6 Easy Steps For Effective E-mail Marketing 2018

Email marketing

It is the process of nurturing and engaging with your audience and clients through emails, in such a manner that they think of you, remember you and hopefully want to get service from you.
Here are 6 simple steps you can take to make sure your email marketing campaign is successful:

Step 1: Determine Your Goals

Good marketing starts with setting goals and same goes for E-mail marketing. To run a successful email marketing campaign, think about what you want to achieve. Typical goals for an email marketing campaign include:

• Welcoming new subscribers and telling them about your business and values so you start to build a relationship with them.
• Boosting engagement with your content and your business, whether that’s promoting a webinar or trying to make an initial sale.
• Nurturing existing subscribers by providing something they’ll value.
• Re-engaging subscribers who haven’t been particularly active.
• Segmenting your subscribers so you can send more targeted email marketing campaigns.

Step 2: Know Your Audience

If you’ve been doing email marketing for a while, you’ll likely know who your audience is. If you’re just getting started, you’ll have to make some educated guesses so you can target your content. Don’t worry; you’ll start collecting subscriber info the minute you send your first campaign, so next time around, you’ll have real data to work with.

Gather data from Google Analytics and your social media profiles, like the Facebook Insights data shown below:

Both sources have data on demographics, location, and interests, plus a bunch of other metrics, that’ll give you a snapshot of who your customers are and what they’re interested in. That’s a good starting point for crafting successful email marketing campaigns.

Step 3: Focus on Email Marketing Design

Email design matters in any successful email marketing campaign. If your emails look terrible, that reflects badly on you and can make people stop reading. It’s important to use a responsive email template so your email resizes automatically whether people are reading it on a phone, tablet, or desktop.

Most good emails have more text than images. There’s no denying that images make your email more attractive, but know that many people disable images. That means your email still has to work even if people can’t see them.

Avoid hiding information in images, because that’s bad for email accessibility. And remember to use alt tags to describe images so people who’ve disabled them know what they’re supposed to see. A good description might make subscribers enable images, which will make your emails look even better.

Step 4: Choose an Email Marketing Platform

If your email marketing needs are fairly simple, it’s possible your CRM provides email marketing features that fit your needs. However, if you’re looking to build self-sustaining email marketing campaigns with email triggers and autoresponders, you’ll probably want a dedicated email marketing service provider.

• MailChimp

• GetResponse

• Constant Contact

• ActiveCampaign

• Campaign Monitor

There are several other credible email marketing solutions not included on this list. It’s worth comparing vendors to determine which best meets your email marketing goals, fits within your budget, and can scale to accommodate your growth.

Step 5: Links & Calls to Action

Once your subscribers know who the email is from and what it’s about, they can dive in and take action. Follow these steps to make your links and calls-to-action flawless.

Links

Links help your reader access more information or bring them to a page on your website or blog. Drop them directly on the page where you want to go.

• Test each and every link prior to sending your email to ensure it works and that it takes your reader exactly where you want them to go.
• Use UTM codes to add additional tracking to your links that you can see in Google Analytics.

Calls to Action (CTA)

Your CTA is what you want your readers to do with your email. It should tell them exactly what action to take. Use these tips to put more action in your calls-to-action:

• Minimize distractions by keeping your reader focused on one action or choice. If you need to have multiple calls-to-action keep your main CTA in a prominent position in your email.
• Be bold with your CTA colors by using a contrasting color for your button as compared with the surrounding elements in your email. This will help draw your reader’s eye in.

Step 6: Enable Track & Test

Your emails are now configured to send responsively and at the pace of your choosing. How do you improve engagement and increase email conversions? Your good friend, the email tracker.

Tracking and obtaining performance analytics is how you optimize email campaigns and marketing assets based on what works for which segments. The possibilities are nearly endless, and you can adapt subject lines, pre-header text, email templates, content design, calls to action, and landing pages through A/B tests and analysis over time.

Here are a few metrics you’ll definitely want to track as the backbone of your email campaign optimization:

• Unique Open Rate

  — This tracks the number of distinct recipients who’ve opened your email.

• Click-through Rate

  — Your click-through rate measures the number of recipients who click one or more links in the email, which bring them to a landing page on your website. Generally, the more clicks, the better.

• Click-to-Open Rate

  — This metric divides the number of unique clicks by the number of unique opens to tell you the percentage of recipients who both opened the email and actually clicked a link. This gives you a sense of how well your content is actually performing with the people who see it.

• Bounce Rate

  — The bounce rate measures the rate at which your emails are rejected by email servers. There are two types of bounces — hard and soft. A hard bounce usually occurs as the result of non-existent or invalid email addresses. A soft bounce can indicate recipient’s inbox is over quota or the email message is too large.

• Unsubscribe Rate

  — This is the rate at which recipients are unsubscribing from your email campaign. Unsubscribe rates vary by industry, but generally, anything over 1% means you should look to provide more value in your content, improve the quality of your contact list, optimize the frequency of your emails, and better segment your list.

• Spam Complaint Rate

  — A high spam complaint rate is a sign your recipients don’t see value in your emails. This should concern you in particular because an excessive complaint rate may result in your account being disabled by email marketing service providers.

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