As with any marketing method, effective email marketing requires creativity and an engaging message, but it is also essential that you understand the technical details necessary to produce maximum success.
Technical details?!
They're not TOO technical don't worry. In addition to producing an email that is aesthetically appealing and compelling, an email should be engineered to get past spam blockers and optimized for your key market segments.
Once you have all of these components optimized, your email marketing initiatives can be a highly effective part of your inbound marketing strategy.
To sum the above infographic, if you can produce emails that adhere to the following principles, your emails should be an immensely productive element of your marketing strategy:
- Produce compelling content: Even if you are using an email template, you can still produce an email that is distinctive in format and message. Using a unique greeting, buyer history references, or individualized customer information can help produce more effective email marketing. You should also include a single message that is repeated throughout the email and is reinforced with Calls-to-Action as well as in the subject line. The subject line should be tailored to intrigue the recipient as well as bypass spam blockers.
- Utilize simple email tools: There are plenty of easy to use email builders available online which can help you produce the most effective email marketing. Tools on Campaigner and Admail.net facilitate the creation of high quality and appealing emails through a simple drag and drop interface.
- Optimize delivery: All of your hard work is pointless if your customers never receive your emails. That is why all effective email marketing should include technical testing to ensure that your emails can be read and displayed on a variety of devices and operating systems.
- Market segmentation: The most effective email marketing includes a robust market segmentation component. With the assistance of market analysis, you can identify the consumer groups that are most likely to respond to your marketing message. It may take a little more elbow grease to produce emails with tailored messages for each market segment, but the results should include a greater response rate across those groups.
- Time it right: You may not have given much thought to when you should send your emails considering that it will remain in the recipient’s mailbox until they are ready to open it, but research shows that timing is an important consideration. A report by Experian shows that the highest marketing email response rates are around noon and on the weekends, although Tuesdays are optimal during the week.
- Analytics: Your emails should be constantly analyzed for effectiveness. Using a variety of widely available analytics you can determine the number of opens, clicked links and blocked emails. This will not only help you determine how successful your email marketing is, but will allow you to refine the elements that are working and discard those that are not.
Creating an effective email marketing campaign is not a skill that suddenly appears overnight, but with practice and these guidelines it can become a reliable tool in your arsenal of inbound marketing techniques.
If you would like to learn other inbound marketing tactics to help generate more leads check out our lead generation ebook:
