In this post we’re going to teach you all need to about successful email marketing. Buckle up. This email marketing boot camp isn’t for wimps.
Mission: Successful Email Marketing
On the ever-changing battlefield of Internet Marketing, it’s important to practice up-to-date and effective strategies to promote your business. It’s no secret that email marketing is one of the most popular, practical and powerful ways of reaching your audience. Though email marketing is arguably the most beneficial method in your marketing arsenal, infiltrating someone’s personal inbox is a delicate operation.
THIS STRATEGY REQUIRES CAUTION AS YOU CAN QUICKLY DWINDLE YOUR CHANCES OF OBTAINING AND RETAINING CUSTOMERS WITH MESSY OR NO STRATEGY, SPAM VIOLATIONS, AND MORE.
If you want the benefits that email marketing has to offer, it’s imperative you perfect your strategic approach for even the most basic of concepts.
But don’t worry! As always, ClickBank is here to guide you through the basics and to success. Our marketing automation and analytics manager, Matthew Flynn has detonated a bomb of expertise upon this very article of the best practices for successful email marketing!
MEET MATTHEW FLYNN
Prior to being hired at ClickBank, Matthew was a Marketing and Sales Analyst for a life sciences company and a Circulation Analyst for a catalog planning consultancy. For over a year now, Matthew has proved to be of great value for our marketing team as he continues to display his skills with marketing analytics.
LET’S MOVE IN
Phase One: Nailing the Subject Line
Let’s start with your subject line. To have a shot at sending hops with email traffic, you must get your audience to open your emails. Your chosen subject line is your best chance to give your audience a reason to do so. Because your email will likely be sent to users on a number of email platforms, including mobile devices, best practices now suggest aiming for a shorter subject line (<50 characters) which appeals to your audience and is relevant to the content within the email.
Want Better Open Rates? Let’s Get Personal
There are many different components to a subject line which when creatively and strategically implemented, awakes the little voice inside a reader’s head, “Open the email, Janet. Open it.” For higher open rates, consider inserting some personalization into the subject line. Invoking urgency or curiosity, eluding to a story, or presenting special offers are some of the many tactics which really bring interest to your email floating in the swelling sea of Janet’s inbox.
- Avoid using too many exclamation marks!!!!!
- Avoid using dollar $ign$
- TONE IT DOWN WITH THE CAPS LOCK KEY
For more information about setting off and avoiding spam filters, check out this article from benchmarkemail.com.
Phase Two: Sealing The Deal with Your Content
Alright, you’ve sparked attention and now Janet is in the email. I repeat, Janet is inside the email. The body is now equally as important and requires, you guessed it, more strategy. The content of your email is your best artillery, built to fire an impactful blast known as a call to action. Whether you are urging the reader to make a purchase, subscribe to a newsletter, visit another website, etc., our email expert Matthew Flynn suggests a short and clear path to that C2A is best practice. “Emails should be as concise as possible. If you are too wordy, or you have too many calls to action, you may lose the readers who are scanning emails quickly. To appeal to as much of your audience as possible, avoid long paragraphs to make scanning easier, and include a call to action link above the fold.”
Phase Three: Delivering the Package
Before you even think about pressing the send button, keep in mind there are a handful of ways people are going to view your email. The combination of devices, operating systems, and apps/webpages emails are being opened through is an ever-growing list. It’s important to confirm your email is responsive and renders well in the combinations your audience tends to use most often. Another best practice would be to take advantage of some of the email services who offer a way to preview your email with screenshots on the most popular email clients to make sure everything looks good before deploying your email. Litmus and Emails on Acid are just a couple special troops that provide these services.
Phase Four: I Sent the Email, Now What?
Now the first email is off, you should probably get going on the rest of them because the next best practice tip is to send consistently. This not only offers your audience the best user experience, but it keeps them remembering who you are and the value you are providing. This reduces the likelihood that your audience will mark your emails as spam. Also, this comes with the added benefit of improved email reputation; your emails will look less like spam to email clients if there is consistent email volume and audience engagement with emails originating from your sending IP.
Phase Five: Maintenance
While you are improving your email marketing game, now is also a good time to wash, rinse and repeat as Matthew’s final best practice tip is good email list hygiene. Most email services will provide some tools which help you cleanse your email list of bad emails. Bad emails would include emails that simply aren’t valid because:
- the email address doesn’t fit the standard email format of accountname@domainname.suffix
- the domain name doesn’t have an email server
- the email does not have an account at that domain
These emails will bounce, which decreases your deliverability rates. Other emails you may want to remove from your list are those which have not engaged in one of your emails for an average of 6 to 12 months. You could try allowing these emails to elect for less frequent emailing, or contact these emails with a re-engagement campaign. Here are some stellar examples that are sure to ignite some email inspiration for you!
Mission Accomplished
You’ve crushed the subject line, your audience is viewing (and loving!) your emails around the world and you are gaining targeted subscribers and keeping them around with consistent emails all while boosting your traffic and sales with ClickBank!
If you want to learn more about email marketing and how to jump start your digital marketing career, we recommend Spark–the only ClickBank-endorsed education platform to help users learn digital marketing from professionals.