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Email is a really effective marketing channel. According to Lyfe Marketing, the median email marketing return on investment (ROI) is 122%.
Yet it’s a very competitive channel with emails flying into your customers’ inboxes at breakneck speed.
Let’s be honest, achieving inbox zero is something most of us can only dream about. That’s why you need to carefully hone your craft and think carefully about what you’re doing before you start firing messages off to customers.
We’ve put together a list of email marketing best practices to make sure your campaigns hit the right note with your customers and, ultimately, drive revenue for your business.
Before you start putting your email together, keep these things in mind to create a successful campaign.
What works for one business won’t work for another. That’s why there is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to email marketing.
We can provide you with email marketing and digital marketing tips that we’ve gained from our experience running campaigns, but you know your customers best and how to adapt these tips to your business.
Email marketing should never work in isolation; instead it should complement the other channels you are using, such as social media, SMS marketing, and event marketing.
Your communication and brand also need to be consistent across each channel so your customers know who you are and what to expect.
You can read about which other channels you should consider in our marketing 101 guide.
We mention a variety of different email marketing software throughout this article, all of which have useful functionality to help you implement these email marketing best practices.
While the right software will depend entirely on the needs of your business, you can check out our top picks of the best email marketing software available today.
In the olden days, email marketers would create one email and send this exact same message to every contact on their email list.
Luckily, batch and blast -- as this technique is known -- is on its way out. This is important as customers want to feel like they are being treated as a unique human being.
Personalization shows them you value them as an individual, rather than just a number.
Trying to manually personalize your marketing emails is impossible if you’re emailing large numbers, which is why you need to automate the process using email marketing software.
Here are some ways you can use an email tool to your advantage:
The more data you collect about your customers, the better.
The kind of information you should be collecting extends beyond just demographic data, to include channel communication preferences, browsing patterns, and purchase history.
This data that will allow you to effectively personalize campaigns according to customers’ preferences and browsing habits.
If you want to get to know your customers then collecting this information is not enough. It’s what you do with it that counts.
Sending the right content to the right group of people is key to improving the performance of your email campaigns.
This is why it’s so important to store all your contact information in one place, so you can spot trends that help you understand what kind of segments you should create.
Segments can be as simple as all your contacts between 18-34 who live in New York City. Or they can be more specific, such as everyone who has purchased yellow sneakers.
Only you know which segments make most sense to your business.
A lot of debate goes on about when you should send emails. Some say that you should avoid the weekend at all costs, others say you should send emails at the weekend because nobody else is.
But there’s no right or wrong time to send your emails. It all depends on what works for your business.
So much of direct marketing these days revolves around collecting data, getting insight from that data, and then making changes based on that insight.
Choosing what time to send your emails is no different.
If your emails aren’t even reaching your recipient’s inbox, and they’re either ending up in their spam folders, or being rejected by the ISP, then you’re in trouble.
That’s why it’s important to keep an eye on your email deliverability rates.
You can do many things to improve the likelihood that your email will end up in your recipient's inbox.
Quality not quantity. It may be a cliche, but it is certainly the case when it comes to your email list.
Whether you’re starting your list from scratch, or you’ve got 5,000 contacts on your list, you need to be mindful of whether these contacts are engaged and when you need to cut the cord.
Since many email marketing solutions charge based on the number of contacts in your email list, it makes financial sense to clean and rebuild your list regularly.
If you have high levels of bounces and unsubscribes because you haven’t cleaned your list, then this hurts your email deliverability score.
Email marketing is a complicated blend of art and science. While creating beautiful email messages and crafting killer copy is important, so is wading deep into your data lake.
It’s important to track the performance of each of your email blasts, especially when you make changes to the way you are running campaigns.
Every email you send and campaign you run needs to have a goal.
This could be to drive traffic to a certain page on your website, or to generate more follows and likes on your social media accounts.
Only when you have set these goals can you decide on how to track your campaign success.
You’re not a mind reader and, no matter how good you are at analyzing every little piece of data you collect from your customers, there is nothing that beats asking customers what they want from you.
This can help you craft a better overall email marketing strategy.
This is where you can harness the power of all your direct marketing channels and make them work well together, rather than relying on email marketing.
Now it’s time for you to go off and put these tips into practice. One key thing to consider is that there is no magical formula for success.
What works for one business, won’t necessarily work for you. And what works for your business now might not work in six months.
That’s why data is key. Collect as much as you can, centralize it, analyze it, and use this insight to make your campaigns better.
But there is no perfect science. Your email marketing campaigns will always be a work in progress, so keep testing and keep optimizing.
Our Small Business Expert
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