Email marketing is a crucial component of any successful growth strategy.
Today’s customers generally won’t convert as soon as they visit your store for the first time. They need an opportunity to get to know your company first and determine whether you’re trustworthy.
That’s why companies work so hard to access the email addresses of their target audience.
If you can convince your customers to subscribe to your newsletter, you can create a campaign that allows you to nurture even the most skeptical visitor into a dedicated customer.
Email marketing can even enhance the outcomes of your SEO and PPC campaigns by driving more traffic back to your site and improving your reputation.
The question is, how do you make sure your email efforts have what it takes to convert your customers?
Start with these must-haves.
Step 1: Personalized, Segmented Campaigns
Your customers might have a lot of things in common. They likely come from the same general area or have a shared interest that you’re targeting with your product or service.
However, you should know that there’s more than one “subgroup” within your audience.
Knowing how to segment your customers based on important factors, like their age, income level, or even pain points, will improve your chances of converting new ones.
Today’s customers want email content that’s tailor-made to appeal to them. If your messages don’t feel personalized and relevant, then your emails will end up in the spam folder or the trash.
Segmenting your audience is one of the easiest ways to ensure you’re delivering the most targeted, meaningful messages.
For instance, you might send an email update featuring your latest products based on the geographical location of your customer.
It doesn’t make sense to deliver emails focusing on your products in Chicago to customers in New York unless you can offer country-wide delivery too.
Finally, at the very least, every email you send should feature the name of your customer in the intro.
Step 2: Creative and Compelling Subject Lines
You can have the most exciting and engaging email content in the world, but if your subject lines aren’t grabbing your customer’s attention, it won’t matter.
The subject line is your first opportunity to capture the interest of your audience and convince them that they want to open your message.
For instance, did you know that personalized subject lines can increase open rates by 22.2%?
There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy to making sure your subject lines leave the right impression.
The key to success is to focus on the value you can offer customers straight away and be authentic.
For instance, “Here’s your free eBook” can be a good subject line to attract customer engagement, but you should never promise customers something they’re not going to get.
So, make sure you follow through on your promises.
Experiment with emojis, questions, and other features in your subject line, and track your open rates to see which options deliver the best outcomes.
Step 3: Valuable, Compelling Content
Today’s customers receive dozens of emails every day. They don’t have the time or patience required to deal with messages that don’t seem important or relevant to their interests.
Therefore, from day one, you should be setting expectations with your audience by showing them exactly what they’ll be getting from a message sent by you.
Content is compelling when it’s specifically designed to appeal to the target customers’ needs.
If you’re not sure what to share, you could consider looking at your website analytics to see what kind of blogs your customers read the most.
Alternatively, why not offer your clients a preferences center where they can tell you what kind of emails they want to receive?
Remember, you should always give your audience an easy way to unsubscribe if they get sick of your messages, too.
After all, forcing customers to continue receiving your emails won’t improve your bottom line or your reputation.
In fact, you could even end up having to pay some significant fines if you’re found to be in breach of CAN-SPAM laws and similar regulations.
Step 4: Automated Tools
Finally, creating high-quality email campaigns for your audience is a process that requires a lot of time, attention, and work.
If you were sending custom emails to everyone on your email list individually each day, you’d never get anything else done.
That’s why it’s so important to have the right automation tools available.
Email automation solutions allow you to arrange for professional-looking emails to arrive in your customer’s inbox at the perfect time to encourage conversions.
Moreover, email automation saves you time and effort when connecting with your customers and ensures that you can collect valuable insights from your audience.
Reports on open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribes, for instance, will give you a better overview of what your customers like to see from you.
Similarly, they indicate the kinds of messages subscribers might prefer to avoid.
You can even find automation tools that allow you to create email campaigns that automatically trigger when a customer completes a certain action, like making a purchase.
Or why not set up an automated email campaign that reaches out to your customer when they abandon your cart without buying a product?
Email Marketing Is Still Key to Business Growth
Despite changes in customer behavior and technology updates, email continues to be the most reliable way of connecting with your clients, wherever they are.
A successful email strategy keeps you in your customer’s pockets, ensuring that you take full advantage of any opportunity to build strong relationships with potential brand advocates.
However, just like any marketing strategy, email advertising efforts work best when they’re implemented with the right planning and preparation.
Therefore, take your time to get to know your audience, design personalized campaigns to appeal to them, and track your performance with website analytics.
With the right automated tools and plenty of insights into your audience to guide you, you’ll be benefitting from stronger connections to your audience in no time.