Email marketing will continue to be an invaluable asset for businesses in 2021, so it’s important to make sure you have a solid strategy in place to make the most of this channel. Some business owners may worry that email marketing is an outdated tactic, but the fact is that millions of people still rely on email, many of whom are younger consumers.
If you’re not effectively utilizing email marketing, your business will suffer in the long term. To help you get the best results from email marketing campaigns, the following is a complete guide to develop and optimize your strategies in 2021.
What Exactly Is Email Marketing?
Businesses that are unfamiliar with the concept of email marketing may assume that marketing emails wind up forgotten in people’s spam folders. However, good email marketing campaigns will appear in people’s inboxes and engage them enough to lead them to a sale.
Through the use of email marketing, you can excite prospects and carry them down the sales funnel without losing them along the way. The key is to make sure that prospects want to open your emails and take action based on the calls to action (CTAs) you include in the content. Whether you offer prospects a free white paper download or a discount on their first purchase, you should engineer your campaigns to ensure recipients complete the desired action.
The Purpose of Email Marketing Campaigns
There are many reasons why you might develop email marketing campaigns. You can use email marketing to:
- Establish and build strong relationships with prospects with personalized emails.
- Share useful high-quality content with audiences that keep prospects engaged.
- Increase brand awareness to gain recognition and build trust among prospects.
- Promote services or products.
- Attract more leads through the sharing of free downloads and other content in exchange for basic contact information.
- Turn those leads into customers by providing content to them through various stages of the buyer’s journey, hopefully leading to repeat sales.
How to Build an Effective Email Marketing Strategy
There are so many things you can do with email marketing, to the point where it can become daunting. If you don’t know where to start, the following steps can help you organize your campaigns and build a winning strategy.
According to research from HubSpot, the average person receives over a hundred emails per day. If you want to stand out among the mountain of daily emails, you need to develop a truly engaging campaign. Taking these steps will help you implement a strategy that attracts more leads and, ultimately, loyal customers.
Gain a Deep Understanding of Your Audience
The very first step you should take before starting your email campaign is to understand the people you want to attract. Do some research around your audience, including demographics, personalities, daily lives, buying habits, and other aspects that could help you determine how to market to them. Conducting surveys of prospects and existing customers can be a great way to learn more about your audience. You can also look at what competitors are doing to connect with similar audiences.
Based on different segments of your audience, you can then develop buyer personas that serve as examples of customers. From there, you could build out email campaigns that appeal to each buyer persona, with personalized messaging, content, and CTAs that effectively carry them along the buyer’s journey.
Set Specific Goals for Your Campaigns
After you’ve learned more about your audience and the prospects you want to attract, you need to set goals for your campaigns, which will help you identify which metrics to look at and which steps to take to achieve those goals and measure your results.
At this point, you should do some research around your industry and find some data that helps you establish clear benchmarks for each goal. If you know what you want to achieve, you’ll go into your campaigns with a realistic, obtainable objective that keeps you motivated. Otherwise, you might not have a clear idea of what you want to achieve, which could hold you back in the long run.
Get People on Your Email Lists
The next step is to encourage people to sign up for your email campaigns. You can attract leads and inspire them to opt-in by offering newsletters, free downloads, free trials, product samples, and many other offers that appeal to your audiences. Try to experiment with different offers and see which attracts the most leads.
Pick a Specific Kind of Campaign to Run
Depending on your audience and the end goal of your campaigns, you can choose different types of campaigns to launch.
For example, you could send product updates to existing customers that list various improvements, with a link to the product landing page. In other campaigns, sending a weekly or monthly newsletter can also help you promote new content with helpful, informative articles that your audience loves. You could also choose to send content announcements, whether you use them to promote new ebooks, webinars, free trials, discounts, or other content.
Make sure that the campaign you run appeals specifically to your target audience, or you may find that you’re wasting your time and effort on recipients who’ve lost interest.
Develop a Strict Schedule
Figure out when your audience is most active on email and develop a good schedule to send email blasts. Sending the right emails at the right times will help keep audiences consistently engaged as you gain their trust. For instance, you may find that you get the best response when you send emails sometime between 9-11 a.m. on Mondays.
Eventually, people will come to anticipate emails from you during that time on that particular day as you become a part of their weekly routine.
Measure the Results of Your Campaigns
You won’t be able to determine how well your email marketing strategies are performing unless you measure the results. Based on your goals, you can identify the metrics that matter most, whether you’re looking at open rates, click-through rates, or sales. Depending on your campaigns’ performance, you can make the appropriate changes to optimize your strategy.
Other Tips for Email Campaigns
To help you develop the perfect email, consider the following tips when producing email content in 2021.
Make Every Email Personalized
Today, consumers expect personalized marketing materials, regardless of the channel. While addressing the recipient by their name and segmenting audiences based on location and behaviors is a good start, you should try to go even deeper with your personalization. One way to effectively personalize your emails is to tailor the CTA, such as offering a discount on the customer’s birthday or membership anniversary.
Don’t Neglect Pre-Headers
Businesses tend to focus on creating the perfect subject line that attracts recipients’ attention, but the pre-header is just as important. Pre-headers feature text of around 85-100 characters that people read after the subject line, but before opening the email.
You can optimize pre-headers by including an enticing CTA or quick offer that further encourages people to open your emails.
Make Your Emails Interactive
Interactive content will continue to be popular among consumers in 2021. You can make emails interactive by including surveys requesting feedback, videos that keep readers engaged, and other clickable content such as image carousels or quizzes. Interactivity can further set your emails apart and make leads more excited to receive future content from you.
All of these aspects can help you create a successful email marketing campaign in 2021 and the years ahead. With high-quality, highly personalized, and consistent email campaigns, you’ll be able to attract more leads and drive more sales. At the same time, you’ll be able to effectively complement the rest of your digital marketing efforts.