Digital Marketing

An Advanced Guide to Email Marketing

By Ejaz Ahmed October 14, 2019 Form Image 1677 Views

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the best strategies to grow your business. Therefore, you should be willing to invest in this undertaking to gain a competitive advantage in the market. Industries are becoming more saturated and competition is heating up.

Therefore, you need to put in a lot of effort to nurture and establish real relationships with your customers and leads. One of the most powerful channels of communication is email marketing. It can help you to purchase your target audience to purchase your products.

Market Statistics are very clear about the power of email marketing. From research, close to 2.9 billion people are using email globally. 73% of millennials state that they prefer to use email for business communication. The group prefers the use of Email over social media sites like Twitter and Facebook when doing business.

Every dollar that you spend on email marketing generates a return of 38 dollars. This increase in purchases is three-fold in comparison to what people spend on social media.

As an ecommerce marketer or business owner, you could be sending some emails to your list. However, you could be lacking a proactive or clear strategy.

You will gain several insights from this ultimate guide to email marketing. It will help you to get a high ROI on your email marketing efforts.

An Advanced Guide to Email Marketing:

1. Know Your Audience:

Audience

Knowing the people you would like to reach out to is crucial in building an effective email marketing strategy. Take time to understand and know your target audience if you want success now and in the future.

Each moment you send out an email to your list, you will be creating an opportunity of connecting personally or directly with your prospective clients. The connection can take place on various sites like Twitter or Facebook.

You need to send messages that will resonate with your target audience and motivate them to take action. You don’t want to waste your time or damage your reputation through the process.

The right foundation to build your email marketing strategy is the knowledge foundation about your target audience. Here are three tips that will help you to understand your target audience.

The first one is to dig into the data that describes your customers. Taking the time to dig into your existing customer data will help you know them better. Search for the trends that relate to their purchasing habits, location, and age.

You could be having so many people on your list who have never consumed your products or services. The data that you gather from past clients will inform your communication with future ones.

The second step is building your audience personas. You need to broadly think about your target audience. Spend some time with your team members building your audience personas. You can reference this list and refine it over time. Hubspot has a great template that you can download and then customize it to your brand.

The last thing is to check on data from your social media pages. The social page analytics about your target audience also has a lot of information about them. Research their engagement and demographic to get ideas about the type of content you need to send to them.

You cannot succeed in email marketing unless you know the type of emails your subscribers expect to receive. Several resources are available online to help you go through this step.

You should have confidence that you have a full understanding of your target audience. From here, think about how you should interact with them through your future email campaigns.

2. Build a Real Strategy:

Real Strategy

When you are new to the business, you may fly on the seat of your pants before the dust settles down. If you are like any other business owner, you may not have worked on your email marketing strategy. However, it is important to build a specific strategy that you can work against.

The good thing with a strategy is that it will help you to focus. Your email marketing strategy can take several directions. A strategy will make sure that nothing will distract you from the right course. It will help you to focus on the most important ideas and prioritize your efforts.

The strategy will assist you to know what works for your brand and what does not. Without a great strategy in place, you will not know what works and what does not work.

A strategy will make sure that both you and your team are accountable. It will make sure that you stick to your goals, priorities, and deadlines.

A strategy will also help you to set clear targets. It will force the marketer to think about why. You will need to think of why you should send emails to the subscribers. Also, think about what you expect to get from your subscribers.

You can build upon a strategy and evolve over time. If you have a clear strategy, you may feel as if you are starting afresh every six months. You will not remember what worked, what did not, or why decided to test one campaign over the others.

You will learn from the past and get to understand what you should do differently in the future. The good thing about a strategy is that another person can handle it. Business owners should delegate tasks for them to grow. Take time to build a clear email strategy and give the responsibilities and tasks to another person.

Email marketing should not be an afterthought for your brand. You should give it the same level of attention that you give to the other business areas.

It is not a one-traffic technique to only use when you want to uptick your sales. To maximize your value from the channel, you should reason proactively and strategically. In most cases, you should be thinking about the communication that your subscribers get from your brand.

You should always look at the bigger picture. Mapping the customer journey will come into great play at this point.

Read more: How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy

3. Map Your Customer Journey:

Customer Journey

As you invest in email marketing, you should only send promotional and sales emails to your audience. It is one of the biggest mistakes you can make in your marketing efforts. If you are new to email marketing, you may think that the only emails you can send are free shipping and discount offers.

