Email marketing is one of the most important tools for any business strategy. With its ability to generate 50% more sales and increase ROI by 4,300%, email is a vital tactic to create and maintain relationships with your customers.
Unfortunately, email marketing is time-consuming, and it’s difficult to find an inexpensive option to speed up the process. To effectively implement an email marketing strategy without busting the budget, follow these eight tips:
#1. Use web forms to quickly build an email list and boost your reach.
Get rid of the hassles involved in building an email list by using technology to automate simple tasks. Connect online forms to your preferred email marketing platform to send form data, like emails and phone numbers, directly into your email list without typing a single letter. This allows you to save your time and energy for tasks that need your attention, like figuring out how to effectively engage with your customers.
You can also use web forms to collect new subscribers with form embedding and social sharing. Embed forms on your social media sites, blogs, and other landing pages to bolster email signups. This will help you gain new subscribers from any consumer touchpoint with your brand.
#2. Offer useful content.
Creating and embedding forms is obviously an important step, but you need to incentivize potential subscribers to actually fill them out. The best way to accomplish this is by providing useful, exclusive content.
Blog posts, Google hangouts, articles, and infographics that offer a valuable service to your subscribers—such as helping them scout out new products, technology, and industry trends—will help you prove that your content is worth a subscription. And, ultimately, you will earn plenty of form submissions and new email subscribers.
#3. Pay attention to your subscribers.
Nothing is worse than receiving unsolicited emails, except maybe losing information because of an email address shift.
As the marketer, you have to avoid both of these problems by paying attention to the shifts in your subscriber base. Be sure to provide an option to change email addresses in your system and always catalog bounce-backs and undeliverables to ensure that your emails are going to active addresses.
Additionally, although the goal is to maintain a subscription to your emails, if someone wishes to end their subscription, they should be able to do so quickly and easily. This will protect the reputation of your brand!
#4. Optimize every aspect of your campaign for mobile users
Acquisition forms should always be compatible with mobile devices. If a customer is on a smartphone and can’t fill out your form, you’re sure to lose them.
Choose an online form builder that is optimized for tablets and cellphones so you can access new customers on the go. Mobile optimization extends beyond the initial contact with your new customer—your entire email campaign should be mobile.
Return Path points out that 63% of U.S. consumers delete emails immediately if they are not optimized for mobile. Offer a smooth mobile experience from the start to show your subscribers that they can always access your content.
#5. Watch the other guys.
One of the best ways to create an effective email marketing campaign is by signing up for your competitors’ email newsletters. See how the other businesses in your space are using email marketing, then try to stand out. Find the areas of their emails that you, as a subscriber, would like to see improved and then implement these changes in your own campaign.
Signing up for email lists is free, and it is the best thing that you can do to improve your email marketing strategy. What better way to beat the competitors than to find the flaws in their marketing and eradicate those problems from your own?
#6. Cater to your customers.
One of the easiest things you can do to engage your customers is simply calling them by name. It is essential that every email you send has the name of the subscriber in the greeting at the very least, which is easy to do in common emailing platforms, like Gmail.
The mail-merging feature includes the name of each specific subscriber in certain spots of an email. According to a 2013 Experian email marketing study, personalized emails generate six times higher transaction rates than regular chain emails. Doing little things to show your subscribers that your emails are intended for them specifically is an easy way to watch your response rates climb.
#7. Consider length and timing.
Although these details may seem arbitrary, the time of day that you send emails, the length of the emails, and the frequency of the emails are all important aspects of your campaign. To get the highest opens, reading rates, and click amounts, you have to customize every facet of your marketing strategy to your customers.
Using advanced analytics, you can discover what time of day your subscribers are most likely to open emails, and then you can tailor your send times to this information.
Additionally, the more frequent your emails, the shorter they should be. If you send emails on a daily basis, then your subscribers will be more likely to read them if they are short and to-the-point.
“Tip of the Day” or daily promotion emails are a great strategy to use if you want to reach your subscribers more than once a week. If you run your email campaign on a weekly or monthly time schedule, then the emails can be longer and more detailed.
Length and time are easy metrics to manipulate to watch your ROI soar.
#8. Humanize, humanize, humanize.
This is the best tip you can follow out of the eight included here. Don’t come off as a company robot that is simply copying and pasting into a template. The more you can do to shake-up your email style with each message, the more likely you are to appear likeable, human, and engaging.
Sure, your subscribers want to receive emails that will help them, but what they really want is an email newsletter that they enjoy reading. To craft an enjoyable email, you must make it as customized and friendly as possible.
Use different salutations as often as you can, such as “warm wishes” or “have a happy Friday” instead of “sincerely.” Sign your emails with your real name. Prove to your readers that your business has personality, flair, and genuinely cares about its readership.
The bottom line.
Email marketing is a must for any business that wants to have a successful marketing strategy, but it clearly doesn’t have to break the bank or take up all of your time. Using these tips for efficiency, go out there and market your products! Your new increased response rates and brand engagement will speak for themselves.
About the Author: Ashley Walsh is the Director of Marketing at Formstack. Formstack is the only solution you need to manage information across your entire organization.