Sustaining a successful email marketing campaign is a challenge, but unlike website visitors who simply arrive at your website and then leave, email subscribers are here to stay — because they believe in your products and ideas.
Without prior experience, email marketing can sound like something that only takes up your time and isn’t worth the effort. Take content marketing for example, it’s the most trending digital marketing topic you will find right now, but did you know that email marketing also involves the practice of marketing content, and making it convert? It’s not like all your product sales happen inside of the email inbox.
In the following guide you will learn about three critical points in email marketing, which are: learning how to build authentic relationships with your subscribers, how to attract and capture your subscribers attention, and why listening to your subscriber feedback can be good for your business. Let’s get right to it.
Build personal relationships
Email is the one place where you can get real with your subscribers. At the beginning stages of email marketing, it was assumed that all emails should be addressed towards everyone on the list, and it was used more like a standalone marketing platform, rather than a way to cultivate personal relationships.
Email marketers who take time to segment and personalize their emails can enjoy a huge increase in engagement, revenue, and overall email opens percentages. Campaign Monitor ran a huge study to understand modern email marketing, and the future of where this field is heading.
The question is, how do we create more personal relationships with our readers?
One way to do this, would be to talk about your business and the challenges you are facing openly. This creates an atmosphere of transparency where you are freely sharing business growth data with your subscribers, and encourage them to become part of something bigger. Buffer is one such company that excels at transparency, their transparent values have inspired countless startups and businesses to get real about their relationships with users.
Allow your customers to have a say in how your business grows, make them feel like they are part of the growth strategy, and the effect of such personalized relationships is going to pulsate in all areas of your business.
Keep their attention captivated
Scientific research will happily tell you that on average, a visitor of any kind will spend approximately 8 seconds on a digital page with their full attention, before deciding to either stay, or leave.
So, you have 8 seconds to make a lasting impression from the moment a subscriber lays his/her eyes on your email. That’s a short amount of time, so what can be done to keep their attention captivated?
- Scannable content — Lengthy emails just don’t happen to perform nearly as good as content that’s organized right from the start. Copywriting emails is an art, one that needs to be practices to be understood fully. Email content needs to be on point, it needs to have easy to scan points, with the most essential information outlined at the top of the email; the place where your subscriber eyes are going to land first. It may sound crazy, but this is how busy people are with their lives.
- Mobile optimized — Depending on the email marketing platform you are using, you should ensure that your email copies are being sent out with full mobile compatibility. It’s going to be a disaster for your campaign performance if subscribers are getting emails that are unfriendly to mobile/tablet devices. Check and double re-check all of your outgoing emails for mobile responsiveness.
- Visual content — The human brain has mucher higher capacity to process visual content on the fly, than it does text content. With the capacity to process visual content 60,000 times faster than text, it pays to include visual imagery in your email campaigns. Any visual content marketing strategy will be applicable to email marketing, with only slight modifications.
Make a checklist of these points for your next campaign, and continue to test your email performance even after you have sent the initial campaign, a good dataset for understanding the performance of each of the points will consist of at least 5 individual campaigns. Keep in mind that email templates can also be highly beneficial when it comes to personalization and engagement, find templates that resonate with your message and use them.
The last thing for maximizing our email marketing efforts, is user feedback.
Listen to the feedback you are receiving
Feedback is something that is being given back to you, based on what you are first providing. If the service you are providing is bad, then feedback is likely going to reflect that. If the service you are providing is good, but could use specific alternations based on customer interest, then customer feedback is also likely to reflect that need. The wonderful thing about email marketing, you don’t need to wait for customers to give their feedback to you, you can just ask for it yourself.
Here is a sample email you might be sending out in this regard:
Hey Mark!
My name is Alex Hope, and I am one of the Marketing Director’s here at Hopeful Inc. We are always looking for more ways to make our products better, and this has largely been possible thanks to the amazing feedback that our customers like you are giving back to us. I was hoping that it would not trouble you too much if I asked you to fill out a quick survey to help us understand your current relationship with one of our products.
If this sounds good to you, please follow this link to proceed with the short 5-minute survey. Your feedback will help us in making Hopeful Inc. the best company out there!
Thanks for being of so much help!
Alex Hope,
CEO, Hopeful Inc.
With a few modifications, you can make your own personalized email that would encourage your customers to leave their feedback on your survey. This feedback could be the crucial point for adding a new feature, or utilizing your newly learned customer pressure points to create a more personalized experience, in turn really helping your email campaign to grow and flourish.
Closing words
Creating personalized experiences with each of your email subscribers allows you to listen to them independently, which creates an atmosphere of trust and sharing. This way, you can more clearly understand what are the needs of your customers, and act accordingly based on your business capabilities.
Author:
Alex Ivanovs continues to work with WordPress clients all over the world to deliver better performance and visibility, amongst many of the methods he uses — digital marketing is one of them. You can find more of what Alex is doing on daily basis at Colorlib, where he helps to manage the editorial calendar.
