Amongst the many tools available to digital marketers to create successful marketing campaigns is email. Email has many cool features and can be very beneficial to marketing campaigns if used properly.
Email is one of the oldest marketing tools and has been around for ages, which vouches for its longevity and value. Over the years, it has faced stiff competition from a plethora of different marketing channels but still managed to survive and survive well. This is why many marketers still count on email as one of their essential tools to create successful marketing campaigns.
Why your business needs email campaigns
Delivers excellent ROI: A 2015 study by the DMA found that for every $1 spent, email has an average $38 return on investment. And the ROI for email is stunning 3,800%. Effective email campaign steps are also far more easily measurable that some social media when it comes to tracking success.
Effective in attracting new customers: Many industry people seem to be in agreement that email is more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined in attracting new customers. Also, email is an open marketing communication tool which lets you remain in charge of your reach and message without being at the mercy of portals like Facebook and Twitter who keep changing their terms.
Achieves multiple marketing objectives: Email can help build brand awareness, encourage readers to act immediately (competition participation, giveaways, special offers), upsell and cross-sell, share crucial updates (the recent GDPR for example), publicise launches of new services or special events, and prevent cart abandonment, by sending a gentle reminder.
Creating effective emails: 5 steps
Step 1. Set your goals
You decided to do some email marketing. Where to start? An email marketing strategy sounds complicated and time-consuming. But it’s not as hard to put together as you might think.
Before creating the email, determine your reader and set your business goals — who you want to reach and what you want to achieve by sending this email. Then, choose the email metrics you want to track to determine your progress: it could be clickthrough rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, email sharing or whatever you find important.
Step 2. Keep it brief and useful
No rambling, get straight to the point without wasting time and words. Use keywords to catch the attention of your audience — people tend to scan emails before reading on. So draw them in by using words that tempt and encourage them to read on.
Use easily recognisable sender names and clever, catchy subject lines.
Personalise your effective email campaign steps. And we don’t mean just putting a person’s name. We mean dynamic segmentation, deep understanding of your customer, leveraging real-time marketing and so on and so forth. It has been proven that personalisation increases open rate by 26%.
Step 3. Use visuals
Liven up and make your email attractive by making sure to use eye-catching imagery.
Step 4. Don’t forget about CTAs
Remember that the all-important call-to-action button is the crux. All efforts will have been wasted, should your email fail to incite the reader to perform the action you want them to.
Step 5. Timing is key too
Mondays and Fridays have higher open rates for email than other weekdays, according to earlier research by Experian, a consumer credit reporting agency. Campaign Monitor research showed that 53% of emails are opened between 9 am and 5 pm, with the peak tending to be in the first two hours.
So what are you waiting for? Now that you have all this useful information, go to create your effective email campaign step by step. And we at Global Message Services are here to help and answer all your questions, both personally and in our articles. Subscribe to our newsletter and get all the insights and news right to your inbox.