You may find several articles explaining you email marketing tips, but the harsh reality is that majority of those tips are too away from real life implementation!
When we talk about designing and running a successful email marketing campaign, you need to stay in reality, show dedication, apply brain, and take right actions.
Attaining goal will be a hundred times easier if you understand the tips in the right sequence, and that’s what we’ve offered in this guide.
Spending 15 mins here in understanding the tips mentioned in this guide is better than facing failure after putting so many efforts, money, time, etc. in your email marketing campaign.
Ready to kiss the success? We’ve got the whole blueprint for you, and applying these tips and tricks is easy.
Tip 1) Building an Email List
A healthy email list is one of small businesses ’ best marketing assets. While proper management of your email file will drive immense revenue, it often proves to be a challenge to create an email list.
With the inbox mess is on the rise and customers getting more sensitive and aggressive toward any unwanted communication, marketers need to develop their subscriber lists with care and relevance.
Fortunately, there are numerous simple and effective methods of creating an amazing email list, including traditional online as well as offline tactics, besides some spicy emerging strategies, for example, paid search, events, special offers, and direct mail. The challenges involved in expanding list growth through are as follows:
- Using these tactics responsibly
- Respecting subscriber preferences
- Complying with all legal requirements
Direct Mail – Reap the big advantages of This Long Standing Channel
You can Advertise email sign-up in all directory ads, direct-mail order forms, and catalogs. A simple checkbox embracing a field for narrating an email address on rebate cards, subscription renewals, bills, etc., is all you need to thrive your list considerably.
While using this trick, ensure to reach out to new subscribers quickly. The chances are that a huge amount of time has passed away since they mailed the form. Keeping your brand fresh in your subscribers’ minds and continuing the dialogue is crucial.
Attractive Email Sign-Up Boxes – Enable your Customers to Sign Up for Email
Email Sign-Up Boxes play a terrible job!
Placing a conspicuous and clear form on your site will help attract email sign-ups for your web visitors. This common acquisition practice isn’t just effective, but it’s very easy to implement as well. There are some considerations when employing this trick:
- Keep the feel and look of all website sign-up boxes clean and consistent. This makes them convenient to find, familiar, and look more reputable to your web audience.
- Place your sign-up boxes either as the top banner’s part or just below it. Most test results have indicated that those located close to the top of the site perform better than those situated in the footer part.
- Couple your sign-up boxes with a straightforward description of “what’s there for them.” Let your customers know exactly what’s expectable when signing up. Sell the advantages for being on your email list (it’s an “always successful trick). This can be as straightforward as promoting the general benefits of the channel — like being able to receive offers and information faster and that it’s eco-friendly.
Online Ecommerce and Account Registrations Forms – Email Sign-Up should be included into Your Forms
Site registration is certainly the most effective and common means of acquisition for marketers. One Research found that around 77% of marketers agree that site registration is effective in terms of both list quantity and quality. So ensure to incorporate email sign-up into all e-commerce forms and account registration on your website.
To do this effectively and perfectly, stick to the following ultimate practices:
- The incentive for registering is relevant and clear to your target audience
- The advantages of registering for your email program should be clearly listed
- Demographic and Geographic information is collected for segmentation
- The call to action is saliently displayed
Word of Mouth – Another Amazing Way to Thrive Your Email File
For your subscribers who stayed on your list for a lengthy period, a small discount or incentive will often get them talking. Marketers need to capitalize on word-of-mouth marketing by including email sign-up on viral components, for example, features that permit site visitors to forward services, wish lists, products, notifications, information online, and more to their friends/family.
This practice is highly effective with sweepstakes entries and new sign-ups, as these types of subscribers are more excited and eager to spread the word to their close ones. Tap into this enthusiasm, and utilize timing to your benefit by offering an opportunity for a referral immediately after your website user has opted in.
It’s a tremendous practice to ask your referrer not just for his/her friend’s email address, but you can also ask for a full name so that you can personalize the message. Remember to add the full name of the referee to the email. By referencing the recommender of the email content, you gain instant credibility, and that way, your conversion rates increase.
