Email Marketing: How to Stay Out of the Junk Folder

In this post, we’re diving into email marketing. It’s been a key marketing tool for nearly two decades, and while it might not have the flashy tech appeal of newer methods, email marketing remains one of the most effective digital marketing strategies for any business, regardless of size or profit.

What is Email Marketing?

As the name suggests, email marketing involves sending messages to customers and potential customers with the goal of promoting your product or service and building brand awareness. It’s a low-cost, scalable, and targeted approach that allows businesses to easily connect with customers.

Email marketing completely opens up your audience in a way that other digital marketing channels do not. There are more than 3.9 billion email addresses worldwide. This means that a successful email marketing workflow can play a huge role in creating and maintaining relationships with a vast number of customers and potential customers. When done right, it can yield impressive returns—by 2019, the ROI for email campaigns reached as high as $52 for every $1 spent. 

The Difference Between a Good and Bad Email Marketing Campaign

Everything being said, email marketing is not a simple panacea for all your marketing woes. A bad email campaign can be a complete waste of time at best. At worst it could end up costing you time, money, and customers. Chances are when you initially think of email marketing, your mind will go to spam/junk mail. The things that filters were created for. Unfortunately, this is the case for many poor email marketing strategies. Poor email marketing campaigns will provide the customer with hardly any useful information, it won’t be personal, and it will ultimately just come across as an annoying sales pitch that you will inevitably pitch right into the trash file. A successful email marketing campaign, on the other hand, is all about building relationships.

Setting Yourself Up for Success 

If you want to see success in your email marketing campaign, you must go beyond just blasting out content and hoping that it will lead to some sales. Successful email marketing is targeted, personal, engaging, and useful. Below we will go over a few best practices when it comes to crafting your own email marketing messages.

Make your Emails Easily Accessible: Deliverability is something that you must keep in mind when creating email messaging. If there is low engagement, you may increase the bounce rates of your messages. To avoid this, you can implement double opt-in strategies meaning that subscribers must opt-in to sign up for email but must also confirm their willingness to receive an email from you. By doing this, you will have a much higher chance of engagement which will in turn increase the credibility of your emails.

Create Content that People Want to Read: Creating engaging content is key to maintaining an active subscriber list. Many times, it all comes down to the subject line. Keep your messaging clear and compelling. The best way to do this is to include actionable language or questions that will catch your customer’s eye. If the subject line is intriguing, you will optimize open rates. Once they open it, ensure that the message is consistent with that subject line and focuses on the core message that you want to get across. Brevity is key here. In fact, you may consider adding images or infographics to reduce the reading load.

Make it Personal: Successful email marketing is like a conversation between you and your customer. You want a subscriber list that is open to hearing from you and then you want to send them information that is personally interesting to them. You can do this by segmenting the messaging that you send out according to specific needs. There are various ways in which you can segment your subscribers. A few options are: 

Demographics (Age, race, gender, etc.)

Purchasing Behavior (Have they purchased anything from you? If so, what?)

Customer Journey (Are they new to the list?)

Customer Loyalty (Are they long-time subscribers?)

Product/ Service Specifications (Have they shown a particular interest in one product/service?)

Continuously Refine Your Strategies: Email marketing messaging is an iterative process. You will have to figure out which kinds of messages resonate with your particular audience. Chances are, you aren’t going to hit it out of the park on the first try. A/B testing is a great, data-driven way to keep track of which messages garner the most engagement. A/B testing involves sending out two different types of messages with one key thing being different (message, subject line, time of delivery, etc.) and all other things being equal. Then you track key performance indicators (KPIs) for both messages and analyze the results to see which message performed better. Some KPIs to consider for email marketing campaigns are:

Bounce Rate (Return to sender)

Conversion Rate (Click-to-customer rate)

Unsubscribe Rate (They’re just not that into you)

Forward Rate (They want to tell their friends about you)

Potential Challenges for Small Businesses

As a small business, you may face challenges like limited resources, maintaining a subscriber list, creating compelling content, ensuring deliverability, and staying up-to-date with trends. Fortunately, there are solutions:

Use low-cost/free email automation tools.

Grow your subscriber base through organic engagement.

Follow best practices for content and deliverability.

Stay current with trends through continuous learning and experience.

Ultimately, if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the idea of creating and maintaining an email marketing campaign, there are marketing agencies out there like Space Bison Marketing who are happy to help point you in the right direction and get you set up for success.