There are many ways to learn email marketing, whether it is from classes or reading articles like this one! There are always things to keep in mind. And a lot of advanced email marketing is perfected by trial and error.
Luckily, TruVISIBILITY has the easiest steps to help business owners and marketing team members get started with optimal email marketing strategies.
Table of Contents
- Email Marketing Basics
- Email Marketing Strategies for Each Industry
- Software Offering Email Marketing: Free Options
- Conclusion
Email Marketing Basics
Why learn how to create email campaigns and manage them? Managing different aspects your email marketing strategy can improve the chances of converting leads into loyal customers. Some things you can consistently change and manage include:
- Number of email campaigns sent for A/B testing
- Ability to change widgets, brand messaging, and colors
- Segmenting email lists by audience demographic
- Managing when and to whom you send email campaigns
How can you learn how to do each of these free email marketing management items? Let's uncover the lessons of email marketing.
How Can Businesses Learn to Create Email Marketing Campaigns?
Whether you have a business that offers an email marketing course or you are a marketer at a company wondering what is the best email marketing strategy, we've got a few tips to follow to help boost your audience engagement.
1) Choose from Templates
If you sign up with the right email software company, there should be templates you can choose from based on design or the message you want to send out.
Keep in mind that you can always change widgets, email copy, images, colors, or overall design of the template to match your needs. Templates are just there to help with starting your design or give you inspiration. They can also save you time if you need more simple emails, like Happy Birthday messages or automated purchase confirmation emails.
2) Decide on a Message
You can choose what your message should be before looking at templates, but if you don't have any idea of what your first email should be, templates are a great place to start.
If you have a few messages in mind, such as "Thank you for signing up" emails, then decide how detailed you want these messages to be. Perhaps you have a coupon offer to send to leads. How detailed do you want it to be?
- Do you need a lot of text to relay your message or offer?
- Will your emails benefit from mostly pictures of products?
- Will you need people to reply to the message?
- Where do you want your audience to click in the email (like a CTA Button)?
- What is your goal from the email?
What you want or expect from each email is a huge part of your digital marketing strategy as a whole. Email campaigns should mirror your brand's message, imagery, and connect to either your company's social channels, website, or simply offer something valuable to the lead or customer.
3) Use a Familiar From Name
The “from” name is one of the most prominently displayed elements of your campaign when it arrives in your subscriber’s inbox.
On many desktop and mobile clients, it’s displayed with a larger text and heavier font to help people quickly identify who the email is from.
Given its prominence, it’s probably not surprising that 68% of Americans say they base their decision to open an email on the “from” name.
So how do you optimize this critical part of your campaigns and help boost your open rates into the 30%+ range? The key is matching it up with your audience’s expectations.
4) Have a Short Subject Line Focused on an Offer
After the “from” name, the subject line is the second most prominent element in the inbox when it comes to driving opens.
On most devices, the subject line is formatted with darker, heavier text in an attempt to make it stand out among the other details of the email.
The first thing to consider is length. Although no research shows that the length of subject lines has a huge effect on open and click-through rates, it is advisable to keep them under 30 characters long to ensure they appear in full on both desktop and mobile devices.
5) Write Compelling Preheader Text
The preheader is the short summary text that follows the subject line when an email is viewed in the inbox.
Pre-header text is a critical component your subscribers use to decide whether or not they open your campaign and engage with your content. So how can you optimize your preheader text for mobile devices?
Given that the preheader text appears next to the email subject line, the two need to work together to tell a cohesive story, rather than be thought about as two separate parts of your email campaign.
6) Write Simple Compelling Text
With your well-thought-out “from” name, subject line, and preheader text driving opens, it’s time to focus on click-through rates with quality body content.
Good writing isn’t about using any particular magic words, but about getting your audience to understand your offering and the benefits it brings them in the simplest way possible, as that’s what drives people to purchase.
How do you write captivating copy? The 4 P's is a technique many email marketing strategists use. The formula is as follows:
- Promise - You start by making a short, punchy promise to your readers. The key to this part of the technique is to make sure your promise speaks directly to the desires of your target market.
- Paint - You need to paint a picture of what their world would look like after you’ve delivered on your promise. Again, the key to being successful with this is truly understanding what the ideal world looks like for your target customers and speaking directly to it.
