In fact, e-mail marketing should be viewed in the same vein as social media. They are all tools in the inbound marketing arsenal. You should house all content on your blog or news section of your website, and then push that content out through as many channels as possible - Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and yes email. Your goal is to pull these readers back into your website or blog where they'll find all of the content you've worked so hard to create and ultimately learn more about your business.
The key to email marketing is to be realistic. Having open rates of over 80% are not normal. In fact, the average open rate for an email campaign is close to 20%. Why are the statistics so low? Well, think about how your inbox operates. How often do you delete messages to get to the core messages that need your attention? Have you ever looked at your spam folder? How often have you abandoned email accounts? Have you ever blocked an email from contacting you? The list goes on.
Once you dial into your evangelist base of email subscribers, and provide them the content and information they yearn for, you can expect to see the interactions and hopeful deep ROI of your investment.
RELATED ARTICLE: IS YOUR EMAIL CONSIDERED SPAM?
Here are a few tips to keep in mind as you evaluate email marketing for your business...
Keep the content engaging
Don't just send out an email campaign to 'touch' your email subscribers. Consumers are well conditioned and can tell when content is forced. Care for your email subscribers as you would your sales contacts and take the time to create lists within your subscriber base, so you can best 'speak' to your segmented audiences. Also, remember that nearly 75% of the over 140 billion emails that are sent each and every day are viewed as spam. Craft email campaigns that do not mislead your subscribers, but rather ask for their engagement, whether that is a sales touch point or the like. Make the email subjects catchy or clear and save the email fluff. Most people skim through their emails and asking a subscriber to invest their time into a detailed email is not feasible. Instead, invite a user to click to learn more or engage further in a trackable way.
Watch how often you send emails campaigns
In some business industries, it is acceptable to send an email campaign 3 or more times per week (news outlets and subscription based platforms), whereas for a B2B businesses, bi-monthly email campaigns are quite sufficient. There is a fine line between not 'touching' your email contacts enough and doing so too much.
'Earn' your email subscribers
Though it can tempting to buy a list to boost your subscribers or trade lists with another company, it's not an ethical practice. Please, please, please consider not doing so. As a business, I'd rather have 250 email subscribers who truly engage with my email campaigns than have an email list of 5,000 who barely eek a 10% open rate.
Email Marketing meets Social Media Marketing
Many of the top email platforms, like MailChimp, offer the ability to share your email campaigns as they're sent to your social media platforms. You may notice some users unsubscribe from your email list because they follow you on social media, but do not let this alarm you. Consider sharing your emails to your social media accounts as another touch point. HOWEVER, make sure that when your emails are auto-shared to your social media accounts, that they're translating well and include copy that speaks to your connections about what they'll expect in your email communication.
Track, track, track
What's great about many email platforms is that they offer extensive tracking and avenues to truly dial into and diagnose your email lists. Take the time to weekly, or however often you send emails, dig into your email tracking to see what your consumers click on in your email campaigns, and what gets ignored. You can learn a lot by email subscriber and consumer email traffic patterns. Let their behavior guide your content marketing strategy. If certain topics resonate well with your audience, then produce similar content for future emails.
Comment below and tell us what your thoughts and experiences are with email marketing? Have you enjoyed great successes or found that email marketing does not bode well into your business? As always, feel free to contact us here at CC Communications if you need help with setting up or managing your enewsletter strategy.
