We often hear people say that email is a dead channel full of nothing but irrelevant spam from all companies alike. While this may be true for most of the emails that arrive in your inbox, the fact is that email is one of the most efficient marketing channels when done right.

That means delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time, not one-size-fits-all promotional marketing nonsense. Email marketing doesn’t have to be overly complicated, and by following a few key rules, you’ll have your email marketing program running like a well oiled machine producing engagement and conversions for your business.

By the numbers

Email marketing is by far the number one marketing channel used by small businesses, with over 80% saying they use email to drive acquisition and retention strategies (Emarsys, 2018). According to HubSpot, email generates $38 for every $1 spent, which is an astounding ROI of 3,800%. Furthermore, 73% of millennials prefer communications from businesses to come from email (HubSpot, 2020).

Welcome emails are a great and effective way to immediately engage with your customers, with an average open rate of 82% compared to 21% for all other types of emails (GetResponse, 2017). Abandon Cart emails are another great way to drive conversions, where sending three abandon cart emails drives 69% more orders then by sending just one (Omnisend, 2018).

The facts are clear: people like to receive emails from brand’s they love, with 49% of all customers saying they would like to receive promotional emails from their favorite brands on a weekly basis. From a spend standpoint, email is by far the least expensive and most efficient way to capture new customers and nurture your existing ones into long term profitability. With 3.9 billion daily email users, you’d be a fool not to take advantage of this highly efficient marketing channel (Statista, 2020).

First things first

The first and most critical step to starting an effective email marketing program is setting up email capture on your website. You can easily do this by creating a form and embedding it onto your website. Most email service providers, like Mail Chimp, Constant Contact and HubSpot, have the ability to build and embed a form; they even have the ability to creat a pop-up form to prompt new traffic on your site to sign up.

Once you have your email capture form set up, the next step is creating an automated Welcome email to thank your new subscribers for signing up. As mentioned above, Welcome emails generate an insanely high open rate and offer a great way to introduce your brand and begin the relationship.

Welcome Series, where you have subsequent emails following the initial Welcome, are a great way to keep your new subscribers engaged as you educate them on your products, services and policies. It is important to avoid hard selling during the early lifecycle, as your main focus should be on building credibility and trust. You want to strike an emotional connection with your new subscribers, which is why cross-selling and upselling should be lightly mentioned in a customer’s early lifecycle.

Build your IP reputation

If you’re starting a new email marketing program from scratch, it’s important to first perform an IP warm up. This relates to building your reputation as a new brand to the likes of Gmail and Yahoo, so they don’t route all of your emails to your customer’s spam folders.

To do this, start small with a list of emails of everyone in your company and have them all open and click through your preliminary emails. Then gradually expand the size of your email audience over the course of a month to build up your reputation. If you have data on your most engaged customers from a purchase standpoint, try starting with them versus everyone on your list, as they’re most likely to engage with your emails.

Thereafter, you can start to send to your full audience as much as you’d like. However, it’s important to periodically perform list maintenance to keep your IP reputation positive by removing unengaged emails. The less inboxes you hit with no engagement, the better your reputation will be, ensuring your email campaigns stay out of the spam traps.

Segment your list

The beauty of building an email marketing program is the fact that your email list is all yours and no one can take that away from you. However, with that comes the responsibility of managing your email list to drive growth and engagement while reducing unsubscribes.

As noted above, new customers are generally the most engaged as they’re in the honeymoon period, so it’s important to segment and talk them uniquely. Your base customers, or one’s that are active and past the new phase, are ripe for upselling and cross-selling, but also prone to become unengaged and churn out. Engage with them with personalized content to drive relevance and build loyalty.

Your highest valued customers deserve the most attention and should also be segmented separately and given the most nurturing. Provide personalized content based on past purchasing behavior and avoid over communicating to them. This audience holds the keys to your growth, so survey them to learn more about what they really need so your business can continue to meet those needs and drive long term profitability.

Unengaged customers tend to draw down your IP reputation and should be treated carefully. You generally don’t want to continue marketing to subscribers who haven’t engaged with your brand in over a year, so simply remove them. Re-engagement campaigns with unique offers can be a great option to try and re-ignite unengaged subscribers before they fully fall out of your program, but avoid deep discounting.

The more you learn about your customers through your CRM program, the more segments you can create and tailor content to drive engagement and conversions. The last thing someone wants is to receive an email that offers no relevance and leads them to believe that you know nothing about them. Avoid this by segmenting and meeting them with content based on where they’re at in their journey with your brand.

Make it personal

Personalization is more then just including a subscriber’s name in a subject line, although studies show that does drive more engagement. While that’s a great tactic to use, avoid over-using it and causing fatigue.

What personalization really means is providing relevant content to your customers based on where they’re at along their journey. You can do this by segmenting your customers based on their purchase behavior, ensuring the creative and copy are aligned with what they prefer.