- Proof - Now that you have made a bold promise and painted a picture of what their world looks like after you’ve delivered it, you need to give them proof that you can. People are skeptical these days and don’t always believe the promises marketers make, so the key here is to show results that independent organizations have achieved using your product or service.
- Push - Finally, with readers excited about your product, it’s time to push them to take action. The key here is to relate your call to action back to the ideal world you painted for your readers earlier, as this reinforces the fact that your product is the path towards that ideal world.
7) Optimize Your CTA Button
The buttons you use in your email marketing campaigns are the final step towards getting someone to click-through from your campaign and visit your website, and the words you choose for them can play a big part in determining whether someone will click-through or not.
But what do you write to ensure your button gets clicked?
The key is to use the button to reinforce the benefit you promised your reader throughout the rest of the email.
8) Spam Filter
If you’ve gotten every single step right up to this point, it could all be for nothing if you don’t avoid the spam filter. The spam filter will take all of your hard work and file it away, never to be seen by human eyes.
To evade the spam filter, you’ll want to make sure that you refrain from the overuse of any spam-friendly language. This could be such innocent words as “buy” or “free.” Spam filters will pick this up and assume your email is spam.
Another way to avoid the spam filter is to ask your mailing list to add you to their contacts. By being a part of their contacts list, you’ll be whitelisted and all of your emails will automatically go through.
Challenges of Learning Email Marketing
So is learning email marketing hard? If you have a solid software that makes it easy to build your campaigns and monitor its successes and failures, then email marketing should be intuitive.
1) Achieving Relevance
Too much email. It is one of the tropes of modern life.
So, how do you cut through the flab with relevant and compelling content? Without achieving relevance, your subscribers will rapidly stop opening your messages.
2) Declining Subscriber Engagement Over Time
Email recipients are most responsive when they first subscribe, after which interest can decline.
How can marketers assess current levels of engagement and develop strategies to maintain engagement through time? Testing of segmentation and personalized content is key.
3) Data Quality and Integration
Integrating ESP response data with information from a CRM database is commonplace, but robust data conventions are necessary, for example, standardizing the names used for different fields, and having solid processes for syncing data and handling conflicts.
4) Deliverability
How do you get your emails delivered consistently through different ISPs, spam filters, or corporate firewalls?
Spam filters are one thing, but newer techniques from big email clients will look at past interaction and engagement in order to determine inbox placement. Email marketers should measure inbox delivery rate and identify methods for improving deliverability.
5) Rendering
There’s no point in crafting excellent email creative if it doesn’t display correctly in certain browsers or on mobile devices.
These five problems can arise sooner rather than later, so make sure your software offers tools to preview your email in mobile view, tablet view, and gives thorough data information to improve deliverability and audience engagement.
Email Marketing Strategies for Each Industry
There are tons of different business types out there. The ones that utilize email a lot are companies selling things, offering services, or asking for money. Essentially, they are all asking for something. And there's an art to asking for something through email marketing.
So if you're a contractor of some sort, a service industry business, have an e-commerce store, or you're part of a non-profit, you can plan on what your priorities will be email-wise to get the most engagement.
Contractor Email
If you offer a service, such as housecleaning or dry cleaning, email campaigns may not be sent as frequently as other companies. Much of these businesses rely on other marketing strategies. However, there are some ways to ensure the email marketing efforts for these types of businesses don't go unnoticed.
1) Learn your audience. Contractors look for a variety of audience members from young adults to older aged adults. Rarely do contractors seek the attention of teenagers because there's unlikely any business interest from them. Once contractors study who responds or is using their services more regularly, such as middle-aged women in a certain district, then they can target them the right way - with the right email message and offer.
2) Send offers and news. Rarely will you need a newsletter like a non-profit would need. But contractors will need to send coupons and offers every once in a while to attract customers and convert those leads who have been on the fence about using the service. If your services have changed in price, location, etc. then newsletters are good to send when the occasion calls for it.
E-commerce Email
Brick and mortar stores as well as strictly e-commerce stores rely heavily on offers to leads to convert them into loyal customers. E-commerce businesses have it a little easier and yet harder to succeed at email marketing.
