5 Tips To Nail Your Email Marketing Campaigns

While Email marketing isn’t spamming, it’s not a personal note from a friend either. It exists somewhere in between these two classifications of communication. Customers don’t give up information lightly if used correctly, email marketing is both a way to establish a connection between you and your customer base as well as a profit-building tool.

An email should be used to build on an existing relationship with your target audience and prospective leads by providing them with relevant information that helps to drive them towards taking action.

Email marketing isn’t about you or the business you’re actually marketing. It should be all about your customer. By always keeping this in mind, the subscribers to the list you’ve worked so hard to build will do more than just read your emails – they’ll look forward to hearing from you every time you release an email.

This article takes a deep dive into how email marketing should still be one of the most important channels in your marketing strategy and how you can use it effectively.

How You Should Use Email

There are many ways that you can utilize email effectively. Here are our favorites:

#1 Build Connections With Customers

You can grow relationships with your customer base through personalized engagement.

#2 Brand Awareness

Place your company and the services you offer at the top of your customer’s mind so they’ll think of you when they’re ready to engage.

#3 Content Promotion

You can use your email marketing efforts to share blog content or other assets with prospective customers.

#4 Lead Generation

Give your prospective customers a reason to provide personal information to you in exchange for an asset they see value in.

#5 Product Marketing

Use Email as a way to promote products and services.

#6 Lead Nurturing

Work on pushing your prospective customers further down the funnel by delighting them with content that helps them solve problems they’re facing.

Getting Started With Your Email Marketing Strategy

On average, people receive 121 emails every single day. If you don’t take the time to develop a strategy that resonates with your audience, your emails will get lost in their crowded inboxes or even worse- get marked as spam.

These five steps can serve as a base strategy to build your email marketing program:

#1 Define Your Audience

Effective emails are effective because they’re relevant and timely. Like every other facet in marketing, you should start with your buyer persona and understand what they want. Then you should tailor your email campaigns to the needs of your target audience.

#2 Establish Your Goals

Before you begin to define the goals of your campaign, conduct some research to provide context. Research the average email statistics for your specific industry. These should serve as benchmarks for your own key performance indicators.

#3 How Can People Sign Up?

Your email list is like gold – this group of users has given you permission to send them relevant content. In order to further build this list, you need several opportunities for your prospects to opt-in to receive emails from you.

Don’t get discouraged if you only have a small list to start with, it takes time to build. While you’re working on growing your list, treat your current subscribers and prospective leads like gold and you’ll begin to see your email list grow organically.

#4 Choose The Specifics Of Your Campaign

The differences between email campaigns are vast and trying to decide how to approach yours can be overwhelming. Will you send a weekly newsletter? Should you send out new product announcements?

These are the questions that every marketer faces, but the answer changes from situation to situation. Set up different lists for different types of emails – this allows customers and prospects to get only the emails that matter to them.

#5 Make A Schedule

Make a decision regarding how often you plan to contact your list and then inform your audience so they know what to expect. When you’re transparent and you set a schedule that you can stick to, you begin to establish trust and your customers won’t forget about you.

Building Your Email List

Building a list boils down to two key elements that work together to grow your subscriber count: lead magnets and opt-in forms.

Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are exactly like they sound: an asset that attracts prospective customers to your email list. This usually takes the form of a free offer, but it can vary from industry to industry. Your offer can take any number of formats, but it should be valuable to prospective customers and it should be given away for free in exchange for their email address.

This presents a bit of a challenge as people have become extremely protective of their personal information. You can’t expect to receive email addresses without exchanging it for something valuable to the prospective customers.

How to Create Lead Magnets That Convert

Your lead magnet should be relevant to your prospects. Use these guidelines to help ensure that you’re creating an asset that’s valuable to your prospective customers:

1. Your Offer Should Be Solution-Oriented: Provide value through practical information that solves a problem for your prospect. Make sure it creates a realistic way to achieve solutions.
2. Ensure Your Offer Is Easy to Consume: Lead magnets should be accessible in a digital format. It doesn’t matter if it’s a PDF, a landing page, a video, or some other format: make it easy for your new prospect to access it.
3. Create An Offer That Keeps Future Content In Mind: It’s extremely disappointing to sign up for a great offer and receive terrible content in return. Your offer should align with the value you provide to your customers throughout their entire relationship with your business, otherwise you can damage the trust you’ve built.
4. Your Lead Magnet Should Be Part Of The Journey To Your Paid Solution: The entire point of email marketing is to guide your subscribers to a paid offer. You offer free content that demonstrates value to you provide as a business. The free offers you have should eventually lead the prospect to your products or services.
5. Create Specific Offers For Each Stage Of The Buyer’s Journey: Every new lead you acquire will be at a different stage of the buyer’s journey. It’s your responsibility to know which. You can segment your list at the very beginning of the journey by creating separate opt-in offers that speak to each stage of the customer’s journey.

Creating Effective Opt-In Forms

Opt-ins are incredibly important as this is how you get your lead’s information to add them onto your list. It serves as a gate between future leads and the assest you created for them.

Attractive Design + Attention Grabbing Header = Winning Opt-In

Your form needs to be branded, stand out from the page, and persuade people to sign up. You want to get readers hyped about your offer.

Your Copy Is Relevant to Your Offer

Yes, your goal is to get people to enter their information. But it isn’t a goal to deceive them. Any information you present on your form should be an accurate representation of the offer prospects will receive.

Keep It Simple

This is, potentially, one of the first interactions you’ll have with your prospective customer. Don’t dissuade them with long forms and only ask for the most essential information- their first name and email is a good place to start.

Conclusion

Your email marketing efforts are a two-pronged affair: lead acquisition and marketing messaging. You can drive enormous value to your business by taking the time to really understand what your customers are looking for, what problems are plaguing them, and then delivering messages that both solve problems and satisfy their needs.

Test regularly on both levels- different lead magnets and different messaging in your email outreach. You’ll be able to optimize your campaigns easily by watching what resonates with your prospects and what doesn’t perform at all.

 

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