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Email marketing. Is it still relevant? Should your brand incorporate email campaigns into your marketing strategy? Where do you even start?
Email marketing is an effective and affordable method of communication with your customers and prospective customers that was, at one time, the end-all be-all to direct marketing. Email campaigns inform your email list about new products, upcoming events, or discounted products and services. Email campaigns also educate your audience about your brand and keep them engaged with your brand and mission. All in all, when a part of your marketing strategy, email marketing impacts your lead generation, customer loyalty, and brand awareness.
With 4 billion daily email users, email marketing is essential to your brand’s marketing efforts. Out of those marketers who have seen significant success from their email campaigns, 4 out 5 would rather give up social media than email marketing.
Let’s take a look at what the data says on email usage.
Email campaigns deliver an average open rate of 20% and a click-through rate of 3.3%. However, social media marketing click-through rates are less than 1%, making email marketing more effective in regards to conversions and driving revenue.
When it comes to 77% of people across all demographics prefer to hear from brands and organizations through email, popping right up in their inbox rather than a social media ad or phone call.
Email is already producing a solid ROI for 60% of marketers. But how much exactly? According to HubSpot, email marketing produces $42 for every $1. Basically, on average, email marketing has 4200% ROI.
Now that you have the knowledge and understanding of the role that email marketing can play in your marketing efforts, let’s take a look at some best practices. Here are tips for creating successful email marketing campaigns for your brand.
- Be sure to include social share buttons at the bottom of your email campaigns. This cross promotion will encourage your recipients to check out your social media platforms and, hopefully, they will follow you if they are not already.
- Use lead magnets–a free item or service given in exchange for contact details. For example, your brand could offer best practices, resourceful checklists, downloadable eBooks, step-by-step guides, etc. to entice recipients and readers to submit their contact information to you.
- Feature blog posts. Including other links throughout your newsletter keeps your recipients engaged and allows them to take a deeper dive into what information you are sharing in your newsletter.
- Automate your email campaigns as much as possible. Automation allows you to improve conversion rates, increase efficiency, and easily scale your emails. Plus, it saves you time so you can focus on other tasks at hand.
- Include a compelling subject line. Craft a subject line that will grab the attention of your recipients and make your email stand out in their inbox. Make sure that your subject line is truthful and honest but also excites your recipients.
- Optimize your email templates for mobile devices. Roughly 1 in 5 email campaigns is not optimized for mobile devices, making it difficult for recipients to navigate through. Optimizing for mobile ensures that your newsletter will display on smaller screens, reformat content, and resize images depending on screen size, improving the experience for your recipients.
How to measure the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns
Make performance tracking a priority. Use data sources to analyze the performance of your email deployments so you can better understand user behaviors and optimize your emails for your recipients. Recommended KPIs to track are open rate, click rate, conversions, and unsubscribers.
Open Rate – The percentage of your distribution list that opened your email. If your open rate is higher, then your subject line may have resonated more with your audience. If your open rate is lower, then you may need to reflect on the variety of your distribution list or frequency of your email deployments.
Click Rate – The percentage of delivered email that received at least 1 click. This KPI is a great indication of whether or not your distribution list found your email content interesting or relevant enough to them to engage with. To improve your click rate, try crafting content that is more useful to your audience and including multiple embed links rather than one or two.
Conversions – The number of successful conversions you received from a specific email deployment. This KPI is a great way to see how truly successful your email campaigns are and how they help your brand reach its goal.
Unsubscribers – The number of recipients who unsubscribed from your distribution list. While you do not want to lose interested customers, receiving a few unsubscribers can be beneficial. Unsubscribers narrows down your list so that it is composed of loyal customers who are truly interested in the content that you are sharing.
You can also take a look at these average email stats by industry.
Whether you need to realign your email campaigns with your brand strategy or refresh your email creative, FUEL can help. Contact us today to start the discussion.
