How do you Define a highly Successful strategy for Email Marketing?
Irrespective of if you are just getting started with the concept of marketing using email as the medium, or you are in the process of redesigning your strategy around it, it may look like the number of things that you have to put thought into is just a never ending exercise.
Where should you begin? We feel you.
We understand very well as to how hard a task it is to be defining a strategy around using email for marketing, and the loads of hard work which it requires in order to play by it.
Well, do not panic yet, we are writing this just for you. We will be guiding you through the journey as you begin towards making sure that your strategy for using email for marketing will be a success story.
So, ready to jump start your strategy for email marketing? Let us start.
Build your list of contacts and grow it
The very first step that you need to be taking in defining the strategy for your email marketing is to build and grow your contact list. Need not be said, you will need the people who you will be sending emails to, else the exercise of your entire strategy will become completely pointless irrespective of how good it looks on paper. There are a lot of ways of doing this, and you would like to try various approaches. The most important part is that you work towards growing your consumer base in an organic fashion.
When you are trying to build a list of contacts, the first place for you to start should be your website. People who are coming to your blog and your website already have shown interest in whatever it is that you have to offer, so to entice them into signing up may be a lot easier here compared to if it was any other place.
You can now start integrating your social followers and your contact that you face on a daily basis to start telling the followers and the consumers regarding the benefits that they will get by joining the mailing list floated by you.
Eventually, you may even decide to start using incentives to increase the number of your sign ups, though we will warn you to be careful in doing this because some of the subscribers may be signing up only to get the offers. You should make sure that you are consistently adding some value to the contacts.
Be sure to define the goals for your Email Marketing efforts
As it is with any other marketing tools, email would be nothing if it is not accompanied by a clearly defined strategy. So, even before you begin to design and send out an email campaign, you may want to first define the very purpose of sending it out. Always keep asking yourself, “What is that I would like to gain by sending this email out?”, and then try to find the most suitable way in order for you to be able to assess if you have really achieved the goals you had set out to meet.
Do not forget that email is the channel of marketing that does drive the highest return on investment. A/B testing as well as comparing performances of various campaigns are very powerful tools when you get down to defining success of your laid down strategy.
These results shall give you a very clear picture regarding your ROI; it will also tell you if you are doing everything you can to increase it. While you are in the process of planning the campaigns, do remember that the word success itself will have separate meanings in all of your emails.
Planning your campaigns
Now that are done defining your goals and must have a focused list of engaged and high quality contacts who you will be sending the emails to, now the next step for you is to start planning your campaigns.
Now what do you want to include as part of the email that you will be sending out?
Though some forms of content are always highly easier to customize and really depend on your goals, there are still a variety of elements which need to have presence in all the mails that you are sending out.
Some of the elements that you should always include in your emails are:
Subject Line
Pick a subject line which makes your mail the highlight of the inbox. Though it still may be important to stay with the voice and tone that is more aligned with your brand in this case, you may still want to be trying out different approaches which may help draw the user’s attention to your mail, for instance, using a phrase to catch the eye of the user or even emojis.
From Name
You would not want the recipient of your email to think that they’ve gotten some random mail, which will result in it ending in the trash folder the moment they see it. So always try to make sure that your contacts can easily figure out as to who is mailing them.
In order to make sure that your name can be recognized, use the name of your brand, or if you are really trying to get creative, then look for something that still easily links back to your brand and keep that consistent.
Pre Header
The power that the pre header holds is very often underestimated. This is an extremely effective manner in which you can summarize the entire content of a given email, which comes really handy in case of mobile devices. This should be complimenting the subject line while drawing attention towards the campaign that you are running.
Call to Action
CTAs (Call to Action) are very strongly interlinked to the main objectives of the campaign. While you are creating them, do consider what you would like your subscribers to be doing after they have read your email. Always create CTAs that are responsive and are very easy to navigate on the mobile devices and on the desktop.
You may want to keep it as simple as possible. Emails with just one focused CTA have the potential to increase the clicks by 371% and the sales by 1617%