Regardless of what you may have heard or what your perception of it may be, email marketing is as important for businesses today as it ever has been. In fact, according to Hubspot, email marketing gives a Return on Investment of over 4,300%! There’s no wonder over 76% of marketers use email marketing as one of their main marketing methods. From a business’ point of view, email marketing presents a great opportunity as it allows them to effectively market to their ideal customers due to the fact that so many people have an email account and most check their emails regularly. They also allow businesses to personalise their message for each contact.
However, while email marketing is very important for businesses and, when done right, can produce fantastic results, there are a lot of mistakes that can be made that can make it a lot less effective. If you forget to consider certain areas of email marketing or just don’t utilise everything effectively, the emails are going to make the desired impact. You should aim for perfection with your emails and we believe we can help you achieve just that with these four great tips!
1) Define A Clear Goal For Your Email
The first thing you should consider before sending an email is why you are sending it in the first place. If you don’t know why you are sending an email, you won’t have any goals and the email isn’t likely to benefit you or your business. So, first thing’s first, determine why you are sending an email and what you want it to achieve. This can be done by creating actionable goals such as:
- Generating Leads
- Collecting Feedback
- Educating Customers and Prospects
- Nurturing Existing Leads
Email marketing can seriously benefit your business but if you are sending emails without knowing why you are sending them and without any goals in mind, it is all pointless. You won't have any way of analysing them so you won't be able to tell if they are actually successful or not. However, for every marketing platform you use, you should have an end goal to be able to determine whether they are effective for your business.
2) Personalise Where Appropriate
People want to receive emails from real people rather than businesses. As consumers, we would rather interact with other people rather than a business. We also like emails that are personalised for us. Rather than sending the exact same email to all of your contacts, think about personalising where you can so everyone gets something slightly different. In order to do this, you should look at the information you have about each of your prospects and personalise your emails based on that.
Personalised emails are a great way to nurture leads, which is great news for your business. In fact, according to Hubspot, nurtured leads produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities. Additionally, 40% of consumers buy more from retailers who personalise their shopping experience across channels. On top of this, personalised emails can improve click-through rates by around 14% and conversion rates by 10%. Check out this article to find out more about why you should use email marketing for lead generation - Why Use Email Marketing For Lead Generation?
3) Focus On Engagement
Promoting engagement in your emails is a very useful and important tool. Going back to the first point, having a clear goal in mind helps you to focus on engagement. Start off by making sure the content in your email is clear and compelling by using actionable language. This is a good way to grab attention and make the value of the email clear. Additionally, you should try to make every aspect of your email a CTA. You can:
- Link any images to landing pages
- Add a CTA to your email signature
- Hyperlink the appropriate copy
- Edit the alt text of images
If the recipient has any sort of interest in what you're offering, they can easily navigate to your site if there are plenty of ways to get there. However, it is important that you don't overdo it and only add relevant CTAs where necessary. You can also boost your reach by allowing the recipient to share the content using social sharing buttons.
4) Test & Analyse
Everything above is important but if you aren't testing and analysing your emails, they may not be helping you achieve what you want. Firstly, you need to check whether the emails you are sending are actually getting to your contacts. Are you getting any bounces? If so, are they hard or soft bounces? A hard bounce is an email sent to a fake or out of service email address, while a soft bounce is an email caught in a spam filter.
Other statistics you should look at are:
- The Open Rate - This can show you the effectiveness of your subject line. A 20%-30% open rate would be a good range to aim for.
- The Click Rate - This can show you if people are actually engaging with your email and what links they are clicking.
You can then run A/B tests to see how different variants of the same email perform to see which one will help you the most.
Email Perfection Is Just A Few Steps Away
Email marketing is still a crucial marketing platform and perfecting your emails can really benefit your business. If you want to nurture leads and build relationships, email marketing is a great way of going about it. Speak to one of our marketing specialists today to see how a good email campaign can give you the edge you've been looking for. Also, check out this article for some of the reasons to use email marketing - Why Use Email Marketing? If You Hate Spam Emails, So Will Your Customers...
