Best Practices for Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most valuable tools your business can use to connect with their customers. By delivering content straight to your audiences’ inboxes, good email marketing allows for more curated content, which has translated into better conversion rates.

Below, you will find a few crucial components of successful email marketing campaigns.

Define your audience segments and set your goals.

Before starting an email marketing campaign, you should think about who your target audience is and how you can segment this audience based on their interests and behaviors.

Once you have defined your segments, you can then develop goals for each of these groups. Your goals will help shape what kind of content you need to provide for that specific audience segment.

For example, for your “new subscribers” segment, your goal may be to help them learn more your business. Thus, your initial content should welcome them as a subscriber, and provide information as to what products or services your business offers.

It is important to note that while your content should help work towards your overall business goals, pushing irrelevant content on your audience is ineffective; content development must consider the different interests of your audience segment.

Sign-up forms should be readily available and offered with incentives.

Now that you have your target audience and goals laid out, you can start growing your subscribers’ list.

One way to do this is through opt-in sign-up forms on your website. These forms can be strategically placed on your website pages with the most traffic to ensure exposure. Visitors to your website will be more likely to put down their emails to sign up for newsletters if you offer some sort of incentive – a lead magnet. This can come in the form of a discount coupon code or an e-book.

Try to make the sign-up process as easy and fast as possible – although longer forms may help you collect more information about these visitors, they are inconvenient and result in lower sign-up rates.

Get a little personal.

One of your business’ strongest competitive advantage is that it is unique – there is no other business that is identical to yours, and that should translate over your email marketing campaigns. Putting personality and voice in your emails not only helps build your business’ brand, it also makes your content much more interesting and engaging.

You want your audience to remember that there are real people behind businesses that care about them.

Consistency is key.

It is crucial to stay consistent with your email marketing. This means having a consistent personality and voice in your messaging but also following a planned schedule.

This is especially important for newsletters that follow strict schedules (daily rundown emails, weekly updates…etc.). In thinking about when to send your emails, it is also important to consider the time of the day and the day of the week. People tend to check and read their emails at certain times and points in the week, so that is a useful tip to keep in mind while planning your email marketing schedule.

Use analytics and data to your advantage.

Being strategic about the data you collect from email marketing is very helpful in improving your future campaigns. Data collected by your email service provider or analytics software will be a huge asset in helping you understand which aspects of your business’ email marketing campaign is doing well and which parts need to be improved on.

For example, the click-through-rate (CTR) of the links in your email can indicate how well-targeted or engaging your content is. Keeping metrics like these in mind can help you optimize your email campaigns to the best they can be.

Optimize for Mobile.

In today’s world, more than 30% of all emails are read on mobile devices. This means that your business’ email marketing must as easily read on mobile devices as they are on desktops. As society becomes increasingly mobile, considering how long your copy is or how adaptable your visuals are on a mobile screen as your business develops visual content will only grow in importance.

Every subscriber is a potential lead and customer. Keeping these tips in mind when developing your email marketing strategy will help you provide relevant, engaging, and digestible content to your different audiences.

For more information on digital marketing best practices, explore the Arcalea blog.