Points To Keep In Mind for Creating a Successful Email Marketing Strategy
Even though as a form of electronic communication, email has been around for the longest time, it still remains an extremely popular choice for marketers due to its universality, familiarity, and flexibility. Even with smartphone generation that has access to many other modes of communication, email remains a firm favorite and its usage, in fact, has increased over the years.
While email marketing is a great communication tool for businesses, it needs to be appreciated that customers are flooded with a variety of emails resulting in most of them being not read or consigned to the trash bin without being opened. Some useful tips on creating an effective email marketing strategy:
Make Your Emails Relevant To the Recipient
The single biggest reason why recipients tend to ignore most of the emails landing in their inboxes is because the contents are not relevant to their needs. If businesses are to ensure that their marketing emails are properly targeted then they should be able to segment their audience according to relevant parameters that may include demographics such as gender, age, education, interests, location, past purchase behavior, etc. By using these data points, emails can be specifically structured to have contents that are relevant to the recipients thus increasing the chances of the emails being opened and read.
Personalize the Email
Subscribers to email newsletters always appreciate communication to them more when the emails are personalized and addressed to them by name. According to studies conducted by a leading provider of bulk email marketing services in Mumbai, emails that are personalized improve their click-through rates by 14% and their conversion rates by 10%. The improvement in the performance of marketing emails is attributed to the fact that when emails are personalized the recipients are inclined to feel that they are more important to the organization. Because of this perceived esteem, recipients engage in more transaction and become more engaged with the brand.
Optimize For Mobile Screens
Customers are increasingly accessing their email accounts on the go with their handheld devices such as smartphones and tabs. This makes it vital for marketing emails to be easily read on the screens that are much smaller. Marketers who neglect to optimize their emails will find that around 80% of the recipients will delete them without bothering to take a look. This makes it imperative for marketing organizations to optimize the emails for portable devices. Email marketers failing to optimize for mobile screens will lose out heavily on the opportunity to generate leads and close sales.
Set Your Email Transmission Frequency
Most email marketers do not have clue about the importance of the frequency of sending email messages. It is a common fallacy that the more messages you send, the more the chances are of getting conversions. However, sending emails too frequently can really turn off recipients and force them to start ignoring your emails. It is a fact of life that nobody likes to receive a continuous stream of email messages because reading all of them is impossible given the time constraints everyone has. Even if there is a lot of action on the marketing front, the frequency of sending emails should not exceed once per week. The entire purpose of sending the emails is to keep the recipient informed without appearing to push sales to such an extent that they get turned off and unsubscribe just to avoid being badgered. The best way of getting to know the ideal sending frequency is to try out a number of patterns and see which one gets you the most number of readers and leads.
Do Not Spam
One of the principal reasons why email marketing has got a bad name is because marketers were sending emails to people who had not subscribed to your email marketing campaign or specifically opted in to receive email messages from you. Buying email lists and using them to spam recipients is unlawful and can negatively affect your email marketing strategy. While each country has a different legal framework, email marketers should adhere to certain compliances such as having an identifiable sender name, obtaining the permission of the recipient, and providing an option to opt out of the subscription.
Conclusion
Executed properly, email marketing can substantially improve marketing reach and conversions with associated sales and profits. A powerful email marketing strategy will enable you to stay ahead of competitors too and increase your market share.
