Zach Heller — November 14, 2016 Follow @zheller
Email marketing is one of those areas that gets a lot of attention in certain circles, and is ignored pretty much everywhere else. It’s been around a long time compared to newer digital strategies. But time and again, it’s been proven to have the highest ROI of any digital marketing practice.
So let’s review the basics that you should know to create an email marketing campaign that wins the day.
- First you need a list of people to email: you can buy one (not recommended), use your customer list, create a signup form and offer an incentive.
- Sign up with an email marketing platform like MailChimp, iContact, Constant Contact, Eloqua, etc.
- Know your ‘Why’ for every email you send. What’s the goal?
- Use your ‘why’ to create compelling subject lines that are short, simple, and give your users a reason to open the email.
- Design your emails for mobile devices as that is where the majority of your opens and reads will take place.
- Send a test email to yourself and others at your company before each major send so you can see the email on different devices before it goes out to your subscribers.
- Send your emails at the right times, when you can expect most of them to be paying attention. This will vary by audience, more information available here.
- Measure opens, clicks, bounces, and conversions over time which you will use to report performance to others in your company as well as improve your campaigns over time.
- Create an email schedule to maintain consistency without overwhelming your subscribers.
- Make it easy for those that want to opt out. No need to keep them around if they are no longer interested.
- Test subject lines to increase your open rates.
- Test content and designs to improve click-through rates and conversions.
- Test sending on different days, with different lengths of content, and different offers to boost conversion rates.
- Use special offers with deadlines to entice your users to take action and boost sales in the short term.
- Continue to build your list over time by signing up any new customers.
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