Whether or not Benjamin Franklin ever said “by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail,” the quote is true for many things, including email campaigns. If you want to get the best results possible, it’s imperative to plan your campaigns thoroughly before launching them.
Effective planning and implementation of email strategies will increase customer engagement and loyalty. Conversely, if you get it wrong, you may end up driving customers to your competitors.
Additionally, leveraging the right tools for a fully optimized campaign is another factor to keep in mind. Using a software to verify email addresses is the first step to ensure email marketing success. Then, combine strategy with tools to continue the positive trend.
To get the best results when executing your email strategy, follow these five steps.
1. Clarify Your Goals
Before you get down to building an email strategy, you must be clear about what it is you want to achieve.
There are hundreds of reasons you may be planning an email campaign: attracting new customers, retaining the ones you have, increasing traffic to your website, and promoting a new product are among the main reasons marketers roll out email campaigns.
Whichever goal you have in mind, make it as specific as possible. The more effort you put into defining your goal, the easier it will become to create your email content and improve the overall effectiveness of your campaign.
2. Decide How To Measure Results
Establishing early on how you will track your success as the email campaign unfolds will prevent headaches later. Different goals will require different measures to track success. Measuring click-through rates requires analytical and email-automation tools to be set up to track clicks and tie them to the email recipient.
Putting these metrics in place after launching your campaign won’t capture all the data you need. If you are trying to reach the widest possible audience, monitoring your inbox rates may be of higher importance, and an email verification tool should be used before you hit ‘send.’
Carefully tracking your progress will enable you to make tweaks and changes to the email campaign as you learn what does and doesn’t work. If you lack the proper tools, your grasp of progress and success will be hazy at best.
3. Check Your Flow
Appealing subject lines are a must for email marketing. If they don’t relate to the content you’re sending, they can be detrimental to your open-and-read rates. Subject lines should honestly connect to your content. Misleading subject lines can result in your email being discarded, or worse, recipients unsubscribing from your list.
Keep in mind that inboxes don’t just display the subject line either; the first few lines of your email can be read without a client ever opening it. As such, the initial sentences should not only match the title of the email, but work to further engage the recipient.
There are a variety of ways in which you can do this. Use the opening lines to expand upon the subject line, summarize the content you are sending, or highlight the benefits you are offering the customer.
Email content should flow from subject line to sign-off and be clear and concise. Thoroughly review your work, or have someone do it for you. According to Boomerang the optimal length of sales and marketing emails is 50 to 125 words; this length yields a response rate of 50% or above.
Finally, organize content so that it can be easily scanned. According to some polls, as many as 61% of all emails are read on mobile devices. Furthermore, most 14 to 34 year olds will view their emails on a mobile, so make your content easily digestible for them. Email design templates can help you organize content and stay on track during the writing process.
We also highly recommend having a look at how to finish an email. You want to make sure that you not only introduce your email, but you want to finish it off in the best way possible too. You want your customers or whoever the email is to, that you give them something to remember your email by and make it stand out.
4. Test Your Content
It’s crucial to test your email campaign before you send them to customers. Basic testing of email content includes viewing the email from a range of browsers and screen resolutions to ensure the formatting works and looks professional across all of them.
A/B testing can be useful to figure out which template, color scheme, or call-to-action buttons will provide top results. When A/B testing, it is essential that only one element of your email is changed at a time. If you change more, you will never be sure which points work and which don’t.
5. Analyze Results
It’s a lot of hard work to set your goals, put in place processes to measure progress, craft the perfect email content, and test to make sure you are sending the best version. That’s why it would be negligent to overlook the results.
Regular analysis of your email marketing results will enable you to further refine your email strategy and optimize ROI (return on investment). It will also enable you to apply any lessons learnt from one campaign to the next, improving each campaign you embark upon.
Email marketing doesn’t finish when you hit send. In fact, that’s where the real campaign begins! Make sure you set realistic and measurable goals, follow the entire process, and analyze the outcomes to ensure you are working towards your final goal each step of the way.
Check out ConvertKit for your email marketing needs.