How Companies Can Successfully Leverage Email Marketing

​Marketers worth their salt know that email marketing is not dead. In fact, since we have previously delved into the reasons why email marketing is a great strategy for companies, we can now explore the how of conducting effective email campaigns.

After all, your business may be spending both time and money on email marketing, but it fails to get the hoped-for results. It can be frustrating when you buy lists of target contacts, routinely email them information on your products and services, and then get precious few responses.

Fortunately, here are a few email marketing tips that will help you steer your ship right into the waters of success:

Build an Opt-In List

​You know that marketing is great for business. So, you have bought lists of target contacts and proceeded to blast them with emails. But there is an issue. Busy professionals are not looking to find their email inboxes cluttered with unwanted spam every day.

Sending unsolicited marketing emails could prompt your recipients or Internet Service Providers to mark them as spam, which will reduce your delivery rates even to those who have opted-in to your email.

The solution? Conduct a strategic email marketing campaign to a smaller group of people who have opted in to your campaign. But how do you develop and maintain an opt-in email subscriber base? By offering visitors something of value.

Giving your web visitors something of value such as a content download like a report or infographic, a discount on a product, or even a webinar in exchange for their email information will work. 

Maintain Your Opt-In Lists

​But just because someone downloaded an infographic from your website doesn’t mean that they want to receive your emails for all eternity. If you have sent them 6 emails and they haven’t opened any, they are most likely not going to buy from you.

What you need to do, then, is determine who is getting value from your email marketing. You do this by analyzing email statistics such as open rates, click-through rates, unsubscribe rates, and bounce rates.

It doesn’t really matter how huge your email list is if your subscribers are not engaging with your emails. They need to be opening them, clicking, and responding to your calls-to-action. For those subscribers who remain non-engaged, clean them off your list.

Remember, the more people that don’t open your emails, the more likely your emails land in the spam folder, driving your open rates down and costing you money. Let your cold subscribers know you are taking them off your mailing list unless they would like to opt-in again, or put them on a campaign that reduces the frequency of your emailing so that instead of getting emails on a daily or weekly basis, they get them monthly or quarterly.

Segment Your List

​For those who missed Marketing 101, the enduring lesson is “If you market to everyone, you are marketing to no one.” Yes, your email list is already targeted to some extent. But by segmenting your list, you will be able to create laser focused copy for each group that gets you a better conversion rate.

Fact: people don’t mind being targeted by email as long as the emails are relevant and specific to their needs. Don’t just take my word for it, the Direct Marketing Association found that segmented and targeted emails generate 58 percent of all email marketing revenue.

Email segmentation helps you divide your subscriber list into smaller segments based on criteria such as sex, interests, purchase history, and geographic location. This is important why? It helps personalize your mail and ensures your message is relevant to your company’s prospects.

Oh, and segmenting your list allows you to know how well your marketing campaigns are doing by making it easier to split test. You can create and track variations of your subject lines, calls-to-action, and even copy for different groups to see which variations give the best results.

Deploy email autoresponders

​You are a busy professional or business owner, which makes it understandable that you cannot abandon everything you are doing to bid a new subscriber welcome. Thank God for technology and the email autoresponders that come with it!

An email autoresponder can be a single email or a sequence that is automatically sent to your subscriber list after certain events are triggered. These could include signing up for an email newsletter, the purchase of a product, or even the abandoning of a shopping cart.

Embracing the help that comes with email autoresponders allows you to free up your time to focus on crucial business needs, even as they help you nurture your leads and turn them into customers. Don’t compromise on the quality of your email autoresponder copy.

​Final tips? Use subject lines that tell, not sell, what is inside; aim to create user engagement by making your emails more interactive – adding videos and GIFs can help; and ensure your emails are optimized for mobile devices. And if all this goes over your head, at least strive to add only one call-to-action per email to avoid confusing or distracting your readers.

It is in your business’s interest to avoid pumping out bland emails. Make sure your emails are interesting and to the point.