How to Make Email Marketing Work Better for Your Small Business

7 Tips for More Effective Email Marketing

August 17, 2021 7:30am Robyn Rivera

When it comes to nurturing leads and customers, almost no other medium is quite as effective as email marketing. Thanks to smartphones, most people’s inboxes are right in their pockets, and emails are often checked almost immediately.

Not only does email marketing give you direct, almost-instant access to your customers and leads, but it gives you a much more personal, targeted way to connect. Nine times out of 10, the more personal and targeted the campaign, the better the results, which may explain why email marketing has such a high ROI.

You can do almost anything with email. Request reviews on previous product purchases or services, recommend additional, complementary products or services, follow up after appointments, send birthday wishes and exclusive offers, announce sales and upcoming promotions and a whole lot more.

When done right, email marketing is incredibly effective for a variety of goals and objectives. It can help you get repeat business, build a strong reputation, drive sales and more.

It’s important to realize, though, that not every email marketing campaign is made equal or will drive the same results. Just because it can be effective, doesn’t mean it will be, but with a little know-how, you can drive the results that you want.

7 tips for email marketing that works

#1. Pick a good platform

Building an effective email marketing strategy starts with picking the right platform. There are a number of email marketing tools to choose from out there; each one with its own pros and cons.

Not all email marketing platforms are made equal, and it’s important to know what you’re looking for in a platform. Here are a few things you’ll want in any email marketing platform you choose:

CRM integration - With CRM integration, importing email addresses is easy, and you can enhance your email marketing strategy by creating custom lists.
Automation - Any email marketing platform you choose should give you the ability to automate your campaigns. This saves time and ensures your customers and leads always get the right message.
Personalization - A little personalization goes a long way in email marketing. Any email marketing platform you choose should give you the ability to personalize your campaigns with names and other dynamic data.
Analytics - Email marketing analytics gives you the data you need to fine-tune your strategy and drive the best possible results.

If you’re not sure where to start, Marketing 360® Nurture is a fantastic, one-of-a-kind email marketing platform. It has everything you need in one place!

#2. Automate as much as possible

If you took the time to personally create and respond to every email, even if it just consisted of basic text, it would take forever and a day. Plus, it would be mind-numbingly tedious. In fact, without automation, email marketing would take so long that it wouldn’t be worth the investment by a long shot.

Automation is a big part of what makes email marketing such an effective digital marketing channel, and such a great investment. With the right email automation tool, a marketer can build out and schedule entire campaigns quickly and easily.

Not only does automation save time and energy, but it ensures consistency and timeliness. By building out automated email campaigns, you can ensure that your customers and leads not only get the right message, but that they get it at the right time.

There are so many benefits that come with automating your email campaigns, especially when you use the right email marketing platform to do so. Trust me. Save yourself the time and energy, and make sure to automate as much as you can.

#3. Make your subject lines catchy

The first thing people see about your email is your subject line, and it’s often what determines whether the email is sent to the trash folder or open and read. So, make it count.

Here are a few tips to help you get your email subject lines right:

Create urgency - If they don’t open your email now, the likelihood is low that they ever will. Create urgency to get your receivers to open your emails right away by using action-oriented language.
Pique curiosity - Curiosity can be a powerful driving force, and sometimes, a little mystery can be a good thing in an email subject line. One way to pique interest is to pose a compelling question in your subject line.
Make it short and simple - Readers should be able to scan your subject line quickly, so try to keep it at 50 characters or fewer, and be concise with your verbiage.

Drive the best results by ensuring that you get your subject line right through A/B testing. Create a couple of different subject lines and test them against each other to identify the best option for your campaign.

#4. Personalize your emails

Want more people to actually open the emails you painstakingly create? One of the best ways to increase your open rate is by personalizing the subject line of your email. It’s the most effective thing you can do to ensure that people open and click on your emails.

Personalizing the subject line of your emails is a powerful technique, but it’s only scratching the surface of what you can do with email personalization.

At its core, personalization is about getting the right message to the right people. One way this is done is through segmentation.

Segmenting your email lists into groups will help you tailor your message to specific audiences. Your email list can be segmented by everything from purchase history to previous website behavior.

#5. Design emails for mobile

As I mentioned, one of the things that makes email such a powerful tool is the fact that emails are often read quickly because most people read emails right from their smartphones. That means that your emails need to be designed to be read on a mobile device.

Here are a few tips for designing mobile-friendly marketing emails:

Limit your copy - Don’t get too wordy in your emails. Keep in mind that most mobile screens are small, and even a few sentences can look like a wall of text.
Highlight your CTA - Make your call to action stand out by making it front and center in your emails.
Make sure buttons are clickable - Elements can quickly get crowded when emails are being viewed on a mobile device, which can make essential tasks, like clicking buttons or links, difficult or impossible. Give each element plenty of space to ensure full usability.
Test it out! - Always open, read through and click through your marketing emails on a mobile device before sending them out.

#6. Test your emails before sending

Imagine this scenario:

You’ve spent hours identifying your audience, studying your audience and designing the perfect email journey, and you finally click “send.” You decide to read through your email campaign one last time, and you panic as you notice that the video you included isn’t working, you forgot to include a key image, your form is broken or a link doesn’t work.

There’s nothing worse than realizing you made a simple mistake — especially when the realization comes after you’ve already sent the email to thousands of people.

Always thoroughly read through your emails before you send them out, testing every button and link, and ensuring all of your content and video is working properly.

#7. Study your results

Driving results with email marketing, like with every other digital marketing channel, is all about learning from past mistakes and fine-tuning your strategy for future success.

Knowing what’s working and what’s not is key to making informed decisions about your email marketing strategy and driving results. And, you can gain that knowledge by learning how to effectively test your email marketing campaign.

Any email marketing platform you choose should give you the ability to create and launch campaigns, but also to monitor the results of your campaigns. With the right testing and monitoring tools, you’ll have everything you need to make data-driven decisions about your email marketing strategy.

Marketing 360® Nurture is the only tool you need to build, launch and monitor email marketing campaigns to help you turn more leads into customers, and to turn more customers into lifelong fans. Learn more today!

Originally published on 10/19/20