital marketing tools when used properly. It can provide key information to consumers, unite them with your brand, and most importantly, drive sales.
Effective email marketing goes much deeper than creating a standard template and firing it out to whatever email list you have on hand. It takes time, effort, and consistency to build effective email campaigns. Let’s look at some of the key strategies that should be considered for email marketing.
First and foremost is your email list. This topic alone could have articles upon articles about list-building strategies but for now, we’ll keep it short and sweet. Building a good email list doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a great deal of effort, strategy, and a bit of patience. At times, less is more for an email list. If you have a list of 300,000 emails but a poor open rate, a high bounce rate, and a terrible conversion rate, that number isn’t all that impressive.
Quality is the keyword here. Building a quality list that includes consumers who interact with your emails, trust your emails, and purchase products from your emails can be far more important than a gaudy list number. Keep your list-building strategies as organic as possible to collect addresses that know and care about your brand.
Next, you need to commit and stay consistent with email marketing. Again, success doesn’t typically happen overnight for email marketers. The worst thing you can do is begin sending emails, become frustrated with the results, and go dormant for long periods of time without communicating to your list. You should also have a strategy with consistent branding and goals for your emails. Tweaks and changes can be made based on results and reporting but the general look and feel of your emails should remain as consistent as possible.
Create a clean, inviting call-to-action above the fold of the email. If sales are the main goal of your email, place the offer and a “SHOP NOW” option near the top of the email so readers don’t have to scroll down to view the offer. You want to avoid the hard-charging car salesman approach, but you also don’t want to hide the fact that you’re selling products and/or you’re offering a great promotion to your consumers. The same can be said if the goal of your email is for the reader to view and absorb a piece of content.
Keep your emails relatively short and concise. In general, there are two types of emails. One that is created to drive sales and one that is more of a newsletter created to provide information and push content. Ultimately, in either case, your goal should be to push people to your website. Therefore, even if you’re taking a newsletter approach you should keep the email relatively brief to leave readers wanting more and navigating to your website to read the entire blog post or view the entire video.
Track your emails and pay close attention to reporting. There is never a silver bullet for the perfect email. Everyone’s lists behave differently and have consumers that respond differently. The key is to pay attention to what works and what doesn’t and adjust from there. Use A/B testing to try different templates, subject lines, and creative. Watch Google Analytics to see which emails sold the most product or drove the most website traffic. No matter what email platform you use, some sort of reporting is almost certainly provided.
Utilize this information to advance your email marketing and if you would like help in your email marketing efforts, please reach out to us at Providence Marketing Group. We would love to help grow your brand’s website traffic and sales via a successful email marketing campaign strategy.