Best Practices for Your DIY Email Marketing Campaign

An email marketing campaign is one of the most effective ways to reach your customers and engage with them.  However, not every company has the luxury of hiring an email marketing team or outsourcing the work. However, going DIY with your marketing campaign is definitely doable.

If you’re creating your campaign in-house, you should concentrate on 3 things: creating a great first impression, engaging your audience with your business, and utilizing your email metrics within your strategy. An effective email campaign can increase your sales conversions, traffic, and lead generation if it’s managed with these best practices in mind.

Create a Great First Impression

A great first impression is hard to make when there are innumerable amounts of spam senders doing the same exact thing. And thus, a customers’ first impression of your marketing email should express your brand image and encourage customers to open the message.

• Place your business logo above the fold so that it is the first thing your customers see. This is an important element of branding – making yourself recognizable to customers through your brand, and then accurately depicting your message.
• Use language that implies urgency. MarketingForecast.com suggests this can work for B2B and B2C: “In the B2C sector, consumers may be more likely to click on emails with a subject line that contains words like ‘discount’ or ‘free.’ In the B2B sector, the promotional word ‘sale’ prompts the best open rates.” Sometimes it’s the smallest details that make the biggest difference.

Engage Your Audience

Email is a great way to market your products, but gives you the opportunity to do a lot more. Diversifying your email marketing messages will help you engage your customers’ interest and improve open and click-through rates.

• Utilize focus groups, conversations on your social media pages, and comments on your blog to determine the kinds of things your customers want to talk about beyond just product marketing.
• Use your emails to engage your customers in those conversations. Thank them for patronizing your business, send them exclusive product information, and keep them informed of developments in your business and the industry. The more compelling content you create, the more your customers will respond to your marketing messages.
• In order to reach the greatest number of customers, be sure that your website is optimized for mobile access. Add a link in your email signature to take mobile customers directly to your site.

Use Your Analytics

Analytics is critical to email marketing success. This will give you an idea of what messages your customers respond the most to. This information, in addition to what you glean from your social media and blog comments, can help you make your email campaign content more efficient with less time and effort.

• Metrics that you should track include: deliver rate, open rate, subscriber retention rate, and click-through rate.
• These numbers in particular will give you a clear picture of whether your emails are getting opened, what kind of headlines and content are most effective, and where you need to direct your email marketing strategy.

Together with your social media presence and website performance, your email marketing campaign is an important element of your overall online marketing strategy. Follow best practices by creating a good first impression, engaging your audience, and using your email analytics wisely.

Megan Webb-Morgan is a web content writer for Resource Nation. She writes about small business, focusing on topics such as business sales. Follow Resource Nation on Facebook and Twitter, too! 

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