Imagine the feeling you had the last time you received a handwritten note in the mail. It means something to you, and it’s personalized. The power of a handwritten note can go a long way. I encourage you to treat your email marketing efforts the same way. Just as a handwritten note in the mail has the power to move a person, so does the next email you send. Email can drive change, and ultimately help you achieve your mission.
Email marketing can build brand awareness. You can drive action from your subscribers to complete a task on your website. You can even encourage them to become an advocate of your organization by sharing your content with their networks.
Email marketing is one of the only channels that consumers ask to receive. The majority of businesses using the platform only send messages to those who have signed up to receive them. This can allow for much higher conversion rates as a business is only targeting those who already have an interest in their brand.
If you aren’t currently including email marketing in your digital outreach efforts, you’re missing out. Think about email marketing in the same way you think about tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and your website. It’s another digital platform that allows you to reach your customers and achieve your goals. There are three areas to keep in mind when executing a successful email marketing strategy.
Measuring Success
In any digital effort, it’s important to define what success looks like. Email metrics analyze various aspects relative to the tracking of the email marketing strategy performance. Identify key metrics by aligning them with your organizational and email marketing goals.
-What do you want your email subscribers to do?
-How would you measure those ideal actions?
Set a baseline for your own email marketing efforts. How many people are opening your emails now? How many people are clicking through to your content? How is email impacting your Web presence and social media presence? Let your goals drive your success metrics.
A/B testing
Optimizing your email marketing efforts for your particular audience is important, and testing is a key part of email marketing optimization. A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a way of working out which campaign options is the most effective in terms of encouraging opens or clicks. In an A/B test you set variations of the one campaign and send them to a small percentage of your total recipients. The best approach to testing is to develop a hypothesis based on insights you’ve gathered from your email marketing metrics and create a test that would prove whether that hypothesis was right or not.
Let’s use email titles as an example. Do long titles work? Do questions work better than statements? Does putting all words or specific words in CAPS work? Testing these theories will help you learn what works best to engage your email subscribers. Here are some elements to consider testing:
-Email title
-Email by line
-Date/time of email
Customer Feedback
It’s important on any platform to listen to your customers’ feedback and use it to improve your strategy and tactics. That means using metrics to dictate how you change. Whether you’re using A/B testing, reviewing metrics, or collecting feedback in a survey, it’s important to listen to your customers’ insights to improve your email efforts.