If you’re new to Digital Marketing or if you understand a little bit of email marketing and you are looking for more information on how to improve user engagements through email marketing; you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we will cover the basics of email marketing and steps to help you 2X your email engagements.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is an integral part of digital marketing practices that enables you to provide value to your users in the form of content and help navigate them smoothly through each stage in the buying funnel, at scale.
Businesses today focus more on SEO (search engine optimization), Social Media Marketing, and landing page optimization making emails the most underrated digital marketing channel. But are there any alternatives to email marketing? I believe not! With other channels, there are limitations around how much content you can provide and what content you can share, but email marketing is a different ball game altogether. The main reason – you may not an Instagram or Facebook account, but Everyone has an email account.
5 focus areas for a solid email marketing strategy:
- Purpose of the email/email campaign
- Email outreach strategy
- Understanding the target audience
- Messages that are likely to get a response
- Timing of your campaign
1. Purpose of the email
The reality is that no one enjoys receiving emails that are not providing real value. You might be getting tons of emails from different subscription services and businesses where you may or may not have made a purchase. Most of these end up as SPAM or without getting any attention from you. Your purpose in running an email campaign should be to provide value with a sense of urgency that triggers action from the user.
Think as if this is the only message from you that your prospects/customers will ever open, and if there is no strong appeal in your messaging, then your only chance to connect with a highly qualified lead could be wasted.
2. Email outreach strategy
Before even a single email is sent out you need to be clear about a few things:
- Why are we sending an email?
- What actions do we want users to take?
- What is the next stage if any user reads or takes any action on the email?
As a marketer or business owner, your goal should be to provide the users with a delightful experience. Put together logics (nurture steps) that guide the user through a smooth process that ultimately leads toward conversion.
3. Understanding the target audience
Your audience selection for an email outreach should be beyond the standard demographic segmentation. The best way to understand your audience is to build the buyer persona. This is not just applicable to email marketing but to all other forms of marketing. Another way to look at this is to think that you are sending emails to your existing clients. There are various email automation tools that can help you with this.
For example: Identify and measure the different actions a user takes (page views, social post interactions, on-site video engagements, etc.) before buying your product/service and couple those with the demographic profile. This allows you to filter down to the most probable prospects and helps you focus on your delivery mechanism.
4. Messages that are likely to get a response
Depending on the different entry points you have you need to build your email templates. For example, an email for a user that signs up through social media ad should be different from a user who signs up through an organic channel. This allows you to add personalization to your outreach and companies that adopt this strategy have witnessed user engagement double overtime.
Similar to A/B testing in landing page optimization techniques, Split Testing is done in email marketing to improve and refine the approach. Here are the different components to Split test in an email:
- Call-to-Action (CTA) placement
- Colors (Header, Background, CTA)
- Email layout
- Product images
- or any other similar variables
5. Timing for your email campaign
Few emails are action-driven. Meaning, that these should be sent to users right after the action. Few examples – signup, ebook download, subscription signup, etc. And there are other emails that are engagement-oriented – emails that are not triggered immediately after an action but are sent as part of a series to keep the user engaged and nurture.
For such engagement or nurture-oriented emails, it is better to experiment with different time slots before fixing one. What works for a different business might not work for you as the audience for your business are unique to you.
Conclusion
To grow user engagement and make the best use of personalization in email marketing, you can use Dynamic Tags with audience segmentation. Once you’ve built your email strategy with these 5 focus areas, then you will be at a better stage for choosing the Right Email Marketing Tool for your business needs and finding success in your campaigns. If you want my help in building an end-to-end email and digital marketing strategy tailored for your business, feel free to send me a note.
2 thoughts on “The Complete Guide to Email Marketing”