Every business who wants to stay relevant needs to embrace digital and social media marketing. While social listening and programmatic advertising are part of the new marketing trends, email marketing still remains one of the most consistently high-performing channels to use.
Email marketing provides you with a wealth of insights into the behavior of your audience, especially when you first launch your business. You can evaluate the performance of your different email campaigns. Despite the proliferation of email spam and unwanted email, it is still a highly effective channel for keeping in touch with your existing customers and converting prospects.
Putting time and effort into building your business email list gives you the ability to reach your customers at critical times in their purchasing journey, building a very personal connection. It’s a channel you can own, where the messaging, images and content can really craft your brand’s story and communicate exactly what you want. The data that you gather from each email campaign you send out can be used to evaluate and make constant improvements.
It’s All In The Data
They say that you’re only as good as your data entry and that’s certainly true when it comes to effective email marketing. Data hygiene is more important than ever with increasing worldwide regulations around privacy. Data security should be a matter of the highest concern to you. Statistically, small businesses are much more likely to become victims of cyberattacks.
Hackers assume that small businesses don’t have the rigorous security or the budget to keep their customer’s information fully locked down. Not handling and storing data correctly puts your business at a huge risk of large fines and even worse, reputational damage.
Make sure you invest in a cloud server with watertight security and look into the security protocol of the email system you use. Whether you’re still using a small scale-free system such as MailChimp or are looking for a convertkit alternative, invest in a secure email platform. Make sure you perform regular data cleanses regularly.
Keep On Personalizing
The average email user receives hundreds of promotional messages per day – and with the likes of Gmail, all marketing emails are filed away in a separate inbox. People are looking for a reason to delete your message immediately. You need to ensure that you grab their attention in the first seconds of them seeing your message.
Always lead with a personalized greeting, and then use insights that you have gathered from the previous activity to create dynamic content that appeals to their unique needs. You can also opt for a personalized sending time based on their usual interaction. Catch their interest early on and tailor the content to be highly relevant. This will help your click-through rate.
Consider A Double Opt-In
If you’re really serious about data consent, create a double opt-in process. Many marketers steer away from creating this extra step, fearing that it will put people off signing up. Although it’s true that it may reduce the volume slighting, it also tends to put the focus on quality leads.
A smaller list of prospects who are more invested and responsive is worth a lot more to your business than a huge inactive one. A double opt-in process has the effect of narrowing your list down to those who are genuinely interested in what you’re doing, as well as improving your data hygiene. It’s now required by law under GDPR legislation in some cases.
Within your pool of subscribers there will be some who are more interested in sales and discounts, others who are signed up for new information and still others who want to know about events, for example. Adapting the content of your messages to these behavioral segments using the insight provided by your email analytics will allow you to serve these audiences exactly what they want.
Refine Your Segments
Take the time to work on segmenting your email lists. This will help boost open rates and click-throughs by increasing the relevance of your communications. Create targeted groups within your CRM system based on what customers have responded to previously and the preferences that they have expressed.
Email subscribers signed up voluntarily. They want to be part of your conversation. With the new GDPR guidelines, you should ensure that there is an ‘unsubscribe’ option too.
You should be looking to implement a personalized email journey for your subscribers. Consider this as a lead nurture and customer engagement tool.
Be Clear On Your Call-to-Action
It’s a marketing basic, but you’d be surprised at how many businesses send out emails without a clearly defined call to action. This leads to underwhelming results. Before constructing your email, be clear on what the purpose of the communication is and what you would like your audience to do as a result of reading the message.
Find an email newsletter tool or software that you like and make sure it has the capability to create email funnels. This means that if someone signs up to your mailing list, they will receive a starter email and based on which links they click, they will receive different autoresponders.
Each action that an email subscriber takes will lead them to a product that is ideal for their needs, based on the link usage. This smart system takes some time to implement but very effective in customer engagement.
Don’t make the mistake of splitting focus – keep it to one key action per email. This could be generating a telephone call, a click through to a certain webpage or completing a form. As we know people receive a high volume of email traffic and have low attention spans online, you’d be wise to cater to that by channeling their focus to one action. If you don’t make it easy for people to do something, the default position will be inaction.