We understand the importance of a targeted email campaign and the positive effect it can have on your ROI (return on investment). In this blog, we take a look at the basics to consider for conducting any email marketing campaign to your target audience.
Your email provider
First things first, you don’t want to use your standard Outlook, Gmail or other basic email system to be sending hundreds of emails, it will take too long and the system probably couldn’t handle that amount of outgoing traffic.
We suggest you use specific campaign tools such as Hubspot. You can create eye catching, image led emails with their different templates. Match the template from your to your existing brand. Make sure logo, font and content is as your audience would expect. This helps to build your brand authority.
The software will organise your emails into specific campaigns and allows you to track and analyse results such as open rates, click through rates on specific links and if anyone unsubscribes. Using Hubspot you can also take advantage of using a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system or marketing automation, but we’ll leave those to another blog.
You target audience
To help build your database add a call to action on the homepage of your website for people to sign up to receive your regular email newsletters on insights, products, services and offers.
Regularly remind people on your social media channels that you have a newsletter that they can sign up to. You can also add this to your Google My Business page. Any channel you have that you can tell people where they can sign up to receive information will help to add to your database.
If you already have a database, make sure you cleanse the data of your email list. Are there duplicate contacts? Is everyone on your list relevant? Do you have the right contact at your client’s business?
If you use an email serice provider then you should be able to see any people that have unsubscribed and they are usually removed automatically. But check first as anyone unsubscribing from your email alerts must be removed from your database.
Relevant email content
Make sure that you stay on topic with your email campaign. Your database should comprise of email subscribers – these are the people that you know are interested in receiving your emails as they have signed up to receive them. Your readers want to know about your business’s products/services and why they should purchase.
Remember to personalise your emails. Send the email with their name as a salutation. We’ve found that emails received with someone’s first name as the sender get more clicks than just having your business email. This is something that may change for you, so play around with it and track your analytics what works for you.
Ensure a subject line tells it how it is. You’re more likely to succeed with the recipient opening the email and subsequent click through if the subject line explains what the email is about.
Content for your emails should form part of your content marketing strategy. Utilise content created such as blogs and repurpose for your emails. The email content should be informative but in bite size chunks to make it much easier to read.
Then use bold and clear call-to-action buttons to make it easy for the reader to know what they need to do.
Importantly, the links in your email should be going back to relevant landing pages on your website. The more links back to your website, the better your site will perform in the search engine rankings as this is one of the key factors of your SEO (search engine optimisation) strategy.
Analyse your email campaign results
Use analytics to track the success of your campaign and also see where you can improve to help conversion rates of future email campaigns.
Send out two types of emails (AvB test), with alternative message titles, call-to-action buttons etc. If it’s your first email you can also test the design with two options. Run both campaigns at the same time with a select list and see which one performs the best. Then proceed with the rest of the database using the more popular email.
Mobile optimised
Make sure your email campaign is mobile optimised. Reports show that 41% of email are now opened on a mobile device. Therefore, ensuring the e-newsletter template is optimised for mobiles is crucial. Test how it looks before you send it out.
The benefits of email marketing for your business
The Rule of Seven may be old but it’s still relevant today. It should be in the back of your mind that a marketing message needs to be seen or heard seven times by a prospect before they consider buying from you. So, considering all marketing channels at the outset, including email marketing, is important.
Reports indicate that email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter. In general, the recipient has at some point given their email address to you to receive further information, so this gives more chance of recognition.
Email marketing consultant Croydon
At Smart Cow we work in partnership with HubSpot to provide you with a high quality level of service for all your email marketing campaigns which can be a standalone service or form part of a wider digital marketing campaign. Call on 020 3137 1826 or email saymoo@smart-cow.com to find out more or book a free consultation.