Email Marketing Tips For Digital Marketing Apprentices

Email marketing on computer

Have you felt struggled trying to create an email marketing campaign? Email is a complex aspect of marketing. The landscape always changes. We have listed our top tips on how digital marketing apprentices can improve their email campaigns.

Choose the right email marketing software.

Email marketing is a powerful marketing tool, so it is important to make sure that you are using the right software to improve your marketing campaign. Email marketing software’s include tools that are able to increase your audience, segment your lists and provide reports to grow your business and earn more revenue. Below is a list of 10 free email marketing campaigns to help you save both time and money:

Promotions aren’t everything.

While the ultimate goal of email marketing is to grow your business, you need to realize that promotions are not the core of email marketing. The most important aspect of your email marketing must be to establish and nurture healthy relationships with your customers. It is these healthy relationships that will result in customers providing lifetime value and act as the driving force of your business’ growth.

A/B testing is a must.

Always test important elements in your campaigns to help you constantly improve your campaigns. A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a way of working out which of two campaign options is the most effective in terms of encouraging opens or clicks. In an A/B test you set up two variations of the one campaign and send them to a small percentage of your total recipients. Half of the test group is sent to Version A, while the other half gets Version B. The result, measured by the most opens or clicks, determines the winning version. This is then sent to the remaining subscribers.

Preview your emails before sending.

As every subscriber is important to you, using previews will help you find the optimal format and layout for different platforms. You want to avoid any mistakes in your campaign

Experiment with send times.

Experimenting with send times is a great way to get to know your audience. Try sending email campaigns at different times and see what email receives the most engagement. Over time, you should start to see patterns and be able to pinpoint what works best for your email marketing.

Email marketing best practice

Have a personalised message.

Personalisation is one of the most important elements you need to strive to nail in every campaign. However, many people have misunderstood personalisation to mean addressing a subscriber by name. While that is part of it, there’s more to personalisation such as:

  • Being relevant
  • Sending timely emails
  • Anticipating your subscriber’s needs

Add GIFs to your email campaigns.

Adding GIFs to your email is a great way to grab your subscribers attention, point them toward an action you want them to take, or keep them scrolling to make sure they get your whole message.

Pay attention to subject lines.

Subject lines are one of the most important aspects of email marketing. The subject line of an email is the single line of text people see when they receive your email. This one line of text can often determine whether an email is opened or not, so make sure it’s optimized for your audience.

Keep on doing tests on your emails.

Testing your email campaigns is important because it ensures that your campaign looks the way you want it to. This way, you know how the campaign will display on different browsers or email clients. Furthermore, testing lets you figure out what’s working with your campaigns and what’s not.

Conclusion.

In summary, email marketing is an effective marketing method when it is done correctly. By following these tips, digital marketing apprentices will be ready to create amazing email marketing campaigns.

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5 Steps to Creating a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

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Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Knowing how to create and deliver a successful email marketing campaign can be a hugely powerful tool to have in your portfolio. As a digital marketing apprentice, it can sometimes feel like you are not quite sure where to start. Is it the subject line, the copywriting or even the target audience?

In this post, I aim to give you a formula that should help your emails perform, time and time again.

Why Email Marketing?

Businesses across the globe are learning that even though Social Media is growing rapidly, Email Marketing is not a channel that can be neglected.

It consistently shows the highest conversion rate of all marketing channels. And, as a result, delivers the best ROI. Therefore, learning how to deliver them effectively, is vital to a business’s growth and success.

Some statistics pulled together by Optinmonster compare Email Marketing with Social Media in terms of potential reach and a few common KPIs.

A table showing the comparison between Email Marketing and Social Media statistics.

The article delves into each of these elements and helps you understand the key differences between email and social media. Give it a read here to dive into the detail.

How to do it

  1. Understand why you are sending the email

Before anything else, you need to make sure you understand why you are sending this email. What is your goal? What do you want customers to do as a result of getting the email?

There are a number of different goals that emails can help a business achieve, such as;

  • Raising brand awareness
  • Generating revenue
  • Encouraging website traffic
  • Informing customers

As part of your goal setting, it is important to set out how you will assess whether these goals are being met. This can be done using KPIs or Key Performance Indicators. We will look at these later on in more detail.

