Top Tips To Formulate An Effective Email Marketing Strategy

 

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    One thing that is essential for the success of every organisation is effective communication. If your communication is not perfect, it becomes difficult for businesses to climb the success ladder. And, in case you don’t communicate well with your customers and prospects, it affects your conversions and sales. Also, if your communication is not up to the mark, you cannot retain your customers for long.

    So, what is it that can help you communicate effectively with your customers and prospects?

    One of the most effective forms of communication known for a long time now is email. Be it your customers or prospects, business associates or partners, email is just the right medium that can effectively put across your message. Email marketing has remained a useful form of communication for long, and businesses who use it properly can reach out and convey their messages more effectively.

    Email users worldwide in 2017, according to Statista were 3.7 billion, which is set to reach 4.1 billion users in 2021.

    And, 269 billion is the total number of consumer and business email sent and received every day, according to the Radicati Group which is set to grow at an average annual rate of 4.4% in the next four years to touch 319.6 billion by 2021.

    An impressive growth to say the least.

    But, if you don’t have a spot-on email marketing strategy in place, it is difficult for you to reap the benefits it has to offer. It is not an uncommon scenario that we send emails to our customers and don’t get any response from them. It is difficult for us to find out whether they opened our email or just deleted it without even opening it.

    Not all email marketing campaigns are effective.

    So, what is it that is going wrong with your email campaign?

    Here are top tips that can make your email marketing campaign effective. But, before getting into the tips, let us try to find out the types of emails.

    Types of emails

    Broadly, there are three types of emails – marketing emails, transactional emails, and operational emails.

    Marketing emails – These are emails that are used to send promotional or informational messages. You send these messages to your prospects, customers, affiliates, vendors, reporters, etc. These messages can be in the form of newsletters, sales promotions, press releases, follow-ups, and announcements.

    Transactional emails – Automated emails that are triggered by the activities of your customers are known as transactional emails. Welcome messages, payment received messages, registration confirmation messages, order tracking messages, etc. are all transactional emails. These kinds of messages have a high open rate, and hence they are considered powerful messages. These types of messages offer plenty of opportunities for cross-selling and engagement.

    Operational emails – This type of email provides information about your business. For example, changes to your service availability, holiday closure, or routine maintenance plans. Operational emails generate trust, engagement, and thoughtfulness. These kinds of messages are informative, but you can use them to improve your image and boost sales. For instance, if you inform your customers about the kind of update you will perform during a regular maintenance shutdown of your services, it is nice way of letting them know that you provide them value as well.

    But, regardless of the type of email you send, you need to formulate an effective email marketing strategy so that it gives you the desired results.

    Here are top tips that can make your email marketing campaign effective.

    Top tips to formulate an effective email marketing strategy

    If you formulate your email marketing campaign effectively, then it can deliver great results. Here is what you should do to formulate an effective email marketing campaign:

    Try to understand your goals – Marketing campaigns, irrespective of its nature, should have goals that are attainable and sustainable. So, if you want to formulate an effective email marketing campaign, then try to anticipate what you have set out to achieve. Here are some of the email marketing goals:

    • Welcome your new subscribers by telling them about your business and try to build a relationship.
    • Cultivate your existing subscribers and offer them value.
    • Arrange a webinar to boost engagement.
    • Segment your subscribers and send targeted messages to your audience.
    • Engage with your subscribers who have not been active in the recent past.

    Make sure your subscriber list keeps growing – You need to ensure that your subscriber list keeps growing. Keep adding new customers and prospects to your list. One of the most effective ways of adding customers to your subscriber list is to add a signup feature on your website. You should add subscription forms everywhere – homepage, blog page, etc.

    There are traditional ways of adding customers and prospects to your subscriber list as well. As and when you attend a trade fair or industry conference, you can ask people to sign-up before picking up your newsletter.

    Inspire your readers to engage and reply – It is all about getting into a meaningful conversation with people who are interested in doing business with you. Just throwing information on your customers won’t do you much good, try doing the following things instead:

    Make sure that your subject lines are appealing and enticing – Try to find out what interests your customers and prospects, and then speak to them directly. Offer your readers interesting and unique stuff so that your email stands out in their inbox.

    Ensure that your message sounds real – Your customers should get the impression that a human is interacting with them and not a faceless machine.

    Get into a habit of sending targeted content – Make sure that you segregate your email users by reader demographics. When you send emails according to the interests and needs of your customers and prospects, the campaign is bound to have a more positive effect.

    Make your email personal – Wherever possible, add a personal component to your email. Use email tools that allow you to enter shortcodes which can then be replaced by the recipient’s name before sending out the message. Try to make the subject line creative, personalise the content, and add a name of the person who is sending the message. And, make it a point to reply promptly to those who respond to your email.

    When it comes to email marketing in today’s times, one size fits all is an outdated strategy. Segment your messages according to the needs and interests of your customers so that it is relevant to those who receive it.

    Make sure that your email messages are crisp and clean – Though we all know about this, still we tend to make this mistake more often than not. Write short paragraphs, and keep the content relevant. The use of pictures and images should be minimal. You cannot and should not replace content with pictures and images. You should also use bullet points to highlight your message. Your readers should be in a position to speed-read the content and absorb its highlight.

    Your subscribers should not find it hard to unsubscribe – Give your customers an easy option to unsubscribe. There is not much you can do if someone has decided to opt out from your mailing list. What you need to understand is you cannot and should not annoy your customers and prospects. Those not interested in your mail would anyway either delete it or mark it as spam.

    Your emails should always be mobile friendly – People these days are more on their mobile phones, and some even grab it as soon as they wake up in the morning. Therefore, if your customers and prospects cannot see your email on their mobile phones, then it is a big problem. Optimise your email so that your readers can conveniently view it on their mobile devices.

    Make sure that you add interesting links and exciting call to action – The purpose of your email campaign is to increase the number of visitors to your site. If people don’t click on the links and calls to action, then it means you are not getting the traffic. The purpose is to create more opportunities for engagement. What you need to do is add exciting calls to action and interesting links so that people engage more with your content. You can add conspicuous buttons like Avail the Discount, Download Now, Find More, etc., to make your content more engaging.

    Never overwhelm your customers – Don’t keep sending your customers emails one after the other. The point is not to annoy your customers. What you want from your campaign is positive engagement. Hence, don’t overindulge.

    Testing and tracking are important, don’t skip it – You need to ensure that what you send works properly. Before sending your messages to your customers, check it several times. Send it to your employees to test it. You can also test it on the internet. There are various tools available that will test your mail. You need to ensure that your personalisation shortcodes are working properly and that the links are opening as desired.

    It is also vital that you track your emails on how they are faring. Check out the email analytics for the click-through rates, open rates, forwards, and unsubscribes (your service provider will help you out on this). The process will help you improve your email campaign and will also give you an idea of how you are faring.

    Provide your customers value – Offer your customer’s something that sticks with them for a long time so that they can remember you for long. You can send your customers educational messages (industry related), operational messages (service related), or marketing emails (product related). Always make sure that you provide value to your customers.

    If you still find it difficult to devise an effective email marketing strategy, you can get in touch with vStacks Software Solutions now.

    vStacks Software Solutions has the necessary experience and expertise to formulate an effective email strategy for you.

    vStacks Software Solutions has been in the business of email hosting for years; hence we know what it takes to make your email marketing campaign a success.