Your business has recently launched its first email campaign but users are simply not responding. You have a fantastic database full of people who have opted-in because they want to hear from you, and youre using their data responsibly, but why no interaction?
Most businesses see email marketing as a key part of their business strategy and send out emails regularly, but often have not taken the time to examine how successful their current email strategy is, or consider how they could improve engagement from their recipients.
Here, expert Georgia Benham shares some easy things you can do to optimise your email strategy and some simple things you could be doing that are negatively affecting your sales process.
Build a strong sender reputation
The winning formula to deliverability is ensuring you have a good sender reputation, emails should come from a trusted domain and there are several tactics you can employ to develop this. The key is to ensure you are continuously monitoring your campaigns, keeping an eye on every aspect of the email journey and making sure your emails are actually arriving in the recipients inbox in the first place.
There are many easy-to-use tracking tools that can help you get the most out of your campaigns. Return Path helps monitor the reputation of your domain and tracks where your emails are being delivered to, if they are being marked as spam by filters, or marked as from an untrustworthy source.
Maintaining your subscriber list is crucial to your sender credibility. Continuously sending emails to inactive users can be flagged as spam so be sure to regularly filter and sort through subscribers who are not engaging or responding to your content.
Keep your email send-out patterns consistent, especially as a new sender. Several reports show that one of the main reasons users give for unsubscribing to email services is receiving too many, so ensure your send-out schedule doesnt have any major volume spikes.
Create exciting and engaging content
Now youve achieved a successful click-through you need to keep your users attention by providing them with informative, engaging and exciting content. Research by Chartbeat last year revealed that the average user spends 15 seconds on a new website before clicking out meaning our attention span for consuming online content is continuously decreasing.
Create content that provides real value to your user, whether its a monthly newsletter with a roundup of where your brand has been seen in the press for its ground-breaking research or a special promotion only available to existing customers. The aim is to have your users constantly anticipating your brands next email, which will guarantee your future campaigns far more clicks and conversions in the long run.
Grab users attention
An email newsletter serves the same purpose as a newspaper or your favourite news site: to provide an engaging and interesting read from a source you trust. So, when choosing your campaign and email subject lines you need to think like a journalist. Devise punchy subject lines that lend towards reading like a tabloid headline. Remember, there are hundreds of other brands all competing in your target customers inbox so your campaign needs to cut through the noise.
Play with subject lines that are a slightly sensationalist take on the information in the content, but be sure the title is consistent with the accompanying content and aligned with your brand values.
Georgia Benham is an email expert from Expert Markets email marketing department. For more information about how CRM systems can enhance your email marketing campaign head to Expert Market.
