Boost Your Results with Seven Email Marketing Best Practices
If it is not already, email should be a core part of your online marketing strategy. The benefits of this medium continue to be proven time and again, especially as technology evolves. The greater power offered to marketers today make email an even more viable way to not just get in front of customers but to get customers to take action.
Following are seven ways to maximize the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns:
- Create Mobile-Friendly Emails
Your emails absolutely must display as well on smartphones and tablets as they do on desktops or laptops. If you need to create two versions of each email to make this happen, then so be it but make sure you do this.
- Offer Digital Coupons
Your grandmother might have clipped coupons from the Sunday paper but today’s consumers are all over e-coupons that you deliver to them. Email marketing is an ideal medium for offering these incentives that stimulate great response.
- Automate and Nurture
From abandoned carts to cross-selling to remarketing efforts, you should be utilizing the power of email to remain engaged with prospects. People that have already taken some action with your business should not simply be let walk away without more attempts to convert.
- Personalize Your Subject Lines
Hopefully you at least take advantage of technology that lets you personalize salutations or other information in the body of your emails. Now it is time for you to go one step further and customize the subject lines of your emails. Research shows this little change can make a big difference in the ultimate results you achieve.
- Develop Integrated Campaigns
An email marketing campaign really should not exist. This is because email should be used as part of a larger marketing campaign. When you combine the power of multiple vehicles your marketing will truly take off.
- Test, Test, Test
Do not be afraid to try new things. A/B testing is one way of doing this but you can also simply adjust elements of your emails. One word of caution—do not change more than one key element at a time or else you will not be able to identify what change was responsible for what result.
- Craft Strong Calls to Action
Your subject line got people to open your email. Your email was engaging enough to be read and perhaps even clicked thru from. But, did you get the conversion? Whether in the email directly or on the landing page that it directed people to, how effective was your call to action?
The ultimate tip for any email marketing—or any marketing effort for that matter—is to remember the point is to convert. Clicks and opens are great but profit they do not make. Let this always be your guiding principle.
Communication is Key
For some time now, the phrase “Content is King” has been heralded throughout the online marketing community. While we do not necessarily dispute this, we do think it could be taken to a higher level in which general communication is the focus. To engage your customers, you must communicate with them—and they with you.
