You may think email marketing is a waste of time and resources given the billions of spam emails sent per day. Yet, that couldn’t be further from the truth. The matter of fact is, email marketing still works, and for some who follow these methods, it works well.
Get some emails
The first step may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised just how many companies expect revenue after sending out email content to their measly 100 or so signups. The simple fact is, your success in email marketing will depend on how many emails you have. This means incentivizing users to give you their email. This can be done through promotions like giving out a 10% discount code for those who signup with an email. Then, send the code to their email to ensure it’s a valid email. In other cases, you can hire others to find your target market. Keep in mind if you’re sending mass cold emails, you often need to include an option for them to opt-out. In either case, it should be your goal to amass new emails regularly, even if they aren’t customers yet.
A/B Testing and more
In your campaign, you’ll need to do some metric testing. This will help you better define your target audience and what makes them tick. An A/B test entails sending two emails with different content and seeing how they perform. Most often, you only want to change one or two variables in your version. For instance, a standard and simple A/B test is sending out the same content at different times. From that test, you can get a better picture of when your audience is opening and reading emails. Then, you should only send emails according to that “best” time. You should also A/B test once in a while and never grow complacent with your current practices.
Offer value for free
With every email, you should have a clear value offering that is given for free. This doesn’t mean giving away your product for free. Instead, it means offering information or something related to your business for free. Often this comes in the form of content with advice and tips, much like this article. The point is twofold. First, you establish your company as a subject matter expert. Second, your free value offer is generous and will keep your customers around for longer. More and more people will seek out reading your content and subsequently be exposed to more opportunities to buy your product or service than usual.
Customize and be authentic
Your email marketing strategy is never done and will never be perfect. Keep this in mind and make sure you continue to tweak your campaigns and content. Here, marketing only inches closer and closer to perfect, but never quite reaches it. So, you should continuously seek to measure metrics and tweak your send times, content, copy, and more. Over time, you’ll see your engagement and resulting conversions go up, but it’s a matter of persistence. You should also make sure customers can reply to your email content to seem more personable and less spammy.
Abundance mentality
This may seem contrary to your goals but make it easy for users to unsubscribe to your emails. This will show users that you aren’t in the business of spamming people. Additionally, it shows users that you’ll be just fine if they decided to unsubscribe. Furthermore, this will help reduce clutter and make metric tracking even more accurate since you’re no longer including people who aren’t interested.
