Successful Email Marketing Requires Strategy
Utilizing email to build your brand and foster sales is an extremely effective tactic, but it requires a well-devised strategy to provide maximum results. When you are setting out to begin an email marketing campaign, you should consider the following:
Who is your target audience? It is important to clearly identify your target audience. Email offers segmentation, enabling you to target specific customer groups. Rather than sending offers or product information to all your customers, you should consider sending emails to specific target groups based on their interests, buying preferences and purchasing history. Segmentation is effective and yields better results.
What is of value to them? When writing an email, consider who your target audience is and what is of interest to them. One of the key ingredients of successful email is sending information that is of value. Your target audience will appreciate and, most importantly, open and read email if you provide them with relevant content.
Which value propositions will resonate the best? It is important to understand what statements resonate the best with your target audience. This involves developing marketing messaging that promotes your products and/or services while, at the same time, communicating on a level that will resonate with your target audience. This means that you must understand why customers buy from you. Why do they like doing business with you? Why do they prefer your products to competitors? What you think as a marketer may be different than what customers think. Therefore, it’s important to take time to develop value propositions that communicate effectively with your prospects.
What is the desired action? Email is interactive! This means that your reader can take action in the form of a desired next step. But what is that next step? Is it a phone call? Is it a click-through visit to your website to learn more? Is it to download a white paper? Thinking through next steps is how you achieve conversion: getting readers to take desired action. Knowing what those next steps are and then developing the framework to support them and make them happen is paramount to email success.
What is your subject line? The subject line of your email is the difference in getting the recipient to open it. It is important to take the time to develop and test subject lines to determine which is the most effective. You should develop several subject lines, and then send out tests to a limited number of addresses, and then track the results to see which gets the most opens. The subject that gets the best response is the one that you should go with.
Have you developed landing pages to support the email? Is your website ready to support your email marketing campaign? Most emails you send will and should contain links to specific support pages on your website. It’s important to create a flow of information that readers follow that ultimately leads to a conversion. (See “What is the desired action?” above.) Preparing your website by creating support pages for your email efforts cannot be overlooked. The worst thing you can do is send an email about a specific product or a service and direct the reader to your home page, leaving it to the reader to navigate your site to find the related information. Do you really think they will spend time doing that? The answer is NO! So send them to pages that continue where the mail left off.
Measuring Success. You should track results. Most email programs provide some level of tracking. It is important to know the open rate, how many undeliverables, how many unsubcribes, how many bounces, and how many click-throughs an email generated. Furthermore you want to know this information both on an individual basis and on an aggregate basis. Understanding the results enables you to refine and improve your efforts and achieve marketing success!
A well thought out email marketing strategy, at a minimum, should address all the topics listed in this article. If you take the time to develop strategy and then follow through with it, you will be surprised at how well it will work for you.
Rhythm Interactive is a full service marketing agency offering clients email support, including strategy development and implementation. Please contact us today to learn more about email marketing strategy.