For one reason or the other, many people believe that email marketing is dead. That could not be farther from the truth. In fact, a recent study conducted by Forrester agrees with the fact that email marketing is a way more impressive way to reach your audience directly than Facebook – which happens to be the largest social media network.

This can be supported by claims from Smart Insights which shows that email marketing has a better conversion rate than search marketing and social media marketing… combined!

With such numbers, it is only right that you take to email marketing for your business too. Not just do it but do it right. Here are some ways to set the ball rolling in the right direction.

1. Know Your Audience

The first thing to do before you set out on an email marketing campaign is to know your audience. Identify the product/ service you have to offer/ sell to them and look at the special features it comes with. In these special features, determine what it can do for the audience and then, you’ll find out who it is for.

That is what will help you in not sending skateboarding tips to a business executive or management tools to a college freshman. Once you have that covered, it is time to…

2. Provide Valuable Information

So, you know what audience you want to reach out to. What do you tell them?

You must have found out that content is king, but you do need to determine which of the content will be key to making your marketing even more effective.

The best way to go about this would be to employ business tools that will help you pick metrics on what your targeted audience is interested in, what they engage with the most, how much time they spend on certain content and so on. If you are just starting out, a suitable SMB’s platform will help you pull all such data

3. Shape Your Content

Having the content you want to send out to the audience is just part of the story. Shaping it in such a way that they want to interact with it is another ball game to consider. Your email marketing should provide a personalized channel of reaching the audience, making the message look more tailored and specific to the individual audience than a regular blog post would be.

Mix things up – use text, images, and videos. If in doubt, you should know that emails with videos embedded in them have a click-through rate which is 96% higher than those not having any video in them.

Remember that moderation is key too though. In all you do too, make sure you keep the main purpose of the content in mind. Content first, then shaping comes next

4. Optimize for Mobile

Gone are the days when only executives used to have any reason to check their emails, and on desktops too. Today, people consume information on the go with the aid of their mobile devices. Before you send out your email content, make sure it has been tested for responsiveness.

The mail has to show up just right on every screen that it could ever get opened on. Otherwise, your efforts could either end up in the Spam, Blocked or Trash folder. The little that make it through won’t even be able to justify all your efforts in the end.

5. Leverage Social Media

Yes – we started this piece with the aim of maximizing the use of email marketing for better customer engagement. However, you can’t just spam your audience with messages everytime of the day.

What you can do though is get them to follow you across social media networks. You just need to do your thing on these social platforms and it streams into your audience’s feed automatically. Remember how being out of sight means going out of mind? This is the way to keep that fear at bay.