Email marketing is an effective marketing strategy when used in
conjunction with relevant content or information. Each email you create needs
to have a goal and purpose, with the overarching goal of email marketing being
to deliver relevant content and information to a segment of your leads or
customers.
. One of the keys to email marketing is consistency of the email’s
design and who the emails are coming from.
Goal: To have
email recipients take some type of action as a result of getting an email.
Step 1: Optimize
Yourself for Deliverability
Segment Your List: You need to
segment your email list into different groups to ensure each group gets
relevant content. You don’t want to overly sell to your customers - you want
them to digest and share your content. You could have four segments labeled
‘leads’, ‘customers’, ‘win-backs’, and ‘newsletter’.
Set Expectations: Setting the
right expectations is important so you don’t annoy your email lists. The
expectations you should set include:
·
Why they should subscribe
·
How many emails will they receive
·
When they will receive the emails
·
What the emails will be about
·
What address and brand/person are the emails being
sent from. Recommend that they add the address to their safe sender list.
If you set the right expectations, you will reduce the chance someone
will be surprised by your email and unsubscribe from your list.
Respect Your Audience’s Privacy: You must respect your subscribers’
privacy so they will stay an active subscriber. State that you will never sell
their information or give their information to a third party. You might want to
create a privacy policy that your subscribers can read and print. You must also
honor their request to be removed from your list within 10 business days to
comply with the CAN-SPAM law.
Includes your company name, address, and unsubscribe link in the footer
of the email.
Determine the Goal
To have a successful email campaign you need to determine the goal of
the email. This will allow you to accurately measure the success of the email.
Here are some goals to consider:
·
Alert customers of a new feature or product and see
how many customers adopt it
·
Announce an upcoming event and measure how many people
register for it
·
Send an email to get people to subscribe to your blog
and measure how many subscribed
From Name & Email Address
The “from” name and email address should be consistent. You should have
the email come from a person at the company or from a brand name, followed by a
dash and the company name. For example, the “from” name could be setup like
this, Thaddeus I. – My Home Salary . You
should then match the email address with their “from” name, e.g. xxx@myhomesalary.com . This will
improve the chance that the email doesn’t get caught in a spam filter and is
more personal.
You should not send the email from an address like noreply@, sales@,
marketing@, etc. These email addresses commonly get picked up by spam filters
and are far less personal than a real person, lowering engagement.
Subject Line
Your email subject line should be a call to action so the recipient
knows what action they need to take and why. Begin with the most important
information in case the subject line gets cut off in their inbox. The subject
line should be under 45 characters, short, and to the point. The more
complicated you make the subject line - the higher the chance people will not open
to read the email at the first place.
Email Body
Most people read emails in less than 10 seconds. Therefore, you need to
put your most important and compelling information at the top of the email.
This is also beneficial because most email clients allow the user to “preview”
the email without having to open it.
Links
You should include a link in the first one or two sentences in the
email. Most emails usually have one goal, so you should limit information that
doesn’t help you achieve that goal. Is recommended you include two or three links in the email,
but have each link go to the same website page. You should also bold every link
in your email, which will help increase your click-through rate (CTR).
Every link in the email should be tracking URL so you can understand
how many people clicked-through to your website and converted on your landing
page.
Plain Text
You should create a plain text version of the email to and or for email clients that are configured by the
recipient to only accept plain text emails.
Personalize
Is recommended you personalize the email by adding the
receipt’s first name in the email body or subject line; you can also experiment
with adding the company name in the subject line.
Images
Make sure you have less than five images in the email to prevent the
email from getting caught in a firewall or spam folder. Create links for all
the images that are associated with a call to action, so people can click on
the image and go to your website.
Each image should include a descriptive alt text phrase, so if
recipients don’t accept images, the alt text will convey what the image is
about.
CAN-SPAM
By law, you must include your company name, address and an unsubscribe
link in your email to comply with the CAN-SPAM law.
Email Signature/Footer
Your email signature should be consistent with the “from” name in the
email. You should sign the email and include any other information you think
the recipient’s could find useful.
This is a great place to add social media icons ,your blog URL, or
announcement s for upcoming events or products.
Testing Your Email
To ensure the best results, you should send the email to employees at
the company or your alternative email
address to make sure it doesn’t get caught by their spam filters. You
should have someone else proofread the email and click on every link in the
email. Have them communicate back to you if there are grammar mistakes,
something that confused them, a misaligned offer, etc.
Send the Email
Double-check all of the links in the email and make sure both the HTML
and text based version are set up properly.
Listen and Respond
The work does not end once you send them email. The other goal of email
marketing is to build relationships with
your list and subscribers. You need to be sure someone is responding to reply;
preferably the person the email came from. Any questions or comments need to be
handled in a timely manner.
Measure
In order for you to
know how much the email contributed to reaching your goal, you need to measure
the click-through rate and unsubscribe rate. More importantly, look at your graph stat to see if there was a spike in your
website traffic the day of and the day after you sent the email. If the email’s
goal was to generate leads, you then need to analyze how many leads you
received and the quality of those leads.
Keep up with these,
you will be successful with email marketing
You can get one of these guides to learn more
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