Designing an effective email marketing campaign is one of the most cost-effective forms of digital marketing. Successful email marketing can provide an ROI of up to $36:1, which is why more than 80% of marketing professionals use email to communicate with their target audience.
In this article, we share seven email marketing tips and techniques to help you design an effective email marketing strategy and maximize your profit.
1. Fill your email list with your target audience
Getting the right email subscribers to sign up for your email list is the first step of your sales funnel. Any effective email marketing strategy requires a sizable email list.
Many companies and small businesses use promotional offers, coupons or sign-up discounts as incentives to attract new subscribers.
Giving your potential customers offers and rewards is an excellent way to seal the deal. Always offer something relevant to your product in return for their email address.
Optimizing your sign-up forms is essential here. Only collect the relevant information: a name and an email address. Any more than that and the opt-in process becomes a barrier preventing new customers from signing up.
If you want a successful marketing campaign, you need to inform new subscribers of the purpose of your emails. For example, you should try to answer the following questions in your email landing page or welcome email copy:
What do your customers or potential customers get after they share their email addresses?
Will you be offering beta trials to your followers?
What kind of emails will you be sending?
Will you also engage with your audience over social media?
How often will you be sending emails?
Will you send them great offers, special discount codes and free trial products?
Simply posting “share your email” often does not get marketers and business owners far enough. You need to explain the benefits. Your visitors are about to share personal information with you, so you need to offer them something in return.
2. Use email automation
Many content marketing professionals incorrectly assume email automation means you can’t send personalized emails, which is perhaps why only 65% of email marketers use automated emails.
On the contrary, email marketers can personalize automated emails with names, location and other list segmentation variables (we’ll discuss this in more detail in a moment).
Using automated email sequences in your email strategy lets you keep in touch with your subscribers without needing to manually stay on top of every email campaign. This saves you tons of valuable time and resources..
When you’re ready to announce new products or sales, your subscribers will be engaged and eager to receive your promotional email.
Always schedule your automation templates in advance and stick to the email frequency you promised in your welcome email. If you find yourself asking, “should I be sending this email?” possibly refrain from sending it. Send limited but valuable emails to avoid overwhelming your subscribers, particularly when using automation.
Start planning your email marketing campaign now
3. Optimize email frequency
Sending the optimal number of emails is fundamental to a great email campaign. It increases call-to-action CTA effectiveness and boosts conversion rates because your subscribers are looking forward to receiving your email. There’s a fine line between sending too many emails and losing touch with your target audience.
At the start of your email sequence, we recommend explicitly stating how many emails your subscribers can expect to receive from you in a given timeframe (e.g. weekly, biweekly, monthly). You can do this with the welcome email, as it sets email deliverability expectations, gives you a concrete metric to work towards and helps schedule promotional offers.
Understanding when to schedule your emails depends on your subscribers. Use A/B tests with email marketing tools to take your marketing automation efforts to the next level. Analyze email open rates and gauge when your subscribers are most likely to engage with your emails.
Good email campaigns also leverage different types of emails to optimize their marketing efforts. These include:
Welcome emails
Email newsletters
Follow-up emails
Transactional emails
Each email has a different objective, such as conversions, brand-awareness, re-engagement campaigns, or enhancing customer loyalty.
4. Collect and segment relevant data
Collecting relevant data and segmenting subscriber demographic details is an essential email marketing technique. Data points to collect include:
Gender
Age
Employment status
Personal relationship status
Religious affiliation
Hobbies/general interests
This enables you to segment your target audience in targeted mailing lists (otherwise known as list segmentation). In turn, this allows you to send different types of content and email types to segmented subscribers, which improves the effectiveness and profitability of your email strategy.
Your list might be small right now, but as your enterprise grows, so will your number of subscribers. You will need to invest a lot of time in maintaining your list and practicing email hygiene to boost email health and improve your email metrics.
5. Analyze and compare
From the beginning of your email marketing campaign, you should be using email marketing tools to analyze the key elements in your email strategy. These include:
Email open rates
Click-through rates (CTR)
Unsubscribe rate
Number of inactive subscribers
Once gathered, you can compare these data points to your predefined key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure progress and see if you’re on par to hit your objectives.
Once your email list starts to grow and you get into the hundreds or thousands of subscribers, you need to start considering list segmentation and email segmentation.
6. A/B split test everything
If your messages have a poor open rate, it’s likely your email subject lines or the contents of your emails aren’t resonating with your subscribers.
Analyzing email open rates and A/B testing different email subject lines fixes this problem, as it allows you to set metrics for improvement and identify which subject lines work for your subscribers.
If your click-through rate (CTR) isn’t meeting your expectations, then your email copy isn’t optimized for conversions. Consider using words and language that better resonate with your target audience personas.
The best email copy successfully directs your email subscribers to your landing page, where you can encourage them towards profitable action. Email analytics provides insight into what is going wrong in a campaign and what you need to change to get things on the right track again.
7. Ensure your emails are mobile-friendly
Last but certainly not least, you must ensure your emails display correctly on mobile devices.
Case studies reveal an astounding 81% of emails are now viewed on mobiles, so having the correct mobile email design and email templates is imperative for a profitable email marketing campaign.
If an email looks great on desktop but distorted on mobiles, you may lose a large chunk of your subscriber’s.
