Email has been around for around 50 years now, and although it is the grandparent of all things social media, it still manages to stay relevant and necessary for today’s businesses, perhaps now more than ever. Despite its age, email marketing remains a powerful tool for businesses to connect with their audience, drive conversions and foster enduring relationships. Let’s cover a few basics so you can get to crafting email marketing campaigns that convert leads into loyal customers.
Segmentation of Your List
Digital marketing allows businesses to segment their audiences based on different categories, allowing them to send more relevant content specifically to the target audience who will most appreciate it, and you certainly should take advantage of this when designing an email marketing campaign. When refining your marketing strategy, you can take into account the unique needs of your customers, whether you segment on the most basic level for where a customer is in the process of getting to know your brand, or you choose to focus on and customize your content for different segments more specifically. Segmentation allows you to personalize your message to your audience, which can promote loyalty and nurture long-term relationships.
Tracking Email Metrics
Identifying and tracking essential metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions will give you the insights you need to refine your campaigns. With time, you can hone these insights into razor-sharp strategies that make your system highly adaptable and specific with the help of your ability to segment your audience. Suppose a subscriber always engages with a particular type of email, such as a promotional, but never with a newsletter. In that case, you can efficiently switch your approach and only send that subscriber the content they engage with.
Honing Your Content
Of course, all this assumes you provide concise, relevant content for your subscribers! (Of course, you are!) However, sometimes your marketing intentions can end up like the children’s game of telephone - what you said doesn’t quite make it through in the same way you intended. Fortunately, there are methods you can use to make sure you’re achieving your intended message with subscribers. Split or A/B testing is a great way to do this. Essentially, you send two different versions of the same message to different segments of your audience and evaluate the response to both to determine which was more effective. This can be done with any email element, from the subject line to fonts, calls to action, etc. You name it; you can split-test it. Remember that you’ll have to split-test one element at a time, or you won’t get specific results for each component!
User-generated content is a great way to establish trust and prompt conversions. Anything created by your current, satisfied customers, such as testimonials, reviews, etc., is a form of social proof that can be incredibly valuable for your business.
Don’t forget the CTA! A well-placed, well-worded call to action button can work wonders for your conversion rate. You want it to be easy and enticing for potential customers to click through your website from the email.
Adopting a Hybrid Approach
Because of the different strengths of email and social media marketing, most businesses find that the hybrid marketing plan is best. Some things, such as general brand awareness, are best approached through social media strategies, where lead conversion is usually higher with email marketing, not least because the people who sign up to your email list are presumably interested in your product or service.