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Originally Posted On: https://www.pwmedia.com/5-steps-to-level-up-your-email-marketing-campaign
Think email is dead? Think again. Email is more popular than ever, and a successful email marketing campaign can help your business get noticed and stay relevant. But it’s not easy. With the number of emails consumers receive—over 306 billion emails are sent and received daily—deploying smart strategies ensures customers open and interact with your email.
Follow these steps to ensure that your email marketing campaign stands out and doesn’t go straight to spam.
Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing tools for getting direct messaging to your customers.
What Is Email Marketing?
To harness the power of a successful email campaign, you must first understand the basics of email marketing and what makes it an effective business practice.
Email marketing is the act of sending an email to a targeted group of consumers to promote the business, generate sales, and keep customers engaged with a brand. Marketers use this in their strategy because email is still the most effective marketing approach to consumer engagement—despite it being one of the older digital communication tools. No wonder the email marketing industry is worth $9.62 billion, and its revenue is estimated to reach $11 billion by the end of the year.
The Benefits of Email Marketing
When done correctly, email marketing can make a huge impact in building your business. Here are a few of the top reasons email marketing is the best digital marketing tool:
- Get the best ROI
Email marketing drives an average ROI of $36 for every dollar spent. This is higher than other digital marketing strategies: SEO has an average ROI of $22 for $1 spent while social media seems to average about $3 per $1 spent.
- Generate synergy among other platforms
With an average open rate of around 22%, you can use emails to send consumers to other marketing channels like social media, blogs, or in-person events. By building a relationship among other platforms, you can increase the memorability of your brand and keep your customers engaged.
- Drive website traffic
One of the most important benefits of email marketing is sending your potential customers straight to your website’s landing pages or sales pages.It’s also great at drawing attention to specific products or add calls-to-action (CTAs) to get subscribers interested in purchasing your product or service.
- Collect valuable customer data and performance
Use your email to collect insights and track analytics on your target audience to improve your business, products, and services.
5 Steps to Launching a Successful Email Marketing Campaign
1) Figure out your goal
There are different types of email marketing campaigns that you can use depending on what your goal is. Examine the various benefits of email marketing to decide which are most important to your current strategy and lean on that for building the campaign. You might do a newsletter to provide company news to build brand awareness or a cart abandonment campaign to remind your customer to finish their order.
2) Understand and build your target audience
Decide what demographics you would like to target with this campaign and learn about their wants and needs to create a meaningful email they want to open. Consider even segmenting your campaign by age, gender, or interests to make the emails more personalized, giving subscribers a better reason to open it.
3) Craft the content
The content of your email might be the most important part since that’s what you want your subscribers to read and, ultimately, drive them to your website. The copy will need a hook at the beginning to draw your customer in. Overall, you’ll want to keep it short, but don’t introduce your offer too early. Let your customer get comfortable, and make the email as personalized as possible for the best results.
4) Design the email
Once you’ve got your message written, plug it into the design. The design can make or break your email’s success. It needs some images and graphics to break up the text, but it shouldn’t be overloaded with them. Also, make sure that your images have alt text to make them accessible for those who are disabled.
5) Pay attention to details
Before you send out the real thing, make sure to do a few things first:
Send tests:
- Send a few tests to yourself and your team: Check that all links work, images show up, and there are no errors in the content. Typos and broken images make you look unprofessional and cause recipients to lose interest fast.
- View on different formats: Test the email for mobile and desktop to confirm that both layouts look appealing and work correctly on each format. Pro tip: Check your email on dark screen mode.
- A/B test: This practice can better optimize your conversion rates. A/B testing compares two versions of an email to determine which one performs better. It can be a simple process, such as sending different subject lines to subset groups of email recipients, or more complex, such as changing the template and messaging. The goal of A/B testing is to improve the performance of the email campaigns, so it better achieves end goals. Once this testing is done, the winning email can be sent to a larger audience.
Measuring the Metrics for Your Campaign
The work isn’t over once you’ve launched your email marketing campaign. Throughout its duration, you will want to keep track of the metrics and status of those emails to see your ROI working in real time and learn what you can improve upon for your next campaign.
Three main metrics help tell the story of your email campaign:
- Open Rate — The percentage of subscribers who open the email.
- Response Rate — The percentage of subscribers who respond to the email.
- Conversion Rate — The percentage of responding subscribers who then buy.
The metric you most want to focus on is the conversion rate. While increasing the open and response rate is important, the conversion rate is where the revenue comes in. Just because a subscriber opens an email doesn’t mean they like what’s on the inside. For this reason, avoid clickbait-y and trick headlines. It’s a surefire way to send your email straight to spam. Use the metrics you garner from your campaign to inform your next one.
Let’s Get Started!
At PW Media, we can help you leverage all these tactics to make your email marketing campaign a success. Whether you’re just beginning to learn the basics or are a veteran needing a new perspective, we can give you personalized solutions to help your brand grow its presence on the web by building up your email marketing game and blending it with other digital marketing strategies. Contact us today to begin working toward a successful campaign that will maximize your ROI.
