According to Forbes, leveraging email remains an effective channel to attract new customers while retaining old ones. Regardless of industry, email marketing is pivotal for increasing brand awareness, ROI, driving sales, reaching new customers, and learning customer preferences.
Several studies show that the ROI of email marketing can be as high as 40 times the initial investment. Furthermore, email marketing is excellent for nurturing leads and boosting conversations. Read on to get some tips for effective email marketing in the definitive guide below.
Know Who You Want to Reach
The first step in an email marketing strategy for small businesses is knowing your audience. Like any marketing strategy, knowing whom to target is crucial, and email is no exception. Understanding your audience first gives you an idea of what they want, when to reach them, how to communicate with them, and more. When assembling email content, understanding your audience will allow you to speak directly to them, address their pain points, and create offers they can’t resist. An embedded sign-up form with offers is a great way to capture email addresses to build your lists.
Segment Your Email List
Email marketing audience segmentation is pivotal to success. To do this, begin by separating your email lists into groups with common interests, demographics, interests, behaviors, or where they are in the sales funnel. Tailored messaging for each target audience can improve open rates and create more customization.
Personalization is Everything
The benefits of personalized email marketing include higher customer engagement, brand affinity, conversions, and retention, so tailoring messaging is well worth it! Customized email marketing adds a personal touch and makes customers feel heard and valued. Personalized emails are relevant and timely to the customer and where they are in the sales funnel. They also come from a person and are addressed to the recipient using their first name. Subjects should also be custom-made to appeal to receivers, increasing open rates. For returning clients, cultivate the relationship with them by sending special offers and coupons during the user's birthday to encourage them to make purchases.
Keep Messages “Above the Fold”
The above-the-fold concept is a significant part of email design. “Above the fold” refers to creating emails with all the essential information at the top, where the reader will see it first. Your emails will either attract readers to scroll or not, so the content should be appealing. Emails content should be scannable and digestible, so be sure to break up lengthy pieces of information into short paragraphs. Ensure that you include a compelling call to action (CTA), even placing it above the fold. Developing a CTA will increase subscribers' engagement on your email links.
Optimize Emails
Don’t forget to make emails mobile responsive. Mobile optimization delivers an ideal experience for users accessing emails from their mobile phones. About 50% of people open emails through their mobile devices, so emails should be responsive on a desktop or mobile screen.
Email Active Recipients Only
After a few campaigns, you’ll learn which of your recipients are active openers and which aren’t. It may seem counterintuitive to cut down your lists and send emails to fewer prospects, but this ultimately will improve your open rates! Users who do not interact with your content may harm your overall deliverability. When your emails are consistently unopened, they are eventually marked as spam, decreasing the effectiveness of your email blasts. So, keep active openers on your lists and delete any addresses that haven’t opened your emails in more than three months.
Review and Reassess
Once you have these top strategies in place, review and assess your campaigns for strengths and weaknesses. Analyzing data means your future campaigns will improve! A good system includes A/B testing your choice of words, subject lines, colors, CTAs, and fonts. An A/B test allows you to send your email list with different versions to determine which is better.
Email Marketing Campaigns with Mid-West Family
Whether it’s email marketing tips for beginners, social media, or radio endorsements, Mid-West Family has a broad range of solutions for advertising your business. Our marketing experts will help you develop an email marketing strategy that will take your brand to the next level.
