Make Your Email Marketing More Effective

Posted by: Dana Gulick 04/23/2020

There are plenty of reasons to run an email marketing campaign. They’re inexpensive, relatively simple to execute and an effective way to communicate directly with your customers or prospects.

In recent years, more and more business has migrated from desktops and laptops to phones and mobile devices, and with COVID-19 keeping the vast majority of your audience under stay-at-home orders, email marketing is a great way to keep your target engaged with a singular voice and message.

But there’s lots of competition for your audience’s attention, not to mention lots of noise. And now more than ever. So how do how do you make sure your message rises above the rest? Here are six tips.

 

1. Have a clear objective

Like any marketing tactic, you need to have a clear goal in mind before you execute. What is it you want the email campaign to achieve? Awareness of a new product? Leads for sales follow up? Nurturing of existing contacts? Download of a coupon to drive sales? Whatever the objective, make sure you know why you’re using email, what you hope to achieve with the campaign and then let that drive the rest of your decisions.

 

 

2. Use the right list

Reaching the right people is critical, otherwise your efforts are wasted. But not every email should go to everyone. Make sure your list of recipients makes sense for the campaign objective. In most cases, you should have this list in house. But sometimes you may need to buy a list. Be sure you understand the demographics of your target audience so that your list is as clean and targeted and possible.

 

 

3. Craft a compelling subject line

Emails allow for longer-form content that some other tactics, so you’ll be able to tell a deeper story when you send emails. But the content of the email won’t matter if no one opens it and reads it. That’s where the subject line comes in and why it’s so important. Without a compelling subject line that breaks through all the other noise in someone’s inbox, your email will get lost and overlooked. Be sure your target has a strong reason to open your email and get the message you are trying to deliver. You have about 2 seconds of their eyes before they decide to click or move on.

 

 

4. Include calls to action

Every email should include clear calls to action. Multiple calls to action are okay and in fact encouraged. Give email readers a couple of ways to respond to you. Want someone to download a coupon? Add that as a CTA. Want someone to download white paper? Add that as a CTA. Your calls to action should be structured to support the objective of your campaign and written to speak to the target audience. Be sure that every link embedded in an email is trackable so that the CTA’s can be measured for effectiveness.

 

 

5. Drive to a landing page

Landing pages are a critical component of many digital tactics and the same is true for email marketing. While you want the audience to click on your email and read it, when they engage with a CTA, you need to send them somewhere that pays off their efforts. Your landing page should tell more of the story and provide deeper details while being easily navigable and visually impactful. Sounds like a tall order, but it doesn’t need to be. There are plenty of simple landing page templates out there that can be used to develop an effective landing page. Make sure your conversion points are easily found and that it’s clear what you’re asking your visitors to do. Remember, multiple conversion points, like multiple CTA’s, are best.

 

 

6. Measure and assess

When set up correctly from the start, you should have some good measurement points after your email campaign, including opens, click throughs, landing page conversions and even shares. The key here is knowing what you want to measure and then making sure the html is set up to track each engagement correctly. At the end of a campaign, you should be able to see how many people the email reached, how many people opened it, how many emails bounced, how many engaged with the email CTAs, how many visited  your landing page, how many converted and if anyone shared the email with others. By assessing these numbers, you can draw conclusions about how effective your email has been and then make adjustments for the next email.

 

One great aspect of email marketing is that it offers a lot of learning. There are many variables that can be tweaked to improve upon the emails that you are sending. Based on measurements, you may decide to A/B test messages and subject lines, add downloadable content and/or visually enhance your landing page. But if you follow these six basic ideas to get you started, you’ll at be on the right path for reaching your customers or prospects directly with your marketing message.

 

 

Time to take your email marketing game to the next level? We can help. Fill out an inquiry or contact Dana Gulick: dgulick@stonerbunting.com.