How to optimize your email marketing campaigns

Even with Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, and Twitter Ads, email marketing remains one of the best forms of digital marketing. This is because it is a very cost-effective, and targeted form of marketing. It can sometimes deliver a better return on investment than all other digital marketing channels. Email marketing is said to be forty times more effective at converting people than Facebook and Twitter combined according to a study by McKinsey.

Another email marketing study called the Deloitte Global Mobile Consumers Survey revealed that the first thing that 58 percent of the 2.6 billion email users do online when they wake up is to check their email.

One reason marketers love email marketing and will continue using it is the direct line of communication it provides. Unlike, social media and PPC advertising, email marketing feels more personal and targeted. That’s why it is so efficient at converting to sales.

While email marketing remains the best marketing channel for building an audience and boosting conversion for small businesses and freelancers, a lot has changed with improving technology. Improved marketing technology has made email marketing even more effective. Using smart modern email marketing strategies will boost your conversion rate and get you better clients. So, if you are a business or freelancer looking to boost your conversion to sales, this article explores some useful tips to make your email marketing more effective for conversion.

1. Define the target audience

The first step of any marketing campaign is identifying the goal. You need to know what you aim to achieve with your email marketing campaign. Do you want more sales? Do you want to drive more traffic to your website? Do you want to inform and educate your subscribers about your industry? Or do you want to do all these? Knowing your email marketing goals will help you define your target audience.

Once you have a solid idea who your target audience is and what your goals are, you can proceed to create your newsletter. Also, you can create separate newsletters depending on your aim, so each subscriber gets precisely what they opted in for.

2. Get quality email addresses

Quality is important in almost every aspect of marketing including your email subscriber list. Effective email marketing is dependent on the quality of the email list, not the quantity. It is not about how big your subscriber list is but the quality of the list. Are they a bunch of old emails from many years ago? Or is your email list filled with spammy email addresses?

If you have lots of bad quality emails, you will not be able to achieve your email marketing goals because you will most likely be sending emails to no one.

To get quality email addresses, it is advisable to use double opt-in when collecting emails. This will help eliminate spam to ensure that only your ideal customers or clients are subscribing to your email list.

Ask for emails from your customers; on your website, during phone calls, and at the point of sales. You can also have an amazing opt-in offer that cannot be rejected. You can offer the PDF version of one of your most popular blog posts or provide a discount for your services or product in exchange for an email address. Confirm every email address you receive using double opt-ins.

3. Use visual content to engage users

Humans assimilate visual content – images, videos, infographic etc. – faster than text. Our brains process images a whopping 60,000 times faster than text. To put it simply, visual images engage users more than bland text.

If you want to engage your email subscribers or pique their interest in a content or information you are sharing with them, use a lot of visuals. The days where you can engage readers with bold, underlined, and italic content is long gone.

Videos, especially, are a hit with users and that is why everyone including top social media platforms are embracing it. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have all embraced videos because live videos and stories have become a hit among social media users. Also, Instagram is now offering a full-on video streaming service with the launch of IGTV. The movement towards videos by these platform shows that visuals are crucial to achieving your marketing goals.

To include video content in your email campaign, you do not need to create new videos; you can just embed videos from your YouTube page or your website. Uploading videos on your blog and sharing to your email subscribers boosts engagement in your email and website.

4. A/b test your campaign

For an effective marketing campaign, you need to test different strategies. This helps you know the approach that is most efficient for your audience. You can run A/B tests to know when best to send emails to your list, what type of content engages them the most, and the visuals that work best with your subscribers.

Several blogs and marketers will give you industry ideas of what works best. They will tell you infographics work better than images, or short videos work better than long videos. While they might be right generally speaking, what works for everyone else might not work for you.

So, it is best to analyze your own data to know what works. Run A/B test campaigns for your email marketing and study your data to know what strategies are boosting conversions and increasing sales.

Conclusion

The best part of email marketing is that it engages your target audience directly. Your job is to find out how best to engage them to get the most conversion. You can also outsource this job to an experienced email marketing agency.

The four tips discussed above can help optimize any email campaign marketing for better conversion. However, it is important you test your campaigns to know what works best for you. Try different visual content, and look for different ways to get quality images.