So you’ve decided to implement an email marketing strategy as part of your overall digital marketing strategy. That’s awesome! Still not quite sure how to make email marketing work for your business? You could probably use a few email marketing tips to help you create more successful email marketing campaigns.
Email Marketing Tip #1: Use Coupons and Promotions
The first of our email marketing tips are fairly intuitive.
People love paying less (or better yet getting stuff for free!). This makes offering coupons, discounts, and other promotions an excellent tactic for your email marketing strategy. Face it, most of us sign up for an email list in order to get a coupon or other promotional offer. So, anywhere that you want to encourage consumers to sign up for your email list, be sure to include an advertisement for whatever deal they’ll receive when they sign up.
How often should you send emails?
Don’t bombard your subscribers with emails though. That can quickly get your emails marked as spam, or it could prompt the recipient to unsubscribe from your email list. Instead, offer your subscribers a chance to decide how often they want to receive your offers on your opt-in page. Now you can segment your email list by desired frequency. This will help you stay relevant to your customers while not annoying them.
What kind of promotions should you offer?
Not sure what kinds of coupons, discounts, and promotions you should offer. You’re not alone.
Discount coupons tend to be the most popular. Offering a specific dollar off amount or a percentage off is generally the most successful for encouraging recipients to make a purchase. If you go this route though, definitely consider optimizing your discount code for mobile. Most shoppers at brick and mortar retail businesses want to be able to scan or show the code at the register directly from the email on their phones. Making that as easy as possible, increases the likelihood that those discounts will be used.
Free Shipping is another great incentive. For e-commerce websites, free shipping is great. Plus, you can encourage consumers to make larger purchases by offering free shipping for orders above a certain amount. For example, offer free shipping on all orders of $50 or more.
For expensive purchases, such as furniture or electronics, rebates can also be a really good promotional offer. Those looking for a good deal will be inclined to cash in on the rebate, but others might not, so you might even increase your revenue. You could also inform your customers when manufacturers are offering rebates. The customer gets a deal, and you benefit from maintaining your brand as friendly and trustworthy.
Should you send the same promotion to everyone?
No, you should send the same promotional email to your entire email list. Given the rise of data-driven marketing, you have access to all sorts of information about your customers. Put that information to work for you! Tailor your deals to suit different segmented groups of your email list.
There are a lot of methods for list segmentation. For retailers, segmenting lists based on past purchases can be a great tactic. For instance, you can send a discount specifically on your new line of sweaters for dogs to all of your customers who previously purchased dog-related products.
Most importantly, use the data, all of the information you have, to create deals that will appeal to segmented groups. Don’t make assumptions about your customers. If you make assumptions, then you’re more likely to make mistakes. People want emails and offer that are relevant to them. Use the customer data to form your strategies.
How do you retain customers?
Customer loyalty programs are truly great for helping you retain customers. The basic idea is that the more a customer shops with you, the more deals they get. The program could be as simple as offering a 10% discount after every five purchases. Many businesses use this type of point system. As another idea, you could reward your loyalty program customers with exclusive offers or early access to new products. Really, you can make a loyalty program as simple or as complicated as you want. As long as your customers feel that your loyalty program is offering them something relevant and valuable, they’ll sign up.
Email Marketing Tip #2: Understand Customer Engagement
Now on to the second of our email marketing tips!
Understanding your customers is a key component of forming an effective email marketing strategy. What good is your email marketing campaign analytics if no one opens and reads the emails? It isn’t enough to just send emails to every email address you can get. You have to know how to engage your recipients to encourage them to open your email and click through to your offer.
How does email marketing engagement work?
There are a lot of different metrics that you can use to analyze email engagement. Good email marketing tools will provide all of this data for you. This will help you to understand how your recipients are responding, both positively and negatively, to your email campaigns. Here are the metrics that you’ll likely use the most.
- Open Rate—This is the percentage of recipients who opened your email.
- Click-Through Rate—This is the percentage of recipients who clicked on one or more links in your email.
