You probably receive 1000’s of emails yearly from businesses all over the world. Of course, they can feel spammy, but there’s no denying the impact a well-crafted message can have on your customers—not to mention conversions.
Email marketing helps you connect with your audience to promote your brand and increase sales. You can do a lot of things with emails, like sell products, share some news, improve your cart abandonment rate or tell a story.
Now before you jump into email marketing, we’ve got some tips to get you started on the right foot.
- Create an Email Marketing Plan
Define your audience
No matter what you sell, you need to have a clear idea of who your audience is in order to effectively communicate with them. Dig a little deeper and segment users within your audience so you can send them personalized and targeted emails that help increase engagement, build trustful relationships and generate greater ROI.
Signup sources
Some of the most valuable data your signup form has to offer is how and where subscribers sign up for your list. If you’re an e-commerce business with your store connected to an email marketing platform, knowing where your customers joined your list can give you a better idea of how to communicate with them and where you might want to focus your marketing efforts going forward.
Segments and groups
Once you’ve identified smaller collections of people within your larger audience, you’ll be able to create groups and segments to send more relevant and personalized emails to your recipients—and the more relevant the campaign, the better the results. There are times when you’ll want to send to your entire list, but by segmenting users and taking advantage of segmentation tools to significantly increase the click-through rates and e-commerce orders your campaigns generate.
Establish your sending frequency and goals
There’s nothing set in stone about how often you should email your customers, but if you send too often, your subscribers are likely to tune out what you have to say or unsubscribe altogether. Some users that run a blog or news website might choose to send daily updates to their subscribers, while other users only send twice a month so subscribers stay excited about their emails. Choose to send your email campaign at your own pace, and check the unsubscribe rates and the click through rates to adjust the frequency if needed.
Make a schedule
One way to make sure you’re staying on track is to create a content calendar to schedule your campaigns, blog posts, social media posts, and more.
Your email marketing schedule will depend on your industry, the types of content you send (content marketing strategy), and your sending frequency.
- Design your emails
Design tips
When designing email campaigns, focus on your message and keep your design straightforward. We suggest laying out all the elements for your campaign in a hierarchy, putting your most important information or the main takeaway toward the top so people can quickly scan your email if they’re short on time.
- Test your emails
Test in different email clients and ISPs
All email clients are created differently, which means that the campaign you designed in your email marketing platform might look slightly different in your subscribers’ inboxes. Be sure to check the emails on mobile devices as well as they can look different in responsive designs.
Send test emails to friends and coworkers
If you have any friends or coworkers who can check your email for typos and give you some feedback on the layout, you can send them a test email so they can preview the campaign directly in their inbox.
Find the best version with A/B Testing campaigns
Not sure which subject line will get the most opens and clicks? Think there might be a certain time of day your customers are most likely to make a purchase through your campaign? Running an A/B test lets you experiment with different versions of your emails to see how the changes you make impact your results.
- What you can do with marketing automation
Unlike regular campaigns, an automation is a targeted email or series of emails that you can set and forget. From a welcome email series to follow up emails after a purchase to rewarding your customers with a special incentive, automation helps you streamline your communications with customers so you have more time to focus on creating content and increasing return on investment (ROI). Plus, you can design, send, and track order notifications to update customers on purchases they made from your store.
- Measure your performance
The data collected in your email marketing reports will help you refine your marketing strategy going forward.
Opens and clicks
These are the most obvious statistics for measuring campaign engagement, as they indicate how well your subject lines and campaign content resonates with a particular list. But it’s important to consider how your open and click through rates compare to other companies in your industry—otherwise you’re looking at your statistics in a vacuum.
E-commerce data
If you’ve connected your store to your email marketing platform and turned on e-commerce link tracking for your campaigns, you can view purchase data for your subscribers in campaign reports, subscriber profiles, and on the account dashboard.
Website traffic
The campaigns you send can help you direct more traffic to your website or online store. And there are a few integrations you can sync with your email marketing platform so you can track any trends in website traffic or e-commerce activity after you send a campaign.
What’s Next?
Now that you know the in’s and outs of email marketing, use these tips to create your first campaign! Be sure to check out our Good Commerce digital products here for more digital marketing tips!