Once you have a good idea of your email campaign goal, it will help you formulate the content, the targeting and how you analyse the performance.

2. Decide on your audience

A large part of an email marketing campaign is the audience.

Woman's hand writing the word "audience" on a whiteboard, with arrows.
Photo by Melanie Deziel on Unsplash

There are a number of ways to identify a target audience based on certain characteristics. These can be broken down into 4 main segmentations;

  • Demographic: Age, gender, race, marital status etc.
  • Psychographic: Lifestyle, personality, values and beliefs etc.
  • Behavioural: Spending habits, brand interactions, customer loyalty etc.
  • Geographic: City, region, country etc.

Use your brand and campaign goals to identify your customers.

3. Create your email

Depending on your end goal, there are several types of email campaign to choose from. You also need to make sure the type you opt for is suitable for your chosen audience.

Here are some of the most popular or recognisable email types;

  • Newsletters – These are ideal for when brands want to share industry information, news, business updates or even sending out a weekly round up of blog posts. Typically they are sent on a regular schedule such as daily, weekly or monthly and are very rarely used for promotional purposes.
  • Promotional campaigns – Typically used when a brand is trying to sell a product or service. The email will highlight key features, benefits, positive reviews and sometimes a price point before directing customers to the website to purchase using a CTA.
  • Triggered emails – These are emails that are sent as a result of customers performing a specific action such as abandoning an online shopping cart. The email will remind the customer of their cart and prompt them to return and complete their purchase.
  • Re-engagement emails – When a customer has become ‘inactive’ with a brand, these emails will target them with the goal of getting them to re-engage. For example, if a customer stops regularly visiting a website, a brand might send them a special discount code to tempt them back to being ‘active’.

Although the email type plays a large part in whether you meet your goals, it is not the entire picture. Making sure you send the email at the best time can also be crucial in its success. And so, on to step 4…

4. Find the best time to send it

To get maximum engagement with your emails, you need to consider when you send them. This means looking at both the day of the week and the time of day.

Some thing are obvious, for example, sending an email to a UK audience at 3am would get very little engagement as people are likely asleep. However finding the right hour of the day might seem a little more tricky.

Luckily, a huge number of studies have been done, analysing millions of email campaigns, to find that optimal time. And, whilst the studies vary in size and style, they all show a very similar pattern.

A infographic showing that the best days of the week to send an email marketing campaign are Tuesday, Thursday and Wednesday.

Based on number of email opens and clicks, Tuesday came out as the top day of the week to send out those emails, with Thursday coming up as a great day to send a second email in the same week.

Whilst the studies did find slightly more varying results when it came to what time of day to send emails, there were a few more popular times, based on differing factors.

An infographic showing the key times of day at which to send an email marketing campaign based on different data factors. 10am, 8pm. 2pm and 6am.

Of course, you can take from this that Tuesday at 10am should be the best time to send your emails and it is definitely a good starting point but we should always consider our specific business, brand and audience when making this decision as well.

5. Measure your success

When it comes to KPIs for an email marketing campaign, there are a few common ones that businesses tend to focus on. These are;

  • Clickthrough rates – the percentage of the audience who clicked on one or more links within the email. CTR is good in understanding what content your audience most engages with.
  • Conversion rates – the percentage of the audience who click on a link within the email and then complete an action. This action can vary e.g. purchasing a product or filling out a form.
  • Open rates – the percentage of the audience that opens the email. This can often be a good indicator of your subject line strength.
  • ROI (return on investment) – this is essentially the revenue you made as a result of the email campaign, divided by the cost of delivering the campaign.

In order to establish the success of your campaign, it is important to align the initial goals you set at the beginning with the KPIs you measured at the end. If your goal was to drive more customers to your website a positive indicator of success might be a strong clickthrough rate.

Hopefully this guide has given you the confidence and information you need to create your own successful email marketing campaign. If you are keen to try your hand at some more digital marketing, check out these blog posts for more helpful tips and tricks;

Happy marketing!