Top 10 tips for business savvy email marketing

Email marketing is not dead – in fact emails are still among the leading outbound marketing tools for businesses in 2017. But how do you get your email campaigns to stand out from the crowd when it arrives in someone’s inbox?

Here are Web Tonic’s Top 10 Tips for creating a business savvy email marketing campaign for your business and ways to improve both the open rate and click through rate from your database of contacts.

1. Set realistic goals – what do you want to achieve from your email marketing? Make sure your goals are attainable and measurable. Rather than focusing solely on the end game, which is more sales, you could look at how your email content can best serve your business, and set your goals for your email campaigns around improving the level of engagement with your customers.
2. Have a plan – your e-marketing campaign should be part of your overall marketing strategy. Work out what you need to be promoting and when over a 12 month period and ensure your email content is in line with your current promotional activity, seasonal lines and upcoming events or sales cycles.
3. Use a List Management Service – whether it is Mail Chimp or something else, it is essential for businesses to use a direct mailing programme for your email marketing. This will not only save you time and provide you with a robust platform for sending professional looking e-newsletters that help you comply with anti-spam regulations, you will be able to schedule mail-outs in advance and measure the effectiveness of each campaign.
4. Segment your list – not everybody on your database lives in the same place or is interested in the same things. If you are running an instore promotion or exhibiting at local trade event, your out of town customers don’t need to get an email about it. Likewise, if you have different levels of customers, like retail and commercial, they won’t want to read things that are not relevant to them. Most List Management Services will allow you to segment your list by location or any other category field you create. This allows you to send targeted campaigns to the right people, providing greater value through more relevant content.
5. Match the subject line to the segment – following on from point 4, if you are going to segment your list by location, it makes sense to localise the subject line too. This highlights the relevancy of your email among the dozens of others arriving in that person’s inbox vying for attention.
6. Personalise the content – nobody likes to read emails that look like they were created by a robot. Use the merge tags in your direct mailing system to place the name of the recipient into the content. You can do the same thing with other list fields like location or company name, to provide more tailored content.
7. Tailor your offers to the recipient – if your database covers a broad spectrum of customers, you can improve the interest levels for your emails with targeted offers. Whether by region or market segment, you can tailor your promotions to have more relevance to the recipient.
8. Make it worthwhile – the trouble with many email marketing campaigns is they focus too much on selling. If your emails are just another form of ads pushing your products or services, then you have a higher chance of being left unopened or marked as spam and diverted to the junk folder forever. Your content needs to be of interest to the recipient: is it helpful / informative / important enough to open? Of course you will want to include a promotion, but don’t make the offer the only thing you have to0 offer in your email content.
9. Link to your social media – your direct mail marketing programme should allow you post a link to your email campaign on social media. Mail Chip allows you to customise the image and text for the post (on Facebook and Twitter) and even post on multiple Facebook pages that you manage. This not only helps reach potential new subscribers to your database, it is a reminder to those already on your database who may have missed your email.
10. Make it mobile friendly – recent statistics on internet use show that more people are using their mobile devices to go online; since 2015 over 50 percent of Google searches worldwide are being made from a smart phone or tablet and almost half of the emails opened in a 2017 study on e-marketing were from a mobile device. You need to make sure the content and display format of your email campaign is mobile friendly. Most programmes will produce a mobile version, so make sure you view it and make any adjustments before sending. If it looks terrible or is difficult to read and find links then it is going to be deleted before it even reaches a bigger screen on a PC or laptop.

In summary
The more you make your email content about the customer, the better your chances of achieving success with your email marketing campaigns. What’s most important is keeping it relevant and not focusing solely on sales. After all, marketing is more about staying front of mind so that you are who people think of when they are in the market for your products or services.