Attention email marketers: 5 things you must never neglect

Did you know that Internet users send more than 74 trillion emails every year? Certainly, much of this traffic is personal, but a large chunk of it is related to email marketing from businesses to consumers.

While there seems to be a belief that email marketing is in decline, nothing could be further from the truth. And email communication crosses all generations. According to Adestra, in fact, 78% of teens still use email, and over 50% of all generations make online purchases.

What all of this means for email marketers is that email campaigns can still be amazingly effective, if they are done right.

So, the first thing that marketers must not neglect is email campaigns. Email is still such a great way to reach your audience.

Top tip: Use email marketing automation to save time during your campaigns and increase efficiency. Check out this handy guide from Drip.

Now, let’s look at the other things that email marketers must not neglect if they are to get the conversions they seek.

Relevance is Critical

What consumers hate are irrelevant emails from brands, even if they have a history of buying from those brands. What this means for marketers is that smart personalization is in order. Content and frequency must be right.

And according to DMA, at least 25% of marketers have trouble creating the right content for their email campaigns.

The first step is segmenting audiences by their relationship positions with the brand, before creating separate emails for those groups.

The next step is to craft content that will offer value to each of those segments, based on their needs and pain points. Once recipients know that your brand offers information, entertainment, products, offers, etc. that could be valuable, they will continue to open those emails, even though they do not buy every time.

Content That Engages

Marketers are not necessarily great content creators. If this sounds like you, then it’s important to use the tools and creative writing resources that will engage your recipients. Boring emails get trashed and often result in “spam” delineation. Recipients just do not want to hear from you anymore.

Here are some tools and resources to make email content “rock.”

1. Rewarded Essays: a company with an entire creative copywriting department to provide the text and visuals you want.
2. Atlas from Quartz Data Center: If you want the latest research on any topic, in the form of graphs or charts, this is the perfect resource.
3. Headline analyzer by CoSchedule: One of the key engagements for email marketing is the subject line. If you want a tool that analyzes your subject lines for emotional appeal and word strength, this is it.
4. Essay Supply: A writing service that has an entire crew of journalists and creative writers for great content.
5. Hubspot Infographic Templates: Say it with visuals. And Hubspot has 15 amazing templates to create infographics
6. Is Accurate: If you need to translate content for foreign audiences, this is a source that will give you the top-rated translation services.
7. Giphy: Everyone loves great gifs, and you can provide entertainment while you get your message out. You can use their gif templates or create your own.
8. Hot Essay Service: Originally formed as a writing service for students, this company has expanded into content writing with a “bang.”

Honoring All Devices

Just like any content, emails must be responsive to all mobile devices – it’s just not optional. Over 80% of people with smart phones use them to check their emails. You will want to create a mobile opt-in, so that your audience can receive your emails on all of their devices.

And consumers are getting pretty savvy. Many have an email address specifically for marketing messages. Because of this, your subject lines have to be amazing to grab their attention and motivate them to open your mail.

Russell Thompson, head of marketing for Citatior, says this: “When we finally realized that our emails had to be formatted specifically for mobile devices, we not only increased our open rate, but we saw a significant uptick in conversions.”

Don’t Underestimate the Power of Email Marketing

Here’s what marketers must remember. When they use social media for marketing purposes, they are throwing a lot of content out there and hoping that some of it will “stick.” But when they work on developing and growing an email marketing list and continually segment that list to target specific audiences, their ROI is much greater. This is borne out by a number of studies that compare social media and email marketing.

Sally Forman, Director of Marketing for Top Writers Review, has this to say: “We have a strong presence on many social media channels. And we monitor the results we get from those channels all the time. What we have learned is that targeted emails are far more effective because they can reach our audience with much greater specificity.  When we target our audiences, we get results.”

Monitoring Results

This is an aspect of email marketing that cannot be ignored. Marketers must know the rate of opens of each email they send out. This is the only way to capitalize on what is working and to create additional emails of the same type. It is also the way to dump the types of emails that are not getting enough “play.” This is an ongoing task, and marketers should use the great tools that are available to analyze results.

So, here you have it – five things that you should never neglect in your email marketing campaigns. If you focus on these five, you will have campaigns that bring results.