Email marketing is the use of email to promote products or services to convert prospects into customers and turn first time buyers into recurring customers.
Each of your potential customers receives hundreds of emails every day. Hence there is a dire need to take time and know the best practices in Email marketing. Otherwise, your emails will get lost in crowded inboxes. And yes, anyone can learn how to build an effective email strategy and send emails that people actually want to read.
An important aspect of Email Marketing is that even if the receivers are not opening your emails, they're still seeing your headline and are still seeing your business. Isn’t it incredible!!
Email Marketing Benefits
- There are 3.8 billion email user’s world over, hence in order to reach your customers, email is the perfect place to find them.
- Two-thirds of customers have made a purchase as a direct result of an email marketing message.
- With respect to customer acquisition, email is 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined.
Best practices of Email Marketing
Build a contact list
This might surprise you that 86% of your contact list actually wants an email from you once a month. Hence build a contact list and subscriber list. For creating a contact one needs to know a couple of things.
- Most importantly you do want their permission.
- Start with a form, fill out a form. Maybe it's on your website? Somewhere on your website, like if you want to subscribe to our newsletter, or be the first to know what's happening. You can sign up and they opt-in.
- One more way is to, of course, promote across your social media platforms, as well. You wanna stay in tune, subscribe here.
- Another commonly used way is to direct call to action.
- For eg. if you are owning a pizza shop, you can simply promote, "Hey, sign up for our newsletter and on your birthday, "you get a special deal. You can also give a discount. So the more value you bring to your audience, the easier and more willing they're gonna be to give you their email so that they can get onto the contact list.
Content is the King
There are many ways to make your email visually presentable:
Catchy subject lines:
The subject line is the first thing that will engage your audience. In order to achieve a high click rate, it has to be striking. This can be done through various ways like by using Emoji’s, Quotes, Statistics, Affirmative sentences etc.
Image Credit: MailPoet Usage of banners:
An email banner is the first thing readers see after they open an email. Creating an eye-catching, clean, crisp and beautiful email banner design is key to capturing subscribers' attention and getting clicks.
Image Credit: Template monster Add an appropriate call to action (CTA):
The CTA is the culminating point of the email. It’s where the story reaches such a point where the reader gets to decide whether the email was in line with his needs.
The text should be properly sectioned, usage of bullet points, and excellent imagery
Image Credit: Venngage Use Positive metaphor between the text and make it visually stand out.
Image Credit: verywellmind.com Provide various social media links:
You should have Social Media buttons like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. in every single email you send. These buttons give your contacts an opportunity to connect with you in many ways and stay updated with all the recent developments.
Image Credit: Venngage The subscribe and unsubscribe button should be clearly visible:
Just as it is important to have a subscribe button similarly your email should have a unsubscribe button. An unsubscribe link is a link within your email campaign, often placed in the email footer, that allows users to cancel their subscription when they don’t want to receive any more emails from you.
Image Credit: Freepik Image Credit: Documentation Know whether Email Marketing Strategy is yielding results?
- The foremost thing to do is to look at the number of unsubscribes. This is something you want to keep an eye on. It informs you that maybe your audience isn't exactly as organic as you thought, and you need to continue building it. And also, maybe reconsider the content and look at open rates.
- When putting out e-books and webinar invites. One needs to check whether the contacts are opening the e-mails? And, if they are opening the e-mails, check if they are actually clicking on your call to action your links.
- No need to get discouraged about the low open rates of email. Because with e-mail, it hardly gets above 80%if you are doing it yourself. Mean Open rates are gonna be pretty low, but that's okay. Even more than 60% of open rates are considered good.
- But even if they're not opening your emails, they're still seeing your headline and they're still seeing your business, which increases that brand awareness.
Some other best practices
- Know Your Audience: Like everything else in marketing, know and understand your potential contact list so that you can run a tailor made email campaign to suit your audience’s needs.
- Make and achieve your Monthly Goals: Before you start your campaign goals do. research about the average email stats for your business and use them as targets.
- Have a schedule: Follow a strict schedule to send the email to your contact list to build trust and so that they don’t forget about you.
- You should, after every six months, make a list of those who are opening your emails and who isn’t. And the ones who aren't opening your emails, isolate that list and let it chill for a little while. And then remind them down the road like, hey, and see if they're interested. But definitely do every six months.
- >Finally, take time to organize your Contact list. Example: hot leads group or cold leads group etc.
Conclusion
Hence it is very important to find a comprehensive email provider. SPRL is one such all-encompassing email provider where you can create, optimize and personalize your email campaigns. Thereby it saves your precious time and effort which you could put into running the business.