What makes a successful email marketing campaign?
The power of email marketing
If you’re looking to boost your profits, perhaps the easiest way to do that is to ramp up your email marketing.
Building an email list is a fantastic way to create a valuable asset you have complete control over. Just think…you get a growing database of people you can contact at any time to promote your products or services.
What’s not to like?
The data shows the reality is just as good as the promise. An impressive 73% of marketers rated their email ROI as ‘excellent,’ putting it ahead of marketing channels such as SEO and PPC.
Email marketing done right can be a very profitable source of additional revenue. Yet most businesses fail to make the most of the potential. That’s a shame because it means they’re leaving money on the table. It’s actually one of the ways to increase your conversion rate.
Fortunately, it’s easy to turn things around and put that extra profit in your pocket.
The secrets of email marketing success
Making money with email is not about building a list of random prospects, then blasting them with email sales messages. That approach is doomed to failure—and could even have legal consequences.
To succeed at email marketing, you need to pay attention to every step of the process. When you get each of these elements right, you can create a powerful marketing system that delivers outstanding ROI.
Here’s what you must do to succeed:
Choose the right email marketing platform
Email marketing software has come a long way in recent years. Nowadays, there are many advanced platforms that take the power of email marketing to the next level.
This is an area where you don’t want to skimp on budget. It’s well worth investing in an email platform with the most advanced features and capabilities. You’ll make your money back very quickly…and then some.
Capture more email addresses
To have a successful campaign, you need a list to mail to. Yet surprisingly, many business owners fail miserably at list building, the most basic tenet of email marketing.
It’s not good enough just to have a form on your website that says, “Subscribe to our newsletter.” Nowadays, people are very wary about who they share their email addresses with. So you need to craft a compelling offer to entice people to sign up. Using a ‘lead magnet’ to attract subscribers can help you grow your list fast.
Manage your list effectively
Your email list is a valuable asset you need to tend to with care. Good email management includes:
- Cleaning your list to remove undeliverable addresses and people who never open messages
- Segmenting your audience according to their interest in particular products or services
- Managing campaigns to ensure you hit the ‘Goldilocks’ spot—mailing them enough to maximize profits, but not too often
Write compelling emails
The content of your emails will have a considerable impact on the results you achieve. You need compelling emails with attention-grabbing subject lines, interesting content, and clear calls to action.
Keep your audience engaged by varying the types of emails you send. Proven options to try include:
- Problem-solution: focusing on the pain the prospect may be experiencing and how you can help
- Story-based: using narrative to engage readers and hold their attention throughout
- Contrarian: taking an unexpected position to attract interest
News-based: leveraging topical events to attract opens, reads, and clicks
Make the most of automations
One of the most powerful features of today’s email software is the ability to build complex workflows using automations. These help you send subscribers messages appropriate to where they are in your sales funnel.
Good automations help you nurture prospects, keep them engaged and convert them into sales. They also ensure subscribers are not annoyed with irrelevant messages and prevent prospects from slipping through the cracks.
An easy way to add extra revenue is to add additional workflows that extend your communications with prospects. There are always ways to optimize your messaging to improve your results.
Maximize deliverability
There’s no point in sending emails if the recipients never see them. This makes optimizing deliverability crucial to long-term success.
In a world drowning in spam, getting your emails through to the inbox safely is a considerable challenge. You must check that your email system is set up correctly, ticking all the boxes for technical matters such as DKIM, SPF, and DMARC.
You also need to take care in writing the emails to ensure you don’t trigger spam filters. Overall, you need to manage your email reputation carefully, so you continue to achieve high email deliverability rates.
Test everything
Simply changing a word or two in your email subject lines can profoundly impact open rates—and, therefore, your sales. This shows the power of simple A/B testing, where you test variations to see which performs best.
There are many different parameters to test, any one of which could yield you a big win. As a minimum, you should be split-testing:
- Subject lines
- From names
- Email body copy
- Calls to action
- Email preview text
- Text versus HTML emails
Analyze your data
Over time, you will gather a great deal of data regarding your list and how your messaging performs. To ensure the success of your campaign, you need to analyze this data regularly.
Look to see which emails are performing exceptionally well and determine why they are successful at engaging your audience. Maybe you can craft more messages along similar lines.
Of course, you should also study messages that are not performing well. Could they be revived with a rewrite? Or do you need to replace them with different messaging?
Look to see if particular messages cause a high number of unsubscribes. If so, you may need to reconsider your approach.
When you delve into the data, you’ll discover a great deal of fascinating information you can use to your advantage. Leverage this to optimize your campaign and maximize your revenue.
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Power up your email marketing
Email marketing has massive potential as a source of relatively easy profit. Not convinced? Here are 5 major reason why email marketing is important for your business. But as we have seen, running an optimal email campaign requires much hard work and specialist skills.
As a business owner, no doubt you already struggle to find enough hours in the day. So how can you reap the benefits of email marketing without the headaches?
That’s where I can help. As a marketing broker, I’ll introduce you to the best email marketing pros in the business. I work with agencies, copywriters, and other specialists who can squeeze every last dollar from your campaigns.
To find out more, just get in touch.
Email marketing is the only promotional strategy that’s proven to deliver around $36 in sales for every dollar invested. That makes it a no-brainer for any savvy business owner.
It’s time to stop leaving money on the table. Get started with email marketing today and begin enjoying the many benefits of successful campaigns.
