7 secrets for email marketing that you mustn’t forget

With all the marketing tools and options available in today’s age it’s easy to overlook the value of email marketing. Electronic mail has always been one of the main staples of the internet as a whole and its role in marketing and advertising is still prominent.

One of the main reasons why many people overlook the value of email marketing is due to social media, blogging and other types of the digital marketing being more prevalent. However, everyone still has a need for personal email, and with it comes a channel of communication by which companies can advertise their products and services.

Recent surveys have shown that there are approximately 3.7 billion email users today which mean a huge number of potential customers and subscribers. That being said, let’s take a detailed look at what makes email marketing tick as well as several secrets which can affect the way people perceive your mail once it arrives in their inboxes.

The benefits:

Before we take a look at some secret tips and tricks that can help you convert readers into subscribers, let’s talk about why you should care in the first place. Email marketing carries with it several benefits from the moment you start implementing it:

High RoI

• Email marketing is known to bring approximately 3800% RoI depending on your brand and audience.

Easy implementation

• Email marketing doesn’t disrupt your existing marketing strategies and seamlessly integrates into your marketing campaigns.

Audience segmentation

• It’s easy to target specific audiences and demographics with email marketing.

Tracking and analysis

• Email marketing is easy to track, analyse and develop over time by following the progress of implemented email campaigns.

Global networking

• Lastly, email marketing is able to reach anyone on the planet if they own an email address. This makes it far more approachable and widespread than any other marketing campaign – online or off.

Tools and services for email marketing

Setting up a successful marketing campaign via email takes more than just writing skills to pull off. Talking about email marketing secrets without touching on the tools that can help you act on them is a half-baked argument. To that end, there are several tools and services available for everyday email marketing use:

Mailchimp

When it comes to email marketing, the name of the game is “automation”. The content you create for your audiences can usually be sent and tracked without your direct supervision.

Mailchimp is a popular mail automation platform that can easily double as a content creation platform. It can track each individual mail for the interactions made by the target user which is great for further content development and marketing analysis.

If you have a relatively small number of email subscribers (e.g. less than 1,000) MailChimp is free to use and yet it still gives you access to a professional automation platform. For other free marketing tools see the post: 5 Free Digital Tools That Every Start-Up Should Have.

Active Campaign

If automation and content creation isn’t enough for you, Active Campaign might be worth checking out. The platform is created with full cloud support for sales, project management and messaging in mind.

This means that you can safely centralize your marketing efforts and use Active Campaign as your sole tool for email marketing. This can help your coworkers and content creators work on same projects in parallel without a fear of data loss, deadline breaches or misunderstanding.

Get Good Grade

Sometimes editing or formatting won’t be enough to save your marketing campaign from postponed launch. To that end, Get Good Grade offers trustworthy and professional writing services for many types of online content including email.

Get Good Grade features beginner discounts, loyalty programs and a versatile pricing system which can be adjusted to fit just about any pocket. Make sure to check this platform out if you need email content written on a short notice and don’t know how to do it yourself.

Image Source: Pixel.com

The secret ingredients of email marketing

1. Subject lines matter

People tend to forget how email works once they start developing marketing strategies. As a rule of thumb, email content should always be presented using a clear subject line that grabs your attention. For example, if you are advertising the latest book design solutions you made for your existing clients, the subject line should allude to it.

Make sure that a “hook” is present whenever you want people to open your email and interact with it. Feed their imagination but don’t give direct information, answers or overly-excited statements in the subject line. Be professional and represent your brand in the best way possible from the get-to – or in this case, the subject line.

2. Brand preview capabilities

Most people overlook the deeper meaning and capabilities of email marketing. Once you deliver an email to someone’s inbox, they will essentially have a bit of history about your company available to them. Every word, pixel and link present in the email’s body means something to the reader.

You can easily use your email content to represent your brand, company and way of thinking without being overly direct. For example, you can include your company’s branding, vision, portfolio and other relevant links in the footer for people to have access to.

