10 Jan
Email is one of the oldest facets of the internet — dating all the way back to 1972. Of course, today’s email (and the internet itself) is far more sophisticated, intuitive and user-friendly than the networks from decades ago. With new innovations in video, social media and advertising, there’s no shortage of people declaring (once again) that “email is dead!”
But email is far from dead. In fact, the number of people online who use email regularly far surpasses those using social networks and even search engines, if you can believe it!
With so many people using email, marketing to these audiences is very much an ever-present part of our digital reality. How you go about marketing to them, however, has changed dramatically over the years.
Here’s how to make sure your email marketing campaigns will get the results you’re looking for — in 2021 and beyond.
Understand Your Role (It’s Not What You Think)
When asked about their role in email marketing, many businesses and organizations mistakenly believe that it’s their job to let people know about new deals, savings and other offers or information that matters to them.
But the problem with holding this point of view is that yours is just one voice of many. People aren’t mindless buying machines (except on Black Friday), and continually peppering them with notices is just going to cause you to be just another annoyance in a sea of noise. No matter how much they liked their purchase or their experience with you, continually sending out emails mindlessly is going to turn you into a thorn in their digital side.
Instead, reframe your role as one of a longtime friend who has just stopped by. You want your emails to be helpful, friendly, approachable and even so far as to be comfortable and familiar to your reader. No matter what your brand voice is about, people are much more likely to pay attention to what you have to say if you’re not demanding of their attention, indifferent to their time and otherwise oblivious to their needs.
If the goal of your email marketing campaign is to sell, sell, sell, then just like the old friend who comes by and suddenly starts hawking their new “business” wares (that you neither want nor asked about), the situation goes from friendly and open to uncomfortable and awkward.
Imagine that, if just to support your friend, you bought one of whatever they’re selling. Now a one-off purchase has tethered you to their list. The situation has gone from awkward to downright aggravating.
“The best email marketing initiatives are those that blend information, support and product suggestions that are expertly tailored to users’ needs, taking into account their prior purchases or other relevant user behavior.”
It sounds insane that people would market this way, but this is exactly how email marketing offers look to the vast majority of recipients. And that’s saying nothing of the people who never wanted to receive these emails from the start! For the purposes of this guide, we’ll be assuming that you have the permission of the people you’re emailing.
So now that you understand the goal of being friendly, familiar and respectful of your recipient’s time, does that mean you can never sell to them?
Absolutely not! Which leads us to our next point…
Never Underestimate the Attraction of an Irresistible Offer
Just like with other types of content, email is not the place where you want to drop the ball on compelling copy. A solid offer that’s precisely targeted and takes into account the information you have on the recipient (beyond surface personalization like knowing their first name or the city they live in), is going to have a far greater effect on them than a blanket “sale notice” blasted to anyone and everyone.
The best email marketing initiatives are those that blend information, support and product suggestions that are expertly tailored to users’ needs, taking into account their prior purchases or other relevant user behavior.
The question is, how do you get that information? You may be surprised to learn that you could already have it. And even if you’ve just started with email marketing, in time and with the right tools, you’ll start to build up impressive profiles about your customers.
Leverage the Tools at Your Disposal
Now, if you have more than a handful of subscribers, you’ll soon realize that trying to precisely craft, target and launch emails for each one of them would be a massive undertaking, not to mention a huge headache.
This is why smart email marketers leverage all the tools at their disposal. Their e-commerce store and email marketing platform and their CRM are often integrated with each other, so that as prospects browse and buy, details are collected and common patterns begin to emerge.
Email marketing tools are used to help remind users about things like an abandoned shopping cart (or even better, items in the cart running low on stock and the urgency to complete checkout). They can also be used to simply keep users “in the loop” on company product or service offerings.
In short, email marketing can be as complex or as simple as you’d like it to be, but the more targeted it is, the better your results will be. That means looking at all of the tools available within your chosen platform and determining which ones are best suited to help you achieve your marketing goals.
Watch Your Analytics, Track, Adjust and Segment
So how do you get the most out of every campaign? You may have heard of (and even use) website analytics, where you can easily see information about the people browsing your website, including things like the pages they visit, where they’re from, whether or not they make a purchase, and so on.
Just like with website analytics, you can also glean helpful information using email analytics. Various email marketing providers offer this information in greater or lesser degrees depending on the options you need, but the three most important metrics to look at are:
Open Rates – This is the percentage of people who saw your email’s subject line and clicked to open it. Subject lines are incredibly important in email marketing. Writing a short, concise and attractive (but not misleading) subject line is the first “success goalpost” of a high-converting email campaign.
Click-through Rates (CTR) – This is the percentage of users who ultimately clicked through one or more links in your email. This percentage reveals how compelling your offer was or how “in tune” you are with your subscribers.
A high open rate, but a low click-through rate often means that there’s a disconnect between what is promised in the subject line and what is delivered in the content of the message itself. Perhaps they were intrigued by the offer but it ultimately fell flat when they saw they’d need to pay for shipping (for example).Unsubscribe Rates – This is the percentage of subscribers who opted out of your email list. A high unsubscribe rate shows that either your users don’t remember opting in to your list, or that it otherwise isn’t interesting, engaging or otherwise worth their time.
As you look at these metrics, and particularly if your email marketing is tied to your e-commerce website, you’ll start to see some common threads emerging in terms of where customers go, what they look at, how long they stay there, and so on.
This can, in turn, allow you to segment certain messages to certain groups of subscribers. For example, if you sell organic tea online, you may want to differentiate offers between connoisseurs who enjoy black tea versus green tea and, based on their shopping history, recommend some variations that they may not have tried yet.
Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help!
This can all sound like a lot of work and a lot to keep in mind when creating an email campaign. Launching such a campaign, and making sure it gets the results you want, involves many steps before you actually press the “Send” button.
With this in mind, don’t feel like you have to “go it alone” in email marketing. At Dizzle Graphics, we’re much more than just an amazing graphics agency. We have the knowledge and skills to help you design a high-performing email marketing campaign no matter what you have to sell or say! To learn more, call us at (813) 534-8458 or contact us.
We look forward to helping you take your email marketing campaigns to the next level!
