Email is an indispensable part of the modern marketing mix. It’s both efficient and effective, allowing you to reach a broad audience with minimal effort and maximum impact. But, it’s hard to get email right and even harder to do it consistently.
If you’re looking for that extra edge when it comes to email marketing, then this blog post is for you! We’ll share our best strategies for crafting engaging emails that grab attention and get results. We’ll also provide insights into segmenting your lists, optimising your content, analysing performance metrics, and more.
Ronin, a Brisbane digital marketing agency, has been helping clients build successful email campaigns for years – so we know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to crafting emails that drive engagement. Let us show you how to create emails that resonates with your customers and drives real results for your business!
Why Email Marketing is an Important Channel in Your Content Marketing Strategy
Are you looking to tap into the potential of email marketing? Email remains one of the most effective marketing channels available, making it a key part of any content marketing strategy. It has the highest return on investment (ROI) compared to other digital channels, and with some careful effort, you can reap its rewards.
What benefits does email bring? It helps you build relationships with your customers and reach them directly. It’s easily trackable and allows for meaningful segmentation – so you can target different customer types with customised content. You can also use automation to streamline sending, collecting and analysing results, scaling your efforts to levels that would be cost-prohibitive in other mediums.
Overall, it’s an ideal way to nurture leads and build a long-term relationship with existing customers; plus its easy scalability makes it an attractive option for businesses of all sizes. With the right strategy and tactics in place, email can bring significant momentum to your business – so read on to find out how!
Crafting Effective Emails
Crafting effective emails goes beyond the obvious basics. Sure, you need to make sure your subject line is clear and actionable, and you need to ensure that the email itself isn’t cluttered with too much text, graphics or images. But if you’re looking for maximum email engagement, it’s essential to go further than that.
The key is to make sure your emails are written in a way that speaks directly to your target audience. Think about it: almost everyone has an overflowing email inbox these days—so why would your customers open yours? By understanding more about who they are and what they need, you can craft content that is tailored specifically to them.
This means engaging with your customers on a personal level with emails focused on their individual interests, as well as segmenting your lists according to their buying behaviour and using dynamic content such as special offers, incentives or discounts. Doing so will ensure that each email resonates with its intended recipient—giving them an incentive to open and click through.
Optimising Email Content
When it comes to optimising your email content, there are a few key things to keep in mind. Firstly, personalisation and segmentation. You want to make sure you’re sending relevant content to the right people on your list so that it resonates with them and keeps them engaged.
You can do this by getting to know your contacts better and segmenting lists based on contact information or past purchases. Once that’s done, you can start crafting custom content for each segment based on their needs and interests.
As for the content itself, one of the most important elements is visual appeal. If you want your emails to stand out from the crowd, you need to make sure they look good — that means using visuals like images and videos (if possible) and using fonts that are easy to read on all devices.
It’s also a good idea to use concise, clear language that gets your message across quickly. Remember — people don’t have much time these days, so you want them to be able to digest your message as quickly as possible.
Finally, always include a call-to-action (CTA) button or link at the end of your email. The CTA should be relevant and easy to understand so that people know exactly how they can take action when they finish reading the email – such as downloading an ebook or visiting your website.
Best Practises for Increasing Engagement
You’ve segmented your audience, crafted a compelling message, now you want to get maximum engagement from your email campaigns. Fortunately, there are plenty of best practises you can use to increase the effectiveness of your emails.
Personalise Content
Using customer data, personalise the content of your emails for each segment. This could be anything from addressing each recipient by their name in the subject line or body of the email, to tailoring product recommendations based on their past purchases. This will make customers feel valued and deepen the relationship between your brand and customer.
Keep Emails Relevant
Make sure that your emails are always relevant and timely – this means sending different messages during different times of day and week, different offers depending on where a customer is in their journey with you, as well as adjusting messages as seasons change. Doing this will provide customers with more relevant information which will reduce unsubscribes and boost open rates.
