Email marketing campaigns don’t always give you the ROI that you want right away because it takes a while to really build trust, create a solid readership, and get in a good rhythm with your content.
Successful companies will even often segment their audiences by creating buyer personas and creating multiple email marketing campaigns to offer the most relevant content for different groups of people.
Whatever your strategy, it’s essential always to make sure that you have a solid foundation.
Consider the checklist below to help you ensure that your email-marketing campaign is doing the best it can for your company’s success.
Your Email Marketing Campaign Should…
- Feature your business name. While a logo is great, include your business name somewhere on the email for those who have never recognized your logo before and want to do more research. This is one many companies forget!
- Include a link to your website. Between all of the links to different web pages, promotions, and click-to-call links, sometimes websites forget to put a link to their company website.
- Tell readers what to do at a glance. Email marketing is meant for the readers who skim. Ensure readers know what to do next even with nothing but a glance at your message.
- Have social connections visible. For obvious reasons, social sharing buttons are a must! People may not want to share your email marketing message, but it also allows them to connect with you there. Here’s a collection of beautiful social media buttons to use.
- Test content and timing. Many companies spend all of their testing time on visual design. While this is important for email marketing campaigns and messages, you should also test your subject lines and different times of the day to see where you get the highest open rate. After all, the design won’t matter if no one opens the email to see it. Most email marketing platforms allow lots of testing capabilities.
- Use your analytics. You want to feature your most popular content and pages in an email-marketing newsletter, so use your analytics to see what people are interested in reading. You may also want to insert opt-in forms for these posts. Plus, any successful email marketing campaign relies on data. You cannot succeed in something you are not measuring.
- Include an unsubscribe option. Not having this option easy to spot comes off as tricky, and all you’re doing is annoying your readers and spreading a bad reputation, thus bringing down your reviews.
Your Email Marketing Campaign Should Not…
- Have large images. This is the big one. While images are a great way to grab a reader’s attention (especially on a website), people want their emails to open quickly, and they want to get the message quickly. Images could slow this down on both accounts.
- Use a do-not-reply email. While these may be great for large companies managing a lot of email addresses, it simply doesn’t look welcoming, and it doesn’t encourage engagement. Use an email address people will recognize to help improve your CTR, and then create a system to weed out the spam. It’s worth the extra work in the end.
- Include more than three links. As with your website, too many links look spammy and can get confusing. Keep email marketing to the point with no more than three links.
- Have a general subject line. You want to promise something specific in your subject line because this is all you have to grab a reader’s attention. If you offer a general subject line, it’s much easier to simply hit “delete” before even opening the message.
- Forget about mobile. More emails are read on mobile than on a desktop these days. Make sure your email marketing messages are working for this size screen. A few content management systems have powerful mobile usability optimization features. Shopify and Wix are two examples. Wix is more affordable.
Email marketing is still the most effective way to re-engage your customers and convert those who didn’t immediately convert. These tips will hopefully make it even more effective!
