Email Marketing Made Easy

I recently attended an email marketing event hosted by the Seattle Chamber of Commerce in downtown Seattle. After a brief lunch and quick elevator ride to the 15th floor of the Rainier Tower, I was learning the ins and outs of email marketing. I want to share what I learned with you, loyal Drake Cooper blog reader.

Email marketing is viewed by some people as an increasingly ineffective marketing tool. To that, I will say; email marketing’s demise has been greatly exaggerated. Let’s look at a couple of stats. There is still plenty of life and opportunity left in email marketing:

72% people prefer to receive promotional content through email, compared to 17% who prefer social media. – MarketingSherpa

 

You are 6x more likely to get a click-through from an email campaign than you are from a tweet. – Campaign Monitor

 

81% of online shoppers who receive emails based on previous shopping habits were at least somewhat likely to make a purchase as a result of targeted email. – eMarketer

 

Like any channel, email marketing may not be the best way to deliver your brand’s message, but it’s at least worth your consideration when crafting the most effective marketing mix. Don’t just take my word, this guy agrees that email marketing can be an effective, fun way to increase brand equity. He loves GQ’s daily emails, largely because of their cleverly crafted subject lines and strange content like “Inside the Orthodox Jewish Hit Squad.” Who wouldn’t click on that? If we could have entire audiences as engaged as he is with GQ’s emails, we wouldn’t need to use any other channel. 

Here are a couple pointers that any brand (big or small) can focus on when creating an email marketing campaign. As always, we love chatting with new brands, so if you have any questions jump on over to our contact page.

Email Marketing Tips:

Know your audience

This is one of the most basic principles of marketing, and it stays true with email marketing. Understand who you are talking to, and how to talk to them. At a minimum, break down your email database by demographics, interests and engagement levels.

Focus on deliverability

Make sure that your emails are actually being delivered to recipients, not their spam filter, not bots, and not old email addresses. Regularly clean up your email lists, remove contacts with extremely low engagement rates, and people who unsubscribed. Overall, just make sure you are not wasting your marketing dollars.

Curated content

Curate the content in your emails to the different audience segments you have defined. I’m willing to bet audiences with high engagement rates might enjoy some more emails, readers with lower household incomes might enjoy more coupons, and audiences interested in cooking might like receiving more recipes.

Short and sweet subject lines 

Keep those subject lines simple. If you give away all the information in the subject line then why would anyone need to open it? Plus, subject lines like “Save BIG $$$ rite NOW at the SUPER store: BUY NOW and enter for a $RAFFLE$ to win $$$” is likely to get picked up by spam filters (and annoy your audience). Static subject lines have been known to perform well. But experiment with variable subject lines as well.

Be Easy 

Don’t make your audience work to consume your message. About 53% of emails are opened on mobile devices (Campaign Monitor). Keep this in mind when designing your emails. Do not make your audience pinch to zoom on their mobile phones. If they have to scroll (or swipe) 2-3 times to get to the bottom of the email, it may be too long.

 

Save wasted content 

If a piece of content did not engage a significant portion of recipients, keep it. Investigate why that piece of content did not perform well, package it up a little bit differently and use it again. This eliminates waste and helps you learn more about how to best deliver your brand’s message.

Provide immediate value

Don’t waste anyone’s time. Whether it is information, a deal, or satisfaction, provide the recipient immediate value. It’s good for your brand equity and engagement.

Understand email marketing’s purpose

Due to consumer attention span, medium limitations, and device limitations your emails can not tell the whole story, just a piece of. Make that part of the story intriguing enough to draw the recipient to your website or landing page. Make sure that your site delivers your brand’s message exceedingly well. If it doesn’t, call us.

Consistency is key

Your email marketing efforts is a part of your marketing mix, make sure it fits in well. Email marketing should be reinforcing the messages delivered on other platforms like social media, radio, television and display ads.

Use Online Tools

There are plenty of tools available to you on the internet for email marketing. Some better than others, some better suited for different types of organizations. Here is a brief list of email marketing tools for you to consider: Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, and Mailchimp.

Test, test, test

Make your emails measurable with tools like Google Analytics. Once they are measurable, experiment a little, find out the subject lines, types of content, and designs perform the best.

For more information, or if you would like to work with Drake Cooper to develop an email marketing campaign click here to contact us.