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If your email marketing campaign seems to be slowly fading away, it doesn’t mean that your strategy is doomed. Making simple, small adjustments can make all the difference and bring brand reinforcement, customer interaction, sales and va-voom back to your emails. Often overlooked, cross check these key points with your current efforts and see what you’re missing.
Is What You’re Sending Valuable?
Does your message provide valuable information? Is it purposeful for recipients to read? Think about the emails you receive as a customer. If a business continues to send message after message of “blah,” then eventually the recipient will stop reading. A bookstore could offer information about ways to store books while maintaining good condition or an auto dealer could offer a step-by-step guide to checking your own oil. These kinds of email do not convert directly into sales but they build customer relationships.
Share It
Are your emails easy for recipients to share? “Share This,” and “Tweet This” plugins are great ways to engage customers and get noticed. Most email service providers like JangoMail.com make it easy to integrate these buttons into your emails.
Do Something Different
Spice up your customer relationships. Step outside the usual email and offer readers something they aren’t used to. Send a funny video, meme or image that entertains and enforces engagement as well as enforces your brand. Trends in social media are great places to find inspiration.
Make It Mobile
More people are accessing their emails from mobile than ever before. It’s frustrating to try to open an email that isn’t compatible with your phone or takes minutes to download. Make sure your email format converts to mobile and tablet. Choose images that are easy to download and make sure links and CTA’s work.
Do You Have the Right Intention?
Use emails to build customer relationships. Create real content that offers something for readers to deepen relationships. Often, marketers get caught up in the idea of turning messages into sales instantly when email can be used to build lasting loyalty and repeating sales when done with the intention of building relationships.
Know Your Audience
Take a serious look at your emails. Do they sound like and advertisement? Too authoritative, filled with industry jargon? This may be turning readership away. Communicate on a human level. Be simple, clear and conversational. Taking a more narrative approach to emails is more inviting and directly speaks to your market on their level.
Calls to Action
Calls to Action should be visible, inviting and front and center in an email. Some CTA’s can be too small or are placed near the bottom of the email. Does your CTA make people want to click? Is it one of the first things a reader sees? Making simple changes like these can make big changes in your campaign.
Are You Taking Advantage?
Customer data and research is a major benefit to email marketing. Utilizing email lists to send surveys to get consumer feedback and researching trends in readership and buying patterns can pinpoint problems, show needs and help shape future campaigns. Not doing adequate research and making changes where they are needed can make or break an email campaign.
Brian Foster spent five years in the IT field as a desktop support tech and supervisor. He is interested in networking, cloud computing and social networking.
