5 Significant Tips For Your Email Marketing Campaign

Email marketing is an excellent tool for engaging directly with clients and prospects while boosting your Return On Investment (ROI). However, as a business owner or a marketer limited with time, it can be a challenging task to keep up with.

From this article, you’ll find out:

• How to protect the reputation of your company domain and the IP of your SMTP server to ensure maximum email deliverability.
• How to segment your contacts, and build your email content effectively to avoid ending up in the spam folder.
• The art of A/B testing to find out which email is the most effective for your email marketing campaign.
• Useful tools to help you accomplish each of the above tasks, listed in an accompanying infographic.

1. Email Marketing Campaign

Email marketing campaigns are an integral part of inbound marketing. With a successful email marketing campaign, you can get your recipients to take action, drive conversion, build brand loyalty, and increase sales. Moreover, it can be used as a channel to achieve several different objectives.

Although it’s an effective tool, many marketers end up falling short and missing their return goals at the end of an email marketing campaign. Email campaigns require a more thorough approach, and thus it’s crucial to think about what you want to achieve before jumping in head first.

2. Email Marketing Tips

It was reported in 2015 that the average ROI of email marketing was $38 for every $1 spent, with 1 in 5 businesses reporting a 70:1 ratio! While email marketing is one of the most effective and profitable marketing strategies, many marketers have failed to update their email campaign strategies since its development.

To ensure that you don’t fall into this trap, we’ve compiled several practical email tips to help ensure that you don’t make the same mistakes. Here are some of the most important things you need to consider before embarking on your email marketing campaign.

Configuration and Verification

Email configuration plays a vital role in the deliverability of emails into your prospects’ inboxes. For instance, your domain reputation along with your email server IP reputation, play an important role in email deliverability.

A good reputation increases the deliverability of your emails. Your domain’s reputation depends on two things; how old your domain is and how it has been classified on the web. On the other hand, the reputation of your email server IP depends entirely on your email service provider.

Therefore, it’ll already have some reputation, whether good or bad. Consequently, it’s important to always check your domain and email server IP reputations before starting an email campaign.

When it comes to email verification, both SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) email standards check for authenticity. SPF compares the sender’s actual IP address to a list of IP addresses authorized to send mail from that domain. If the IP address is approved, the email gets accepted, if not, it doesn’t.

DKIM ensures that both recipients and senders are protected by adding encryption to the emails. An outbound mail server attaches a unique DKIM signature header to the message consisting of two cryptographic hashes.

The inbound mail server looks up the sender’s public DKIM key in the DNS, decrypts it, and counterchecks it against a freshly computed version. If it matches, the message is validated as authentic and is received.

Content and Segmentation

The next important tip is to ensure that your content is on point. Ensure that you stay away from using spam words that may trigger your emails to end up in people’s spam folders. Avoid using unscripted phrases, excessive symbols & punctuation marks (!!!), ALL CAPS, etc. especially if it’s your first campaign.

It would be a great idea to avoid phrases and expressions that create a false sense of trust or urgency, relate to sex or relationships, or about drugs and medicine, or those that bluntly push for an action such as a purchase. Make sure to do your own research, and check which specific words or phrases may get you flagged as SPAM or those which have shown to put email recipients off.

Don’t send generic emails. Make sure that your content changes regularly depending on the preferences and interests of users. And finally, it’s important to make sure that your content is personalized.

You also need to utilize segmentation in your email campaign efforts. For instance, you can segment your contact list based on demographics, interests, purchases, location, gender, age, and even job titles. In this manner, you can create an email copy that best suits their interests and improves your emails’ open rates.

Aside from initial personalization, contacts that are in different segments can even be further personalized with their likes & interests, as well as with the results of actions they’ve taken on your website.

Moreover, the more specific your customer persona is, the more targeted your email marketing efforts are and the higher the possibility of attracting high-quality leads. Therefore, you can quickly reduce time and resource wastage and attain your campaign goals with fewer struggles.

A/B Testing  

A/B testing, otherwise known as split testing, is a technique of working out which campaign email (or landing page) is the most effective. It’s all about understanding your email audience better by testing all the assumptions that come from your marketing instincts and strategies. For instance, you can test a few things in your email campaigns such as:

• An email’s subject line.
• Emails with mostly-images versus mostly-text.
• Effectiveness between a short-copy email and a long-copy email.
• Hyperlinks vs buttons. Etc.

Through A/B testing, you can fine-tune your email’s copy to achieve your goals whether it’s increasing open rates or increasing conversions. And yes, a single word change can make a huge difference.

3. Email Marketing Platforms

Choosing the best email marketing platform is essential and plays a significant role in determining the success of your email marketing campaign. A good platform should enable you to manage all your contacts, segment them into groups, and track the performance of your campaign.

Most importantly, it should help ensure that your emails don’t end up in the spam folder. Your email campaign reports on such platforms can also help you further segment your list (opt-ins, opt-outs, etc.).

Before you can invest in an email marketing platform, you need to consider a few things such as ease of use, pricing, and features. Some of the best email marketing platforms include:

• AWeber
• MailChimp
• Constant Contact
• Drip
• ConvertKit
• Get Response
• SendinBlue, among others.

Conclusion:

Like all marketing efforts, attaining success in your email marketing campaign is not guaranteed. However, with the above few tips, you stand a better chance of your email campaign reaping the benefits of high conversion and high open rates.

Author: Pawel Tomczyk

Subscribe to weekly updates

You’ll also receive some of our best posts today