Email marketing attracts a large amount of a marketer’s spend, and drives the best conversion rates for websites. But for your email campaign to be a winner, you have to be doing everything right. Here’s the breakdown:
Get them to subscribe
The first step in building an effective email campaign is to get people onto your subscription list and receiving your emails. You should definitely have a subscription form that’s easy to find on different pages throughout your website – including the homepage, Contact Us page, and blog pages.
If you can put it in the footer so it appears across every page of your website, that’s even better. Scroll to the bottom of this page to see 28K’s example (at right) – it’s simple, unobtrusive and provides a clear next step for any reader.
Offer value
Think about the average email recipient. It’s likely they’re receiving a huge volume of mail each day, could be viewing on mobile, and have a short window they’ve allocated to reading what they receive.
To succeed in piercing through all this, you need to shape emails that have a powerful subject line, which tells the reader what they’ll get when they open the email. Speak plainly and avoid jargon. And wherever possible, personalise your emails by using the recipient’s name or title.
Segment your audience
People want to receive email that is relevant to them. If your business has clients, prospects, cold and warm leads all in the one mailing list, it’s almost impossible for a single email to be relevant to each of these groups.
What you want to do is take the time to segment out your audience – splitting up existing clients, new leads, and prospects that are warm. This is a basic aspect of the more sophisticated concept of email automation to improve conversion.
Now, you can send mail to each of these separate groups that is relevant for that particular group. Existing clients don’t want a heavy sales pitch. And neither do new leads – that will scare them off. By segmenting, you add value and relevance to your emails for different audiences.
