Email marketing is used by the vast majority of companies and for good reason, it has the highest ROI of any marketing technique and it uses a communication channel that virtually everyone has access to and finds easy to use. That said, some companies use email more successfully than others. Understanding how these successful companies go about their email marketing can help improve your campaigns too. Here we’ll look at some of the main ways to make your email marketing more effective.
- Develop positive relationships from the outset
First impressions count in any relationship and this includes email marketing. This means your first email has an important job to do. Rather than going for the hard sell, the initial correspondence should be a welcome email that thanks users for subscribing, introduces the company and informs customers about the good things to look forward to in future emails. This will make the customer feel valued and let them see that your business doesn’t simply want to make money from them. In doing this, you are laying the foundations for long-term relationships with ongoing sales. - Build trust
Customers will only stay loyal to businesses they feel they can trust and to build that trust, you need to deliver on your commitments. So, if you make promises to them, especially if this is done in order to get them to subscribe to future emails, you need to ensure you keep them. Whether this was a commitment to not send too many emails or to send regular discounts or offers, once you stop you can be perceived as untrustworthy and this can impact on email conversions in the future. - Use impactful email addresses
Who an email is sent from can have an impact on whether it is opened and read. For this reason, it is often a good idea to set up an email account specifically for email marketing and with a discrete sender name that recipients will easily recognise and identify with. This could be something like ‘Your Newsletter (yournewsletter@…) Special Offers (specialoffers@….) or even from the Customer Team (customerteam@…) The more familiar customers are with the name, the more likely it will get opened and read rather than finding itself in the trash or spam folder.
Unless you are sending out huge numbers of emails that you have no chance to respond to, try to avoid using no-reply emails. If someone has a question or query, a modern, customer-centric business should be able to respond. Indeed, that response might lead to a sale or at least reaffirm that you are a business willing to help its customers. - Personalisation is important
A lot of the software used in email marketing enables the customer’s name to be taken during the subscription process. It also provides the means to include the name in any correspondence so that every email begins with a personalised salutation (e.g. Dear John).
By today’s standards, however, this is the bare minimum you should do. Modern consumers have high expectations from the businesses they use and want to see emails that are relevant to them. If you have collected data about their purchase and browsing history, you can use this to send out both personalised content and personalised offers. Doing so vastly increases the chances of making a sale and will ensure they keep reading the emails over the long term. - Do more than just sell
If every email you send is just about the products or services you offer, eventually customers will get fed up and unsubscribe. Instead, you have to mix this up with relevant and interesting content, useful advice and tips and unmissable offers. These can be used to send customers to blog posts and landing pages on your website which may, in an indirect and less pushy way, still generate leads and sales.
Of course, engaging content, advice and special offers also show that you are putting the customers’ needs at the core of what you are doing. This helps to cement existing relationships and makes readers look forward to your next email. - Make your emails secure
Billions of marketing emails get filtered into spam folders every day and many of those which don’t get deleted because the recipient is unsure whether they are genuine. With so many phishing and other email scams happening, ensuring that your emails are perceived as authentic and trustworthy can be crucial to make sure they get opened, read and acted upon.
How do you do this? The best solution is to use email signing certificates. An email signing certificate helps your emails safely pass through spam filters and enables the recipient to verify that it really is from your business and not from a scammer, increasing the likelihood it will be opened. At the same time, the certificate encrypts the content of your email, including any attachments, so they cannot be stolen or tampered with either during transit or while waiting to be downloaded from the recipient’s email server.
Conclusion
Email marketing can be an extremely effective way to drive new sales and develop long-term relationships with your customers. Hopefully, the six suggestions given in this post will help you create better email campaigns that are even more successful.
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