Best Practices For Email Marketing
There are several general guidelines to follow when using email marketing for prospective and current customers. During this article, we will go over some of the most important of these marketing practices.
Use a Welcome Email
First, sending a welcome email is important for anyone that is new to the company. This often stems from websites using a prompt that encourages visitors to subscribe to the email list, so that they receive new deals, discounts, and updates. One way to get customers to subscribe to this email list is offering a one time discount (ex:10%) for the first time they sign up. Not only will this bring in new customers, but also build long lasting relationships.
Use Valid Email Addresses
It is important to use a valid email address rather than one that is a no-reply email address. This way customers can directly respond to the email sent out, rather than making the customer go through extra steps to contact the company. Doing this can help your company establish a solid relationship with the customer.
Personalize Your Emails
Personalizing an email includes making them relevant and timely. To do this, it is important to figure out what the customer wants to see. When a new customer signs up for emails, oftentimes it is beneficial to ask them directly what information they would like to gain from the emails. In this way, you are directly providing information that the customer actually needs, rather than sending useless emails. Another method to personalize your emails is by including the customer's first name, or some other aspect that makes that email unique to them. Other ways include: website browsing emails, birthday offer emails, product purchase emails, and abandoned cart emails. Abandoned cart emails send a reminder to the inbox of a customer who created a cart, but never checked out.
Make Emails Short
Consumers receive many emails a day, totaling an average of 120 business emails every day. This being said, it is important to keep an email short and sweet, so the current or prospective customer reads until the end of it.
Make Emails Easy to Skim
Keeping an email short is important, but many customers will still read over it hastily. As such, it is important to keep paragraphs short, use bullet points and headers, add graphics, and bold or highlight important information. Furthermore, if the email is sent out to encourage a customer to take action, include an attractive colored button that is easily spotted in order to draw the reader's attention to that action.
Make a Schedule for Emails
If you are planning to stick to a similar recurring email schedule, send out the email on the same days and times as done previously. If a consumer is interested in the emails your company is sending this allows them to expect an email, possibly causing them to check their inbox which reduces the likelihood of them missing the message. If the email is for a special event or promotion it is not necessary to do this, however sending a follow up email would be very beneficial.
Incorporate Consistent Branding
Having consistent branding is vital to keep your company's brand awareness high and attract new customers. This can be done by using a similar branded template, designating colors, email signature and typefaces.
Use Different Data Metrics to Help Run the Marketing Campaign
By using metrics such as open rate, click through rate, and the percentage of subscribers that unsubscribe it will drive changes to your email marketing campaign. Open rate is the percentage of subscribers who actually open the email newsletter. Use these metrics to compare to benchmarks or future goals to help you decide what changes need to be made to the company’s email marketing strategy.