Do you want your email marketing campaign to rival the greats? What do they do with their emails that you're not?
Start doing these 10 things immediately and watch your email marketing campaign jump up to an entirely different level of success.
1. Testing Before Sending
Though it seems incredibly tedious and a horrid waste of time, testing your emails before sending them out to your subscribers is a necessary evil.
By testing emails before sending is a safeguard because it quickly shows what problems there are with deliverability, download time and any other issue that may have been overlooked in the review process.
You have to remember that even with the best intentions and the best eyeballs on your email, things can slip through the cracks.
2. Pretesting Any Changes
Let's say that your email has undergone a design overhaul. You love the changes. Your staff will love the changes. And, most of all, your boss loves the changes. But, what will your customers say? How will they react?
Before sending out your brand-spankin' new email out to the masses, pull a select group of email subscribers and ask them what they think.
It doesn't matter if any change to your email marketing campaign is lauded by the President, but if the customers hate it, they're either going to leave you or worse, not act on your calls.
3. Researching Top Email Marketing Campaigns
Do an Internet search for the top email marketing campaigns of the year. See what the best performers are doing that you're not.
This is a great opportunity to see what's hot in the world of email marketing and see what advances the top companies are making.
Also, take a look around email marketing blogs for honest reviews of email marketing campaigns and what customers are saying about the email promotions they receive.
You'll get an eyeful!
4.Researching Your Competitors
While you're researching the very best email marketers, take this time to see what your competitors are doing.
This is an easy enough search: many companies keep older email newsletters and promotions in archives on their website. Read what their customers are saying and keep tabs on any changes they're making to their emails.
The name of this game? Reconnaissance.
5. Linking
For many marketers, this is one of those tips that makes you scratch your head and say, "Huh? Who isn't doing that, I wonder?"
Let's just say that sometimes linking to social media, archived articles and all other sorts of online goodness doesn't cross some marketers' minds.
By leaving your email bare, you're making your email do all of the heavy lifting. That's not to say that your email shouldn't do all of its own work, but having support (website and social media) underscores your call-to-action as well as your brand.
The more relevant links you have in your email, the more chances of click-throughs and conversions.
6. Segmenting Your Subscriber List
What is segmenting, exactly? All it consists of is dividing your email subscriber list into different categories so that you'll be able to target them more efficiently and effectively.
Try sorting your email list by location and target your customers with regionally appropriate promotions and products. Or, try sorting your list into purchase history and target customers who haven't bought from you in a while (some email marketers call this "inactivity) with an unbelievable promotion.
7. Reviewing Data
On the surface, your email marketing efforts may be chugging along nicely, but remember the old saying about ducks. "Calm on the surface, paddling like hell underneath."
Reviewing your data regularly paints a clear picture of what's happening under the surface. Are your sales static? How many opens do you have compared to click-throughs? How many subscribers jumped ship recently? Is there a spike in bounces?
However you look at your data and whatever data points you examine, knowing how your email is operating shows you what's working and what's not.
8. Cross-promoting with Your Other Marketing Strategies
If you're not promoting your other marketing channels in your emails, then you're missing out on a golden opportunity.
Why?
Cross-promotion not only boosts the effectiveness of the channels but helps drive home your call-to-action. Chances are you're running the same deal across your social media networks and website as you are in your emails. It reinforces the deal and reminds your subscribers if they've forgotten.
Further, cross-promoting encourages your email subscribers to subscribe to your other channels.
9. Soliciting Feedback
One of the hardest things to do is to ask for honest-to-goodness, no-holds-barred feedback on what you're doing. For a lot of marketers, their emails are their babies, their pride and joy, and asking for an outsider to judge what they've done, well, that's a travesty.
But, really, soliciting feedback from your email subscribers is anything but. These are the people you're serving. These are the people you're communicating with every day. These are the people who can make or break your marketing campaign with a simple click.
Why would you not want to ask them?
You'll learn if your deals are stale or any good. You'll learn whether you're sending emails too frequently or not often enough. You'll learn pretty much everything that you're doing right and doing wrong.
10. Thinking Outside the Box
Status quo kills creativity. Doing what everyone else is doing makes you a marketing lemming. Sticking to what you know instead of venturing out into the unknown is terrifying and surely is the fastest way to failure.
Those notions are crap.
Innovations aren't forged by those who fear. Great success always comes with the potential for failure. Trying something new means that you're invested in what you're doing and providing the best possible marketing material to your subscribers.
What's the worst that can happen if you do? What's the worst that can happen if you don't?
There you have it, 10 areas where you can improve your next campaign and better yet, do what the big players are doing all the time.
Making these little changes will help you target your customers better, improve your subscriber retention rate and skyrocket your conversions. And who doesn't want that?
