Nope, social media isn’t eroding the effectiveness of email marketing – poor strategy is doing that for you. Here’s where email marketing goes wrong: too many emails, not enough quality content and lack of relevant information about the audience.
Think about it: In email marketing, there is already a built-in base of subscribers who want to hear from you. Put in place a planned strategy with interesting content and include a call-to-action to motivate clicks to your desired destination. The goal is to gain more avid readers while not boring–or spamming–your existing audience.
There are many advantages to using email marketing. When used effectively, it can help leverage sales, retain old customers and generate new clients. It can also help create a clear brand identity through the tone of voice used in your mass communications.
If you’re reading this because you’ve decided you either (A) want to revamp your existing method or (B) you’re starting from scratch, the key to creating a successful email marketing campaign is the development of a content strategy. Here are a few tips to get you on your way…
Start with establishing your strategy
Before you should even get-going with churning out your emails, it’s important to create a clear content marketing strategy. In doing so, you will ensure that you hit the targets you set out to achieve, while pinpointing your brand’s focus and goals. This should include details on what pieces of content (blogs, articles, promotions, etc.) you plan to share through your eNewsletter and how often. Cadence is very important because you don’t want to be the company who spams all week long when you can likely get by with a weekly email. Although there is no cookie-cutter method for planning your strategy, creating a content calendar that is integrated with your other strategies for social media and paid media is a good place to start.
GHIDOTTI TIP: Check out our Guide to creating a Content Market Roadmap for a full run-down on how to kick-start your e-marketing structure with a clear plan.
Make your emails attractive and attention grabbing
One of the greatest email marketing sins is putting too much content in the email itself. Use interesting headlines in bold, visually appealing fonts to grab your reader’s attention, and then use a snippet of text from wherever it is you’re wanting to lead them to that will draw them in. If it’s a podcast, use an interesting quote; if it’s a new study, use a wild statistic featured in the piece. Also – imagery is important! Keep your emails visual with eye-catching photographs and infographics.
GHIDOTTI TIP: Make sure you resize your images to 72 dpi to ensure they do not slow down inboxes and load normally.
Utilize your subject line
Depending on your market, the subject line can appear in a multitude of styles. If your audience is young and affluent, and your content is light-hearted, use a hashtag or even an emoji. If your email has links to several different types of B2B content, choose the most interesting piece to feature in the subject line. You should also consider testing different subject lines with your audience to see what keywords or phrases are catching their attention, or if you see more responses from asking a question versus general statements.
GHIDOTTI TIP: If your email is featuring several pieces of content, it is NOT necessary to cram them all into the subject line. Just pick the one that is most attention grabbing and that you believe will be most intriguing to your audience..
Don’t ignore the reports
Once you’ve hit ‘send’ on an email newsletter, it can be easy to just have that be the end of it. However, there are so many useful insights that can be drawn from looking at your email report. You can see not only which subscribers opened it, but also what they found most interesting by clicking on content links from within the email. If a large majority of people were only clicking a video interview, for example, but ignoring a written article altogether, you can draw what sort of content your audience prefers.
GHIDOTTI TIP: It’s important to mention you can also see who UNsubscribes from your database. Now, this isn’t to say that this information should be used to harass! But, it is helpful to see if people in certain professions or certain demographics are no longer finding your content insightful and entertaining.