By Sherry Bonelli / Guest Column
You might have heard somewhere that email is “dead” and is no longer working as effectively as it used to. Not so. Email marketing is still one of the most inexpensive ways to reach out to your customers. If you use the right email marketing strategy (and software), you can get amazing results.
Have you ever heard the expression, “the money is in the list?” The Internet marketing industry has been using this expression since email arrived on the scene. While you still might send out “snail mail” messages/postcards to your customers or potential customers, ignoring email marketing is not a smart thing.
The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) and Demand Metric recently conducted a survey of U.S. marketers. The study found that email had a median ROI of 122 percent — more than four times higher than other marketing platforms studied, including direct mail, paid search and social media.
One thing to remember about your list is that it’s not always how big your email list is. What’s more important is the quality of people in your list. Just sending out emails the right way can bring you better results than many of the other digital marketing channels.
An additional benefit is that your email list is something you will always have – it’s a business asset.
Email campaigns work best if you segment your list. If you send every person on your list the same message, your campaign will probably fail. People want email messages that are customized and relevant to them individually.
Also, if you’re not segmenting and targeting your emails, they’ll end up in the spam or junk folder. To prevent this, use email list segmentation to filter emails to create separate lists (or groups) in your list. The segments should include things like your customer’s demographics, profession, past purchases, interests or how much money they.
Write an enticing subject line that makes people want to open up your email. Do not use the word “newsletter” in the subject line. Instead call your newsletter a “Roundup” or “Vault” or something more creative. In general, you should try to get the length of the subject line to around 70 characters.
Another thing to keep in mind is that more and more of your audience are checking their emails on their smartphones – so you need to create a subject line that can quickly grab their attention on a smaller screen. Additionally, you want to keep your email formatting simple so that the email can be easily read on smaller devices, like smartphones and tablets.
The email should also provide direct links to your social media pages. You also want to make sure that your email campaign has content that is engaging. Many email providers, like Gmail and Yahoo!, are using “engagement filters” to determine which emails gets into your subscriber’s inbox – and which ones are tossed into the spam folder.
Monitor your email marketing campaigns to see what’s working – and what’s not. Unless you track and monitor your email campaigns, it’s difficult to deliver the desired results. You need to monitor every campaign for email opens, click-through rates and conversions. Campaign tracking tools or your email software provider has ways for you to find out how well a campaign is performing.
One important thing many marketers forget to include is a solid Call To Action (CTA) which tells people what you want them to do next. For instance, do you want them to click on a button in your email to enter a contest? Click on the link to your new product or service?
Email is still a great way to market your business to interested customers. It’s never too late to start building your list – but you do have to take that first step.
Sherry Bonelli, digital marketer and presenter/speaker, has been a digital marketing professional since 1998. She is currently the owner of early bird digital marketing, a full-service digital marketing agency Cedar Rapids. She can be reached at http://earlybirddigitalmarketing.com or (319) 409-3287.
