ADVICE FROM THE 18 EXPERTS ON THE KEY FACTORS OF EMAIL MARKETING CAMPAIGN
Email marketing, no doubt, is the most effective marketing strategy so far, of course combined with the mix of what works for you. With new technologies emerging every day, email marketing has become easy and fun. CRM and email campaign software are very popular these days and are getting perfected with each new product coming in to play.
However, the mere use of these types of software is not enough, content is very important along with timing. There are many secrets and many interesting points you need to consider when creating your email marketing strategy.
So what are the key factors to successful email marketing campaign?
We have gathered 18 experts on the matter and asked them one simple yet complex question:
What is the key to successful email marketing campaign?
Learn from the best to see what in the opinion of the gurus of the field works and what not. Always remember though, use but never duplicate! :)
Adjust any idea or any strategy or any factor you read, hear or see being brought to live to your specific product and your specific case.
Without further due here are the key factors according to email marketing experts.
1. Relevance is the key to a successful email marketing campaign. Most marketers can achieve better relevance using segmentation and smart personalization.
Joanna Wiebe, Copyhackers.
2. There are many keys to a successful email marketing campaign, but one of the big ones that many marketers neglect when crafting their email copy is to make the language about them, not about you.
As humans, we're naturally focused on ourselves -- our own needs, interests, and goals (especially when we have a metric we're trying to hit with this email send!) -- but the way you frame your email will make all the difference.
For example, how easy would it be to write:
"We just launched our brand new product, and we're so excited for you to try it out!"
But if you look again, you'll notice 3 company-focused pronouns and only 1 reader-focused pronoun. Even though this sentence sounds like it's about the reader, it's really more about you, the marketer.
Start thinking about how to craft your email copy to truly make it about the reader, and you should see your click-through and conversion rates start to increase.
3. If I had to only pick one, though, I would probably say understanding your audience and creating a personal email that resonates with them is key.
People get a lot of emails, in many cases over 50-100 emails a day. Standing out in that kind of noise is tough and so you need to really understand your audience and know what is going to get their attention and be of interest to them.
People are pretty smart when it comes to generic blast type campaigns with marketing speak. They have no problem tuning those out and quickly moving on to the next email.
Treat your emails as an ongoing conversation and build relationships by providing value and personalizing to their needs—as opposed to your own.
Once you do this well, you will create more engaged subscribers that trust and value your emails.
And once you start personalizing with content that speaks directly to them (instead of to your entire audience) that’s when you’ll see increases in your conversion rates.
As I mentioned, there are many variables that go into a successful campaign and this is just one of them. There is no silver bullet to emails. You need to do lots of testing to find the magic recipe and learn what works for your audience—since what works for you may not work for me and vice-versa. - Sean Kennedy, Zapier.
4. The key to successful email marketing campaigns is to make sure your emails are focused on topics that are interesting and valuable to your ideal clients, but give them new information in an entertaining way (rather than the same old stuff they've heard time and time again).
5. The key to success is a great offer to a great list. A great list is made up of customers and potential customers who have given you permission to contact them via email.
A poorly permissioned list or third party list data is no substitute.
- Tim Watson, Zettasphere.
6. As like any other marketing thing, a successful email marketing campaign entirely depends upon the psychology. The single thing that determines your email marketing success is whether you follow AIDA principle or not. If you don't know what AIDA is, it stands for Attention-Interest-Desire-Action. It is most popular with sales people. However, this formula works like a charm in case of email marketing, particularly when combined with A/B or split testing. As I've been quite involved in NLP, I can bet you that it works.
1. Attention: Grabbing the attention of the subscribers is important. In this case, including the name of the subscriber in the subject line works like a charm. Including the subscribers' name, asking them by addressing their problem, including emojis in the subject line, works great. I would like to thank Matt for introducing emoji email marketing to me.
