While email marketing may not hold the same appeal and instant gratification as other forms of marketing, its tried and true effectiveness combined with its relatively low cost make it an often underrated but distinctly necessary marketing strategy. Your cost per acquisition with email marketing is the lowest you’ll spend. When used correctly, your business’s email marketing can really work to create compelling messages and connections with your customers and potential customers.
Your email marketing strategies should be consistent and should always have a call to action. Here’s more you should always include:
Email Marketing Checklist
- Choose The Right Tool – Since there are so many tools and platforms, such as Hubspot, Constant Contact, Zoho and more, you’ll need to do your research to determine which you’ll like best for your business.
- Choose Offer & Value Proposition – What in your email will compel the user to click? This is the promotion you’re highlighting. You can get creative with this – but mostly think about what information is useful for your customer. Can you offer a video, a free ebook or a coupon?
- Design & Optimize Landing Pages – This should be very specific to your offer. Don’t forget to include a form and a call to action. Orange and green submit buttons historically work best for click-through success.
- Create a Workflow & Automate Your Funnel – This is the sequence of events that will happen after a lead submits a form. Your workflow is unique to your business, so you’ll see what works best, but you need to have an idea of what you want to happen next.
- Upload Lists/Subscribe Button – Hopefully you already have a subscriber list, but this is where you look through your lists to scrub the bad emails out and handle the “unsubscribes”. Make sure you’re using emails from people who have approved receiving your emails, otherwise you’ll be marked as spam.
- Set Up & Test Tracking Tools – When will you send your emails? What time of day will get the most click-through rates? What subject lines will you use? You’ll want to optimize based on what your results show you. Increased open rates are the goal here.
Next, it’s time to decide what your email is about.
You can only share so many promotions — your subscribers will eventually unsubscribe if you’re not mixing up the information and the purpose of your communication. You want to engage your audience in creative ways, so think about sending a welcome email to new subscribers, sharing pertinent community news, sending happy birthday wishes, requesting a review, announcing exciting company news, introducing a new product or service launch, sharing an award your business has received, detailing an upcoming or past event, or even a simple thank you to your subscribers.
Once you’re ready to design your email, you can use great and inexpensive templates from Envato, and then work with your team to change the colors or content.
Mobile Matters!
Remember that although many email service providers have the platform optimized for mobile, sometimes it doesn’t work out the way you want.
Don’t forget to:
- Optimize images for mobile. You don’t want your carefully selected images to appear pixelated, or worse, not at all.
- Verify text doesn’t run off the screen. Users don’t want to pinch or scroll left to right to continue reading.
- Ensure text is big enough to read and your links are clear.
These things should all be verified when you run test email campaigns. View your email on desktop and mobile, because both are important. In fact, here’s something to think about regarding email data: 61.9% of all emails are opened and read on a mobile device.
Learn more about successfully incorporating email marketing into your strategies, crafting a great email and more on our podcast!
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