Customer Requests & Downloads – Offer for Potential Customers a chance for Email Sign-Up
When your site visitors request online price quotes, pamphlets, company information, research papers, or catalogs, ask for their email addresses. This list-growth tactic is particularly useful for B2B marketers, financial organizations, catalogers, and other businesses that may not own eCommerce websites.
You can Save any new doc as a PDF for download and ask individuals to enter their names + email addresses to access it. The value of the info you’re offering is directly comparable to the amount of personal data that your website visitors are willing to offer, so ensure the tradeoff is fair. A highly anticipated report or white paper can garner a huge number of new email subscribers openly expressing interest in your brand. Hence, don’t leave this opportunity unaddressed, as there’s much juice here.
Point of Sale – Email Acquisition Should be a Part of your Checkout Process
For retail stores, asking their customers for their email addresses while they reach the point of sale (POS) is a highly proven technique that’s quickly gaining momentum. In-store and In-person events were ranked second in acquisition quantity and quality, as per a 2007 Jupiter Research study.
If you want to practice the same, it’s crucial that your associates:
- Explain the advantages of your email program
- Ask customers for their email addresses
- Let customers know what to expect concerning email frequency and content
- Read the email addresses once again to verify correct grammar and reduce the chances of error
Employee training, as well as in-store signage promoting your program, may prove to effectively support this effort.
Send a Welcome Email and a Free Gift with Any Purchase
You need to encourage your customers to provide store associates their email addresses, you should offer a free product with their upcoming purchase. You can just send an email to confirm the email address and further include the free offer coupon. This will validate the email address and encourage customers to buy again from your site.
Call-Center Representatives (CSRs) – Request your Customers’ Email Addresses While you’re on Customer Service Calls.
Customers are fully receptive during customer service calls, and you have their full attention. You should use it beneficial yourself by requesting email addresses. You may truly be surprised at how many of your customers will comply.
Tip 2) Manage and clean your email list
When you discover that there are some issues with email hygiene, it’s mostly too late. You’ve already wasted resources, and significant damage has already been done to your brand.
That’s the reason proactive email list cleaning is a crucial part of a successful email marketing strategy today.
How often to clean my email lists?
Here’s a quick summary:
- We suggest you clean your lists every 1 to 6 months.
- In case your list is growing rapidly, then you should clean it a minimum of once every month.
- You need to clean a list that’s yet to be delivered and after each campaign.
But why before and after?
Well, cleaning the email list before sending it will save you money (that’s in case if you are charged per unit from your email server). You’ll remove email addresses that have just recently become inactive. Also, you’ll clear out all the email addresses that would have brought you a hard bounce or simply ended up as spam.
Why after a campaign? You’ve got all that fresh data to work with—marking all sorts of issue addresses in your heap.
How to clean up a mailing list?
Okay, that’s a pretty interesting question. How do you clean up those email lists? Thankfully, there are some nice ways to tackle things, but what about the best one? And is it the perfect method for you or not?
Combining those methods and getting the best of both worlds is the smart option.
Mailing list cleanup services
There are numerous email list cleaners from which you can choose. After deep research, we concluded that My Email Verifier is the ultimate choice.
It offers one of the most comprehensive email list cleaning services (at low costs) in the industry.
Their email list scrubber applies AI to constantly validate email addresses, and its verification success percentage for Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail emails is tremendous.
Utilization of such a list hygiene service can improve the percentage of emails that successfully make it to the inbox, reduce the risk of getting banned by your Email Service Provider, and reduce your risk of getting blocked by various Internet Service Providers.…
They’re truly worth the investment in case you’re having an old email list or are collaborating on one. Remember that you’ll never hit 100% accuracy on your email lists. People change jobs and providers, abandoning their old email addresses.
Clean it yourself
Let’s compare your car to your email list.
Weird comparison, is it? Well, still we’d!
Nobody loves your car (or your list) more than you actually do. Nobody is more concerned and familiar about your campaign’s work, the sort of client you’re searching for, the areas where you need your undivided attention, and the engagement you expect.
You know the sort of things— behind the door sills and under the wheel arches!
