So you’ve decided to go all-in on email marketing. Congrats! You are one step closer to profiting off one of the most effective, yet underutilized marketing platforms around.
Whether you are just getting started or are looking to take your marketing strategy to the next level, this article is for you. Here are some proven techniques that will help you master the art of successful email marketing so you can start converting your subscribers into paying customers.
Set Achievable Goals
The most successful email marketers I’ve worked with have all adopted a growth mindset. They understand that success in this space is driven by consistent grow-as-you-go improvement. Always looking for the next best thing, these marketers strive to constantly learn and improve their processes so they can continue to maximize their results.
Setting measurable, achievable goals will also help you stay motivated. Without them, it’s easy to get distracted by the latest marketing trend and lose sight of what you initially set out to achieve. For example, if one of your goals is to increase your conversion rates by 5% within the next 30 days, but you don’t track the number of sign-ups per week, you may become disheartened when you don’t see instantaneous results.
By setting measurable goals, you are also giving yourself a clear indication of just how far you have come. You can monitor the improvement of your conversion rates, and seeing numbers like “123 new sign-ups in the last 30 days” gives you a moment of joy instead of questioning whether or not you are actually making any progress.
Plan Your Outreach
One of the most important things you can do for your email marketing efforts is to plan your outreach. What does that mean? It means that you are going to choose who you are going to send your email to, and you are going to make sure that this person is actually interested in your product or service. This type of strategy will help you avoid the “spam” email problem. Most people think that “spam” is an email that is just blindly sent out to as many people as possible. But in actuality, there is a massive difference between sending out a single message to thousands and planning your outreach properly. You can read more about it here.
Determining Success With Metrics
There are so many different metrics that you can use to determine the success of your email marketing campaign. The key is to find the ones that matter most to you, your product, and your audience. It’s important to be able to track the results of your efforts, so you can continually improve your strategy. Your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) should be based on the actions of those who have bought your product or service. The metrics that you use should also be replicable and should provide you with clear, measurable results. The following are a few examples of metrics commonly used by successful marketers:
- open rate – the percentage of people who have clicked on a link in your email
- click through rate – the percentage of people who have clicked on a link in your email (also known as click-through rate)
- conversion rate – the percentage of people who have made a purchase after following a link in your email
- average order value – the average amount of money that a customer orders from you after following a link in your email
You can also use email marketing tools to track the success of your strategy. Some of these tools offer insight into the performance of each email along with the ability to test changes and refine your strategy based on what you learn. For example, HubSpot offers a funnels and analytics tool that can be used to follow the path of a customer through their buying process. You’ll be able to see everything from the time they first subscribed to when they made a purchase to understand the entire journey.
The Importance Of Testing
The best email marketers I’ve worked with have all adopted a data-driven approach. They constantly test, retest, and tweak their strategies based on information gathered from analyzing data. In an era where marketing changes as quickly as technology does, it’s crucial to be able to adapt your approach and determine which strategy is best suited for your company. You always want to be looking for the next best thing, but at the same time, you need to make sure that what you are doing is going to be effective for you in the long run.
A/B testing is one of the most common ways of determining the effectiveness of different marketing strategies. This approach allows you to compare two distinct marketing approaches (A and B) and determine which one is the most effective. The idea is to send out one version of an email and measure the results compared to a control group that receives the other version. Following a simple A/B testing formula, you can measure the success of your marketing efforts and determine which approach is responsible for the highest conversion rates.
Avoid The Email Overuse Horror Story
You’ve undoubtedly heard the term “email overuse” thrown around a lot recently. This refers to the excessive use of email as a marketing tool, which in turn leads to poor customer experience and a diminished reputation. The key to avoiding this problem is to be thoughtful about the type of content you are putting out via email. Too often, companies rush into creating massive email campaigns and forget to take the time to plan out each individual message. As a result, they end up creating a huge email list full of people who have been inundated with poorly targeted emails.
When used effectively, email marketing can be a highly effective tool for attracting and engaging with customers. But if you go overboard and just send out countless emails without any plan, you’ll end up losing a lot of potential subscribers. So be sure to put into practice what you learn here so you can begin to see the benefits of email marketing for your company.