To get the right message to the right person at the right time you first need to get the right data to the right database at the right time – John Caldwell
Today, email communication has become a very important marketing tool and it plays an important role in your marketing success. Right email marketing can allow you to easily strike the right cord with your customers as well as prospects and leads.
Today’s email marketing software come with great tools that can help you to personalize emails for each and every receiver. And, this aspect – personalization has opened new doors of success for an organization’s marketing strategies. In this article, we will share some tips to make the best use of personalization in email marketing.
There are many elements on which the success of an email marketing campaign depends. These are minute aspects that can make or mar an email marketing campaign. Every aspect must be given due consideration for the overall success of an email marketing campaign.
Defining Success in Email Marketing
To measure your email marketing success rate, first of all, you must clearly define the objective that is to be achieved through an email marketing campaign along with a clear cut strategy to achieve it. Definitely, the outright goal of any email marketing campaign is to maximize the click through rate (CTR) of the call to action (CTA) in your email.
Well, this is obvious but, indefinite and elusive. You should set your targets as precise and numerically measurable as possible. This would help you to measure your success rate and also get insights regarding required steps to be taken to achieve it in future campaigns.
Tips for Formulating a Perfect Email Marketing Strategy
Let’s take a look into some top tips for formulating a successful email marketing strategy:
- Build and Maintain Genuine Email Contact Lists
Email Acquisition is like cutting hair, must happen regularly, can be done well, but one bad experience can scar forever – David Baker
Build permission based email contact lists of your own. With this, you can be assured that all your contacts are genuine. Also, as it will be a permission based list, so your contacts won’t see you as a spammer as spamming is against law, badly affects email deliverability, negatively impacts your brand and is thus not the right thing to do. For collecting email contacts, you can use the following methods.
- Offer E-books or Guides in exchange for e-mail addresses.
- Conduct contests and ask for email addresses of participants.
- Collect email addresses by asking to subscribe to newsletter or blogs.
Also, it’s better to ask the subscribers about the type of communication they want to receive from you. Thus, you will not send unwanted mails to subscribers and keep the unsubscribes to a minimum.
Always keep your lists updated by removing the unsubscribers and updating the changed email IDs after every email campaign. Always try to take feedback from unsubscribers on why they are unsubscribing, so that you can improve upon it.
Maintain a well-defined frequency of sending your mails like – weekly, monthly, etc. and use different email IDs for different kinds of communication ex. – notifications, promotions, newsletters, etc.
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Properly Segment your Audience
‘One size does not fit all’- it’s also true in the case of email marketing as well. Your audience will be very much diverse and have their own needs. Thus, the same email cannot have the same impact on all of them. Thus, you need to segment your audience accordingly on the basis of who needs what.
To analyze their needs, you can request more information from time to time, or conduct surveys. Also, you can analyze the results of your previous email campaigns and analyze what kind of email is opened by which category of subscribers.
You can also segment your audience on the basis of products they are using, their geographical location etc. Ultimately, you must send different emails to different segments of your audience.
- Focus to Build a Great User Experience
You must always focus to impart value through your emails by delivering a great user experience, so that your subscribers don’t see you as a marketer and easily get engaged with your emails. This will get you a long way in email marketing. You can do the following to provide a great user experience:
- Write an appealing subject line that clearly states the purpose of your email, and that it is not misleading, else the readers will feel cheated and they will just delete it or even unsubscribe.
- Add personalization to your emails by using the recipient’s name and other details in your mails because personalized mails have a higher success rate.
- Use a standard and consistent design and format in your mails. Also, design your mails such that they equally convey the same message with and without loading images, on all the email clients – on desktop as well as mobile.
- Always keep it short and simple, clearly conveying what you want to convey as nobody likes to read lengthy mails.
- Include multiple Call to Actions (CTA) in your mails, for maximizing the click through rates (CTR) as John Hayes rightly said – bait without a hook is just food. 😉
- Have a well-designed landing page in place that can complete a conversion for the visitors coming through your mails.
- Google and all other email clients can filter the spam emails from the genuine ones. So, never use spammy words like free, bonus, etc. in your mail.
The above mentioned email marketing tips are simple but very effective. They are tried and tested and can help you to devise a great email marketing strategy to achieve great success with your email marketing efforts.
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Fantastic post on email marketing, Pavan. I must say that email marketing has one of the best and cost-effective marketing channels, which will get excellent results in terms of traffic, leads, and sales conversions if appropriately managed. Thanks for writing this down.