Email marketing is still a very effective digital marketing strategy used by millions of brands. However, to achieve truly great results with it, you need to be up to date with all the latest techniques used in this field. Hence, here are the seven best tips to update your old-fashioned email marketing strategy.
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#1 Let Subscribers Choose
First and foremost, you need to look at your mailing list. How did you grow it? Did you buy these contacts? Did these users choose to subscribe to you on their own? The best case is when your mailing list was built organically over time through a variety of techniques to make it more diverse. However, no matter how you got your list, you can still go a step further and let your subscribers choose what they want to get from you via email.
By letting your subscribers choose what kind of content they prefer, it will be easier for you to segment your audience. And once you have different segments to work with, you can personalize and customize your emails for these specific segments. Through personalization, your email marketing efforts will become more effective and successful both in the short term and in the long run.
If you already have a mailing list but don’t know your subscribers’ preferences, it’s a good idea to directly send out an email asking them to choose their preferences. When you start looking for new subscribers, make sure to require them to opt-in through a confirmation email. Likewise, make them choose their preferences during the opt-in or even before that when they subscribe initially.
#2 Clean Your Mailing List Regularly
Speaking of your mailing list, there is one more thing you need to do with it now and keep doing from time to time. Cleaning your mailing list regularly is important for a variety of reasons. On one hand, doing so will help you get a better idea about who of your subscribers are actually active and interested in your content. Likewise, having a clean list will help you get more accurate metrics about your email marketing and further personalize your content for the different segments of your audience.
Obviously, keeping your mailing list clean from the start is the best thing you can do, so utilize the opt-in and preferences approach explained earlier. In addition to that, think about the ways you get your subscribers in the first place. For instance, if someone searched “how can I buy a dissertation”, found your website, loved your blog content, and decided to subscribe to your list, then they will likely be an active subscriber. On the other hand, if they only subscribed to participate in your giveaway, they might stay passive in the future.
As for the cleanup itself, there are different tactics you can use to perform it. Look at your metrics and see which subscribers haven’t engaged with your emails for several months. You can remove them from your list. If you see a high bounce rate, then there are probably quite a few email addresses on your list that are pretty much useless to you due to being inactive or for other reasons.
#3 Align Email and Social Media Marketing
Both email marketing and social media marketing are extremely powerful on their own, but when combined and used together, they can become even more effective for your overall digital marketing strategy. Here are some things you can do to align the two:
- Cross-promote your social media accounts through your emails and your email newsletter on your social media accounts.
- Align your schedules and send our emails at the same time as you publish new content on your social media accounts.
- Launch a giveaway or contest on social media and require participants to subscribe to your email newsletter.
#4 Identify and Fix Broken Links
Linking may not be as important in email marketing as it is in content marketing, but it can definitely be a deal-breaker for many subscribers if your links are broken or completely absent. That’s why you always need to identify and fix all the broken links you find in your email marketing content.
All your emails need to have at least a few links in them for different purposes. Some of these will direct subscribers to check out your social media accounts, others will point to help pages, and yet others can be used for landing pages. No matter what kind of purpose each link has, they should all point to precisely the destination you want them to have.
Likewise, all the linking on your website should be correct, including the subscription page for users to be able to subscribe to your mailing list. If you don’t know how to integrate links into your web and email content in a natural way, you can always hire a professional writer from a custom writing reviews site like Best Essays Education. An expert writer will be able to include links seamlessly and where relevant without overstuffing your content with them.
#5 Consider Working with Sponsors
Even though your primary aim with emails is to promote your own brand and its products and services, you can still consider working with sponsors for extra income. Besides, using sponsored content is usually easier than you may think and the income from this can then be used as a budget for your email marketing as a whole. One more benefit of using sponsored content is that you will need to produce less of your own content for your emails.
Keep in mind that there are different ways you can integrate sponsored content into your emails. You can do this in the form of visuals, text, links, and more. You can even have ads as your banners in the emails if you don’t want the sponsored content to take up too much space. Of course, you have the option to send separate sponsored emails, but you need to consider how your audience will perceive such emails before agreeing to send them.
#6 Add Urgency and Scarcity
Urgency and scarcity are essential for sales, but they can also be used in marketing to great success. By adding urgency and scarcity to your email content, you can maximize the results of your campaigns and make users act on your CTAs more frequently. Whether the offer includes content, products, bonuses, or something else, there is likely a way for you to add urgency and scarcity to it.
For example, let’s say someone searched “how can I pay for a research paper” and found your website. There, they saw that you have a discount for clients that subscribe to your email newsletter. This can be a great incentive for the person to subscribe, but you can go a step further. You can have a month during which new subscribers will get a free service from you, but only if they subscribe to you until the end of the said month.
#7 Analyze Your Metrics Constantly
Last but not least, don’t forget to analyze your metrics constantly to see what works well and what doesn’t. Some tactics could be more effective for your overall email marketing strategy while others could be counterproductive. If you can differentiate between the two and see what works best, you can plan your future campaigns better and with more nuance.
It is also crucial to analyze the right metrics. For instance, you might be seeing a steady growth of your subscription rate, but if you notice that many of the new addresses on your list get your emails to bounce, then those overall growth numbers are likely skewed due to something you have recently done to get to grow your list quickly (e.g. a giveaway that required participants to subscribe to you).
Bottom Line
All in all, updating your email marketing strategy shouldn’t be a big problem as long as you follow the tips above. Making even a few of these changes will already make your email marketing more effective and efficient, but if you make all of them, you will achieve even better results.
Author Bio
Anna likes writing from her university years. When she graduated from the Interpreters Department, she realized that translation was not so interesting, as writing was. She trains her skills now working as a freelance writer on different topics. Always she does her best in the posts and articles.