How to build an effective email marketing strategy
For years now, email marketing has been one of the most cost-effective and efficient ways for businesses to engage with their target audience, and boost their sales. Simply sending out emails, however, will not generate any new sales or increase any customer satisfaction or loyalty. The best email marketing strategies are conceived, planned, and run by professionals who can avoid all of the common email marketing mistakes.
Effective email marketing strategies don’t have to be overly complex, but they must include some important components. Let’s take a look at some of the best email marketing strategies that combine to deliver a coherent, comprehensive, conversion-boosting email marketing campaign.
The importance of a successful email marketing plan
While we are all aware of how effective and powerful a tool email marketing can be, it’s important to know exactly what a successful email marketing plan achieves.
The goal of email marketing is to help businesses, organizations, or institutions engage with customers, identify new prospects, build brand awareness, increase customer satisfaction and retention, and, ultimately, boost sales and conversions.
Without a solid strategy in place, however, your email marketing efforts may turn out to be a waste of time and resources, achieving precisely none of the aforementioned goals.
A successful email marketing campaign will be based on in-depth market and competitor research conducted by professionals, who have the experience and expertise needed to conceive, craft, design, and disseminate conversion-focused marketing emails. Let’s take a look at how the best agencies do this so successfully.
Best email marketing strategies that will work for any brand
There are a host of effective email marketing strategies that can benefit any business, whether they are in B2B, financial services, or even the non-profit industry.
The first of these is list segmentation. By segmenting your subscriber lists, you can send highly targeted and relevant emails, increasing the likelihood of engagement, customer satisfaction, and conversion. Segmenting lists also helps improve the overall effectiveness of the email marketing campaign.
Next, we have personalization, which isn’t all that dissimilar to segmentation. Taking advantage of the information we know about the subscribers, we can personalize their emails with names, locations, previous activity, career success, or even mention a recent promotion, publication, or other professional accomplishments. There are uncountable numbers of studies that show personalization is one of the biggest driving factors behind successful email marketing campaigns.
As well as personalizing emails, we need to remember to optimize them – for mobile that is. Mobile optimization ensures that any emails, regardless of their contents, will display correctly on mobile devices, as well as computers and laptops. A responsive design is key, as it includes large buttons that can be tapped with ease, bringing the reader to your website or landing page.
Testing emails is another surefire way to improve your camping effectiveness. The best email marketing campaigns include thorough A/B testing, where different versions of each component of the email – subject line, language, layout, design, call-to-action (CTA) – are tested in different combinations to identify the best version of the email. Once identified, this is the final version that will be sent out and, based on the data, will be much more likely to resonate with your audience.
Finally, there is the CTA itself. Your CTAs must be strong, concise, and enticing enough to elicit a click from the readers and drive them head-first toward conversion. Keep your CTAs short, and avoid generic, spammy words and phrases for best results.
Common email marketing mistakes to avoid
Just as there are important steps that anyone can take to increase the effectiveness of their email marketing strategy, so too are there common mistakes that can be avoided when crafting a robust email marketing strategy.
First and foremost, do not buy email lists. Building your own lists organically is the best way to ensure your emails are relevant and targeted. Without this knowledge, you are essentially sending emails to random people. Don’t be surprised when your bought email lists lead to low engagement, high unsubscribe rates, and no demonstrable gain in conversions.
In the same way, you must optimize for mobile, conduct thorough testing, and include clear CTAs, skipping any one of these steps will likely cause your campaign to fail. These steps are not optional, and they are often the key difference between successful email campaigns and unsuccessful marketing emails.
Start building your first email marketing campaign with inSegment
inSegment’s full-service digital marketing capabilities make it the ideal agency to partner with if you need to build an effective email marketing strategy. The company’s experience and expertise in content and copy, design, and lead generation puts them in a prime position to conceive, run, design, test, and report on your email marketing strategy.
From building and segmenting your email lists, and personalizing and optimizing your emails, to analyzing and adapting as the campaign progresses, inSegment is the perfect partner for all your email marketing needs.
