What would you do if you had guaranteed email marketing success? How might it change how you view your content marketing strategy?
Guaranteed Email Marketing Success
How effective is your email marketing campaign? Do you consider it a success or do you feel like the results could use a little improvement? Reaching customers through email continues to be a very important marketing strategy with the potential to grow your business and it doesn’t look like this will change anytime soon. It allows you to send your messages directly to your target audience in a way that entrepreneurs only dreamed of years ago.
It makes staying in touch with potential and existing customers easy so you can grow and strengthen these relationships. Every time someone receives an email from you, it reminds them of the products and services you provide and it also makes it easy for these consumers to reach out to you.
However, in order for this type of marketing strategy to work, people have to receive, open, read and respond to your emails. If your plan is flawed in any of these areas, then you’re not getting the most from your marketing efforts.
Top 10 Tips for Guaranteed Email Marketing Success
If you’re unsure where you are in your process, you might consider doing an email marketing audit to assess. To help ensure you’re on the right track, here are the top 10 tips for guaranteed email marketing success.
One: Use the Subject Line to Captivate Your Audience
Email marketing success largely depends on whether or not your audience is reading your mail. Therefore, you must give them a reason to open your emails, which is why the subject line is so important. Use it to compel the reader to open the email to learn more about the subject at hand.
Here are a few ways to accomplish this:
- Create a sense of urgency – When you have special deals or promotions that won’t last long, find a creative way to put that in your subject line. For example, you can say, “Don’t let this great deal pass you by” or “Only six items left in stock”. This type of subject line will encourage the reader to learn more about what you’re offering before time runs out. However, do avoid trigger words and phrases that can land your email in the spam folder.
- Intrigue your audience – When you intrigue your audience, you build up their curiosity. They become excited about receiving and opening your emails. You can do this by asking questions, stating facts or telling a story. Since many people are curious by nature, it’s an excellent way to improve your open rate.
- Make a legitimate promise to your audience – This includes things like “Our new product makes cleaning a breeze” or “Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back.” Just be sure that you don’t disappoint and always fulfill the promises you make.
- Use number lists in your subject line – For example, it could read, “Top five ways to use this product” or “Six mistakes newbies make when starting a business”. As long as it’s relevant to your business and offers real value to the audience, it’s a great way to draw attention to your emails.
Remember to keep your subject line short and to the point for the best results.
Two: Encourage Interaction with Quality Content
Email marketing is all about building relationships with consumers but that won’t happen if you don’t take steps to encourage interaction. A great subject line will capture the reader’s attention and encourage him or her to open the email but good quality content will keep them coming back.
Consumers do not want to waste precious time reading content that has no value. Therefore, it’s vital that you provide content that serves a purpose whether it’s to offer special discounts and savings or to provide important information about your particular niche.
When creating content, use your own distinctive voice to set you apart from competitors. Make short paragraphs instead of long blocks of texts and get to the point quickly. Use bullet points and numbers to break up the text even more and to make it easy for the reader to skim through the content. This will make your emails more appealing and encourage the subscriber to open, read and then respond to the content you provide by clicking that Call to Action button.
Three: Edit Your Content for Guaranteed Email Marketing Success
Your content should always be clear, concise, and look like it was written by a professional, not an amateur. No one enjoys reading content that is poorly written with spelling and grammatical errors. Not only does it make you look unprofessional and untrustworthy but it always appears that you just don’t take any pride in your business. Editing your content is a very important step in guaranteeing your email marketing success.
Four: Pay Close Attention to Your Design and Format
Customize your design to match your brand by including your company’s name and logo in the design. It will help distinguish you from the competitors and build your brand. Offer both HTML and plain text formats so your emails are suitable for computers and mobile devices such as phones and tablets.
Consumers are on the go now more than ever and expect the option of using their mobile devices to check emails. If you don’t make this option available, you’re not taking full advantage of your email list and hindering your own results.
Five: Choose Color, Font, and Images Carefully to Make a Good Impression
Color creates mood by triggering emotions and feelings in the viewer. Therefore, the colors you use can have an emotional effect on how subscribers view your emails, so choose wisely. One good option is to use colors that reinforce your brand because it’s familiar to your readers and it will make your brand more recognizable.
