Email Marketing: What To Consider Before You Press ‘Send’

When you run an online business or an e-commerce store, every minute of your time and every marketing dollar is critical. You have finite resources for both, but stretching them to get the very best results in terms of traffic, revenue and profits is not as hard as you might think. Simply use a tried and true method: email marketing!

While it might surprise you that we suggested email and not social media, there is no better medium than email marketing for businesses. The statistics are quite clear and they are astounding:

• 89 percent of marketers use email as their primary lead generation channel.

• 55 percent of businesses generate more than 10 percent of sales with email marketing.

• Email marketing is nearly 40x better at new customer acquisition than Twitter and Facebook.

What Works in Email Marketing?

Taking the time to carefully plan your first campaign will give you better engagement and a better payoff by focusing on the purpose of your campaign.

Personalize It

Cater your emails to the people they are addressed to; people decide whether to open your communication based solely on the subject line, so make it count by making it personal. Which email would you open?

• Open this email right away

• Debbie, I’ve got some great news for you about XX

• Information about XX inside

If you are like most people, the one that starts with your name (and tells you upfront what the email is about) is the winner. Beware of forcing personalization, though—and it follows by implication that it’s difficult to make large email blasts sound cozy. Nevertheless, being as personal as one can be in one’s email marketing definitely pays dividends.

Preview and Test It

Always preview and test your campaign. This way, you can avoid the rookie mistake of sending out an email to hundreds of people with a typo, a bad link, or images that don’t load.

Use your email marketing tools to test your content on a variety of devices and different email systems to see how it will look to recipients. Make sure your emails are mobile friendly, meaning they’ll fit nicely on whatever sized screen the recipient is viewing. If not, count on it being instantly deleted.

Never Spam

You want your email marketing to make you money, not scare off potential customers, so make sure nothing you send can be construed as SPAM. Spam filters will weed out certain content, so don’t use all capital letters, lots of exclamation points or spammy words and phrases. Chances are, emails with those things will never hit inboxes.

To entice your subscribers to engage, keep the content you send relevant, on-brand and consistent.

Be Yourself

It’s very easy after seeing an unsuccessful email to go out to overthink things and to try and change your style. Don’t! Write for the audience that wants to read from you not for the person who wants to write for them. Learn your genius and make your own brand. There will always be people who leave or who don’t like your content, but don’t let that change how you write. It’s good to get to know your audience, but don’t let them define you as much as inform you.

Track Your Metrics

How will you measure success in your email marketing campaign? What are your goals for open rates and click throughs? Create realistic goals so that you can measure your campaign performance. You should review these average email marketing rates from Smart Insights so you know what to expect, and plan from there:

• Open rate: 22.87%

• Click-through rate: 3.26%

• Unsubscribe rate: 0.53% (0.47%)

Not everyone will open your email but if over 20 percent of people do on your first try, you’re doing great. Likewise, click-through rates show what your recipients are responding to, giving you good information for future campaigns. Good tracking will guide you in the right direction. When you have a flop, move on, but when something works, rinse and repeat!