Email Marketing Campaign To Make Your Digital Marketing Efforts More Effective

The average Internet user is bombarded with huge amounts of information everyday, depending on the sites they visit and content they engage with. Because of this huge competition for exposure, digital marketing has become a struggle to stand out in your market.

Among the various digital marketing tools available, one that’s sure to foster a connection with your audience is email marketing.

What is email marketing? A cost-effective strategy, email marketing is an accessible way for all types of businesses to converse with customers. Through email marketing, you can customize messages for target loyal consumers or potential clients with various promos and offers, depending on how far down the funnel they are.

Below is an in-depth guide on how to develop an effective email marketing campaign to bolster your digital marketing efforts and reap success for your brand:

Why email marketing?

There are various email marketing benefits that are sure to boost your digital marketing efforts. Below is a quick rundown of the main ones to get you started:

• A huge pool of users available

Out of the 4.57 billion Internet users in the world, 3.9 billion of whom use email. This number is expected to grow to 4.3 billion in just three years. By 2023, half of the world’s population will be using email.

What does having a huge pool of email users mean for brands? Whether you’re a huge business or a new start-up, you’re sure to find your target market using email. Potential consumers for new customer acquisition are also highly accessible via their email accounts.

• Email marketing influences consumer purchases

Email marketing also plays a hand in your market’s purchasing decisions. According to a survey by SaleCycle, 59% of respondents say that marketing emails influence their purchases.

Sending brand updates, educational articles, and discount offers to your consumers are just a few ways to clinch new and old customers to purchase your product.

Email marketing boosts your brand's ROI

You’d think that with the ease of ignoring or deleting messages, consumers are likely to neglect your email marketing campaign. On the contrary, according to Hubspot, 78% of marketers saw a rise in email engagement from their customers.

Brands also saw a rise in their email marketing ROI with a staggering ratio of USD1-42. For every dollar spent on email marketing, USD42 is returned as revenue.

What problems can you expect from email marketing?

Even with a considerable influence on purchases and excellent ROI, email marketing isn’t a walk in the park. Below are some problems you might encounter and how to resolve them when implementing an email marketing campaign:

• Clinching new subscribers

Getting people to join your email list is a crucial step in email marketing. Without the right strategy, you’ll find yourself sending messages to no one.

Through the various content that you put out, you can attract new subscribers by promoting the benefits of your email list. Examples of this are website articles with automatic pop-up prompts asking for a visitor’s email address.

Users can easily dismiss or even fail to see these pop-ups; so it’s important that you strategize where to place them and what message you want them to say.

What works best are Call-to-actions (CTAs), offers of privileges, and educational information that would come with subscribing to your email list. Make them an offer they can’t refuse!

Standing out in a sea of unopened messages

One of the main challenges you might face is your market not seeing your email amongst the hundreds they might receive in a day.

Aside from personal contacts, expect that your audience also receives messages from other brands and sites they patronize. This can easily drown your content out.

You can solve this in two simple steps: upping your attention-grabber and being creative with your content. Your attention grabber is your subject line; keep it short and concise yet appealing or interesting. Use power words to make your subject line stand out.

In the same way, your content should be more than just boring lines of text. Try using graphics to make the experience more visually appealing to your audience. Capitalize on graphic design psychology to make sure your content sticks with your market.

Retaining your customers

Keeping your audience in your email list is as much a challenge as getting them stay subscribed there. It’s so easy for your subscribers to mark your messages as spam or to unsubscribe from your updates.

The best fix for this problem is to first segment your subscribers based on demographics and interest. This is a good way to produce and send content that’s highly relevant and useful to your groups of subscribers. Valuable and accurately segmented content is a surefire way to retain your email subscribers.

Getting thrown into spam

Aside from your own subscribers marking your messages as spam, email service providers can also accidentally label your content as junk email. This can lead to them not being visible to your market.

Spam filters are now designed to be more meticulous in tracking useless and even potentially dangerous content. To avoid being lumped together with these types of emails, yours should avoid using words that can be flagged as spam.

Not getting conversions

Lastly, one of the most frustrating things you might encounter in launching an email marketing campaign is your efforts not leading to conversions. Your market sees your email, reads through it, and yet your email conversion rate is stagnant.

A simple solution would be to create engaging content. Write for an audience that you want to respond; ask questions, prompt them for testimonials, and offer them privileges.

Email marketing is a strategic mix of segmenting audiences, personalizing messages, and engaging content. Converse with your market every now and then instead of just dumping information in their inbox.

You encounter the aforementioned problems when you treat your market as just a mailing list instead of actual people who need advice, information, and connection.

How do you measure the success of your email marketing?

A successful email marketing strategy is measured by a set of metrics. Below are some basic metrics you can use to determine if your email marketing efforts are successful:

Delivery rates

These refer to the percentage of emails delivered vis-a-vis the number of emails you sent. A solid emailing list should render a high delivery rate, which means that your audience has received your emails, as intended. Some emails bounce back because of errors in inputting email addresses, or users don’t submit real addresses when asked to subscribe.

Open rates

These refer to the percentage of emails opened by your subscribers. As with delivery rates, not all delivered emails are opened. A low open rate is a sign for you to optimize your subject line and preview text, to grab the attention of your audience.

Click-through rates

When you’ve successfully led users to open your email, the next step is to drive traffic to your site via links you place in the message.

Click-through rates are measured by this traffic. A high click-through rate usually means that your emails are interesting and engaging enough to warrant a visit to your actual webpage.

Conversion rates

These refer to the number of subscribers who--through your email marketing campaign--accomplish set goals to become a customer of your brand.

Low conversion rates mean that even though your subscribers read your messages and click on the links in your emails, they still aren’t convinced enough to buy your products.

Practical tips on crafting a strong email marketing campaign

Now that you get the general idea of the benefits of email marketing, the possible challenges you’ll face, and how to measure your performance, the following are four foolproof tips on how to boost your email marketing efforts and propel your brand to success:

Set viable goals

As with starting any marketing strategy, you should first come up with a list of business goals to guide you through the process.

Your email marketing goals should include short-term and long-term objectives that are founded on your brand’s capacity to expand and deliver. Possible goals can include customer acquisition, brand awareness, and lead generation.

Get to know your audience

Knowing your audience is a key part of any email marketing campaign. Invest in learning who your market is, what they are interested in, and even how they talk. This information can help you craft marketing strategies that are relevant and valuable to your consumers.

When your users feel that your emails are personalized and customized to their interests and demographics, they are more likely to engage it and be influenced in their purchasing decisions.

Adopt a brand personality

Aside from having a solid knowledge of your audience, adopting a brand persona can also help in relating to your consumers. This can make your audience feel that they’re talking to a person, not just a machine or company aiming to collect their money.

Don’t forget CTAs

CTAs are crucial in driving your audience to accomplish your desired goals. Word it in a way that empowers your users in making choices that’s beneficial not only to your brand, but also to themselves, more importantly.

Examples of CTAs include asking them to subscribe to your newsletter, donate to a charity, or check out your new product.

One key principle to remember about creating an email marketing strategy is that it’s more than a sales pitch, it’s a conversation.

Email marketing entails much more than clickbaits and flashy titles; it calls for a deep understanding of your audience and the platform. It might seem one-sided, at first, but continuously measuring and assessing your performance can lead to boosted consumer trust and loyalty.

I am a futurist who spends most of my time monitoring social behavior in search of new consumer trends. I use the information to create viral and useful content as part of the new media strategy.