With an effective inbound marketing strategy one of the items businesses will use is email newsletters to reach their audience. Your audience may be in a nearby town like Merrillville Alabama for us in Cullman or could be across the country in Amarillo Texas. When your product reaches across the country email is an effective means of communication. No matter your target audience email marketing has a lot of potential to drive people to you and inform them about your company even with the standard 15-30% open ratio. Today we will look at effective ways to utilize email marketing effectively for part of your inbound marketing strategy. We say "part of" as your inbound marketing strategy needs to cover multiple marketing methods.
Why Use Email Marketing
With such a low open rate compared to other marketing methods one might think that email marketing is a poor choice for a business. With an email list of 100 people you are likely to only reach 15-30 of those individuals if you arrive in the user's inbox at the right time. This can be frustrating with all the efforts that many of us put into every marketing channel. Email marketing helps businesses attract new customers that show interest in your products and services while continuing to inform your existing customers of what you offer. It has been said it takes a minimum of five touches to convert a prospect into a customer. We have seen it take well over twenty touches. Email marketing is one of those "touches" and helps get you closer to a sale with a customer.
Don't forget mobile!
Like your website mobile email is truly a "thing". More consumers and business users utilize mobile devices to keep up with their email. There are programs like MailChimp and Constant Contact that help by already having pre-made templates that you can customize to help achieve this. If you are already doing email marketing look at your current email newsletters and see what percentage are using mobile devices. If you are not using email marketing yet make certain that you are learn about how to use these analytics to improve each newsletter you send out.
When sending out your emails here are a few items to think about from a mobile perspective:
- Button sizes should be clear, concise, and easily clickable for people with fingers of all sizes
- Keep your marketing emails as short, interesting, and relevant as possible
- Try to keep to a single column format
- Personalize if you have a person's name for that added "touch"
- Keeps the size of the buttons large enough so that email recipients can easily click on those buttons from a mobile device
- Try to keep your marketing emails short, interesting, and relevant
- A single column responsive template always works best for creating mobile friendly emails
- Adding personalization
Statistics show that personalized newsletter emails increase the engagement and readers are more likely to open the email(s) when they see their name. To ensure that your marketing emails/newsletters are personalized, you need to collect customer's data at every point (more than just email address). People love to see their name when it comes to communication between an online business and customer because that's how humans communicate. Adding personalization adds authenticity to an email.
Pre-header preview text
Whether you use a web based email client or a program like Microsoft Outlook emails have a preview area that is one or two lines of text that shows as a summary of the entire email. By wording and crafting your preview message well you can increase the number of opens you receive in your mass email.
Quality content goes a long way
Quality content is not just for your website or social media posts. All methods of inbound marketing need to be crafted in a way that presents and shows quality, thought, and foresight to help your potential customers purchase from you. Do not rush the process.
Creative subject lines
Beyond the pre-header, the key to getting clicks are quality subjects to get those clicks. Items that work well in headings are:
- Numbers (e.g. 10 Awesome Social Media Tips)
- The word "free" (e.g. FREE guide to growing your business)
- Ask a question (e.g. Are you ready to increase your business?)
- Be a "tease" (e.g. Destination weekend… Want the rock star treatment?)
- Make it an announcement (e.g. The winners to our contest are...)