Editor's Note: Mary Walton helps UK students as a proofreader at OXEssays, and helps job seekers land perfect jobs with resume writing service Resumention. Today, she joins us to discuss tips for optimizing your email marketing campaign to generate more leads.
Over the last few years, email has proven itself to be one of the most effective tools available to Internet marketers. Even with the rise of social media marketing and other more complex strategies, email marketing retains a strong track record of success.
To get the most out of email marketing, however, it's important to create a comprehensive campaign that efficiently generates leads for your business while minimizing costs. Today, we’ll explore eight key tips to help you along the way while simultaneously building your opportunities as a business.
Getting Back to Basics
Compared to other marketing techniques, email campaigns are fairly easy to understand. As a result, marketers often get lost in the complexity of finer details as they struggle to stand out from the crowd. But at the end of the day, an email is an email, and mastering good composition on a fundamental level is crucial before moving onto anything else.
Relevant Subject Lines
Subject lines are sadly a commonly overlooked aspect in email marketing, but they have the potential to make or break your campaign. The subject line of an email plays the same role as the headline of an article: it determines whether or not anyone will click.
While nobody is guaranteed to open an email, almost everyone is guaranteed to see it in their inbox. Make sure your subject lines not are not only interesting and relevant, but that they convey the most important details of your message. If you're having a sale, don't make customers click to find out - tell them right away!
Keep Emails Clean
If you have ever opened an email to find sloppy formatting and sloppy text, then you know the importance of a clean and minimal design. Failing to invest in your email formatting can easily push away leads who would otherwise convert.
There are many ways to mitigate this issue - one is to hire a professional designer who will know how to integrate best practices with your needs. The other is to use templates, provided by popular campaign managers like MailChimp. But failing both of those, strive to keep your emails plain, white and simple. This will convey professionalism, and remove as many barriers to your message as possible.
Easy Readability
Your emails should be as easy to read as possible. This means using clear, large fonts that recipients don't have to squint at. You should also take every precaution to ensure that your call to action (CTA) text is clearly labelled, and the entire body of the email is scannable.
Write your emails under the assumption that your readers will be at work or commuting; this design paradigm will help you to streamline your text, and focus on the most important information.
Define Each Email
Before setting out to create emails for your marketing campaign, you should define the purpose of each message. Over the course of a campaign, you might create hundreds of emails, so it’s important that every single one has a clearly defined goal.
Michael Ellis, email marketer for Assignment Help and UK Top Writers, explains;
“When creating your entire email campaign, you’ll have targets you’ll want to achieve. For example, you may want to boost your sales by 50% over the next year. However, there are so many ways you can do this. Even directing people to your social media accounts through email marketing can boost your sales in the long-term.”
For example, one email may be used to educate a reader on a certain product line or service. Another may be used to get people to bring in followers for your social media pages. Whatever it is you’re trying to achieve, have this reason at the forefront of your mind throughout the entire process.
Beyond the Basics
Once you are writing and sending basically good emails to your subscribers, there are a variety of ways to boost their effectiveness. Any method of perfecting an email involves looking closely at small details that can influence the results of your campaign.
Use Specific Targeting
Thanks to modern day software and marketing packages, you can select your email audience with significant precision. Let’s suppose your company is selling products for running: you may have customers who are 50-year-old men and customers that are 18-year-old girls. These are diverse demographics, and they’ll be looking for different things in your products.
Using precision targeting, you can create different emails for each demographic before sending them off to dedicated mailing lists. This is a much more effective way to market your products, as you’re giving each customer exactly what they want.
Write Engaging Content
Content in the body of an email needs to be engaging for people to read or act on it. Once again, it is useful to think of emails like articles: if the content is boring and lacks substance, they will probably be ignored.
Some key tips to remember when creating email content is to keep things short, sweet and always make sure to stay on point. When writing an email, keep the purpose in mind, and never stray from it.
If your goal to expand your social media audience, discuss the benefits of joining your social media community. Give reasons why your readers should want to click follow, and how it's relevant to their interests.
Always remember that you’re not trying to bombard your readers with information in emails: they’re working or commuting! Instead, use your emails as bait to lure them into something they can’t resist.
Test Your Emails
You may have invested a large amount of your budget in creating an email marketing campaign, and you may have countless ideas that you’re itching to try out. But rather than diving in head first with your fingers crossed, test your emails before taking any risks.
The most popular way to do this is with A/B testing platforms. During these tests, you will simultaneously run two similar ideas with unique calls to action, text, subject lines etc. to see which performs best in large groups. When the results come back, you can simply choose the best bits of both emails, and combine them to improve.
Analyze & Redefine
Once you’ve launched your email marketing campaign, you should continually monitor its performance. It may be tempting to let it run without intervention, believing that the hard work is over. However, email marketing is a constant job that needs constant adjustment to remain effective.
The first thing you’ll want to monitor is your open rates. Hopefully, if you’ve divided your lists up well and included a good subject line, this rate should be fairly high (around 25%). However, if it’s too low you'll need to invest time in your subject line to ensure those emails are getting opened. When your emails are being opened, you should then monitor click-through rates which should hover at around 5%.
These tasks are easily performed with the aid of tracking software, included with many campaign managers. Furthermore, when advertising your social media pages, you can use social media insights to find out how many visitors come from email clicks.
Learn more with these related OMI classes:
Email Marketing Messaging Best Practices
Creating and Curating Content People Love
Successfully Measuring Email Performance
Visit the Online Marketing Institute to browse over 400 classes in the digital and social media market