Include Multiple CTA’s
The goal of any email is to get people to take action – so try including multiple Call To Actions (CTA). Ensure that these CTAs are clickable buttons or text links so readers can see them easily and take the desired action quickly. You might even include two contrasting CTAs such as ‘Shop Now’ vs ‘Get a Quote’, depending on which action is more appropriate for that subscriber at that time.
Strategies for Segmenting Your Lists
One of the most effective strategies for engaging your customers is by segmenting your email lists. By dividing your list up, you can create emails that are tailored to the individual interests and needs of your target customer. Segmenting allows you to target different segments with specific content and offers – making sure it’s relevant to them.
You can segment your list in a few different ways:
- Demographics: Age, gender, location
- Behavioural: What type of customer interaction they have with your brand
- Purchase: Their past purchases or lack thereof
- Interests: What interests or keywords they may have expressed in the past
- Industry / Profession: If a customer works in a certain field, you might want to target messaging specifically at that industry.
By segmenting out different customer types, you can create emails that are more likely to pique their interest – leading to higher engagement and potentially more sales too! You’ll also get much more accurate results when tracking performance, since the customer types will be much more defined.
Tips for Analysing and Tracking Results
Another important step for successful marketing emails is analysing and tracking your results. Understanding how customers interact with your emails and what changes need to be made is essential for creating effective content and campaigns. Here are a few tips to help with your analysis:
- Track the metrics that matter: To analyse your email performance, you need to track the right set of metrics. This could include open rates, click rates, conversion rates, unsubscribe rates, etc. You’ll also need to look at geographical data and demographic info such as age ranges or gender so you can identify areas for improvement in your overall targeting strategy.
- Set achievable goals: Making sure that your email campaign has clear goals that are achievable is key to success. Your goals should include both short-term (what do we want to achieve within this email) as well as long-term objectives (what do we want to achieve over a certain amount of time).
- Use A/B testing: A/B testing is an effective way of understanding which version of an email resonates best with leads or existing customers. You could test design elements such as the subject line, story or CTA click rate. With accurate A/B testing comes a much better understanding of what works and what doesn’t work with particular audiences.
By setting realistic goals, using metrics to track progress, and using A/B testing for optimisation purposes you can ensure that your email marketing efforts yield maximum engagement from leads and existing customers alike.
Integrating With Other Marketing Channels
Your email marketing strategy isn’t an island—it’s important to integrate it with other digital channels if you want maximum reach and engagement. Leveraging the data from your email campaigns and boosting them across other platforms is also a great way to personalise content, target specific customer segments, and get the most out of you marketing budget.
Cross-Platform Messaging
Cross-platform messaging is a great way to communicate with customers on different platforms simultaneously—think emails, on-site notifications and ads on social media marketing channels. This allows you to create more targeted campaigns and deliver relevant messages that are personalised to each recipient. With data from your email campaigns, you can craft a customised message for each segment based on what type of email was opened, what links were clicked, or when customers interacted with an ad.
Re-targeting Campaigns
Retargeting campaigns can be used to keep your brand top-of-mind for customers who have engaged with your emails in some way. Whether it’s clicking a link or opening an email, these people are more likely to be interested in your products or services, so using re-targeting ads that appear on other websites they visit can help drive conversions.
By tying together different digital channels, you can gain valuable insights into customers behaviour and make sure the right message is delivered at the right time—all while improving engagement and boosting returns on investment.
Conclusion
While email may seem like an older form of digital marketing, it can still be an invaluable asset for attracting and engaging customers. From crafting compelling content to tracking and analysing results, email can be used to great effect to reach your marketing goals. By utilising segmentation, optimisation, personalisation, and other strategies, you can craft effective emails that will drive up customer engagement, loyalty, and conversions. With the right strategies in place, email can be your most powerful digital marketing tool. As a leading Brisbane marketing agency, Ronin has helped hundreds of clients with successful email marketing. Contact us today to see how we can help your business.