Dust off your email marketing campaigns to attract modern consumers.
It’s easy to forget that early email marketing campaigns evolved into more modern digital marketing tactics. Email may seem old school, but smart marketers continue to take traditional tactics and use modern strategies to maximize conversions. If you don’t make the most of your email marketing campaign or yours has gotten stale, it may be time to dust off the distribution list and rethink your strategy.
Email Marketing Is Still a Campaign Backbone
According to an email marketing statistics summary compiled by Campaign Monitor, companies use email marketing technologies more than those dedicated to social media marketing, content management, sales and marketing automation, and data management. Furthermore, a well-crafted email campaign is forty times more effective than Twitter or Facebook when it comes to new customer acquisition, so it’s hard to argue that email is an outdated strategy.
Instead, it’s advantageous to understand that a relatively small email marketing budget can result in an outrageous return on investment (ROI). The same statistics summary claims that for every $1 spent, email marketing generates $38 in ROI. Wouldn’t it be nice if all of your marketing channels could promise that kind of return?
Timeworn Email Marketing Tactics Are Still Crucial
Today, email automation and paint-by-numbers templates come in all shapes and sizes. As email marketing was made easy, more brands dedicated less time to their campaigns, and it’s easy to see why consumer inboxes continue to fill with lackluster “junk” e-mail.
The email marketing game really hasn’t changed much. It’s still your job to manage what you send, when you send it, and why it’s sent. Here are a few email marketing musts you need to keep in mind:
- Moderation: Consumers don’t need to hear from you every day of the week, regardless of how phenomenal you think your daily message may be. The quickest way to earn yourself a one-way ticket into the spam filter is to bombard consumer inboxes with your messages. Smart marketers establish and stick to a schedule to provide exceptional content, announce seasonal sales, and create a continued-but-welcome conversation with a consumer.
- Audience segmentation: One-size-fits-all is a size too small for email marketing and has been for some time. Today, campaigns need to embrace audience diversity in order to appreciate different customer preferences and buying habits. Audience segmentation along demographic lines (as well as a variety of other factors) can help form customer profiles you can utilize for targeted campaigns, and targeted campaigns will always be more effective than throwing your message at consumers and hoping something sticks.
- A/B testing: Testing various elements of your e-mail marketing campaign such as your subject line, text vs. images, and audience-specific content is a great way to sharpen your strategy. A/B testing can support a marketing hypothesis or present unexpected consumer behavior. Try testing two different subject lines to observe open rates, or send one version of an e-mail with just text and see how consumers respond. Every audience is different, and it’s your job to discover which tactics work best.
- Mobile optimization: You’ll hear this mantra repeated wherever smart marketers gather: mobile optimization is a must. Over fifty percent of emails are opened using a mobile device in today’s digital age, so you don’t want your message to be jumbled due to poor mobile optimization.
Remember, just like any aspect of a successful marketing campaign, subjectivity is key. What works well for Business A may not be the best strategy for Business B, and Business C may have a completely different audience than A or B. The point is, adapt your email marketing strategy to reflect your brand’s goals and address your audience’s needs.
Email Is Just One Piece of the Marketing Puzzle
Fortunately, it’s as easy to spot companies that do email marketing campaigns well as it is to pick out bad tactics, and brands that stand out do so for a reason. Whether that be message brevity, exceptional subject lines and content previews, or creative email templates, businesses that treat email as an essential piece of the marketing puzzle see their campaigns succeed.
The goal is to have email work hand-in-hand with other, equally important marketing elements like social media, sales opportunities, and data management. It’s only after all the pieces are cleaned up, fine-tuned, and fitted together properly that the big picture comes into focus, and email marketing has a tendency to get a little dusty when you’re not paying attention.