By cleaning your email list (or your car) yourself, you can be sure that it received the best attention, but this process is actually too lengthy and tiring. We’d still insist you grab an email verifier service rather than manual hassle, most importantly, when your lists are huge.
Tip 3) Planning an email campaign
1. Choose Your Email Marketing Goals
You can’t run a marathon without properly training for the race. Exactly like that, you shouldn’t begin planning any email marketing strategy without setting proper goals.
Before starting to create goals, take some time to reflect upon what defines a good goal. The philosophy is that Good goal is SMART goals, and here’s what SMART actually stands for:
- Specific: Avoid planning vague goals. Be sure to include deep details around your planning to reach your goals.
- Measurable: You need to be able to properly measure your goals with given numbers or checkpoints.
- Attainable: When designing your goal, consider what resources you have. Just ensure your goal is attainable with your current skill set, time, and most importantly, budget.
- Realistic: Undoubtedly, your goal should be challenging, but even more importantly, within reach. Research industry benchmarks or historical review data to determine what this means for you and whether your goal is attainable as per your desire or not.
- Time-bound: Allot yourself a date by which you need to complete your goal anyhow.
Make sure your goal aligns with these five guidelines whenever you create your goal for email marketing strategy.
Here’s what you need to do:
Growing your email list: With a huge email list, you’ll be able to construct relationships with more people out there. Not just tell them about your business, but also encourage them to buy a product/service.
Increasing your email open rates: In case many people aren’t opening your emails, keeping them engaged and building a relationship with them will be impossible. Addressing this issue could help you increase subscribers with whom you’re able to interact.
Improving your email click-through rates: How do you figure out that people like your content? You get to know good email click-through rates, and a good CTR directly means a big chance of more conversions.
Decreasing spam complaints and unsubscribes: Decreasing complaints and unsubscribes help improve your deliverability greatly and ensure you’re sending valuable and engaging content to your subscribers (top priority).
Increase your email subscribers: You can communicate with your subscribers directly and build relationships to encourage them to buy when subscribers respond to your emails.
Asking for and implementing subscriber feedback: You can apply subscriber feedback to create emails that prove to be more useful to your subscribers. This could help you increase open, CTR, and conversion rates.
2. Define Your Target Audience(s)
After setting goals for yourself, start determining who your ideal subscribers are and create a persona for these subscribers.
Create a persona for your ideal subscriber, and attract the right individuals to fit in your email list. Further, send content that’s relevant and, even more importantly, helpful. This will perfectly guide your email marketing strategy to move forward, from how you build your email list to how you interface with your subscribers.
The customer persona document you design should answer these questions:
- What’s your ideal subscriber like? Age? Married or single? Male or female? Kids? Occupation?
- What are their goals?
- What are their problems and pain points?
- What’s their industry?
- What could stop or pain points from buying your product/service?
- What sort of content do they consume?
3. Think About Integration & Choose the Tools
We already talked about email list cleaning using tools like My Email verifier, and now, we’ll discuss some integrations and tools.
To attain better results, use your email campaigns in conjunction with various other offline and digital marketing activities. Blend your email strategy with your overriding marketing strategy and highlight how various tactics will support each other to explain your brand story.
Choose an EPS (email processing system) to help you manage your entire email campaign. The market provides plenty of choices from Dotmailer and MailChimp to Infusinsoft and several others.
Just analyze which one meets your needs and budget. Most of them do offer free trials, so take your time trying out a few of those before committing to one.
Once you begin implementing the campaign, there are a few other tools to make your work more efficient. Here they are:
- Cliché spotter: Cliché Finder
- Subject line analyzer: Touchstone
- Image resizer: WinSoftMagic.
- Spelling and grammar checker: Reverso
- Content checker: Lyris
4. Gather Your Data
At your email campaign’s planning stage, consider how you’ll be gathering contact details. Two aspects should be looked at: the message and the channel.
First of all, figure out where it’s best to ask your prospects their details. This decision will be acknowledged by your customer personas and also where they spend time online. A few tactical options you may have to consider include PPC, social advertising, and your website.
Next, think about your message and the value you can offer to them. In simple words, offer something in return for their information to increase your sign-up rate. It can be a discount code, an industry report, or a voucher.
That’s how you take control of the conversation. Every time your name appears up in an inbox, more chances are there that the email will be opened as they’ll expect some sort of benefit.
Tip: Avoid offering your promise on the page that pops immediately after the sign-up page. Your email should contain the advantage. It’s also a tremendous way to check whether the email address they’ve provided you works.
Moreover, consider what other elements on the data gathering form can increase the chances of signing up. For instance, you can explain to them what email address you’re trying to get from them: work email (B2B) or personal (B2C). In case you aren’t sure, use these different elements to determine which one works perfectly.
5. Segment Your Data
After gathering your data, it’s time to properly segment it, and you can’t skip this. Research has found that email campaigns ran on segmented data performed better than those which used unsegmented data.
Analyze your data to determine what criteria can be used to segment it. It can be anything from demographics, location, position in the sales funnel to interests and purchase history.
This will help you design your campaigns to individual characteristics. The golden key here in email marketing is relevancy; it can make a huge difference between an unsubscribe and a conversion.
Top tip: create quarterly groups of “clickers” and “openers” to see who engages more with your brand and which are the most valuable readers (another sweet chance to get in touch with them offering a reward). Besides that, you might want to determine in case you want to delete or re-engage your inactive subscribers. You need to be careful, though, as engagement rate depends on your business and industry’s nature.
6. Content and Design
Your email‘s design and content are two of the most critical aspects of your email marketing campaign.
Just list down the valuable content you can provide that your readers will appreciate, which can be:
- Guides
- Industry reports
- Templates
- Prize draws
- Tips
- Whitepapers
- Free online courses
- Coupons
- Taster sessions / free demonstrations
Your past email reports and customer personas can help you decide what sort of content to send to various subscribers. Customer profiles will not just indicate what sort of content your readers love but also when there are bigger chances of them to engage with your email.
Design an attractive layout and decide on one perfectly placed call to action per email. Some EPSs even offer free templates to use. However, you can design your own as well. The most effective layouts carry a catchy headline, immediately followed by the email’s main body. Structure your email in a fully logical way and compulsorily test it on various devices.
Tip 4) Scheduling an email campaign
After adding content to your campaign and picking recipients, you can schedule it as per your preference.
If you truly want your campaigns to kiss success, then do consider following up with your prospects on time. Just think, what’s the point of sending a thank you email when it has been 24 hours of conversion or subscription? Success and failure in email marketing are defined by your presence at the right time!
Remember that the timeline of sending emails varies with every product and industry. Try out different offers, timelines, and content with the use of A/B testing to see what fits your business.
Now, what if you own a list?
You need to figure out and segment your target audience on geological location. It’s more important than you think, and we’d have an example here. Suppose if your email list comprises people from eastern Australia, and you are living in New York. You’re sending them an email in the daytime, and for your knowledge, they’re actually 14 hours ahead of you. That means they’ll be simply sleeping and dreaming.
You need to use some marketing tools to schedule your emails.
Now, let’s talk about some ethics related to timing. Follow this general outline for better results.
- First Email – It should be a thank you email coupled with added value or a promise you made
- Second Email – You can send it the Next day asking needs (or solving his/her doubts) of the customer
- Third Email – don’t be hasty here. Wait for two days to send the third Email asking for review or testimonial
- Fourth Email – After five days, you can send a case study or tips that match their interest
Tip 5) Monitoring and tracking emails
You May have heard of email tracking or may be familiar with the aim of tracking clicks or opens but not getting too deep into how it works. But does email tracking truly matter to your business? Well, yes, it really does, and more than you think.
Let’s hit the point straight away: email tracking isn’t new and certainly not going anywhere in the upcoming time. It shouldn’t surprise you to meet the fact that starting from the emails you receive from the huge box store to the newsletters you subscribe to, everything is being tracked.
As per a successful email intelligence company, OMC, 99% of bulk emails, such as newsletters, are tracked. What’s the reason? Because email tracking helps businesses understand what content gets a response from their customers.
