It’s important to keep certain key points in mind when you start developing and launching your campaign – no matter what industry you work in.
Here are six tips to help you achieve your email marketing goals much more consistently:
1. Have specific goals
You’re not likely to achieve your goals if you don’t know what they are. Be as specific as possible when outlining what you hope your email marketing campaign will do for your company. Vague goals like “boost brand awareness” aren’t clear enough. Instead, make the goal measurable: Have an average open rate of 25%. It’s difficult to confidently develop content for your emails if you don’t know why you’re sending them.
For example, if you’re sending emails to alert customers to a new product, know exactly what type of action you hope they’ll take after reading your message. Do you want them to place an order? Share the information with friends? Knowing what you want people to do after receiving your emails is key. With this information, you can then curate your emails more effectively, as they will be aimed towards a specific goal.
2. Track your progress
Developing a clear set of goals is important. However, you also need to make sure you have ways of determining whether you’re achieving them.
Start by ensuring your emails are actually being sent to valid inboxes. You can’t make any significant progress if real customers aren’t receiving your messages. Use
an e-mail checker to weed out invalid email addresses.
Once you’ve taken this step, establish procedures to track the success of your campaign. Your email service provider should have an analytics tool jus for this purpose. Additionally, you can use tools like Email on Acid and others for more in-depth reporting.
3. Ensure your content transitions naturally
Studies indicate that approximately 47% of people decide whether they’ll open an email or not based solely on their reaction to the subject line. Obviously, this is an important element of your emails.
The problem is, too many marketers don’t understand that an attractive subject line still needs to accurately reflect the content of the message. Readers will stop clicking on your emails if they learn that your subject lines don’t honestly convey what a customer should expect from the email. Keep the transitions natural, and you’ll develop a more loyal customer base.
4. Use your first lines of text wisely
With more and more people using their smartphones to check their inboxes, the importance of your first few lines of text can’t be overstated.
Your subject line typically isn’t the only text a recipient sees when they receive one of your emails. They may also see a few lines of pre-header copy. This text can optimise your subject line by giving a reader even more reasons to open your email.
However, smartphones tend to display less text than desktop computers. Thus, it’s important to make sure those first few lines are especially enticing.
5. Edit carefully and thoroughly
Your customers have plenty of distractions vying for their attention when they’re reading your emails. Most people don’t finish reading the pieces of content they open online.
You can’t expect your customers to finish your message just because they opened it. That’s why you should edit with concision in mind. You want to provide customers with relevant information that reflects your branded identity, but you also want to get to the point. Ask others to read your emails before you send them in order to get a better sense of what material you can remove.
6. Keep mobile in mind
Again, people are reading a lot more emails on mobile devices these days. This information should impact the design of your emails. Break up the text so it’s easily scannable, use headings to make the content appear more organised, and include elements like images and videos to make your emails more visually appealing.
You also need to keep speed in mind. Make sure your email content is optimised for mobile devices. Consider that 40% of people will leave a mobile website if it takes more than three seconds to load. With such little time to spare, you need to have optimisation methods in place to ensure your mobile emails load quickly and efficiently, images and all.
The nature of your organisation will play a role in determining which email marketing tactics will be most effective for you. These general tips simply provide you with a foundation on which to build your strategy. They’ll help you make the most of your email marketing campaign.
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