- Conversion Rate—This is the percentage of recipients who opened your email and completed the desired action, such as making a purchase
- Unsubscribe Rate—This is the percentage of recipients who opened your email then unsubscribed from the email list
What’s positive engagement?
Positive engagement refers to the positive actions that recipients take after receiving your email. Actions such as opening your email, clicking links in your email, and sharing the content are all examples of positive engagement. The best form of positive engagement is converting a recipient into a customer! Keep in mind that you have to decide what a conversion is for your email marketing campaigns. A lead converts by performing whatever action you’re using to qualify them as a conversion, such as signing up for a trial service or making a purchase.
What’s negative engagement?
Likewise, negative engagement refers to the negative actions that recipients take after receiving your email. Actions such as unsubscribing from your email list, marking your emails as spam, or simply not opening your emails at all are examples of negative engagement.
Email Marketing Tip #3: Keep Growing Your Email List
Last (but not least), the third of our email marketing tips, is a definitive must.
By now, you’ve likely figured out that creating an email list of engaged subscribers is rather important for the success of your email marketing campaigns. Not only that, but you also want to grow that list of engaged subscribers (assuming you want to grow your business). How you grow your list needs to be a part of your email marketing strategy. Remember to keep your ultimate goal for your email marketing campaign in mind. That will help you know what data you need to collect from your customers.
How does my email marketing strategy help me grow my list?
Remember how we were talking about data-driven marketing earlier? Well, data is important for building your email list too. If you know how you want to use your customer data for your email marketing campaigns, it will help you figure out what information you need to collect to begin with. For example, do you want to personalize your email marketing campaigns? If so, then you want to be sure to get your subscriber’s first name.
How do I actually grow my email list?
Growing an email list isn’t as difficult as it might sound. You simply need to consistently provide opportunities for people to subscribe to your email list. Here are a few of the more popular methods for encouraging people to opt into your email list:
Sign-up form
You can use a sign-up form in a lot of different ways. Most businesses use a form on their Contact page, but you aren’t limited to just that. You can also create the pop-up forms that offer deals (think $25 off your purchase!) Sign up forms can be used all over your website as well as social media platforms. As long as you’re offering something of value, people will fill out the form. Just remember not to ask for too much information. If there are too many fields to fill out on your form, people are less likely to fill it out. Again, keep in mind your end goal here. Do you want to be able to send offers to your customers on their birthdays? Then include that in your form. Does your company market different products to different age groups? Then include a field for age on your form. You can pretty much ask for whatever information that you want. If you want to try to get a lot of different information from your forms, then consider making the only name and email address mandatory. This allows the people who don’t want to share too much to still participate while allowing others to provide more information.
Checkout
This one is kind of a no-brainer. If someone is making a purchase, then they are likely already interested in what your business has to offer. Politely ask for a customer’s email address at checkout. While some may decline to provide it, others will offer it right up. If your customers are purchasing online, then collecting email addresses is even easier. Most online retailers require an email address in order to send order confirmations, receipts, and shipping information.
Social Media
If you’re making good use of your social media platforms, then they can be an excellent channel for getting new subscribers. There are many different methods for encouraging email sign-ups on social media. Again coupons, discounts, and promotional announcements are good go-to options Contests are really popular. Everyone likes free (or discounted) stuff. They key on social media is to make sure whatever you’re offering is easy to share. The more your followers share your offers, the more sign ups you’re likely to get.
Final Thoughts
Email marketing campaigns are part of any good digital marketing strategy. However, there is a lot to consider when you’re developing your email marketing strategy. There are many great email marketing tools available to help you make sense of all of your data. Understanding your data is a fundamental component of creating successful email marketing campaigns. Are you ready to get started, then contact an email service company to help improve your current email marketing strategy? We’re always here to help. If you want more email marketing tips (or other tips on digital marketing, check out our Blog. Do you have some great email marketing tips of your own? We’d love to hear about them!