Choose a font size and style that looks professional and that’s easy to read. It’s usually best to stay away from red, yellow, orange, and other colored fonts that are hard on the eyes. Keep all images relevant to your business and email content for the best results.
It’s also important to avoid using too many images or oversized ones because these distract and take away from your text. They also increase the odds of your emails being sent to the spam folder. When used correctly, embed videos, GIFs and infographics can also be very useful in making your point and creating interest in your content.
Six: Personalize Your Content
When you personalize your content it’s referred to as segmentation. It’s much more effective than sending out generic emails with the exact same content to every subscriber. Get to know your audience to determine which offers would be the most appealing to them based on demographics and other data that you collect. Then customize your emails accordingly. Personalizing your content based on subscriber interests will encourage your audience to read and respond to your emails.
You can also personalize your emails by using the recipient’s first name in the greeting and by using a friendly, casual tone throughout your content. Write like you would if you were having a conversation with a friend. This friendly tone makes your business appear more personal, which in turn helps to build your relationship.
Schedule your emails to ensure you’re staying consistent with your messages and to avoid sending out so many that you appear to be spamming your subscribers. Also, include several “Call to Action” links or buttons that stand out and grab the reader’s attention, and make it clear what you want the subscriber to do.
Seven: Make It Easy to Subscribe and Unsubscribe
Take every opportunity you can to ask your target audience to be a part of your contact list. For example, clearly place your sign-up form on your website, blog, social media sites, and anywhere else appropriate. The more opportunities you give your audience to sign-up, the better response you’ll have.
Make the form short and easy to fill out. If you get too personal or ask too many questions you’ll discourage people from signing up, so keep it simple. It’s always best to just ask for the basic information you need. However, if you add extra questions, make answering them optional and keep it to a minimum.
It may seem irrelevant at first but making it easy for people to unsubscribe from your email list is just as important as making it easy for them to subscribe. For starters, it encourages more people to opt-in because they know they can unsubscribe at any time, so they don’t feel pressured.
It’s also better for your business if someone unsubscribes when they’re no longer interested in receiving your emails. It will prevent them from being tempted to flag your emails as spam so they won’t receive them anymore. It will also prevent you from wasting time targeting someone that no longer has an interest in your products or services.
Eight: Create a Plan before Sending Out Emails
It takes time and hard work to create content for emails so you don’t want to waste this opportunity to reach your audience. Email marketing is not simply promoting your business. It’s designed to help you make a real connection with your existing and potential customers. Therefore, you need to know what type of messages you plan to send out before getting started.
If you don’t have any real plan or purpose for sending out emails, you may find yourself struggling to keep your audience interested. You should have a clear idea of what types of emails you’ll be sending out, how often you’ll send them, and how you plan to track your results. Then, commit to making it happen.
Nine: Track and Record Your Data
Guaranteed email marketing success revolves around tracking your data and recording the results so you can see what’s working and what’s not. If you don’t keep track of how well your audience is responding to the content you provide, then you won’t have anything to compare to.
You’ll be forced to make decisions based on an educated guess instead of real data and that’s not very efficient. Tracking your data will help you learn how many emails were not delivered, your open rate, click rate, best response time and so much more.
Ten: Learn How to Avoid the Spam Folder
One of the worse things to happen to your emails is for them to end up in the spam folder where your target audience will never see them. Different types of spam filters flag different things so it may be impossible to avoid them all. However, there are a few red flags to avoid that will help ensure the majority of your emails reach their destinations.
For example, don’t use trigger words such as “act now”, “limited time”, “100 percent free”, or “as seen on TV”. Don’t use all caps, quotations marks, or several exclamation points at the end of your sentences in your subject line. Include a valid postal address with every email and only send emails to people that have signed up to be a subscriber.
Guaranteed Email Marketing Success Conclusions
These top ten tips can help you get your email marketing campaign off to a great start and keep it on track in an effort to guarantee your success.