2. Interest: Once the email demands attention, it's time to make them interested in reading your email. The subheading is what comes to play. Include a subhead that dives your readers down the email. Include a catchy introduction maybe an enchanting story, talking about their problem. It's the opportunity to build rapport with them. Make them think, "Damn! This guy knows me". 3. Desire: Here is where you develop a desire for your users to take action. Whether the action may be to click on a link or even purchase something. Presenting the benefits for your users if they take action would be great. Highlight how your article or product will solve the painful problems of your readers. Highlight the advantages and features of the product. You can make use of scarcity marketing to make subscribers perceive your product as more valuable. You can also make use of testimonials and the feedback of the readers in the form of social proof. Make sure you backup your data with factual information. 4. Action: Be fearless to pitch your product or ask your subscribers for clicking or sharing a link. In this time you can also highlight the reason, why they've to take action right now. Maybe a limited time discount, few spots left. At last, thank your readers for taking action even if they haven't taken action. This technique is called presupposition. For example, after including a CTA button at the bottom of the email put social sharing buttons and asking subscribers to share your content. Add a line at last that says - "PS: "Thanks a ton for sharing the article". A person who have not even shared your article, after reading the thank you text, reciprocates with a share (inner-conflict?) PS: Again it's important to address the subscriber by the name. Not like "Sir/Madam". People feel special when you call their name. Make use of personalization tags more.
7. The successful email marketing campaign will always have a great content and great call to action buttons to anticipate user action. Focus on creating and sending high-quality (personalized) emails versus many low quality general emails that don’t provide value to your users.
Creating personalized emails for higly defined segments takes time and money. But the results speak for themselves as you will see great click through rates and you will have better conversions for your landing pages.
Have a short and meaningful conversion with your users via email, ask their queries and help them whenever possible. The key to success email campaigns often depend upon how quickly you response to the situation and how fast you are able to solve the customer query.
Also choosing the best email marketing services is also very important for your business, because using poor email marketing services often lead to low CTR rates and low conversions.
The email will not be delivered to their inbox. Also prioritizing communication is also important part of email campaigns.
Determine which emails are most important while suppressing those of less significance email campaigns. This is a matrix decision based on buying cycle, focus of emails and the business unit that owns the email.
Maintain open and strong communications within the entire marketing organization. This can be very tedious when disparate teams are involved in your company.
At last, measure your each campaigns at the end and see which are working best and which are not, keep testing new things with your email headlines and content. This will help you to get more results while measuring each metrics.- Jitendra Vaswani, BloggerIdeas.com.
8. Email marketing is simple but at the same time tricky. It's not just about signing up to an autoresponder and getting leads. The key to its success is targeting. If you get the wrong people on your list, no matter the size of the list and the tools you use, you'll fail awfully. - Enstine Muki, How to make money blogging.
9. The key to a successful email marketing campaign is having the right tools and system in place to both nurture and track the process of your leads.
For example, making sure that you have a great landing page and autoresponder is key to building a relationship with your subscribers, and not just hitting them with a one-time email.
For advanced email marketing, there are many options now in place to actually track and follow the progress of each subscriber where you can see if they are opening, clicking and acting on the emails you send.
One last component to successful email is to add retargeting into the mix, which will allow for yet another shot at getting the subscriber to come back and act on your email, even after they've read or closed out your site or email.
- Zac Johnson, Affiliate Marketing Tips from ZacJohnson.com.
10.The key to any successful email marketing campaign is getting people to open the email.
It's the same as opening the front door of a house. No one will see the rest of the house unless they open the door. No one will see the content of the email unless they click on the subject line.
There are many ways to encourage people to click on the subject line.
1. You could start your email with phrases like "Good news!" or "My research is done," or "Let me start with an apology." People are curious. That curiosity will motivate them to open the email.
2. Tools exist that aid in writing subject lines such as Hook Line Dynamic, a free tool.
3. Check your analytics. See what types of subject lines have resonated with your email list members in the past.
4. Send your email out at optimal times. I use MailChimp's premium feature of sending my post out at optimal times when my subscribers are most likely at a computer.
5. Keep the subject line short. Busy people won't keep reading. People's attention spans are short. For both reasons, the shorter the better.
6. Studies have been done that say if the subject line is between 50 and 60 characters, it is less likely to be opened than shorter or longer than that window.
Getting people to open the email is imperative to a successful email marketing campaign. These six tips will go a long way towards that success.
