It takes time and effort to create effective and long-withstanding email campaigns, so follow these 6 best practices to ensure you’re getting the most out of your email marketing.
- Set Goals: Why do you want to send that email to contacts or prospects? What are you looking to achieve? Set goals to drive traffic to your website, to drive sales, to promote a new product by providing an offer, etc. Setting a goal beforehand will allow you to determine your level of success.
- Create Lists: Creating segmented lists will help you when it comes to providing relevant content to each audience. This way you’ll be sure not to send a new business focused email to a current customer.
- Plan Content: Speaking of different audiences, think about your goal and what kind of content you want to provide. Keep in mind why they signed up for your email list in the first place. Are they expecting to receive a sales-focused email with an offer or is it more informational? Planning content in advance is essential for long-term success. The thought of creating a content calendar may be frightening, but don’t worry there are free email marketing planning templates to help you stay organized.
- Enhance Design: Whether you’re using templates or creating your own layouts, you should know the fundamentals of a good email blast design. A few best practices include keeping the most important information above the fold (mainly your call to action), adding social media sharing icons, using an easy-to-read font and providing scannable content.
- Optimize: Along with #4, your emails should be optimized to fit a range of devices. Have you tried to read an email from your phone or tablet that’s not formatted properly? With 91% of consumers checking their email at least once per day on their smartphone, this should not be ignored.
- Test & Analyze: Email marketing programs such as Emma, iContact and countless others give access to analytics so you can see which email campaigns are performing best. In most of these programs you can also conduct A/B split tests where you can test subject lines, email links, and layouts to see which are most effective.
In the end, it’s vital that you set concrete goals and measure your success.
Are you getting the results you want from your email campaigns?
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Until next time,
