Broadly speaking, here are the steps you need to take to start running email marketing.
Develop a strategy: try to find gaps in how email marketing can work together with your other online marketing strategies.
Decide on the platform to use: this platform you will later use to spread your email. Currently, there are many email marketing tools that can be used to help you manage your email marketing strategy.
Build an email list: get subscribers by offering content such as ebooks, reports, webinars, and much more.
Monitor and analyze: improve your strategy based on analysis of past strategy performance.
Guide to Creating an Email Marketing Strategy
The average person receives 121 emails every day. That means, without the right strategy, your email will be ignored in subscribers’ inboxes.
So learning how to devise the right strategy to run your email marketing is the main step that must be taken. Here are the general stages:
- Defining Your Audience
An effective email is an email that is relevant to the needs of subscribers. As with other marketing techniques, start designing your strategy by creating buyer personas.
It’s important to be able to know the wants and needs of the audience to make it easier for you to create relevant emails.
- Determine Goals
Without clear objectives, measuring the success of your strategy is impossible.
Try to do research first on the average email marketing performance in your industry to use as a benchmark in determining objectives.
- Determine the Email Campaign Type
Determining what kind of campaign to run can indeed be very confusing.
Should you use the weekly newsletter format, or send product announcements, or distribute blog posts, all of which are actually subjective choices.
However, if you have done in-depth research on your ideal audience, and also have knowledge about the various types of email campaigns, it should be easier for you to determine what kind of content you need to share.
- Make a Schedule
Determine how often you want your audience to receive your emails, and try to stay consistent with the schedule you have made.
- Measuring Results
Thorough analysis of your email marketing performance is the key to continuously improving your next strategy.
How to Build an Email List
Of course without an email list, your strategy will not work. So building an email list is one of the first steps that is important for you to do.
There are many creative ways you can add to your email list. But to simplify, there are two main elements used in an effort to build an email list: lead magnets and opt-in forms. For more details, see the following explanation.
- Using lead magnets
As the name implies, a lead magnet is something or an offer that can bring in leads from your email list. Usually, these offers can be accessed free of charge.
The content offered can be in various formats. Most importantly, the content has value for your prospects so they are willing to exchange it with their email address.
Some examples of lead magnets that you can make include:
Ebooks
Whitepapers
Infographic
Report
Templates
Webinars or courses
tools
- Opt-In Form
The opt-in form is the form or page your prospects use to enter their information. Here are some tips for creating an attractive opt-in form:
a. Create an attractive design
It is important that your form page has an attractive design so that it can entice users to be willing to provide their information on the form.
b. Forms should be kept simple
Too many or too difficult questions can make users change their minds and not share their information. Therefore, only include questions that are very essential, such as first name and email address.
c. Requesting reconfirmation
Asking to re-confirm your subscriber registration sounds counterproductive. However, studies show that consumers prefer to receive confirmed-opt-in (COI) compared to a simple welcome email.
Tips to Increase Open Rate Email Marketing
Successfully getting lots of email lists will not make your email marketing successful, if your subscribers don’t open the emails you send. Therefore, the important thing that you have to do is optimize your email to get a high email marketing open rate.
- Pay attention to the delivery time
The two main rules that must be considered when sending emails are, you must send emails to subscribers when:
They are not sleeping
Their inbox is not busy
Therefore, you should avoid scheduling emails early in the morning. Because, most likely your email will be lost in the middle of important emails in the subscriber’s inbox.
It’s not easy to determine the right time to send an email. To help with the process, you need to run experiments to get data on the best times to send emails.
- Apply the “80/20 Rule” to your email content
What it means to apply the 80/20 rule to your email content is: Use 80% of your email to provide information, education and entertainment to subscribers
Use 20% of your email to promote your brand
Use 20% of your email portion to introduce the product or service you offer.
- Optimizing Email Previews
There are three main factors that are considered by subscribers to open your email or not, namely:
Title on the subject
Sender
Message previews
Most people don’t care about the third point, the message preview. Though, message previews are useful as your second subject heading. Therefore it becomes important.
Thus a brief explanation of what email marketing is, how to create a strategy, and tips for optimizing it. Hopefully the information we provide is useful for you.
If your business needs help running email marketing, Meson Digital Marketing Agency is willing to help you implement an effective strategy.
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