Email marketing has significant potential for relationship and profit-building, but in order to reach this goal, your email newsletters must be something for your customers or clients to look forward to seeing in their inboxes. Your email newsletters are not about you, they are, in fact, about your customers. Here is what to consider when trying to create an effective marketing email campaign. 

Get to Know Your Audience 

Creating your ideal customer avatar is an incredibly important part of creating your brand guidelines and your first step in creating a successful email marketing campaign. Sending your clients an email is like sending them a personal message, but without knowing your audience there is no way to send a meaningful message. By knowing your audience you will know how to meet your audience’s needs. 

An ideal customer avatar supports you making content that appeals to your target audience. When building your ideal customer avatars consider the accounts your customers might follow, the books they might read, the places they might shop, their home life and their family dynamics. The more specific you are when creating these personas, the better. You want to be sure you are attracting the most high value subscribers because your subscribers are your leads and are a part of the customer base you will retain over time.  

What Is Your Goal? 

This is your why. Identifying a goal is a vitalt part of the creative process. Revenue or reach should always be the end game. A strategy without revenue or reach is a waste of time.  Email newsletters have the potential to build or establish a relationship with your client, or to help you seal the deal and make the sale. If your newsletter is missing opportunities to gain revenue or reach you are missing the goal. It is important to review your email newsletter and be sure your goal is nurtured by its content. 

This is also where you want to look at and analyze your open rate and click-through rate to make tweaks to your strategy month over month. 

How Do You Capture Your Clients? 

It should be easy to sign up for your newsletters and there should be some incentive for doing so. Your prospects want there to be value in signing up for a newsletter. Building your email list is invaluable and there should be more than one way for you to capture leads. Give your customers options to send messages, to follow you on social and to simply opt in to receive your email newsletter. No matter how many subscribers you have, treat them like gold. 

You can offer ebooks, whitepapers, reports, templates, tools, or webinars. No matter what industry you are in there is a way to make an offer to your potential clients. Use this as an opportunity to solve a problem, or make an offer. 

Email Marketing Strategies

The Devil Is in the Details 

Campaign Type

There are many different types of email campaigns. You can send new blogs, new offerings, product launches, seasonal opportunities, informational emails, an ezine, an event invitation, a co-marketing announcement or internal updates, nurture emails, thank you emails, confirmation emails, and welcome emails. 

This list is long and with close attention to details there is most certainly a way to strategically make any of the above work to your advantage. 

Schedule

Be specific and consistent. Your emails are a catalyst for building trust and brand awareness. Set a schedule, plan out your emails, and let your customers know just how reliable you are. 

The Proof Is in the Pudding

Revenue or reach, followed by results. Measure EVERYTHING.

Keeping a close eye on your metrics is going to help you mold your campaigns to work even better in the future. Have you considered your open rate? What about the click-through rate on your emails? This is just a starting point for your metrics. Pay close attention to your unsubscribe rate as well as this is an indicator as to whether or not your content fits your avatar.

What Email Marketing Service Will Work Best for You? 

There are many options but what is truly important to consider here is the customization and optimization tools available to you. Aesthetics matter as much  as metrics and finding a service that covers all of the bases is vital to the success of your email marketing campaigns. You should not have to reinvent the wheel. Think about things like easy to customize templates, easy automation set up, and downloadable reports. 

Here Is What Every Successful Campaign Should Include

  • Creative Copy: Creativity looks different for everyone. Be sure your copy matches your voice and that your brand shines through in your copy. 
  • Graphics: It is important to include on-brand, and on-point imagery in your emails. 
  • Call-to-Action: What do you want your readers to do? It should be easy to understand and even easier to do.
  • Timing Is Everything: Research shows 11 AM on Tuesdays is a great time to send your emails. With a little more research you can come up with a few more times that will bring equal success. Check your open rates to see what the most common open time is and adjust your schedule from there. 
  • Mobile Optimization: Most of your readers will open your email on a cell phone. Be sure your email campaigns are optimized for mobile. If they are not, your readers will erase instead of engage.
  • Be Personal: Add a first name, add information that pertains to the geographic locations of your readers, and create a personalized signature. Be human!
  • Come Up With a Captivating Headline: This is the first step to high open rates. 

Segment + Build and Develop Relationships

All of your subscribers have a goal in mind. Some of these goals are similar, others are different, no matter what, they need to be catered to. Generic emails just do not work. This is another reason why it is invaluable to study and know your audience. Segmenting your email list ensures you are treating your subscribers like their wants and needs matter. One size fits all is a no-no. Segmenting your email newsletter subscribers can more easily help convert them later. 

Segmenting your email lists means getting clear and concise on where your leads are coming from and when collecting contacts be sure your subscriber information is added to the proper list. You can take into consideration location, industry, previous engagements, awareness, and where your customers are in their decision-making stage based on data collected. 
Email marketing needs special attention. VIVID Collective is here to help you strategize, create and execute. Give us a call, (720) 594-6968.