11. Email content quality, list segmentation, and subject line. Every email is an opportunity to engage and bring in new customers. But are your subscribers opening your emails? Once opened, are your subscribers reading your message? Are you able to build a rapport (or further elevate that feelings) with your readers? A good subject line persuade recipients to open your email. Consistent quality content builds trust. And, a segmented list allows you to send personalised, directly useful emails.
12. The key is first establishing a connection with your readers and then providing them with something of value. By this I mean give them something that solves one (or more) of their problems! It doesn't get any more plain and simple than that!
13.The key to a successful email marketing campaign depends on two things:
a) A good sized email list
b) Email's subject line that gets readers to open the email. These are the key to getting your message across. Once there, it depends on your message, call to action, email copy and contents to entice the reader to take the next action or even better convert them to a buyer.
14. Email marketing, like everything you do for your business, should be planned meticulously. Each month we sit down with our team and plan the upcoming month's emails - every Monday through Friday for the entire month.
At the very least this plan should include a topic and possible subject lines that will then get tested. This way, there is no debate or question about what email goes out on a specific day or what you should be talking about the following week - it's already in the plan.
If you don't have enough content to plan a month, then every Friday plan the following week's emails.
This takes the guess work out of figuring out what to email out. The morning of is never the time to do this. And yes, we mail every business day.
If you are emailing once a week or less, it's just not enough. People are busy and often delete their emails in bulk. If you email just once per week, your email is likely to be deleted along with everything else in the inbox that they have not checked in a few days.
And finally, in our company we have a saying, "What gets measured gets done." Meaning, if you don't have a way to measure your efforts, your plan will fall to the wayside and you'll find email marketing relegated to the "back burner" of your marketing.
After you make your plan, write down what will be considered a "successful" email campaign. Will it be opens and clicks?
Certainly that should be included, but you should go deeper than this and include any action that helps you see a real ROI (return on investment) for your efforts.
15. The key to a successful email marketing campaign is having a plan beyond "I want to sell something." You need to have a series of hardcore value adds before you ask anything in return. You need to give your audience so much value that you feel uncomfortable and like you are possibly cheating yourself.
16. The key to a successful email marketing campaign is to send emails based on user behaviour. We see it all too often where email marketers are going in for the hard sell when the users haven't engaged with any of their emails.
Instead, you should create different paths within your sequence so that users are receiving different emails depending on their level of engagement with your product (or sequence).
When we onboard users to Snappa, users that are engaged with our product will eventually get an email promoting our paid plan. However, if the user hasn't done anything using our app, we'll ask them if they were having any issues. Trying to up-sell them when they haven't even used the app would be pointless.
17. The key to successful email marketing campaign depend on below-mentioned points -
1. Know your audience. When a user subscribes to your blog they want value more than anything else. Give them value as you promised while asking for their information.
2. Do not just send affiliate emails, Do send information newsletter, guide, articles regularly.
3. Conduct regular surveys on your email list to know your what they want.If you know their interest then can rock anytime.
4. Always write concise emails to your email subscriber and describe them what benefits they 'll get by clicking the link.
5. Always clean your list, And do add unsubscribe link below in every email.
6. To get maximum response from your email campaign you must do split testing.
7. Regular send email otherwise your subscriber will forget about you.
8. Clear CTA is what you need in every email.
9. Always email them with their names not sir/mam etc. It creates a personal touch and phycology matters a lot in email marketing with great conversion rates and success of your company.
18. For me, the key to success with email marketing of any kind is connecting with the reader. It starts with getting them to open the email of course, so a subject line that intrgues, but does not lie, is a great start.
Never mislead is my motto!
Then you have to get them reading, just like any good content marketing, by making it interesting and relevant. Without those two things, you will lose them before you start.
The rest is up to the goals of the campaign and what works for you and your audience.
As you can see, there are many approaches to email marketing campaigns and many different things to consider, but the essential part everyone really agrees on is personalization and analyzing your results and continue doing what works for you and only you. So try all the tips our experts have given you, pic the one that works and stick to it. Of course, never forget to mix things up and make sure every time your clients get an email from you, that he/she will be interested to read it. In other words, put your clients’ needs and they will pay you back with great conversion rates and success of your company :)