Creating a strong email marketing campaign that helps you achieve your digital marketing goals can be tricky. This is especially true if most of your experience has been with other types of digital marketing.
Nevertheless, if you have an email marketing strategy already and you see that it isn’t working the way you want it to, there are some things you can do to improve this. Hence, here are the five ways to strengthen your email marketing campaign.
1. Personalize Customer Onboarding
First of all, you need to look into your customer onboarding process. While you may already be using personalization in your email marketing strategy to some extent, there are still some things you can do with it, especially when applying it to your onboarding process. Instead of only segmenting your target audience by using basic customer characteristics, look into behavioral-based segmenting which will allow you to personalize even further.
To put it simply, behavioral-based segmentation relies heavily on the behavioral patterns you see in your customers and combines this data with other personal characteristics like socio-economic status, location, interests, etc. This way, you will be tracking which demographics act in which way so that in the future, it is easier for you to determine which new subscriber is likely to have which type of behavior.
In addition to that, you can use the onboarding process itself to determine such things. Once a user subscribes to your email newsletter, send them a welcome email and track which item they click on in the email. For example, one user might instantly click on the “current discounts and sales” while a different user will choose “our loyalty program”. Likewise, you can ask users to fill out a short form while subscribing so that you already have data on their preferences.
Related: Email Marketing Series: How to Make your Emails Impossible to Ignore
2. Change Email Scheduling
Another way you can strengthen your email marketing campaigns is by changing your email scheduling method. Scheduling can be an extremely powerful tool in digital marketing because of the way it can influence the response time from your target audience as well as the engagement your content gets. If a subscriber receives your email during a period of time when they don’t tend to check their inbox, they won’t respond until much later.
As Gordon Aldridge from the writing service reviews site Best Writers Online puts it, “It’s the same with blogging, email marketing, and even social media marketing. There are certain periods during the day and during the week (and even during the month or the entire year) when your target audience will be more active online and will be more likely to see your content and respond to it. Your goal should be to identify that time and use it.”
So, how exactly do you adjust your scheduling? Right now, you might have programmed your emails to be sent out automatically at certain points in time. But is this effective? The best way to know what time is the most optimal one for you is by analyzing the data you already have such as open rate, click-through rate, and so on. If you see that a particular segment of your audience tends to open emails on weekdays at around 6-7 am, then that’s probably the best time for you to shoot for when sending out emails to them.
Related: How AI Is Shaping an Increase in the Impact of Email Marketing
3. Maximize Email Preview Text
When it comes to email marketing, a lot of the work can be done for you with the help of various email automation tools. These will help you schedule emails, track their performance, and so on. But what can’t be programmed for you by machines is the content you put into your emails. More specifically, the preview text of your emails. And the only way you can successfully make it better is by working on it yourself.
Maximizing the impact of your email preview text can help you increase your open rate by a lot. To put it simply, the preview text can either include just the beginning of your email that gets displayed right after the sender’s name and the subject line or it can include all three of these elements. In any case, working to improve all three is the best path to take as it will get you the best results from your efforts.
To make your recipients click on the email and open it to read it, they need to get hooked first. The displayed sender name should be either your brand name or your representative’s name (to give the email more of the “human” factor). The subject line should be short and sweet and should get right to the core of your email. The preview text that follows needs to be relevant to the subject line and should act as a continuation of it.
Related: 15 Best-Kept B2B Email Secrets to Win Prospects’ Hearts
4. Update Email List Regularly
One thing many email marketers tend to forget about is just how important it is to de-clutter their email list and update it regularly. The more unnecessary email addresses you keep in, the less accurate your metrics become and the more effort you might be spending on your email marketing as a whole while getting poor results in return.
As Keira Darcy from the custom writing reviews site Writing Judge explains, “Try to update your email list at least once every three months. You don’t need all of those deleted email addresses that are skewing your metrics. It’s pointless to try to reach these people anyway. Moreover, you don’t need the people who never open your emails. If they haven’t opened a single one of your emails in quite a while (say, three months), then you should probably stop trying to get through to them. Your efforts can be spent on a different user.”
Related: 5 Steps to Update, Validate, and Enrich Your Contact Database
5. Test and Track Email Campaigns
Last but not least, you should remember that it’s never enough to just create an email marketing campaign and assume that it will function just the way you intend it to. No email marketing strategy is perfect, and no email is guaranteed to achieve the aims you set out for it. This is why it’s so important to keep testing your email marketing materials and then tracking your campaigns.
If you see that a particular approach doesn’t work with one or more segments of your target audience, then you should either try to adjust it to make it work or drop it completely. Experiment with new ways of using email to get through to your audience and you will ultimately find what works for you best. Track all the relevant metrics (open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, etc.) and always aim to improve them.
Related: The Only Guide to Email Marketing Analytics You’ll Ever Need
Final Thoughts
All in all, improving your email marketing campaign and maximizing its results is definitely something you should do if your efforts seem to be in vain. Use the tips from this article to help you change your email marketing strategy for the better and start getting more positive results from your email marketing campaigns.
