Starting a successful email marketing campaign

Everyone loves to be talked about. To be the centre of attraction is cool. Also having the greatest number of followers on twitter might be a measurement of how great your brand is doing in social media circles.

Paid advertisement is a great way to make people see your brand and product, while organic ranking on the first page of Google might drive tons of traffic to your website.Bbut all of these will mean nothing if you do not have a way to retain and interact with this people after they have come into contact with your brand.

Have you heard the saying “The money is in the list”?

In a study conducted social twist, the highest conversion rate for people who became new customers was through email marketing. In fact, Facebook has about 22 per cent conversion rates; the highest amongst social media platforms, email marketing trump at 58 per cent.

Email marketing is the only way a business can continue to make money and survive. Here are some tips that can help you start a successful email campaign

Grow your list by giving away freebies

Do you want 1,000 or 100 emails subscribers? Then give away free stuff. Have you written a great post on your blog? Can you run a survey or research, something no one else in your niche has done before? Sometimes you do not even need to run a new research. You can take an outdated research and run a new version of it.

Once you do this, you can offer it as an e-book or a white paper for download on your blog or website. Asking people to give their email in exchange for such a piece usually works very well. The only thing you have to watch is to make sure that you don’t ask for too many things. For example, if you giving away an e-book, asking for a name and email address is enough. You can then segment this list as they grow and lead them down the marketing funnel.

Be responsive

Mobile devices are getting increasingly popular and one of the ways to get people to read your email is to make sure that it can be viewed on all devices by making it responsive. If you are not sure where to start, you can begin by using a third party email marketing tool like mailchimp or aweber.

Personalise your message

If you want to get your email into your subscriber’s inbox , then personalise it. With most email providers like Gmail and Yahoo fighting junk mail, customizing your email might be the secret to getting past their filter.

Avoid too many images

Except on rare occasions, loading your newsletter with too many images might raise a flag with your subscriber’s service provider. Also, since you are not too sure how your email will be opened, loading it with images might increase your page load speed which consumes bandwidth. In our environment where bandwidth quality is low, it might take eternity for your email to load.

Avoid too many links

A good email campaign should contain only one link. Why? As conversion marketer, you want to make your subscriber carry out that one main task you have in mind for them. When you include too many links, you create a divided attention. Remember the saying: Too many options mean no option at all. Therefore to achieve high conversion rate, send your list only one link which should lead to your landing page.

Write good headlines

Learning how to write good headlines is a great way to increase your open rate. Your headline is the first part of your message that people will see and they will make up their mind right away if they want to read your message or junk it.

How do you know which headlines resonates with your list? It depends. Business-to-business marketing is a lot different from Business-to-consumer marketing; therefore you need to A/B test your headlines most importantly.   Segment your email list, then write two different headlines and send it to the two segments. Only the headlines should be different. Now measure your open-rate and you will start getting ideas of what kind of headlines your list wants.

A/B Test everything else

Should you test your headlines only? No. Test everything from your headlines to message length, CTA (Call-To-Action) and any other thing you can test. The mistake with most A/B testing is not creating a baseline first so you need to first understand what you are testing and why you are testing.

Running a successful email campaign should not be a daunting task. Understand the basis and you will be on your way smiling to the bank. Remember the money is in the list not a purchased list though!