A Guide for 2020
Email marketing is a great way for businesses of all shapes and sizes to retain current customers and generate relationships with potential customers.
It’s been a popular choice now for quite a few years and is used every day by small business and global brands alike.
It’s popular with a range of businesses for a simple reason, it works really well.
If you are new to email marketing then it can seem pretty daunting at first and you may ask yourself questions like:
– What software do I use?
– How do I set it up?
– How do I design a mailer?
– What type of design works best?
This article will help to take the mystery out of it. We will be outlining how quickly and easily it is to get up and running with successful campaigns, and most importantly how to avoid the pitfalls beginner often fall in to.
So first up let’s take a look at what the main of the main advantages offered by email marketing
What are the main advantages of email marketing?
Email marketing is very cost effective to do, if you compare it to some of the more old school methods such as mail-shots or printed media advertisements, Email marketing costs a fraction.
For example, at email marketing company EmailBlaster, it costs £12.99 to send a email campaign to 2,000 recipients.
Email Marketing is very easy to do
Modern cloud based email marketing software makes it very easy to use. It is possible for everyone, with no prior experience, to provide a professional looking campaign very quickly.
Modern software has an easy to use click and drag designer and usually a library of pro designed templates available for you to use.
Click and drag, means drag all of your images into place and cut and paste any text that you want to. This is great as it means you don’t have to have any HTML coding experience.
Using one of the library templates also means a great looking design is almost ready to use all you need to do is personalise it with your own text and images.
So if you are a one-man-band or short on time and resources then a modern email marketing software will make life so much easier as it does all the heavy lifting for you.
Cloud based software also means you don’t have to be tied to a desktop computer, you can login from any device connected to the internet.
The results of you send are trackable
Email marketing software will have an analytics suite. This will enable you to see the results of how people are interacting with what you are sending. This makes your marketing completely transparent.
You can see:
– Who opened
– Who read
– Who clicked
– Who unsubscribed from your email marketing
This is a really powerful tool to have at your disposal. Having the knowledge that people are liking or not liking what you are sending, means that you can make fine tune changes if you need to.
Checking and Proofing
In this next section we are going to outline some of the key strategic points to follow with your email marketing. These are really easy to employ and help to make your marketing as successful as it can be.
– Check thoroughly before sending
Now it’s really easy to overlook this one, sometimes we get so wrapped up in other areas like how good the design looks, something as easy as proof reading is often overlooked but typo or two can stick out like a sore thumb to your recipients.
As well proofing the text, it’s important to check all of your links work properly. It’s so easy to miss type a link causing it to stop working.
It’s pretty common for email marketers to also forget to enter a subject header line, nothing looks worse than receiving an email that says
– Verify your sending domain
If you are using email marketing software your email will appear as being from you but they are sent via the software providers sending servers. Some mail filters can view an email sent in this way as suspicious as they appear to be from a different person.
Verifying your sending domain, means adding a seal of authenticity to your domain, this part is the stricts of mail filter’s requirements in terms of security.
Check for consistent display across all devices
If you are sending emails marketing this year, your recipients will be opening your emails on a variety of different devices. This means when you are designing your email, you need to make sure it looks great on both mobile and desktop devices. As more and more of us are using our mobile devices as our prefered option for viewing an email, it’s really important to check your email design. Now modern software will provide you with a simulated view of what this looks like on mobile devices and desktop.
Email blaster for example, gives you the ability to create a fluid design that works well on all devices. Email Blaster also offers you the ability to exclude some elements from mobile devices. So when designing for a 5 inch mobile screen you could offer a slimmed down content to your recipient.
– Include a ‘Call to Action’ Inside’ your design
Your call to action serves as instruction for you views to do something; It gives your email marketing purpose. This could be a prompt to visit your online store or to contact you.
What works here is a large coloured button, this big and clear and in the top half of your mailer. As a lot of us are reading emails on mobile, large buttons work really well.
– Vary the content and styling of your mailer
Using a mix of tone and content work really well. Your recipients tend to get bored if they keep receiving variations of the same message. In order to really boost conversions of your sales email it’s worth mixing these emails with others that focus on news and tips.
Sharing tips and knowledge with your users really helps to build loyalty and value; it insures that you aren’t flooding your recipients with the same sales campaign.
– Use Tracking Campaign Analytics
With analytics you have complete visibility with how people are interacting with your email. You can see how many people; open, read, clicked,, bounced or unsubscribed.
Successful email marketing is all about identifying trends in your stats and basing your future campaigns around this. For example; are more people reading your campaign on mobile or desktop? Are they reading inside our outside of working hours? Which link is most popular?
By gathering this information and acting upon it , you can really boost the effectiveness of your email marketing . You can tailor your sends based on people’s preferences.
– Segment you data depending on the results
Leading on from the last point, segmenting your data is all about splitting people into groups based on their previous interactions . For example; you may have a group of people who prefer to receive their emails in the evening rather than in the working day or vise versa.
You can then split these lists into evening people and day time people and send to each group at their prefered time.
Any decent email marketing software will give you the ability to build these lists based on previous campaigns.
– Post your Email Marketing to your social media feeds
Over the last few years email marketing and social media have become very closely linked indeed. This year it will continue to build. When you send out your email marketing you can also share a web based version of your campaign to your social media feeds, this really helps to broaden your reach as your campaigns are seen by your email subscribers and social media followers.
Any decent email marketing software will be able to automate this for you. This means that when you send out your campaign the software will automatically post a copy to your social feeds. Automating this process makes it really quick and easy to extend your reach.
In Conclusion
It’s really easy to get started quickly with email marketing. Modern cloud-based software makes it very easy indeed. If you follow these quick tips that we’ve outlined today, it will really help you to make your email marketing as successful as possible.
We’d love to hear how you get on so please share your experiences with us at EmailBlaster by visiting our site or contacting us directly at [email protected]
