Many businesses avoid email marketing because they associate it with spamming or because they have heard it is not effective. It is true that if you bombard people with unsolicited emails, it will create a poor impression of your business. If you use email marketing wisely, though, it can be very effective. In fact, email marketing can be more effective than social media marketing (McKinsey & Company).
Here are ten tips that will help your email marketing generate more leads and increase sales.
1. Get to Know Your Target Audience
To make an email marketing campaign a success, you must first get to know your target audience. Create a profile of your typical customer. Think about who they are, what their interests are, and what they need. If you have a picture of your target customer in your mind, you will write emails that appeal to that type of person.
2. Segment Your Mailing Lists
Your target audience will include different types of people with varied interests. Email campaigns are effective when you target specific groups within your mailing list. There are several ways that you can gain the information that you will need to segment your mailing list. You can group existing customers by the types of products that they have bought, for example. You can segment new sign-ups to your mailing list by asking questions about their interests in the sign-up form.
3. Make Your Emails Personal
If you have the first name of your subscriber in your mailing list, use it. Use the recipient's name in both the email's opening address and the email subject line. When you address someone by their name, it makes the email far more personal. An email addressing the person by name is much more likely to get opened and read.
4. Keep Marketing Emails Short
Keep your marketing emails short and to the point. Every day, the average American office worker receives more than 125 emails (Email Statistics Report 2020 - 2024). They usually read them in a short space of time. If your email sales pitch is too long, the recipients won't read it all. Get your sales message across within the first few lines and make the email easy to read.
5. Have a Clear Call to Action
For the sake of brevity and ease of reading, it is best to have only one call to action in sales or marketing email. Place the call to action (CTA) in a location where it will be easy to see. Make the wording of the call to action clear and persuasive. Calls to action must be easy to find and easy to understand. The recipient must not doubt what action they need to take next to take you up on your offer.
6. Test the Success of Different Emails
You will need to test and track the performance of different types of emails. The best way to do this is by split testing your email marketing campaigns. Split testing means sending two versions of an email to a subset of your mailing list. You can also split test an email by sending the same message to two different subgroups. Split testing will show you which types of emails work best for which groups in your mailing list.
7. Make Your Emails Scannable
As well as keeping your marketing emails short, it would help if you also made them easy to scan. So, keep sentences and paragraphs short. Use bullet points where you can. Break up the content with subheadings, and don't be afraid to use white space. You only have a few seconds to grab the attention of a reader. If you fail to pique their interest fast, recipients will discard your email and move on to the next one.
8. Offer Value in Your Emails
Emails that offer value are the most effective type of marketing emails. That value might be a discount, it might be something for free, or it could be a unique, time-limited offer. If you offer something of value, more people will read the email, and more people will follow your call to action.
9. Follow a Consistent Email Schedule
The people who have signed up to your mailing list signed up because they want to receive emails from you. So, sending them a reasonable number of emails on a regular basis is not spamming. Many people check their emails daily. So, sending regular emails will be more effective than a one-off email or irregular email campaigns. If your customers are loyal, then weekly emails should not be a problem.
10. Track Responses
Track the responses to all your email campaigns. For each campaign, look at the number of emails opened and the number of conversions. If you don't track email marketing campaigns' success, you will not know which emails were the most effective. When you know which emails worked, you can use the same type of campaign again and repeat the success.
Conclusion
You can't send out emails, hope for the best, and expect to get more sales. It will help if you put some careful thought into the wording of the emails and the targeting of the campaigns. You also need to track the performance of email campaigns. You may have to go back to the drawing board sometimes and think again. Even so, email marketing does work. So, it will be well worth spending some time fine-tuning your email marketing campaigns.
written by Anne Albright