A Skeptic’s Guide to Making Email Marketing Work for Your Brand

Email Marketing

Feb 20

With so many marketing channels to choose from, it can be easy for email marketing to get lost in the mix. Flashy new marketing tactics, social media, paid ads, and video strategy can push email to the bottom of your priority list -- which is a likely mistake.

Don’t overlook the power of email marketing.

We always recommend testing tactics and understanding which performs best, but time and time again, still yet, an active email marketing strategy continues to prove to be one of the strongest tools in our marketing tool belt for most all of our clients.

Let’s look at why email is still a leading marketing tactic -- and how you can set up a strategy that will create results that turn you into email marketing’s biggest advocate.

Why Email Must Be a Part of Your Marketing Strategy

Email marketing is dead. It seems like every year, a marketing guru makes this bold statement. And, every year this statement continues to be debunked.

Email still works -- and will continue to work for the foreseeable future -- because it supports the most important parts of a strong marketing strategy.

Email keeps your brand top-of-mind. Ninety-nine percent (99%) of email users check their email every day. Email allows your brand to regularly appear in front of audiences who have already shown interest in your brand.
Email offers a direct connection to your audience. A post on social media is not guaranteed to get in front of your audience. Many social posts are never seen, whereas email lands right in your audience’s inbox.
An email list belongs to you. When you build an audience through email, you own the audience. Unlike an audience on social media, you don’t face the possibility of deplatforming or rule changes that could diminish or remove access to your audience.
Email educates, entertains, and engages. From value-based resources to urgent news and updates about your brand, email offers a direct line to communicate and share information with your audience.
Email can be personalized. Segmentation allows emails to get in front of the audience most likely to be interested in the content while calling out personalized details such as names, cities, and past purchases.
Email can be automated. Through automation tools, email can work for your brand 24/7/365. Drip campaigns and trigger emails can send personalized, targeted emails that offer value and support to your customers while acting as a sales tool for your brand.

With the right strategy, email marketing can engage customers, drive website traffic, increase sales, and improve customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

So, how do you get all of the benefits of email marketing?

How to Make Email Marketing Work for Your Brand

If you have been overlooking email marketing because you haven’t seen strong results, it could be because you don’t have the right strategy. To make email work for your brand, follow each of these essential steps.

1. Actively Build Your List

Email marketing can’t be an afterthought. You can’t sit back and hope people sign up for your list. A strategy for growing your list and attracting the right audience is essential to leading to email marketing success.

Actively build your email list through a variety of methods such as:

Customer loyalty programs
Customer profiles/accounts
Contests
Coupons
Events
Exclusive content

2. Leverage Segmentation

The biggest key to effective email marketing is segmentation. Instead of sending the same email to everyone on your list, target customers based on their habits, interests, and actions through segmentation.

First, build a strong tagging system that labels your audience based on:

How they signed up for your list
Products/services they are interested in
Stage of the buyer’s journey
Content they’ve engaged with
Persona types

Then, craft emails focused on specific segments -- which brings us to our next step.

3. Use a Mix of Email Campaigns

Email might not be working for your brand if you are sending one monthly general email to your entire list. To make email work more effectively, use a mix of campaigns.

Build campaigns for:

General newsletters
Announcements
Promotions
Welcome or onboarding series
Nurturing drip series
Post-purchase
Cart abandonment
Retargeting
Reengagement
Customer service

4. Include Essential Content Elements

The content of your email is what gets audiences to open, read, click, and even forward to a friend. Strong content keeps your audience interested and drives them to engage with your email.

Don’t rush through content creation or treat it as an afterthought. Spend time crafting:

Strong Subject Lines: The subject line is your first and most important attempt to get a reader to open your email. Catch attention by creating a sense of urgency or curiosity. Show immediate value, and use personalization when you can.
Preview Text: Preview text is the first line of content that shows in inboxes after the subject line. Customize this space with valuable content instead of letting it autofill from the first line of your email content.
Personalization Content: In your email copy, incorporate personalized details such as the reader’s name, and curate personalized content that is relevant to the reader using segmentation.
Call-to-Action: The goal of email marketing is rarely to only have your audience read the email. You want the reader to take action. Use a strong call-to-action that tells your reader what step you want them to take next.
Unsubscribe / Manage Preferences: Email is about trust. Never add subscribers to your list without permission, and always give them an opportunity to opt-out or control the type of emails you send to them.

5. Track Your Results

You won’t know if email is working if you aren’t measuring your results. Set up a system to track email key performance indicators (KPIs) for each of your campaigns, such as:

Open rate
Click-through rate (CTR)
Bounce rate
Unsubscribes
Conversion rates to purchases, scheduled meetings, etc

6. Run A/B Tests

Don’t assume your first attempt at an email campaign will be the best. Instead, use A/B testing to try different versions of your email to see what works best. Use A/B variations on:

Subject lines
Call-to-actions
Offers
Button colors
Body copy
Templates/layouts
Images vs videos

7. Manage Your Email List

Your email list is only as good as your contacts on the list. A list of 10,000 disengaged contacts is no better than a list of 100 highly engaged customers. Don’t focus on list size. Instead, focus on list health.

Regularly manage your contacts and clean up your list.

Remove duplicate entries
Update or remove invalid email addresses
Delete or fix emails that regularly bounce
Attempt to re-engage unresponsive contacts
Remove unresponsive contacts

Make Email Marketing Work for Your Brand

There’s a reason why email marketing continues to be a top marketing strategy… it works!

If you aren’t seeing results from your email marketing efforts, you may not have the right strategy.

Use these tips to level up your strategy, or talk to the team at SpotOn Digital Media to see how we can design an email marketing strategy that engages customers, drives website traffic, increases sales, and improves customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

Our expert team looks forward to helping your brand discover the power of email marketing. Contact us to learn more.

Robyn Spoto