Step Up Your Email Marketing
Email marketing remains a reliable workhorse of online promotion, but its longevity means it’s often taken for granted. As a result, it can seem like all its secrets have been learned, and it’s already giving all it can.
But while it’s undoubtedly a mature discipline, that doesn’t mean it can’t be optimized. And also developed to achieve even better results. So whether you’re an ambitious beginner or a seasoned promoter. Here are six ways to take your email marketing to the next level.
1) Embrace Testing
No matter how experienced you are, your gut feeling about what works in email marketing isn’t infallible. And neither does collective wisdom always offer a sure-fire route to success. To find out what works for your industry and your audience. You need to try out many different approaches and measure accurately which ones drive the best results.
Whether you do simple A/B subject line comparisons or a more complex flavour of multivariate Testing. When you throw caution to the wind and experiment. You’re certain to come up with some winners you couldn’t have predicted.
2) Accommodate Your Customers’ Marketing Preferences
It’s often advised to keep your email broadcasts to a predictable schedule, neither overwhelming your customers nor letting them forget about you. Unfortunately, finding the happy balance depends largely on your customers’ preferences, and they won’t all be the same.
Show some flexibility by having separate lists with different broadcast frequencies, and let your customers choose which one to sign up for. If an in-depth weekly digest suits their routine better than a daily drip feed, then give them that option – you’re much more likely to keep churn rates to a minimum.
3) Keep a Clean List
It’s tempting as an email marketer to focus on the size of your list, but as the saying goes, less is often more. There’s no point in having a bloated list full of recipients who don’t respond. It makes accurate Testing more difficult, and the low open rates can also work to drive down delivery rates as an unhappy side effect.
Never be afraid of removing inactive or unwilling customers from your main database. Keep your primary list lean and clean, and you’ll know that your messages are actually hitting home rather than being sent straight to rubbish.
4) Try and Re-Engage Quiet Customers
However, there’s no need to hastily delete a previous customer just because they’ve been unresponsive for a while. As part of your list-cleaning process, segment off customers who’ve not been active for six months (or however long suits your niche) and send them an exclusive and appealing offer to try and rekindle their interest.
You could even keep these customers on a permanent ‘quiet’ list, sending them occasional reminders that your company exists. But just split them off of your main list to keep it clean.
5) Personalize Where You Can (And Where Appropriate)
It’s a well-established fact that adding personalization to an email can send open rates and click-throughs soaring. However, it’s about much more than including the recipient’s name in the subject line.
What data do you hold about each customer that can be leveraged to your advantage? Could you fold in their browsing and purchasing history to more closely match offers to their preferences? Could you cross-reference different buyers’ purchasing profiles to suggest potential products of interest?
The opportunities are boundless, but you need to use a little finesse. Try not to cross the line between personalization and inappropriate. Or you’ll alienate more recipients than you impress.
6) Always Measure Everything
Intelligent use of metrics is the basis of effective email marketing. It’s not always obvious in advance what you should be measuring. The solution, however, is simple: If something can be measured, then measure it.
You may have no idea just yet how to exploit the data you’re collecting, but storage and bandwidth is cheaper than ever. So it’s only common sense to collect whatever you can within ethics and the law. And when you come up with a genius new way of using that data, you’ll have an entire back history to delve into to power your fresh approach.
Email marketing might have been tried and tested over decades, but it can still offer up surprises. Keep experimenting and working to optimizing and measuring your campaigns. You’ll discover all over again why it remains such an effective tool in the savvy digital marketer’s kit. Google Analytics is a great place to start when monitoring your results.
BDP also provides email data, for your marketing campaigns contact us today on the number above or fill out a contact us form and one of our account managers will be happy to discuss your requirements.
