There’s nothing more heartbreaking than lovingly crafting a beautifully worded email to send out to your prospects, only to find that you get absolutely no responses!
If this has happened to you, don’t worry. You can definitely get great results from your email marketing campaign just by following a few simple steps.
A lot of people are moving over to social media for a lot of their marketing, and it’s easy to see why. You have quick and easy access to almost everyone in the world, plus they’ve sorted themselves into groups, so you know who is likely to be interested in what you have to say!
However, email marketing is still an incredibly powerful tool. Around 90% of adults and 74% of teenagers use email; research indicates that a lot of people prefer to be contacted by their favourite brands via email than by any other method.
A huge number of businesses have great success with email marketing campaigns, and you can too.
When you’re planning your campaign, the most important thing is knowing who you are talking to.
If you have an established website, you can use analytics to determine what type of people are most often engaging with your business. You can also use your website as a way to collect the email addresses of people who are interested in your services, which means that you will have a ready built lead list!
If you don’t have this information, don’t worry. You can enlist the help of companies like leadlists.com.au to help you to build a list of people from their database who are likely to be interested in your business. They will discuss your target market and desired outcomes with you and tailor a list that is designed to help you to meet your goals.
Set specific, measurable goals
It’s no good just sending out emails and hoping that you might get some more sales out of it! For one thing, not having a goal will make your copy wooly because you won’t have anything specific to say. This will make people switch off when they’re reading your email.
Having goals will also determine what type of person you are contacting. For example, are you sending out an offer to people who regularly engage with your website in the hope of driving sales? Or are you contacting people who haven’t looked at your website in a while to remind them that you’re still there?
It’s also important to have specific goals for your campaign so that you will know whether or not you have reached them, and therefore whether your campaign has been a success.
A really effective strategy for any type of marketing campaign is to use a customer avatar. Your avatar is a lot like a character sketch.
You will create a detailed profile of a person from your target market, including things like age, how often they check their email, what type of things they like to buy, what makes them happy, what makes them angry, etc. Then when you are designing your campaign, you tailor it so that it should be successful for your avatar. This is much easier than trying to tailor a campaign based on statistics, which can seem quite abstract; picturing a real person is really effective.
You can use tools like Google Analytics and Facebook insights to ascertain what types of people are already engaging with your business, and therefore who you should be targeting your campaign at.
The next thing to decide is how many emails will you be sending? Generally, just one email isn’t enough. Even if you pique the person’s interest, the chances of them getting distracted and deciding to act on it ‘later’ are quite high! Just think about how many times you do that yourself.
On the other hand, too many emails too often can be quite annoying and could leave a bad impression.
Think about your avatar, their daily habits (in particular their email related habits) as well as your goal, and use this information to determine how many emails you should send.
It’s also important that you allow email recipients to ‘opt-out’ of your emails or opt to choose to receive emails less frequently.
When crafting your copy, there are a number of things to consider:
- Your subject line. This is essentially the gatekeeper for your email. Get this right, and your email will actually get opened. The most important thing is having an actionable subject line, that is, use the subject line to make clear what the person can do with your email.
- Where possible, personalize your emails.
- Ensure that both your subject line and body text are clear and concise. People will stop reading if you bore them or if you’re unclear.
- Talk in the second person. Be clear you are talking about what the recipient can do and how they can benefit, more than about what you want from them.
- Let your brand’s individuality shine through. This is what will leave an impression.
Before emailing people en masse, be sure to TEST your emails. You don’t want to send out 10,000 emails only to discover the link you’ve included doesn’t work.
Test your emails using multiple browser types as well; you never know what little glitches may appear.
Measure your outcomes. That way, you will know where your campaign succeeded and where it didn’t do so well. This gives you information that you can work with to ensure that your next campaign is even better.