These businesses can have a wider range of a target audience from kids to older adults of all genders, races, and regions. The interest of these audience members need to be segmented. This also means more email data to analyze, leading to more A/B testing needed, more development and creativity needed in their email layout, etc.
This also means e-commerce businesses have more opportunities to connect with their target audiences, get them to open and read their email messages, and collect more information about their audience. So what are the top things to focus on?
1) Send discounts and offer value. The more people see offers from your e-commerce business, the better. Even if it's a small offer, at least it's an offer that can likely grab someone's attention. Let's say you don't want to give discounts. Then offer something valuable. Perhaps it is early access on the Thursday before Black Friday to buy certain coveted products.
2) Set up automated messaging. E-commerce businesses have (hopefully) tons of leads a day being added to contact lists. It's important to group together information from a survey or landing page to a particular email campaign. For example, once a new lead signs up for emails and submits their birth date, you can send them a thank you email to thank them for signing up. You can also send them a special birthday deal at the beginning of their birthday month.
Non-Profit Email
Non-profit foundations don't always have products or a brick and mortar store for customers to check out. Sure, some have items to buy that they will receive. Most not-for-profit organizations, however, have one main goal: raise money for a good cause. How can this be achieved by learning email marketing?
1) Segment your contact list. Every business needs to segment their contact list unless every lead and customer is literally in the same demographic. If you have different messages and want to really hit home your message to different people, such as young people versus older people, then make sure you have separate groups for these email addresses. This makes it easier to send automated messages as well.
2) Focus on newsletters. Newsletters keep your audience in the know. It builds awareness to your message and need as well. You can boast about the accomplishments of your non-profit and encourage and inspire those leads to donate. Most digital marketing software companies that focus on email messaging have templates for non-profits. TruVISIBILITY has a specially made template for non-profits that is built for high conversion.
Software Offering Email Marketing: Free Options
Which software is actually easy to use? There are complicated ones that require a lot of coding for more advanced features if you want to add them. Most online tools are simple, drag and drop, and can be quickly tested or previewed before being sent out or published.
Now, which ones are affordable or free? Only TruVISIBILITY is entirely free. No free trial duration necessary. But some other companies offer a good email digital marketing platform with free trials.
Here are a few companies that offer free trials:
- Mailchimp
- Constant Contact
- ActiveCampaign
- TruVISIBILITY
Most of these software companies have 14-day free trials. After the two weeks, however, you will be automatically charged the plan you chose in the sign-up process. Usually, the standard or "most popular" choice is already selected for you. So, double check to make sure you are happy with the platform.
Of course, there is only one truly free for life software - TruVISIBILITY. No client is charged upon sign up, so no credit card is required. There is a freemium account option. If you wish to customize your options and payment plan to send emails to more contacts or build more chatbot conversations, then you can pay per 1,000 extra contacts.
How TruVISIBILITY Can Help with Advanced Email Marketing
TruVISIBILITY offers the only email platform that can be integrated with your TruVISIBILITY site, blog page, chatbot or SMS messaging for free, meaning no monthly fees ever. You can simply build email campaigns for up to 1,000 contacts for free for as long as you have an account with TruVISIBILITY.
So what else can TruVISIBILITY offer to help learning email marketing simpler? Some email platforms require some coding knowledge, but instead there's:
- No coding needed
- Free guides and support articles for every aspect of each app (Chat, Messaging, Sites, etc.)
- Around the clock support in addition to personalized support
- SEO tools to make sure Google boosts your pages on the SERPs
- Countless marketing strategies and guides (like this one)
- Ability to easily segment email lists
- Schedule and automate email campaigns to make less work for team members
- A/B testing capabilities
- Understandable email analytics (open rate, bounce rate, etc.)
- Ability to integrate with any app, including landing pages from non-TruVISIBILITY hosts
Conclusion
If you can’t write a killer subject line that captures people’s interest, then you’ll never get them to open your campaign. And, if you can’t explain your offer quickly and easily, you’ll never get them to click-through and purchase your product.
So, next time you’re creating an email campaign to announce your latest product or feature, use the practices mentioned above to help you write high-performing email campaigns that get opened and clicked, and ultimately drives sales and revenue for your business.
Don't forget that TruVISIBILITY is always available to answer any questions and help you with optimizing your marketing apps for high-conversion.
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