Scheduling and automation. These are the first steps to scalable marketing, right? It’s not all about avoiding having to wake up to hit send on a newsletter at 7 am on a Monday. There is something more to it. Big email lists. With simple math, anyone can see that the more people your content goes out to, the more effective the campaign will be, right? Not quite. For email marketing to be successful, it must be more than just spamming your list with emails urging them to buy.
Great email marketing provides valuable insights and information that your audience can use and allows you to talk with your audience without directly pushing for a sale. With an average ROI of $38 for every $1 spent, it’s worth the investment to take your marketing emails and turn them into an integral part of your overall marketing strategy.
Here are the activities that help take your email marketing to the next level.
Build your audience
It all starts with your audience, that list of people you can talk to anytime you want. That audience is one of the most undervalued assets in any business. While there is no shame in a low-quality email list, it is never going to perform as well as a list built of prospects who are interested in what you have to say and find value in your messages. It’s a better investment to put effort into building a good list than buying an average or worse one. Take the time to understand your target audience and then focus on providing valuable content for them. Use SEO tools to research the keywords and topics your audience is searching for online. Then utilize all this information to create a great content plan that enables you to consistently provide that value for your audience.
Strategy is key
All of your email marketing should be driven by and tie back into your overall marketing strategy. The secret sauce to great email marketing is strategy. Otherwise, you’re just sending out marketing emails. The right approach helps take your email marketing to the next level. Even when covering a good portion of the basics, your open and click rates can be abysmal, and your conversion rates especially so. Analyzing your performance as a part of an overall marketing strategy and content plan can help you refine and improve your marketing.
Be consistent
Once your audience recognizes the value you provide, all that is needed to keep the fire stoked is consistency. Consistency helps build good habits, but it also helps with customer loyalty. They know what to expect from you and when which helps build trust. Consistency does more than just appeal to your audience’s expectations, it also provides a more controlled environment for collecting data, analyzing it, and making decisions. A sporadically deployed campaign can introduce too many variables. So can a campaign with inconsistent content, messaging, or purpose. Having fewer but more defined variables can help you see clearly what is working and what isn’t. Consistency is key to deploying your strategy long term and having viable data to analyze throughout the process.
Follow the data
Analyzing the data allows you to see what is working and, just as important, what is not. The goal of utilizing analytics, creating carefully crafted content, and refining the presentation and distribution of this content is to see the needle move when changes are made. Using data and testing to determine the frequency, subject lines, CTA buttons, and message length is just the beginning. Understanding the correlation between the orientation of that needle and campaign performance takes all of the guesswork out of creating great email marketing campaigns and shows you when and where to make changes to improve your campaigns.
Great email marketing is an integral part of a targeted campaign backed up by data to help build your relationship with prospects, pull them further into the funnel, and even help them self-qualify. That’s what great email marketing does, and that’s where the fun is.
All the best,
JP Clement
CEO