For example, if you know the gender of your customers, segment and send them products that reflect that. If you know that they’re parents, use family imagery. If they buy snowboard over ski products, reflect that in your emails.

The purpose of an email marketing program is to build trust and loyalty, drive engagement and increase customer lifetime value. Personalizing your content to match a customer’s point in their lifecycle will help build the relationship and drive an emotional connection between them and your brand.

Test & learn always

If you’re not constantly testing & learning to optimize your marketing efforts, then you’ll never really know if those efforts are actually working. Just like us humans, marketing programs can get stale, especially if they don’t keep up with trends, so it’s important to study what your competitors are doing and test to learn what works best to drive engagement.

The easiest testing opportunity involves subject lines, and nearly every email provider gives you the ability to perform subject line optimization with every send. You do this by providing two different subject lines, setting a threshold of customers to receive each option (i.e. 30% of your total population) with the winning option then being sent to the remaining audience. Test using names, emojis and differing sales phrases. The most important goal of your email is getting your subscribers to actually open it, which is why you should always test different subject lines and keep track of the ones that work to use iterations of in the future.

Content testing is a bit more involved but equally as important as testing subject lines. Try testing different formats in your email, images, CTA buttons, background colors, and fonts. Test different products or using pricing and discounts. The more you test, the more on point your designers and copywriters will be, making future campaigns easier to build and execute.

Stay on track with how emails are trending in the market place; chances are other businesses tested and found new ways to engage with their customers too. Often an afterthought but crucial to test is header and footer formats, particularly as it relates to your navigation bar. Your emails are an extension of your site, so having a simple yet proper navigation is important to drive familiarity and engagement.

Measure your results

Keeping a pulse on how your email marketing program is doing is imperative to evolve in order to meet the changing landscape. Most email service providers include great reporting dashboards to provide you with all the engagement metrics that you need. This will allow you to see which campaigns work and which do not, to then pivot as needed.

While monitoring engagement is needed, the most important measurement is conversions, and requires a proper CRM system to tie back email lists to sales. Many CRM systems provide the functionality of offer codes and tracking links to be able to attribute email campaigns to revenue.

Treat your email marketing program like a living and breathing thing that constantly needs to be monitored for performance and optimization. The more data and insights that your team consumes, the better you will become at planning and executing effective email campaigns.

Build for mobile

While desktops and lap tops still exist broadly, mobile is rapidly growing and leaving PCs behind. 60% of all email opens are from mobile devices (Adestra, 2019), and 35% of business professionals check email on a mobile device (HubSpot, 2020).

With smart phone use becoming more like an organ for most people, designing mobile optimized emails is crucial to driving engagement from your subscribers. There’s nothing worse than receiving an email that is not mobile responsive, with the images and copy so small you just simply press delete. 68% of consumers say they would delete an email that wasn’t mobile optimized (HubSpot, 2020).

Thankfully most email service providers offer mobile optimization built within their templates. As you build your email marketing program, test what your email templates look like on different devices and update as needed. Test and monitor the results of your emails as you try new techniques, and if you see high bounce rates or low engagement, chances are your emails may be failing in mobile inboxes.

Now don’t ignore building for desktops as well, but the writing is on the wall that mobile is the waive of the future and where most of your focus should be. Customer experience means everything in business, and ensuring that your emails drive a seamless experience on mobile will lead to more engagement and ultimately improve brand equity.

Survey for feedback

Keeping a pulse on the evolving needs of your customers is crucial, and surveying your subscribers is a great way to gain that feedback. Sites like SurveyMonkey offer an affordable way to build surveys and include them in your emails.

Start by surveying your highest valued and most frequent customers since they tend to engage the most. It’s generally effective to offer some sort of incentive, like a discount, to gain responses, but you’ll be surprised at how often your best customers just want to be heard. The insights that you’ll gain from surveying will help your company adjust and evolve to meet the changing needs of your customers.

Keep it simple

At the end of the day, the most important rule to live by in developing your email marketing program is to keep it simple. Keep your email template design simple, with a clean and minimalistic navigation and footer.

Be sure to make your content easy to digest and avoid writing long novels that no one will read. Switch things up every so often to avoid fatigue from your subscribers, such as simple changes to background colors and button formats.

Your email is a reflection of your brand, which is why you’ll want to keep it clean and concise to improve the perception of your brand. When an email looks bad, your brand’s reputation suffers and opens up the window for your subscribers to look elsewhere. Simple, clean and concise will lead to success.

In Conclusion

The key to building and maintaining an effective email marketing program is to keep it simple and grow your program as time goes on. Ensure that you can capture emails in the first place, and then build and nurture your list through segmentation and personalization.

Test and learn early and often and always measure your results to produce insights to drive optimization. In the end, your goal should be to connect with your customers to build a long lasting, profitable relationship, and email marketing allows you to bring out the human side of your business at a direct and personal level.

References

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How to Build an Effective Email Marketing Program