Email Marketing Tips

According to a study done by McKinsey & Company, email is nearly 40 times more effective in obtaining customers than Facebook and Twitter are. Email will serve you well in your efforts to keep your brand, products, and services on customers’ minds. It will also help you build loyalty and increase your revenue in the long term. Email marketing is also an extremely effective way to reach customers on their mobile phones and mobile marketing is a must!

• Focus on your goals! Make sure your goals for your email plan fall in line with your broader marketing and business plans.

• Use analytics tools. It is important to know how many subscribers you have, how many are reading your emails on desktops and on mobile devices, how many are visiting your website via email links, and how many are making purchases thereafter.

• Focus on email centric content. Email content should not just be cut and pasted from a website or from a template designed for traditional mail. Email content should be specifically designed to work well in an email, whether the person is opening the email on a mobile phone, tablet, or a desktop.

• Personalize and target. Target your emails to specific subgroups within your customer community. Broad reaching impersonal emails tend to be overlooked. Remember, your customers receive hundreds of emails a day from companies. Tailoring to the customer’s interests, demographics, behaviors, etc. will set you apart from the rest. Obviously, to gather enough information about your customers to successfully segment them requires the use of analytics tools and/or surveys. You can persuade customers to fill out surveys upon creating accounts on your website.

• Facilitate site visits. Make sure your emails entice customers to visit your site and make it easy for them to do so.

• Use email to engage. Use email to invite your customers to engage with your brand. You can invite them to write humorous stories about their experiences with your products, take pictures of themselves using your products, enter contests to win merchandise or discounts, etc. Use your imagination and make it fun!

• What’s in it for them? Your emails should always focus on your customers’ needs. Each email should offer information or opportunities of value to them. If you tend to only write promotional emails about yourself and your products, your customers will likely see you as an annoyance. This will cause customers to click the dreaded “unsubscribe” button, which will be detrimental to your brand.

• Have a landing Page. Just as important as the email you send is the landing page to which the email leads. This page should be continuously updated and optimized to offer fresh images and new valuable information. This page should be easy to navigate.

• Test, test, test! Always test your emails within your company before sending them. Test the links, the appearance, and ease of navigation within emails and from emails to landing pages. Also, for those of you who segment your customers (every business should be doing so), make sure emails arrive in the inboxes of the customer segments for which they were intended.

• Creative content is essential. Include it in your emails and update it frequently.

• Mix email campaign styles and methods and switch content types. Test them out to see which work best for different segments of customers and use best practices to improve future email campaigns.

• Avoid spam filter trigger words. Words such as free, opportunity, offer, click here, and discount will likely send your email to customers’ spam folders. Research online to find more trigger words and make sure they do not appear in your emails.

• Keep in touch! Stay connected with customers and prospective customers by checking in every once in a while with emails that offer information valuable to them. Find the correct frequency with which to connect with your customers. Find that line between too often and not enough. It’s different in every industry and can differ with every customer segment.

About the Author

Chiara Tedone

Chiara is Digital Content Creator and Blog Manager for AMA Tampa Bay. She is Co-founder and Director of Winning the Fight, a non-profit organization specializing in neurodegenerative disease research. Chiara is also a freelance digital marketer for small businesses and is finishing up her MBA with a specialty in marketing from the University of South Florida. Prior to moving to Florida, Chiara lived in Washington, DC. She earned her BA in International Studies from American University’s School of International Services in 2007 and worked for Booz Allen Hamilton and the Department of Defense thereafter. Her hobbies include obstacle racing, running, swimming, kayaking, SCUBA diving, and opera/classical singing. She also loves country music and chocolate!

Contact Chiara

Email: Chiara at [email protected]

Social Media: LinkedIn