Email consistently ranks among the top marketing channels for many businesses. Despite little change over the years, email continues to foster strong engagement with valuable leads and drive customer conversions. With engaging messaging and well-coordinated campaigns, email can play an important role in your brand’s digital marketing efforts.
Email Marketing Basics
Email marketing centers around a reliable email platform and a well-maintained contact list. There are many platforms to consider, and most offer free plans for accounts with contact lists under certain thresholds. Providers range from simpler, email-focused software such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact to more robust offerings such as HubSpot*.
You can populate your contact list from existing customers and leads who’ve indicated interest in receiving communications from you. However, you should continue to build subscribers through your other marketing channels. Opportunities range from featuring an email sign-up on your website to collecting contact information at in-person events.
Email Goals
As with any initiative, approach email marketing with your business goals in mind. Ultimately, your messaging needs to connect shoppers with the next steps to engage with your brand. Determine what action makes the most sense for your business and your audience(s), and limit your call to action to one primary “ask” per email.
Email Timing
Send campaigns with a consistent frequency that makes sense for your business and doesn’t overwhelm your recipients. Many brands are successful with deploying eblasts monthly and only sharing special one-off emails as needed throughout the year.
The timing of your email deployments is also important. Your customer personas should inform the optimal days and times that your subscribers are likely to engage with your content. Many business types are successful by emailing in the mornings during the middle of the week. Others do well in scheduling emails outside of traditional working hours. Test send times and determine what performs best with your contacts, based on analytics and customer feedback.
Email Elements
When designing an email campaign, you can customize several elements to improve performance. The “from” name seems straightforward, though consider using the business owner’s name or other public-facing team member rather than simply your business name. This can provide a more personal impression and increase email engagement.
For your subject line, choose a brief headline that attracts recipients to open your email without giving a spammy impression. For example, headlines with words in all capital letters can potentially land your email in the recipients’ junk folders. You should also craft a preview message, the short text that appears by the subject line before an email is opened. This text should be brief and encourage the subscriber to open your email without raising alarms of potential spam.
Once opened, your email content should focus on engaging the reader and encouraging a single primary action, such as browsing a product sale or booking a reservation. Including multiple “asks” in a single email can leave recipients feeling scattered or focused only on the last item they see.
Before sending your eblast to subscribers, send a test email to yourself and view it on multiple device types. Ensure your email’s desktop experience translates well to mobile, as most recipients will likely view it on their phones.
Email Analytics
Once your campaign has been sent, email providers offer analytics on how subscribers engage with it. Review the percentages of your list that successfully received your email, those who opened your message, and those who clicked through to your website. As you send additional emails, use this data to identify the types of messaging that draw the most interest from subscribers and which days/times attract the most engagement.
Your website analytics should segment data of visitors arriving from email by default. Consider adding UTM parameters to your email links to capture additional information, such as segmenting user behavior by eblast type or content.
Next Steps
While this guide only scratches the surface of email marketing, it should highlight the importance of this channel and offer insights into developing your email strategy. From here, several optimizations can further improve your campaigns’ performance, including automatically personalizing emails with your subscribers’ information, A/B testing variables such as subject lines, and implementing automated drip campaigns based on your leads’ interactions with your brand.
