Any marketer knows how difficult it is to create effective email marketing campaigns. In addition to the content, offer, and call to action (CTA), there are many important foundational aspects to an email marketing campaign.
Running a successful email marketing program can be complicated. But by following a few simple guidelines, you can get your email program off to a good start. Here are three key areas to consider as you develop your email marketing strategy.
Compliance and List Hygiene
The foundations of your program must be established before you can even think about the marketing aspects of your email campaign. Compliance and a clean email list are two of the most vital.
Providing your recipients with a way to opt out of future emails is one of the most basic and important aspects of email compliance. Your email platform or compliance and suppression list management platform should be processing and suppressing opt-outs from future campaigns.
Don’t assume it’s working perfectly and optimally for your company. Ensure your email program is compliant by evaluating all aspects of email compliance and partnering with the best technologies and partners.
Similarly, you should not treat your email list as a passive asset. People change jobs or simply stop using old email addresses. Some recipients keep receiving your emails but either delete them or never open them. If you aren’t on top of it, all of this can harm your email campaigns.
You need your emails to be delivered first. Maintaining a clean and current list is one of the best ways to ensure this. Cleanse your list regularly to remove invalid or undeliverable email addresses. Consider removing high-frequency nonresponders as well. A clean email list will help your sender reputation on various email platforms and increase your email delivery rates.
Audience Targeting
Email marketing allows marketers to target audiences at a very specific level. Depending on the data you have on your email list subscribers, you can create audience segments that allow for one-on-one engagement. Using audience targeting effectively requires striking a balance between broad and narrow segmentation. Efforts to further segment will likely yield diminishing returns as time and resources invested are no longer offset by improved response.
So, how deep should you segment your audience? The answer, like most marketing questions, is it depends. It varies by industry, company, product, and email recipient. Testing is the only way to find your audience targeting strategy.
If you haven’t used audience segmentation before, start with some basic segmentation. Consider your email list’s composition and who is on it. Is it a client or Purchase history? History of email engagement? How do these stats relate to your business model, products, or services?
Begin by segmenting your audience and tracking your email performance within each segment. This will help you establish performance benchmarks for comparison. Then start tailoring your email campaigns to each segment. Subject lines, offers, send times, CTAs, etc.. Evaluate these elements and start testing them across your audience target segments. You should gradually identify tactics that work best for each audience segment.
Remember to keep testing even when you think you have the perfect audience targeting strategy. Even the best marketing strategies will eventually get old.
Content That Is Relevant
Writing content is probably your favorite part of email marketing. On cannot simply skip the first two best practices and jump to this one. Engaging content is useless if your email is not delivered. You can’t create compelling content that is relevant to your audience if you don’t know who they are.
It’s time to put on your marketing and creative hats and start creating email content that will attract and engage your recipients. Your audience should drive the creation of content. Focusing on your audience rather than yourself is the most effective content development strategy.
Even after creating the most amazing content, remember to test. Even the most compelling content will eventually fail. Your content must evolve to match your audience’s changing interests and needs.