The ABC on Newsletters for Online Marketing

Email marketing is one of the unsung heroes of any digital marketing campaign. If you’re looking to boost this (mostly) free, organic marketing channel and make it work for your business, what should you do? Today the gurus from Zebra 360 Digital Marketing Agency have the tips you need.

Growing Your Email Marketing

Did you know that email marketing can pay off as much as $44 (yes, dollars) for every $1 you spend? That’s an amazing return- but it’s a specific niche all of its own. Done wrong, it can become a frustration, which is why many people forget to include this powerful tool in their online marketing efforts. Leveraging smart tools, like personalization of emails and easy automation to cut down on your work are the key to getting it right. So let’s take a look.

What Receivers Like in Advertising Emails

So, spamming bulk emails is not the route to go. What do we know about what recipients like?

  • A dazzling ¾ or consumers will only engage with messages personalised to their tastes.
  • Roughly the same amount also want to buy from retailers who show their name and understand their purchase history and tastes.
  • Using automation to help you achieve this improves lead generation for 80% of businesses, increasing conversions almost as much.
  • Email marketing can nearly double customer retention rates

A: Starting With Bulk

For most companies, you begin your email marketing efforts with a bulk communicator. This is a service that lets you (legitimately and legally, provided they opted-in) send the same email to everyone on your database. That doesn’t mean it can be left unattended. You need to make sure you are actioning and removing unsubscribes, seamlessly adding new subscriptions, and creating, sending, and scheduling regular communications.

If you are at this point in your email development cycle, you need to focus on easy onboarding through subscription forms, managing your database so it stays clean and relevant, designing appealing emails and ensuring you track engagement with them, and this laying the foundation of a more personalised email experience.

B: Moving to Personalisation

However, it’s important not to get stuck there. Once you’ve created this solid base to work from, it’s time to think bigger.

A/B testing is going to be critical at this stage- using two, slightly different, email versions to see which gets the best traction with your audience. Additionally, you need to be working towards using filters, tags, and data metrics to manage the data you need for personalised email campaigns. It’s also a good stage to introduce dynamic content into your emails, or content that changes based on campaigns or user preference. This is, as you can guess, your first steps in personalised email campaigns.

C: Going Beyond the Basics

Now you’ve got all the basics down pat strongly, you can really unlock the value of personalised email campaigns. The word ‘email workflow’ is going to become a core of your vocabulary. 

Email workflows are just a series of automatically generated and sent emails. However, they use the subscribers’ contact info, behaviour in your shop or service, data-learned preferences, and more to work together to a specific goal. Perhaps you want them to buy a specific product, book a service, or engage with a specific campaign you are running. Examples of email workflows include welcome emails, lead generation, or focusing on ecommerce activities.

Once you understand how to select the ‘triggers’ that will match specific emails to specific subscribers, you can also fully embrace automation softwares to help. Anything that saves time, energy, and resources is great, right? Plus, that juicy extra personalisation will ensure you see boosted client retention and outcomes.

This can seem a difficult journey, especially with a ton of new ways of thinking about your email marketing to embrace and new software to explore. However, with the right partner, it can be a smooth and rewarding process. The Zebra 360 Digital Marketing Agency team, powered up by our email-savvy friends at Everlytic, can help you boost your email marketing efforts into the stratosphere, so don’t be afraid to onboard the help you need to maximise your results today!