Best uses and best practice for email marketing
With so many different and innovative ways of getting in front of prospects, there’s plenty marketers who say email has lost it’s lustre.
It's still a super low-cost way to reach your audience, so compelling - and necessary if you’re on a tight budget. On the negative side if your emails are unsolicited, it’s an unwelcome annoyance to your audience – same sentiment if you’re bombarding them several times a week.
Email isn’t dead, but it has lost it’s way. In our hyper connected world, it’s not always being used to best effect.
Change your strategy. Repurpose, and you’ll notice the difference. In this article we look at how to increase email marketing effectiveness.
· Best uses
· Best practice
Best uses
We’ve already said that for cold call prospecting email is cheap but not very effective. There are of course exceptions - for example partner marketing introductions, or when email is part of a larger targetted campaign where the audience are likely to have some awareness, recognition or interest.
A pretty standard marketing journey is to ask people to sign up for regular updates and news. If you’ve signed up some followers, they’re interested. Email it’s a great way of keeping in touch and keeping them informed, so it’s important to work out your contact strategy and build a pipeline of activity:
· Invites to webinars/events – with automated reminders and follow up
· Thought leadership – use cases, testimonials, commentary
· Announcements – press coverage, awards, financial results and wins
· Nurture – If you downloaded content X you might like content Y
· Round up emails (people scan read so curate a list with links)
Aside from acquisition activity, Email is efficient for Account Based Marketing – especially if it’s personalised from the account director. Keeping clients informed helps to build and strengthen relationships. It opens the door for conversations and it will also help improve your CSat
Integration with your CRM platform is a must! It will enable you to know much more about your audience. Lead scoring and segmentation lets you see who is engaging and about what. Target your audience with things they’re interested in, and you build relationships and drive conversations. You can also set up automated journeys based on responses and actions.
Quarantine is important. Avoid overloading your audience – 4 emails in a day from different people in one organisation is overkill, so you need a holistic approach to put your customers and prospects first.
In the email itself, layout must easy on the eye, with clear signposting, summary boxes - and don't be afraid to add some animated gifs to
Best Practice - 5 tips to make your email activity more effective:
1. Compelling Subject Lines
Seen this lots of times – marketing teams spend ages drafting and designing the email content, then at the last minute they chuck in a subject line. If no one opens it, you’ve wasted your effort. The subject line is the first thing your audience sees, so make it count. It should be compelling. Give the reader a reason to open your email. Keep it short and to the point. There are several approaches to test with your audience (see below). A/B test to see what works best. Remember there’s also a subhead. While we are on the topic, think about who the sender is – no reply@company name is not the best start point.
2. Personalise
Personalisation is not just about addressing the recipient by their name, though that’s at least a start. Use data to tailor the content of your emails to meet the specific needs and interests of each recipient – for example if you know the recipient role is finance it makes sense to include it. More effort, but it significantly increases engagement rates (more on call to action below).
3. Mobile friendly
More and more people read emails on their mobile devices – business and consumer. Ensure your emails are mobile-friendly. Sounds like a no brainer but use responsive design to ensure your emails look right, no matter the device.
4. Clear Call to Action
Every email should have a purpose. You should make it super clear what action you want the recipient to take. Whether it's visiting your website (deep link, not home page), find out more, or signing up for a webinar, make sure your call to action is clear and compelling. Another thing you can A/B test.
5. Test and Learn
Over time you learn and refine - and boost effectiveness. It’s worth the investment. Test different subject lines, email formats, send times and call to action messaging (and button colours) to see what works best for your audience. Use analytics to track open rates, click-through rates, and conversions to measure the success of your campaigns. As I said earlier, you get more insight if email is hooked up your CRM.
You can test different approaches to subject lines – see what resonates for the different types of email. Here's a few to consider:
Reminder – Two days until our webinar/ You haven't registered for our...
Testimony – Our CEO discusses.../Research reveals the 5 keys to ...
Announce – New Launch/ New Survey/ Revealed:...
Command – Sign up today/Set the pace with...
Benefit – How you can drive more value from ..
Educate – Learn how to/ Find out how
Teaser – The best advice you’ll get this week
FOMO – See which FinTechs are growing fastest
Next Steps
If you need help with your Marketing comms strategy - or would you like a consultation or audit on your marketing effort, our GTM Marketing experts can help – check out our rates now.
You can also read the blogs and use our free templates for a range of Marketing topics, including Integrating your Marketing tech stack, Modern Marketing Structures, Linking Business and Marketing Strategy, GTM strategy, Value Propositions, Agency selection and Agency briefing. They're all in the Hive Knowledge Hub.
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