Email marketing is all about sending messages, tracking responses, and following up with unsubscribed customers. If your marketing strategy relies on email, you’ll be glad to know that email marketing is still alive.
According to research firm Econsultancy, “Email continues to be an essential part of the marketing mix, and the vast majority of companies (72 percent) rate email ‘good’ or ‘great’ in terms of ROI.” .
To use email effectively, you need a good understanding of email design best practices, email deliverability, and the ability to develop engaging content targeted to a specific audience.
Getting started with email marketing
In the always-evolving world of marketing and email marketing, it can be difficult for marketers to know where to invest their energy and time to garner the best results.
To help marketing organizations prioritize their email marketing efforts, we surveyed more than 500 digital marketing experts. Asking them to rate the broad range of email marketing technologies and tactics as well as their predicted business impact during 2020.
Hopefully this marketing survey can help you determine the platform and technologies you can leverage to execute your email marketing campaigns. From sending your email messages, observe responses, managing unsubscribers, monitoring engagement, and tracking the results.
The first step is to choose an email service provider (ESP) or a CRM solution provider to build automated email marketing campaigns. Your choice will depend on your budget, feature requirements, sales process. Marketing organization, and the number of contacts in your database.
How to build an email marketing list
When you build a house, the first thing that is built is the foundation. That same concept applies when you are building your email marketing program. The how, where, and when of building your list are as critical a factor in the success of that email program as anything else you can create. A relevant and engaged audience is crucial to deliverability success and having the right mailing list is a good start.
Once you’ve chosen the platform/solution for sending messages and managing responses, you’ll want to focus on building your email list. To be clear, email marketing is not spamming. In fact, it usually begins when website visitors voluntarily “opt in” to be added to a database of marketable names. Your audience has asked for your emails and should be expecting to get them.
They might have signed up for a newsletter or webinar, filled out a form on your site, or be following you on social media. It is better to build your email list with people who want to hear from you. Rather than buying email lists or procuring email addresses from other sources.
In this way, you can better ensure that the email is something the recipient wants. Sending a random email out, even if it’s relevant to recipient’s interests and business, is the same as cold calling. Your audience didn’t ask to be contacted and may not be receptive to hearing from you. See below for several best practices for building your email marketing list.
Email best practices—create a strong welcome program
When a subscriber is first added to your list. It is a good idea to send them a series of emails welcoming them to your program. With these emails, you should clearly communicate your opt-in/permission policy . And set expectations for what is to come in future emails.
You should also use this opportunity to let them know how often they can expect to receive your emails. And how to opt-down or change their preferences if necessary. A simple welcome campaign can go a long way in establishing a good relationship with new subscribers.
Acquiring new email addresses is the golden goose for marketers, but experts point out that there are inherent dangers. New signups risk a Spamhaus listing because emailing. Multiple times to a new registrant who never opens or clicks is a high-risk gamble.
This newly acquired email address can likely be a spam trap, and repeated emailing to it can trigger having your emails blocked.
Have a review process:
Agree on a review process for new mailings. Having a review process ensures high-quality communications by making sure that the proper stakeholders are involved along the way.
Communicate with all teams:
Ensure that other departments are aware of your communication efforts. This ensures that customer-facing employees have all the information they need to respond to customer inquiries about your campaigns.
Keep messages consistent:
Organize and maintain your content. Properly organized content ensures that your communications are consistent and will enable you to efficiently produce new messages.
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