Collecting data such as clicks, time spent on a website/page, or whether you buy something after tapping that newsletter is all unbelievably valuable.
No perfect formula exists for monitoring because it varies as per your product, industry, and program targets. While metrics like delivery and open rates prove to be great starting points, these just represent one portion of your email program’s health.
But regardless of your industry, you should pay close attention and track the below-mentioned email marketing metrics.
Create a Tracking and Reporting Document
By tracking and measuring your email marketing campaigns’ performance, you’ll be able to determine:
- Where you need to make improvements
- Your content’s overall performance
- How frequently you should send emails
- Which lead source is the best performing
- The health of your email list
What you need to Included?
An easy format to use is Google Docs or Microsoft Excel. Your document should include the information outlined below:
- Audience (segments) sent to
- Date of Send
- A brief summary of the email
- Email Marketing Key Performance Indicators
- Number of emails delivered
- Number of emails sent
- Emails Opened
- Delivery Rate (Delivered/Sends)
- Emails Clicked
- Open Rate (Emails Opened/Delivered)
- Opt-outs and Opt-out Rate (Opt-outs/Delivered)
- Click Through to Open Rate (Emails Clicked/Opened)
- Post analysis comments
It’s all about those clicks
In true words, not completely, but yes, it’s super crucial!
The click-through rate (CTR) indicates the number of recipients who tapped on a link or any call to action within an email. Undoubtedly, it’s an amazing indicator of overall strategy and content quality.
If your CTRs are lower than what you’d like, just check the content quality within your email and various other variables such as your images, call to action (CTA), etc. Consider the areas of betterment.
Conversion rates
A conversion enlarges on the click. During a conversion, not just a recipient clicks on your link, but he/she takes a step further down your marketing funnel by handing over information. Conversions vary depending on what you offer in your email. Some examples include:
- Downloading a whitepaper or eBook
- Downloading a promotional code or coupon
- Filling out a form
You should definitely be measuring conversions after every single campaign to see what’s working and what’s there to be improved next time. Although your email service provider probably won’t provide you this out of the box, you can track this amazing metric with a CRM. Or in case you don’t use any CRM tool, and if you send recipients to a landing page, you can use a free tool like Google Analytics to measure this metric.
Leads generated who transformed into customers
You’ve already done all this hard work to design targeted email campaigns with high-quality and engaging content.
Don’t forget to conduct the next step and monitor who among those have done the deed and purchased your stuff. In case you offer freemium versions of your service/product, this would count as a customer as well.
There’s no need for a fancy CRM to track your leads to customer ratio either (although several automated versions are available for companies of various sizes these days).
Consider the email touchpoints that your email subscribers need to conduct to become a customer. In case you keep offering additional value at every single stop on the way, you’ll be more likely to convince them to become your customer.
5) Email List Growth
Finally, we’d describe your email list as a huge email metric. Without a thriving and healthy list comprising engaged users, the above-mentioned metrics won’t matter. Closely monitor how much is your email list growing over time.
Also, keep track of those the audience that unsubscribed from your emails. Was there any considerable spike in unsubscribes after a specific campaign? That signals email fatigue.
Your email list brings your program full circle besides illuminating the criticality of the open rate as well. Ensure you’re removing those from your email list who haven’t opened an email in a few months. Now, that’s an inevitable part of every single email program, and most seasoned email marketers come across it.
All email metrics are highly helpful for your program, so never discount the ones you may be presently monitoring that aren’t on this guide. But try to register a consistent measurement and add additional metrics to perfectly track the performance of your email program.
The Conclusion
So, that was the path worth following for adding the spice of success t your emailing campaigns, and most importantly, nothing was tough enough to discourage the markets. These were general, yet deep marketing tricks, and can be followed with a bit of courage and a lo of determination.
Applying a couple of tricks won’t do, it’s a whole process which needs to be properly followed step wise. One crucial part that several email marketers (especially newbies) skip is proper validation of the email address, and skipping this actually destroys the whole campaign slowly. You can never attain proper conversion that way.
That’s the reason we’d appeal you to cherish this best email verifier listing, and if you’re in hurry, then just visit the best email verifier service HERE.
