Best Practice for Email Marketing
Email may have been around since the 1970s, but the ongoing effectiveness of email marketing categorically proves that it’s possible to teach an old dog new tricks. Every day, companies large and small rely on email to sell their products and services to consumers and other businesses, constantly refining and optimising their content and strategies to gain a leg up on the competition.
Email may have worked in much the same way for decades now, but the world of email marketing is constantly evolving – and it’s just as valuable a marketing channel as ever. When you consider that around four billion of us check our digital mailbox on a regular basis, that’s perhaps not surprising.
Want your own slice of the email marketing pie? Once you’ve chosen a provider, you’ll be free to create campaigns of your own. But before you do, make sure you hit the ground running with our five top tips for email marketing success.
Cultivate audiences (and understand them in detail)
Before you start sending out emails, it’s important to build a targeted list of people you’d like to send them to. For example, you might want to email people who have added items to their basket but not checked out – or people who have expressed interest in a service before, but haven’t yet gone ahead.
Once you’ve built an audience (or multiple), dig into the data to work out what they might be interested in, how many emails they’d like to receive and when.
Keep it short and sweet
You don’t need to bombard recipients with tonnes of information. Generally speaking, the most successful (and most read) email campaigns are engaging, intriguing and fairly light on content. The goal here is to persuade people to visit your site or get in touch with you – so you don’t want to give them all the information in an email. There needs to be some incentive for them to click through to your website.
Give A/B testing a try
There will always be a degree of experimentation required in email marketing – and pretty much any other form of marketing, for that matter. To work out which email content is most effective, you can try A/B testing. This means sending one email to half your audience, and another email with different content in to the other half.
Analyse the data
Email marketing platforms give you access to an array of different statistics, allowing you to really analyse the performance of your campaigns in minute detail. Tracking each one of these metrics might be overwhelming, so we’d advise selecting a handful to keep a close eye on. You could even set targets for these metrics to make sure your campaigns are on the right track.
Improve landing pages
Yes, you’re reading that heading right. Even if your emails are top-notch, if your landing pages aren’t up to scratch, people won’t convert. It’s as simple as that. If your emails are being opened and users are clicking through to your site but not converting, it’s probably time to take another look at your landing pages. Review competitors and ask yourself: how could the layout and content be improved?
Still scratching your head and need some advice from the pros? Get in touch with the team at Echo today.
