Email marketing is an indispensable tool in any sales campaign, because it is inexpensive and very effective.
However, this effectiveness is conditional on it being implemented correctly. Email marketing has many advantages, but it also has its tricks. Keep reading if you want to implement it successfully.
How to build your mailing list?
If you have a list of people interested in your product or service, then you have the most important input for email marketing, you just need to grow that list. If you don’t have a qualified contact list, follow the tips below to build one:
- Place a subscription form on your website and on social networks where you have a community. Ideally, this form should contain data relevant to your brand, although if it is too long to fill out, it may cause resistance.
- Set up an email verification to sign up your subscribers to the list, this makes the list more refined and only people who are really interested will enter.
- When you make a sale, set up a way to capture that customer for the list. It can be through a personal data form where there is a box to authorise the subscription.
- Offer something in return, in the form of a gift, for subscribing to your list. It is important that the gift is related to your brand and that it is something of value to your customers.
- Clarify what your posts are going to be about. Your subscribers should know what you are going to talk about and how often they will receive your newsletters. Establishing a suitable frequency is very important, newsletters cannot be too frequent because it is annoying and not too sporadic because they are forgotten.
- This procedure must be constant, so that the list of subscribers does not stop growing.
How to choose an email marketing manager?
Sending emails one by one can be a titanic task, and if you create groups you will be identified as spam. The solution to this is to automate the sending. An email marketing manager is a computer platform that allows you to automate the sending of emails.
The email marketing manager works by managing a database where all contacts are uploaded. It also includes a newsletter editor to create the message you are going to send.
That way, you can perform the task of sending your newsletter in just a few steps.
But the task does not end there, the email marketing manager offers metrics that are very important to analyse and that are vital for a successful marketing campaign.
For example, it tells you how many and which of your contacts opened the message, if the message has a link it tells you if it was opened and how many actions that contact took. With all this information, you can know if your strategies are working or if, on the contrary, you should modify them.
There are many email marketing managers on the market, with different functions and conditions. It is necessary to review all the features, make comparisons and evaluate them to choose the email marketing manager that best suits the needs of your campaign.
How to design the newsletter?
The newsletter is the message that we are going to send. It is very important and strategic, as it is the one in charge of achieving the actions we want.
It is very important to be clear about the objective of this message, for example, you may want to achieve a direct sale, but you may also want to drive traffic to your website or keep yourself in the minds of your potential customers.
Based on this objective, you should create the text, images and action buttons, always remembering not to overdo it with the information you include. It is better to send a single powerful idea that catches the attention and achieves its objective, than to be overwhelmed with a lot of data that will only get the subscriber to close the message.
Images and animations can be included, but in the right measure and with a clear objective, never to fill in. Light colours and dark fonts always work, unless the brand image requires other strategies.
A very important aspect of the newsletter is the subject line. The subject line is a sentence that titles the message and has the privilege that the subscriber can read it before opening it. Many times, the subscriber opens the message because of the subject line, so you need to think it through and write it cleverly.
What if you have a very low open rate?
The average open rate is around 20%, i.e. only one out of every 5 mass mailings you send is opened. So maybe you don’t have a low open rate, but your expectations were too high.
If your mass mailings have an open rate of less than 20%, you need to do an evaluation of both your subscriber list and your campaign. Do the following:
- Evaluate the reasons why people subscribed. It could be that they did it for the gift, but they are not interested in the topic you are conveying.
- Check the subject line of your messages, maybe they are not well written. Sometimes the subject lines don’t indicate the brand, or you don’t know what they are going to tell you about in the newsletter.
- Make sure you offer content that is of value, i.e. relevant to your customers. When someone opens a newsletter and doesn’t like it, they may not open subsequent newsletters.
- Check the frequency of the newsletters. They may be too frequent or too sporadic.
- Conduct a survey of subscribers who do not open messages. You’ll have to use all your ingenuity to get them to answer it, but it’s the best way to find out why they’re not interested in your content.
- Offer another gift to get at least one open, and change the strategy to get the attention of those elusive subscribers.
Email marketing is a tool with many advantages, don’t leave it aside in your sales strategy.
