The main advantage of email marketing is still, as ever, its potential to turn your email subscribers into paying customers. The figures vary depending on who you ask, but the consensus among digital marketers is that open rates for marketing emails are still pretty high. Actuall it’s higer than the percentage of social media advertising. And unlike social media, it’s a straightforward task to track and prove the ROI of an email campaign.
With email marketing companies you can even A/B test your marketing emails — sending different versions with a different subject line to each half of your email list — to evaluate their comparative success against whichever metric matters most to you (let’s be honest, it’s sales). This arms you with the data you’ll need to optimise return on investment going forward.
Even in 2020 a well-written email campaign is still the most direct way to cultivate a relationship with your customers. Of course, the content of those emails is crucially important. Email marketing gives you an opportunity to deliver entertaining and engaging content that your audience will love direct to their inboxes. Assuming you’re willing to invest some creative energy into doing that, you’ll make your newsletters the ones they check their email for.
However, you have to create content that people want to engage with. Emails with boring, sales-heavy headlines wont’t get opened. Emails with badly written, dull or overly pushy body copy won’t get read and emails without any gripping visual content won’t hold the reader’s attention.
So what should you do for a successful email marketing campaign? Keep reading this article and we will share you the steps which will make you successful in this market.
1. Verify Your Email Lsit
Unfortunately there is a metric many people often forget about it measures the very first step of your email marketing campaign — email address validity. The more accurate your initial email list is the better your campaign’s performance will be. More importantly this small metric can improve your results dramatically or completely ruin the whole campaign.
Email verifiers are desktop tools or online services (both software-as-a-service or plugins) that allow marketers and salespeople to verify a single email address or a whole list of email addresses, and be sure the contacts exist, working and valid.
There are quite a few reasons why an email address may not be working anymore or be considered invalid. Some reasons are technical, others relate to the human factor – things change, anything can happen. However email list must be verified to run a successful email marketing campaign.
If you send an email to a an email address which is not valid for any reason your email will get bounced. The amount of bounced emails called bounce rate. In the email marketing business the acceptable bounce rateis approximate 3% to 5%. Your account may get blocked if you have hard bounce rate above 10% in most of ESPs. Moreover your domain will get blacklisted and all of your emails will land in receiver’s spam folder.
We have collected you the best email list verifier companies which are tested one by one. Read our article “Top 5 Email List Verification Services” for the reviews and choose the one you like the most. For now keep reading this article for the next email marketing step.
2. Choose Your Email Marketing Company
Before you would jump right into the middle of this business you have to choose your email marketing company. Obviously you can start creating creative templates by yourself but it’s smarter choosing the company first which fits the best for you. Moreover they have a lot of tools you can use to edit & design your emails. There are some things you need to consider when you are about choosing the one. Our article will definitely help you in this step “Top 5 Email Marketing Companies“. You will find only the best services here so you don’t have to burn money on testing.
We highly recommend you to check those 5 websites because we have tested all of them. Actually they all have simple drag and drop email building tools, social media sharing tools, free image library, A/B testing, contact management and costumer support. They also include monitoring and email visit tracking. They all comes with email templates so actually you need to consider only a few things.
After reading our article about “Top 5 Email Marketing Companies” kindly visit all of the mentioned websites. Check their pricing for different email list sizes. Some of them focus on the subscribers sizes. Others focus on the pageviews in total and some come with sending limits when we compare plans.
So it actually depends on your needs and your email list size. What is more important for you? Sending unlimited email to a limited sized list or sending just a few email to more addresses. How about your budget? The pricing of plans are higly different between the companies. After choosing your favourite one simply register so you can finally start creating your killer email marketing campaign.
3. Write Your Email Copies
What’s the surest way to encourage an email subscriber to open your email, read it all the way through and click the buttons you desperately want them to click? The answer is obvious, make them laugh and provide highly valuable content. It’s only human. We hate to be sold to but we love to be entertained and it fits very well to email marketing business.
If you can disguise your sales message as an entertainment your audience will absorb it with their guard down. Even studies show funny email marketing campaigns get more attention. Think about how many of the ads you see on TV are funny, or at least trying to be. The same principle applies to email marketing.
With so many emails demanding their attention in the inbox a person won’t spend too much time reading one email. Lot of websites do email marketing so the receiver will hit the ‘back’ button quickly for sure. Moreover, many people won’t read the email carefully and in its entirety so you definitely need a killer headline. However we will help you to write your very best email copy. Kindly read or article “15 Email Copy Writing Tips” for more information but for now keep reading this aricle for the next step.
4. Choose Your Design
The following step in choosing your design. Each email marketing companies have their well-designed email templates you can choose from. Actually the right design depends on your content. Choose the one which fits the best for it. Every design has it’s own vibe at the first sight and in this email marketing game first sight is one of the most important things. It takes only a second but if your design grab your client’s attention there is a high probability he/she will read your email.
Effective design grabs attention, directs the eye and – most importantly – motivates your reader to positively respond to calls to action. Your email content should educate, inspire, and add value to your subscribers’ inboxes. But the best of the best looks great, too. Your email layout should help the viewer know what they should check out first, and where they can go from there. They should be able to scan the email marketing content quickly using a logical hierarchy with large headlines and images focusing the attention. Use layout to break up space and help create chunks of content.
One column emails work great on desktop and mobile. These mobile first emails usually adapt to desktop and scale images. It helps consumers navigate the email without overwhelming them. The one column design makes it obvious what information is important and what you want a consumer to do next.
5. Run A/B Tests
As a modern marketer, there are a million demands on your time and testing your email marketing campaigns may often end up relegated to the bottom of your list. But testing doesn’t have to be time-consuming and the opportunities you can uncover to improve and optimize your results can be priceless.
Testing allows you to compare and contrast different elements of your email campaigns to see how they impact your subscribers’ reactions to them. You can form a hypothesis about what you think will occur, and then formulate a test and find out what really happens. One of the most important things in email marketing industry is testing. Test, Test & Test again…
You can gain a ton of actionable insights from your email marketing tests that can directly affect the performance of your campaigns. For example, we recently noticed that some of our click-through rates were plateauing so we decided to run a few tests to see if we could boost them up. We wanted to see if we could use some extra content features to increase the click-throughs.
For example; We were working on a huge project a few months ago and obviously we run email marketing campaigns. After running an A/B test of a new design and guess what? We got a 127% lift in click-throughs just by using a more visually appealing design. That’s why it’s so important to test before running the full campaign. Now imagine if we run our campaign without testing and loose all of that highly valuable click-throughs. Keep reading this article for the last step which is very important running a successful email marketing campaign.
6. Run Your Campaign
After running several A/B tests you are finally ready to run your email marketing campaign. However running the full campaign and sending emails to all of the addresses on your list doesn’t mean you can lay down. First of all, never send to all of your contacts at once except if you have only a few hundred addresses. However if your campaign generates sales it means you did a successful job and need to keep continue. Your clients need to stay in touch with you. Send them emails weekly and let them know about the news. Don’t let your clients forget about you. If you can keep their attention you can convert clicks into sales over and over again.
Email marketing is a very serious business which requires hard work, perseverance and creativity but once you feel the pleasure of email marketing success you want more & more. It’s a very profitable business model and soon you start to think about collecting new email list. If you already had an email list probably you know the right way collecting it. However we would like to help you with some proven tips in our article “How to Build an Email List“. Kindly check it because we share some email marketing secrets you won’t find anywhere else.