You can also localize your email content into other languages and make it available to an even wider audience. Check out IsAccurate if you want to find professional translation writers based on testimonials and reviews left by satisfied clients. Anything you can do to go the extra mile in regards to your brand representation can bring you a step closer to another conversion.

3. Making it easy to convert

One of the main reasons why companies opt for social media or blog content is the conversion process itself. It appears easier to encourage people to subscribe, purchase or interact with content if they are already present on your website.

Email marketing works differently however and you need to make sure that people want to convert in the first place. This is where most companies buckle, and it’s where you can make the most impact. Make sure that it’s easy and straightforward to interact with your brand in some way or form.

Depending on the type of campaign you are creating, you should make it clear how people can interact with your brand. This might be for subscriptions or survey buttons, purchase links or promotional events. People tend to spend little time reading through email bodies, especially from addresses they have never seen before. That’s why you must make it easy to buy or interact with your organization. Email marketing can then prove beneficial to your company.

4. Apply SEO methods

Search Engine Optimization is a practice that can help you rank better in search engines such as Google or Yahoo. However, these rules can also be applied to email marketing content to make it more legible and organized. While SEO doesn’t matter for email marketing (because it’s targeted, not organic), it can make your content come across as more professional and easy to digest.

Some of the things you can do to make your email content better are to use popular keywords (depending on your industry), minimise the size of multimedia content present in the body and format any written content with subheadings and tags. This can help improve your relationship with existing clients and convert new ones due to the fact that your emails are not only well-formatted but easy to read quickly.

5. Minimalism and negative space

One of the worst mistakes you can make in building an effective email marketing strategy is to treat your email’s body as a brochure. You do not want to make the mistake of overwhelming your readers with too much information or data that doesn’t matter to them.

Instead, focus on building a minimalistic approach to email design and make ample use of negative space in your email’s body. Include only a few sentences of information that is relevant and actionable. Pair that information with hyperlinks or buttons that lead to your website’s pages relevant to the marketing campaign.

That way, you will attract the audience that really cares about your brand and products on offer. Others will politely pass on the opportunity but still appreciate your professionalism and understanding in not spamming them with too much content. If they don’t care about your brand and sales pitch from the start, they will never buy anything no matter what you say.

6. Focus on value – not yourself

Email marketing is a great way to promote your brand’s mission, goals and company culture. However, make sure that this doesn’t end up being the majority of the content you have on offer.

People that may or may not buy your products have no value from knowing how much your company made in the past several years. They have no desire to know how many employees you have or how many subsidiaries are under your name.

Instead, focus on presenting the benefits of your products and services for each individual user. Remember that emails are usually read individually without the presence of another person. Treat each reader as a friendly neighbour and talk about the benefits you have on offer for them today. You will come across as unobtrusive and casual while still maintaining a strong professional presence that is more likely to lead to a conversion.

7. Calls to action work wonders

Lastly, there is no point in building an email marketing campaign without adequate call-to-actions (CTA’s) to back them up. Calls to action represent the pinnacle of marketing, email or not. These phrases, short messages and direct requests serve as a reminder to the reader about the importance of interacting with the content.

Make sure to always “tell” your readers to subscribe, buy, comment, reach out or otherwise act on what they just read. Assuming that someone will do what you want in marketing campaigns never ends well. Don’t assume that your readers are well-informed from the start.

Be the friendly reminder that they need and tell them what to do about the email content they just read at the end of the body. That way, you will always leave on a punch line and ensure that some form of interaction took place.

Missing the point (Conclusion)

If you’ve read through some of the above-listed secrets to email marketing, you might have noticed a pattern. These “secrets” are only secret because we made them that way.

They follow a sales logic that can ensure effective conversion and revenue streams if handled correctly. They are in no way a revelation or a game-changing perspective on an existing marketing strategy.

All they do is reaffirm the stance that email marketing has a lot to offer even in today’s age of short-form content and social media. Try implementing some of them in your own strategies in order to make the most of what this marketing medium has to offer.