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Email marketing is often the forgotten child in digital advertising. Yes, it might not be as “sexy” as PPC, Programmatic or Social Media but it is nevertheless an important ingredient for a solid digital marketing strategy. Email marketing can amplify conversations between your business and your potential customers, provide value, and build trust. In this blog I am going to write about how a good email marketing strategy can lift your business to new heights.

Forbes even goes as far as stating that email marketing is still the most powerful tool in your digital marketing arsenal. It is essential to segment your audience to create a successful email marketing strategy. You want to send the right person the right message at the right time. Email marketing is usually considered a lower-funnel strategy. To give you a high-level overview, there are three main stages of the buyer’s journey, i.e. awareness, consideration, and decision. Email marketing also gives you the power of personalization and help potential customers towards conversion in the consideration – decision stages of the funnel. The more relevant the emails, the more likely it is that your subscribers will engage with your business and continue the conversation.

Neil Patel, a digital marketer influencer, wrote a blog on email marketing segmentation. To read his blog, click here.  

If there is only one thing that you will remember from this blog it should be that you want to add value and not ask for it when implementing an email marketing strategy. It is truly the golden rule of email marketing. Before you send your email, you need to make sure that the door to your emails is optimized. What exactly do I mean? I am referring to the subject line. It will directly impact your open rate. Here are some bullets on optimizing your subject line:

• Keep it short. 41-50 characters is the average and you need to consider mobile devices
• Keep it short and sweet
  • FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out)
    • “Jennifer, Earn Double Points Today Only”
• Curiosity
  • “What They Eat In Prison”
  •  “9 Disgusting Facts About Thanksgiving”
• Pain Points
  • “Get More Kitchen Space With These Easy Fixes”
  • “Your Beauty Issues, Solved”
• Retargeting
  • “The Price Dropped For Something In Your Cart”
  • “Hey, forget something? Here’s 20% off”
• Personalize it when appropriate
• Be creative

Further, you want to continue the theme presented in the subject line in the body of the email. Make sure to show the value in your email.

The most important aspect of your email is your CTA (Call To Action). You want to stick to one CTA to promote the primary goal. If you absolutely need more than one CTA, make it different, e.g. a different color and/or different placement in your email. I used to work with an email tool called Campaign Monitor and they have a list of a variety of CTAs that you can look up. Click here to see the list of CTAs. 

Your email template needs to be on-brand with the rest of your branding. For example, you do not want to have a different brand look between your emails and website. Aim for a clean, straightforward design to display the value you are sending to your audience. There are various email marketing tools like HubSpot or Mailchimp that offer nice email templates. Images are also a good way to engage your readers. Make sure that your email template is compliant with the CAN-SPAM compliance law. Read a compliance guide from the FTC here. 

Do not just send out spray-and-pray emails. This irresponsible method can hurt your brand in the long run. Remember, your emails need to provide value and build trust and continue the conversation with your audience. You need to collect consent and from that you create a contact list. Your email funnel will look like this: inbox-open-click-trust. If you are spamming, your chances to get past the inbox stage are small.

After you hit the “send” button you need to track positive and negative engagement. A positive engagement helps your brand to connect with people, move the conversation forward, and build trust. A negative engagement also helps you to learn more about your contacts and adjust your email deliverability for an overall better brand experience. Your metrics will become a good listening device to refine and improve your entire email marketing strategy. What metrics are important to track? They are:

• Send metric
• Email delivered
  • Goal is to have a minimum drop-off between send & delivered metrics
• CTR (click-through-rate)
• Conversion

Tracking metrics will help your business to a) measure success, b) analyze, and c) adjust. You should test several elements for metric optimizations. We mentioned the subject line earlier and the subject line would be a testable element for open rates. Click rates could have testable elements such as:

• Email body copy
• Email body design
• Email body images
• Email CTA
• Email signature

To acquire good quality leads email marketing also needs to incorporate lead nurturing. What is lead nurturing? It is the timely, efficient, and targeted approach to connect with your contacts. Pardot has good information on lead nurturing that you can check out. To learn more about this concept click here. Creating relevant content and value are important ingredients in a lead nurturing strategy.  

Email marketing done right can easily become a full-time job especially once your contacts database has reached a certain number. However, a strong email marketing strategy can be invaluable for your business’ growth. It can build trust, help with brand recognition, build relationships, and drive more traffic to your website for example. Digital marketing is not only about paid search or social media. Email marketing is not going to go away any time soon and I highly recommend that every business builds an email marketing strategy.  

If your business has an email strategy I would like to hear some success stories. Leave a comment here or shoot me a quick message. You can contact me here. For now, never stop learning and have a great upcoming Labor Day weekend. Cheers!