Is your brand taking advantage of email marketing to grow to its fullest potential? If not, it’s missing out on the opportunity to build strong customer relationships, improve engagement and drive sales.
On average, around 102.6 trillion emails are sent and received each year, and that number continues to increase over time. 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.
Increasing 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. Receiving offers and fresh content straight to subscribers’ inboxes will familiarize them with your brand until they feel ready to purchase.
Offering convenience and accessibility
Not only is it convenient for businesses to spread their marketing messages, but it’s also easy for subscribers to receive that information. They can access their inbox through any 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 business’ latest updates.
Providing 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.
Reaching 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.
In this article, we’re going to take a closer look at the ways you can improve user engagement through email marketing by:
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
Let’s get started!
1. Solidify your goals
It’s important to set clear goals that streamline your focus on 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 onto other goals for your next campaign.
Some common goals for email marketing campaigns include:
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 that give you information about their needs as a customer, such as 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 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 personalized questions based on your customers 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 form 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 (UX) or another issue that causes visitors to turn 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, pain points and more.
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’re able to 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 relevant emails saves you from a high unsubscribe rate, low engagement and annoyed subscribers.
When your brand listens to customer needs and concerns, it builds the foundation for strong customer relationships to take place. People want to feel like more than a number when they engage with your business, and providing relevant content is one great way to do so.
You can separate your list a multitude of ways depending on the goals you’ve set for your campaign:
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. Create improved future campaigns by analyzing your data and making a note of what worked well and what didn’t translate with subscribers.
Some common metrics to measure for your email campaign include:
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
Depending on what email marketing service you use to send your campaigns, the process of monitoring your campaign’s analytics will differ. What’s important is that your marketing team consistently tracks its performance and recognizes any major changes in conversions.
It's time to make your next email marketing campaign a success
There’s no doubt that email marketing is crucial to your 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 so you see better engagement?