Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach a highly targeted audience with your messaging. Effective email marketing avoids the negative connotations of being “spam” — instead, it should feel personalized and direct. If you know how to do email marketing the right way, it means highly responsive campaigns that your audience looks forward to getting, not email that gets filtered out or goes right to the trash.
Depending on your objectives, email marketing can be part of a content marketing campaign or it can be a more direct promotional, lead-generating or sales-generating effort. It can also be a mix of both. No matter what your objectives are, following these practical tips can help your business or organization learn how to do email marketing effectively.
Email marketing doesn’t have to be intimidating
Here are the basic steps that any email marketing campaign should follow as well as advice that seasoned marketers follow:
- Determine your goals — Before you do anything else, have a clear picture of what your objective for the campaign is. An email campaign that is focused primarily on generating sales will look a lot different than one that is looking to build brand image and a loyal following. From there, you need to determine measurable and realistic goals for achieving your objectives.
- Target your audience — Your next step should be determining who the most effective audience should be for your email marketing efforts. Factors to consider include age, gender, income, location and interests. Knowing who your potential readers are can help you focus your content for better results.
- Build your list — ABC: Always be collecting. Building your email list should not be a passive enterprise. You should have as many frictionless, yet transparent, ways for collecting email as possible, including lead capture forms on your site, making sure your representatives are collecting email addresses as a primary form of contact and offers that are dependent on collecting emails. You should also target local events that fit your customer profile.
- Create compelling content — The content of your emails should never be an afterthought. Particularly if your main focus is content marketing, such as a newsletter, it has to be something that your audience wants to read and contains useful information. Even if your email is more directly promotional, the offers still need to be compelling and attention grabbing.
- Analyze data and make adjustments — Once your email campaign is off and running, it’s important to be continuously making data-based adjustments based on factors like open rates, click-through and conversion. Analyze successful emails to find the common denominators to improve performance. Likewise, use careful testing to find out why an email has a lower open rate and make fixes as needed.
Expert collaboration for fully integrated digital campaigns
The experienced digital marketing team at Burg & Co. understands that successful marketing is a two-way street. While we have proven knowledge and resources for the full spectrum of digital channels, from email marketing to search engine optimization, only you truly understand your business. That’s why we value a people-centric, highly collaborative approach to marketing.
To learn more about how we can help you, contact us today and schedule your free consultation.