There are several types of email campaigns that can help you to build loyalty and nurture relationships. You should understand where your opportunities lie and go beyond the sales emails. Map out the actual journey that typical customers who buy your products go through.

The buyer or customer journey is different for each business. Make sure you understand the ideal case for the brand. The phrases include advocacy, retention or loyalty, purchase, consideration, and awareness. Email marketers should determine how they can leverage email marketing.

It will help them to move towards the journey of conversion and advocacy. Therefore, you should map your customer journey if you want to succeed in email marketing.

4. Write Like a Human:

Connecting with your email subscribers at a personal level is crucial. It will help you to convince them to take the action that you would like them to make. The message in your campaigns should resonant around your audience to succeed.

The writing style and words that you use in your email marketing matter a lot to your audience. The wrong positioning and message will lead to a lack of sales, low open rates, and low CTRs. It may also motivate people to unsubscribe from your email list altogether.

The secret is to write like an actual human being who has a distinct and unique personality. It will help you to craft the kind of message that resonates well with your target audience. Everyone wants to feel a connection with the brand on an authentic and personal level.

You need to add voice, style, and personality to your email marketing campaigns. To achieve this, do not try to be overly funny or clever. Such an approach may come out as forceful and inauthentic to your recipients.

The next tip is to use an active voice in all your writing. Besides, write as if you are speaking. It is good to read your email copy aloud before you send it to your subscribers. Anything that sounds unnatural and odd will also sound funny to your subscribers.

Your emails should come from an actual person. Don’t leave your mails unsigned at the bottom or use the no-reply email addresses. Add a human component and personality to your email campaigns by making sure they come from a real person. Include your actual name at the bottom of the email copy.

Lastly, do not fear using All-Caps, emojis, and exclamation points. Your goal is not writing a perfect business email. The email that you write should connect with your target audience, nurture them, and influence them to try your products.

For some businesses, you may have to go out of the traditional box by using CAPs, emojis, and exclamation marks in the email.

Your subscribers are getting so many emails from different brands. You can cut through the noise and develop a strong relationship with the people you wish to convert. The only secret is to humanize your email copies.

6. Look for Opportunities of Personalization:

Personalization

Personalization is a critical element in the email marketing strategy. People on your email list will not visit your page and buy unless they have a personal connection. With personalized emails, you will be able to establish and nurture relationships. It will also remove fear, build trust, drive action, and create excitement.

Personalized emails have an open rate that is 30% more than the ones that don’t have. The delivery times for personalized emails is six times higher transaction rates. Besides, 80 percent of consumers prefer retailer emails that recommend products basing on past purchases.

Therefore, email personalization adds a lot of value to your marketing efforts. Personalized email messages enhance conversions by 10% and click-through rate by 14%. As a marketer, you will report a 20% increase in sales when you use personalized experiences.

According to 53% of marketers, personalizing communication with the current clients leads to a moderate to a significant effect on revenue.

7. Ask for Feedback:

Feedback

The last tip to get a high ROI from your email marketing efforts is requesting feedback. You need regular feedback from your customers and subscribers. It is good to understand the experience that people have while interacting with your brand.

With this kind of feedback, you will use quantitative data and not assumptions in your working. It will introduce a quantitative perspective that you won’t get unless you speak to your subscribers.

Ideally, you need to ask for customer feedback throughout their purchase journey. Make sure you collect all the relevant information from your clients. Some of the common questions would include;

  • Do you have any questions about our products?
  • Are you comfortable with the frequency of emails that we send your way?
  • Do you enjoy the type of content that we send to you?
  • Do you think the promotions and offers that we send are relevant and compelling?
  • Did you enjoy the products that we shipped to you?
  • Are you willing to share with your friends about our brand and products?
  • Do you have any concerns or problems with your shopping experience with us?

When you send regular feedback email requests, you will strengthen the relationship that you have with your customers and subscribers. It will also go a long way in helping you to build trust. You will get the insight that you require to grow and improve your brand over time.

Conclusion:

With all this information, you have all that you need to build a perfect email marketing strategy for your brand. You need to implement a plan that will work best for your brand because it depends on your niche. [email protected] offers the best email marketing strategy for your brand.

You are welcome to share your learnings and ideas with us in the comment box below.

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Ejaz Ahmed

Part-time blogger, full time dreamer! Ejaz Ahmed likes to think about how technology will ultimately transform human lives for the better. He is deeply fascinated about using technology to democratise the spread of useful information on the internet.

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