On average, we send around 102.6 trillion emails each year, and that number continues to increase. That means there are brands just like yours fighting to get your audience's attention when they check their inbox.
With so much competition, it's crucial that your subscribers pay attention to your content to increase your conversions and prolong engagement.
Why use email marketing?
There are several reasons why your business needs email marketing to reach its goals and continue growing.
1. Increase conversions.
You can create email campaigns that promote your products, improve engagement and increase conversions. A whopping 96% of marketers use email marketing to drive traffic to their website. Offers and fresh content that go straight to your subscribers' inboxes will familiarize them with your brand until they feel ready to purchase.
2. Offer convenience and accessibility.
Not only is it convenient to spread your marketing messages with email marketing software, but it's also easy for subscribers to receive that information. They can access their inbox through the device of their choice with little effort, making it a great marketing tool. Consumers can keep their favorite content and offers from your brand in one place while keeping up with your latest updates.
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3. Provide personalization.
Building an email list lets you collect user data so you can learn more about your subscribers and pay attention to their behaviors. It also helps you create future email marketing campaigns that are sure to improve user engagement. The more information you have, the easier it is for your brand to tend to customers' needs and drive sales.
4. Reach mobile users.
Email makes it easy for those on any device to connect with your business. When people are on the go, they can still take advantage of your offers and receive your marketing messages. The easier it is to reach subscribers, the quicker you can solve their pain points and move them through the conversion funnel.
Let's take a closer look at these ways you can improve user engagement through email marketing:
- Creating and focusing on a few specific goals for your campaign
- Researching your target market and creating buyer personas
- Segmenting your email list to create personalized campaigns
- Tracking your campaign's performance and analyzing the results
1. Solidify your goals.
It's important to set clear goals that streamline your focus to a few aspects of your campaign at a time. Keeping a couple of objectives at the forefront of your campaign forces you to concentrate on a specific area to improve results. Stick to one or two goals so your campaign's progress is also easier to measure. From there, you can move on to other goals for your next campaign.
These are some common goals for email marketing campaigns:
- Improving engagement
- Driving traffic to your website
- Increasing your campaign's open rate
- Nurturing subscribers
- Growing your email list
To reach your campaign goals, you need to know your audience so you can create relevant content for them. Create buyer personas for your audience to gain insights into their needs, profiling them by their demographics, location, pain points, buying behaviors and more. The more details you include, the easier it is to create relevant, tailored future campaigns.
2. Know your audience.
Before you start sending out campaigns, you need to assess how well you truly know your target market and can tend to their needs. It's easier to send optimized emails when you know your target audience, as you'll have the information you need to resolve their pain points and cater to their interests.
How well do you know your audience? If you don't know them well, then you need to gather user data, collect feedback and research your competitors to get ahead of the game.
Surveys are a great way to ask your customers personalized questions to receive the most helpful feedback. You can ask exactly what you want and let users add their own answers so they can be as honest as they need to.
When reaching out to your audience, keep the questions short, simple and straightforward. You risk a low completion rate if you ask for too much or don't ask relevant questions.
Study your website analytics to get to know your visitors better. Pay attention to the content they spend the most and least time on, which webpages are most popular, and where users drop off. You'll likely notice a disturbance in the user experience or another issue that turns visitors away regularly.
Take the information you've gathered and turn it into buyer personas, which are profiles of your customers. Buyer personas give you details about your customers in one place, including their demographics, buying behaviors and pain points.
3. Segment your list.
People sign up for your email list for different reasons, and each person has a different need that your brand helps them solve. That's why it's crucial to segment your email list before sending out campaigns.
When you segment your list, you can create and deliver emails tailored to that group's needs and interests. Segmented campaigns have the power to increase revenue by 760% because they personalize the experience your brand gives consumers. Sending only relevant emails saves you from a high unsubscribe rate, low engagement and annoyed subscribers.
When you listens to customer needs and concerns, you build the foundation for strong customer relationships with your brand. People want to feel like more than a number when they engage with your business, and providing relevant content to them is one great way to show them they matter to you. That must be why 60% of consumers make purchases after receiving a marketing campaign in their inbox.
You can segment your list by a multitude of customer factors, depending on the goals of your campaign. Here are some of the most common:
- Age
- Gender
- Buying behavior
- Past purchases
- Industry
- Lead magnet
4. Monitor your campaign.
How proactive are you about measuring your campaign's performance? You need to track, monitor and collect data about your email campaign to measure its results accurately. You can improve your future campaigns by analyzing your data and noting what worked well and what didn't resonate with subscribers.
These are some common metrics to measure for your email campaign:
- Open rate: The number of subscribers who opened your email
- Click-through rate: How many users clicked on your email links
- Bounce rate: The number of users who clicked out of your email
- Unsubscribe rate: The number of users who unsubscribed from your email list
The process of monitoring your campaign's analytics will depend largely on what email marketing service you use to send your campaigns. What's important is that your marketing team consistently tracks its performance and recognizes any major changes in conversions. [To help you find the right solution for your business, you can check out our reviews of the best email marketing services.]
There's no doubt that email marketing is crucial to a business's growth and success. Through email, your business can communicate with subscribers, collect feedback and nurture leads until they turn into loyal, paying customers. How will you refine your next email marketing campaign to improve user engagement?