5 Strategies for Creating a Winning Email Campaign
Email marketing is still one of the most effective channels for digital marketing. While content marketing, social media, and display advertising has caught everyone’s attention, one DMA report shows that email marketing returns $38 for every $1 spent. However, many businesses fail to get results with their email marketing. In order to grow your business through this marketing channel, the right email marketing practices must be followed. Here are some strategies that can help create winning email campaigns.
1. Test Campaigns with Small Sample Sizes
The best way to come up with performing email subject lines and messages is to test your campaigns with small sample sizes. If your list is large enough, you can test multiple subject lines against several groups of subscribers. Success in email marketing depends on your ability to test different efforts to find which activities are the most effective. Once you figure out which subject line and message results in the highest response rates, you can roll it out to a majority of that list. Even if your email list contains 1000 subscribers, you can still run a respectable test before you roll out your email campaign. Do not get caught in a routine, however, but continue to test your efforts in order to improve your model.
2. Segment Your List Appropriately
One of the biggest mistakes that you can make is to address your entire email list as one entity. If you do your research, you’ll find that there are multiple personas, various types of customers, and unique audiences that make up your email list. In order to deliver the right message, you want to segment your lists and communicate in a way that resonates with that specific group. MailChimp reports multiple performance boosts from segmented lists. There is a 14.31% higher open rate, 100.95% higher clickthroughs and even 9.37% fewer unsubscriptions with segmented lists.
3. Create a Lead Nurturing Strategy
Many businesses have the idea that email is a channel designed for selling. While that’s partly true, a big part of making email a big source of revenue for your business is turning leads into customers. This requires a lead nurturing strategy where you slowly move a prospect towards becoming a customer. A great way to nurture leads is to deliver educational content that’s delivered in multiple parts over the course of a one month period. An advanced strategy that some businesses are using is delivering emails based on actions that prospects have taken like links they’ve clicked on, emails they responded to and segmenting lists they’ve signed up for.
4. Use a Checklist Before You Hit Send
Once you hit that send button, there’s no going back. That’s why you need to make sure that you proofread scrupulously before sending every email. You need to create the best image possible through your marketing efforts, and even small errors will hurt your chances of more people engaging with your content.
While some email marketers check their email messages for spelling and grammar errors, they don’t really know what else to look for when they go through their email campaign. There are many useful checklists and resources that will help make sure all emails are properly optimized. Be sure to research important details such as the most effective subject line length, spam filter triggering words, personalization, and more.
5. Use a Combination of Email and HTML Emails
There’s been a constant war over whether to use text or HTML emails. Statistically, text emails have higher open rates than HTML emails, but Internet users prefer to receive HTML emails. However, it can be hard to grasp the attention of your subscribers with text emails. The best thing to do is to use a combination of both. You may want to give subscribers an option to receive text or HTML emails. Overall, it’s probably a better idea to use a minimally designed HTML version so that you can use font that’s easier to read and integrate call to action web buttons for higher clickthroughs. You will also want to use text emails when it’s an important email message that you absolutely need delivered.
Discussed here are some core strategies you should be using in your email marketing campaigns. Getting results comes down to the fundamentals, however many businesses focus too much on the tactics and put the blame on email not performing for them. With the right fundamentals in place, you will be able to get better results from email marketing and create more room for experimentation.
