Among the mountains of data that MarketingSherpa compiled in its 2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Report is a list of marketers’ biggest email goals for 2013.
With the year halfway over, here are tips for how to sprint to the finish and accomplish the email marketing goals that you set out.
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Here are the top five email marketing goals of B2B and B2C marketers, and some solutions to help them:
Increase sales conversion (71 percent)
- Generate leads with a multi-faceted approach – Combining email and social media is a powerful way to stay in touch with prospects, distribute content, extend offers and create leads. Consider creating a monthly newsletter from your company’s top blog posts, using social sharing buttons and developing email drip-marketing campaigns that drive prospects to your site.
- Optimize emails for mobile – Email is the top activity for 78 percent of smartphone owners. Make your emails mobile friendly by making text larger, using a single-column design and highlighting your call to action.
- Determine what works – Determining the value of an email campaign is essential because it shows you what works and what doesn’t. When calculating your results, track the value generated from a mobile email campaign (such as leads, sales and revenue) per 1,000 emails.
A majority of email marketers entered 2013 with the above email marketing goals.
Grow and retain subscribers (68 percent)
- Use an online and offline approach – Whether someone visits your website or brick-and-mortar store, make it easy for them to sign up. Have a simple, conspicuous opt-in form on your web properties and put out email sign-up sheets near the counter.
- Offer contests and promotional offers – Providing people the opportunity to save money or win something of value is a sure-fire way of getting them to sign up. However, once the contest or promotion is over you must use valuable content to keep them engaged and subscribed.
- Consider cross-promotion – Find another site and attempt to develop a partnership. Having an opt-in box on their site could expose you to an audience that may not know who you are.
Increase email engagement (67 percent)
- Test using symbols and images – A recent campaign saw a 97 percent lift in open rate by including a symbol in the subject line. Another campaign with several graphics in the email body saw clickthrough rates three times higher than what they had previously seen.
- Encourage sharing – Peer-to-peer recommendations are highly trusted. So once an email is shared it will reach a less skeptical and more likely to engage audience. Encourage sharing by providing valuable content and including sharing buttons on the email.
- Write what people want to read – If you find that your content doesn’t get opens, shares and clickthroughs, it may be that you’re writing about things your subscribers don’t care about. Use any number of free tools to check popular keywords and trends to give you insight into what your target audience wants.
Drive more web traffic (64 percent)
- Test your email content on your web properties – Discovering that a headline and teaser performs well on your website or blog is often a clue that it would work well in your email marketing. Limited organic reach? Find a popular, reputable site that will let you guest post.
- Embed videos – Including a short video in an email can be a great way to boost traffic to your website. Avoid technical difficulties by embedding a thumbnail of the video in the body of the email. When subscribers click the video, they will be taken to your website to watch it. Simply adding “video” in your subject line can increase clickthrough rates by 7 to 13 percent.
- Using sharing buttons wisely - Using social sharing buttons indiscriminately likely won’t produce results. Think about how you can best use them effectively. An email from KFC advertising its Double Down sandwich had the sole motive of having its subscribers share the message.
Deliver more relevant content (64 percent)
- Segment your email lists – Divvying up your email subscribers by demographics, geography, purchase history and many other factors helps deliver the right message to the right people at the right time. Produce custom, valuable content for each segment.
- Desire quality over quantity – Whether it’s surveying customers, asking your sales staff or researching search terms, you can discover the problems your customers have. By answering those questions, you will provide relevant content and establishing yourself as a go-to resource.
- Never let good content be a one-off – Publicity, case studies, reports, blog posts and any other content that your company creates has the potential to be repurposed and included in an email newsletter. Search through your most successful content and see if there’s a statistic or other element that might make for a compelling email.