Email marketing is one of the most effective ways for businesses to engage with their target audiences regularly. It’s also a great avenue for tapping directly into various customer segments – especially those with high sales conversion potential.
The start of a new year is the best time to think about freshening up your email marketing strategy in a bid to turn a healthy profit over the next 12 months. Refreshing your approach means considering a reputable marketing automation software, tidying up your master list, and breathing new life into your content. This article covers all of this and more.
The Ultimate Guide to Improving Your Email Marketing Strategy
The key to improving your email marketing strategy is to start by revisiting the foundation it rests on. Is its role in the broader growth strategy of the business obvious to the whole team? Is there a bottom line vision that you want to get across with every email, no matter the audience segment it is targeting?
It’s good to be reminded that always putting your readers (aka your potential customers) first is the best approach to any campaign. Considering consumer habits have changed so much as a result of the pandemic, it might be worth revisiting the amount and frequency of your campaigns. From there, consider the following as part of refreshing the strategy.
- Do an Analytics Deep Dive
The analytics data collected during the course of every digital marketing campaign is incredibly useful for seeing where things are working and where they aren’t. Getting a better grip on your email marketing strategy means sitting down with the team and running through reports from last year to learn more about how your audience is engaging with your messaging.
Work through data measuring opens and clicks, conversions and website (landing page) traffic. What are you most surprised or struck by? Discuss this with the team, along with coming up with new ideas to make these revelations work for the bottom line.
- Tidy Up Your Master List and Its Segments
Unlike social media followers, email lists are owned by businesses themselves. This means that the in-house marketing team has a responsibility to keep them well organized and maintained at all times. Doing so “from the ground up” makes it easier to have a firm grip on things even if it grows exponentially every month.
Companies taking shortcuts and buying lists will quickly realize how hard it is to work with a large database that isn’t their own. The same goes for carving out audience segments from these. If you’ve done things the right way, doing a quick audit of your existing segments and making sure they are still bringing in decent conversions will be easy enough. Create new segments (and A/B test them) if a few haven’t been yielding great results recently.
- Invest in a Marketing Automation Software
Automating is truly the way of the future, especially so in the marketing field. It can save businesses a lot of time, energy and help to redirect key resources elsewhere. The “set and forget” email campaign feature offered by marketing automation software providers like Sendlane is helpful no matter the type of business. It allows you to create and tailor content upfront on a schedule, with the tool pretty much handling the rest for you.
The right fit can also help speed up the process by automating design, handling tracking, and offering analytics reports from a central dashboard. Explore a couple of options, and don’t be shy to try one that also gives advice on how to improve future campaigns to increase CTA clicks and other important KPIs.
- High Quality Over High Volume Content
The saying that “less is more” holds true for email marketing too. High quality, well targeted content is always going to trump spray and pray messaging sent too frequently. Reflect on whether your business has been doing this over the last 12 months. High unsubscribe rates are generally a good indicator of this.
Combating this means getting your content right by using power words and making copy skimmable wherever possible. Personalization is everything these days; the more you can do to speak directly to the customer (a real life person), the better. A good proofread is well worth it every time. Consider making it a priority, especially if you’d like to leave silly typos in the past this year.
Now that you know exactly how to freshen up your email marketing strategy this year, effective, well-polished campaigns are right on your doorstep. These will help to entice hot leads to convert into customers, as well as encouraging the existing ones to return for more. Before you know it, you’ll have a highly loyal customer base hanging onto every message or promotion you throw their way this year.
