Email marketing is an old technique, but it is still one that businesses should be taking advantage of. With the right strategy on your side, email marketing can significantly augment your other marketing efforts. Here’s what you need to know.
Establish Your Growth Strategy
If you want email marketing to play a central role in your overall marketing strategy going forward, then you are going to need a sustainable approach to building out your subscriber list. Ideally, you need to be constantly adding new users to your subscriber list in order to replace those who either abandon their email addresses or lose interest in your newsletter.
Of course, this is easier said than done. What separates the best email marketers from the amateurs is that the pros know how to keep adding new names to their subscriber list. With a concerted effort, any old marketer can build a list of email addresses. But if that list is not kept regularly updated, it is going to depreciate in value constantly.
There is no sense pouring time and resources into crafting intricate email marketing messages if you don’t have a reliable list of subscribers to read them.
Identify the Best Software for Your Needs
There is a plethora of email marketing software on the market today. For small businesses, choosing the right one can seem daunting. Not only are there the usual premium options for you to consider, but there are also a number of open source and freeware tools available. This list of free email marketing tools is an excellent place to start your search, and there is plenty of information about each option.
It is worth taking the time to make this decision properly as the email marketing software that you ultimately settle on can have a profound impact on the success of your future campaigns. Without the right email marketing tools on your side, managing large campaigns is going to be significantly more difficult. Make sure to do your due diligence and carefully research any software before you commit to using it.
Get as Much Feedback as You Can
There are plenty of different metrics that you can use to measure how successful your email marketing campaigns are. Some of these will be direct measurements, such as the uptick you see in traffic following each newsletter, or the number of your users who redeem discount codes provided to them within these letters.
However, these metrics are never going to be as good as direct feedback from your audience. Feedback is a valuable tool for refining your approach and improving your decision making. Without direct feedback from your audience, you will always be flying blind and relying on the influence of indirect data.
Use Personalization Strategically
Personalization has come a long way in recent years; it used to be nothing more than a simple way of addressing a recipient by name, but it has evolved into something completely different entirely. By using personalization strategically, you can significantly enhance audience engagement with your newsletter as well as helping to make your message resonate more strongly.
The more data you gather from users when they sign up for your newsletter, the more you will be able to personalize the emails that you send to them. However, you need to balance this against making a sign-up process that is too unwieldy and tiresome for any user to bother with.
Avoid the temptation to include more personalization just for the sake of it, and only use personalization where it makes sense to do so.
Make It Mobile-Friendly
The majority of internet users today do their browsing on mobile devices. Things have been trending in this direction for many years, but the imbalance is now so extreme that it is madness for any business to neglect their mobile users when they are composing their newsletters.
When you are deciding on the overall design and layout for your newsletter, make sure that your mobile users are at the forefront of your mind. Not only do you need your newsletters to properly display on mobile devices, but you also need to think about the data requirements involved. People who are browsing on the go, on their mobile devices, won’t appreciate being made to download a significant amount of data just for a regular newsletter.
Put yourself in the position of a mobile user and ask yourself what kind of things you would expect or reject in an email newsletter. Don’t include anything that you would not want to receive in such an email yourself.
With the right strategy in place, email marketing can be a very powerful tool indeed. However, as with any marketing technique, email marketing will only be as effective as your strategy for implementing it. If you do not take the time to devise a coherent email marketing strategy then you are dooming yourself to failure. Make sure that you stick to the advice outlined above and your email marketing campaigns are sure to impress.