So You Want to Be a Successful Email Marketer?
Good thing you came here! Read on to learn about this week’s course from Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing University taught by Eric Groves, the Senior VP of Constant Contact. And don’t forget to check out last week’s post on Inbound Lead Nurturing. But before we get started, you might be wondering, “Email marketing? Isn’t that outbound marketing?” Well my friends, I learned that if you’re doing it right, you’re delivering value to the recipient. So, if you think of it as an inbound marketing tool you’ll do it right because you’ll sit in the recipients’ seat and think about what you can give to them, what you would want to receive.
So what is email marketing all about?
Well, like everything else seems to be, your current and potential clients! To be successful you must deliver professional communications to an interested audience with information they find valuable. It provides you with an opportunity to speak out to your consumers; it’s all about taking your brand and your essence and delivering it.
Ok, why email marketing?
Well, for starters, it works because almost everyone your business needs to reach reads it. It’s also cost-effective. You’ll be spending a fraction of the money sending emails that it takes to send direct mail, which means you can also do it more often.
The Big Three
There are 3 main concepts to keep in mind when thinking of email marketing campaigns. You need to focus on making connections, informing those connections, and growing your business.
Making Connections
The thing to start with is building a quality email list, and make sure you have quality over quantity! There’s no point in having 100 emails in your list if you know 75 of those people are not interested in the topic you’re writing to them about. Collect names of people who really want to receive your information.
Three basic questions to ask yourself when building your connections are:
- Are you collecting contact information at every customer touch point?
- Are you asking for permission as well as contact info?
- Are you clearly describing your email frequency and content?
Informing Your Audience
In order to inform your audience, like blogs and your website content, focus on creating valuable email content. And when creating that valuable content keep in mind your objectives and what you want to happen. Do you want to promote your product or business? Inform people about your industry? Increase loyalty? Knowing your objectives will help you figure out how you’re going to measure success and figure out what information you want to collect and track. Now decide what email format would be most effective for you.
Newsletters usually have educational content, a small amount of images, and lots of text. The calls to action are pretty soft, saying things like, “learn more,” or, “read more.” And newsletters are typically sent out monthly or quarterly. Now, a newsletter can contain an unlimited number of articles, but Groves reminds us that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Promotions/invitations/surveys have more images and less text and are sent out monthly if not more frequently.
Announcements on the other hand are sent out very frequently for save-the-dates, thank yous, etc.
Keep it concise! Host large bodies of content on your website, in a pdf, or in a longer archived version, not in your monthly newsletter. Email only essential information.
Getting email ready. When people look at a message to determine whether or not to open it, the two key factors are typically the “from” line (do I know you?) and the “subject” line (do I care?). In your from line, depending on what your consumers are most familiar with, use either your name or your brand’s name. But be consistent in whatever you decide to go with. For the subject line, if you have “monthly newsletter,” that’s no fun, and it’s certainly not exciting enough to make anyone care. Grab their attention and tell your consumers what the value of your email is in the subject line.
Growing your business
A great tip is to have a “forward to a friend” option in your email so that people can forward your great, valuable content to a friend easily.
You should also try to understand bounced and blocked email, as well as nonexistent addresses (check for misspellings, try to get new address). For undeliverable/mailbox full/email blocked messages, try resending, correct temporary issues, or obtain a new address if a recurring issue is present.
By tracking click through rates (or the “open” rate–who is opening your emails) you can spot trends that you can capitalize on, whether it is the time people are opening the emails and capitalizing on that to get a greater open rate, or seeing what topics you are writing on that are the most popular.
So go get out there and start a great email marketing campaign! And don’t forget to check back next week for Analyzing Inbound Marketing.
