Essential Email Marketing Tips and Tricks for Canadian Businesses
Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels for promoting products and services. It is widely used in Canada and the US to send promotional emails, newsletters, and campaigns. Doing email marketing well requires effort, but it is worth it. Studies consistently show that regularly emailing subscribers with promotional content can generate revenue over time. These essential email marketing tips can help you fine-tune your strategy and make email marketing another revenue-generating channel for your business.
1. Drive More Clicks To Your Landing Page With a Clear & Focused Call to Action
The whole point of your marketing emails is to drive traffic to your landing page. It’s really just that simple. If you’re not using effective direct marketing tools to drive clicks to your page, your email subscribers can’t be converted into customers. This is a crucial aspect of any successful marketing strategy.
The key to driving traffic to your landing page through marketing emails is quite simple: have one primary call to action (CTA) in the email message. Having multiple CTAs in your marketing strategy will only distract the reader and make them confused. When they’re confused, they will leave your email or delete it, resulting in lower engagement and a missed opportunity to reach their inbox.
What you want is to guide your reader to take a specific call to action in your marketing emails. Tease them on the benefits they will get by visiting the landing page in your marketing campaigns. For the best user experience, the email, CTA, and landing page must be congruent with your marketing strategy.
Although you’re using one primary CTA in your marketing emails, don’t be afraid to include it in multiple locations. You can place them early in the email above the fold, in the middle, towards the end, and remind them again in the P.S. This strategy can help improve your email campaigns’ open rates and click-through rates, ensuring that your subject line stands out in the inbox.
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2. Encourage Your Readers to Reply
In the old days of direct mail, you would send out your correspondence, and then wait for your readers to act. Not anymore. Today, email marketing opens the door for meaningful conversations with your potential customers. We’re talking about real people who are interested in your business. With that in mind, you’ll want to encourage this back-and-forth in three ways:
- Enticing email subject lines: Speak directly to your subscribers and promise them something that will stand out. The best way to achieve this is with automated personalization.
- Use a distinctive and entertaining voice: Just because someone opened your email, doesn’t mean they’re actually going to read it. Always make sure your message sounds like it’s coming from a real person who cares, not an emotionless robot.
- Target content: Email marketing best practices are to segment your email lists by your subscribers’ demographics. This makes it easier to create messages that resonate with each segment’s needs and interests, making them more likely to be converted, engage with you, or at least pass it along to someone else.
The focus of marketing campaigns is to get your audience to respond. That may mean just clicking a link, but wherever possible, encourage them to actually reply to your emails. It’s the best way to show you’re interested in what your subscribers are thinking and to send targeted marketing messages.
3. Personalization is Key
It’s a good idea to add personal elements to your marketing emails wherever you can. Address your recipients by name. Craft your message to dive deep into their interests and needs. These practices are not only becoming more commonplace in marketing campaigns, but they’re also becoming expected by those you send emails.
There are many ways to achieve this personal touch:
- Most modern email tools allow you to send emails using shortcodes that will be replaced by the recipients’ names once the email is sent out. You can also make a copy of the email for your records.
- Try mixing and matching your email content by location.
- Customize your subject lines.
- And of course, be sure to segment your list by behavior for a successful email marketing campaign. Email marketers should always consider segmenting their email campaigns based on user behavior to maximize the effectiveness of their email marketing campaigns.
4. Make Sure Your Emails Look Great
It might sound somewhat obvious, but you may be surprised at how many businesses still send emails that look like those free, amateur websites from the ‘90s. Once you entice recipients to open your marketing emails with engaging subject lines, it’s crucial to keep their interest, so they’ll continue to read your content. The best way to do this is through a well-executed campaign.
- Use short paragraphs to create engaging content for your email marketing campaigns. Make sure that your email subject line includes relevant keywords to grab the attention of your readers.
- Include bullet points to help people skim the important content in their email campaigns. Use catchy email subject lines to grab the attention of your email list. Make sure your emails are engaging and relevant to keep your subscribers interested.
- When conducting a marketing campaign, it is important to use images sparingly. The purpose of these images should be to illustrate your point rather than overpower your content. Additionally, it is crucial to consider that some email providers may block images or view them as indicators of spam. Therefore, your emails should still be able to make sense to the recipient even if the images do not load.
- Make sure your marketing emails look good on both mobile and desktop devices. According to Campaign Monitor, more than 70% of emails are opened on mobile apps by the recipient.
5. Include Links to Your Social Media Profiles
Encouraging your readers to engage with your business on social media should be one of the key ingredients of your email marketing campaign. Therefore, email marketing’s best practice is to include links to your social media alongside a call to action to share this promotional offer with their social media followers and friends on your email list.
Not only does this give you an added opportunity for marketing promotion, but it also builds trust between your business and your audience. If a visitor has already given you their email, the odds are good they will follow you on social media too. Make it easy for them to follow you with a well-planned campaign of emails!
6. Send Test Emails Before Distributing to Your Email List
If you want to ensure the success of your marketing campaign, you’ll need to make sure that every email message is working properly. Double-check that each of your messages looks the way you want them to by first sending them to employee accounts. Preferably, you should view them in several different email clients and providers (like Outlook, Gmail, and Yahoo), as well as on a variety of mobile devices. This will help you optimize your marketing campaign.
This is a best practice for email marketing campaigns. Sending mass emails without double-checking the content is like showing up to a business meeting having gotten dressed in the dark. If it goes poorly, you won’t just look foolish; you’ll look unprofessional too!
7. Keep Track of Your Data
Keep a keen eye on your marketing data, like how many email addresses were undeliverable, how many marketing emails were never opened, and what time of day people did open your message. The tiny details in your marketing data can tell you an awful lot about your campaign’s performance.
If you’re using Google Analytics for your website, you’ve got even more powerful marketing data at your fingertips. Try tagging your emails with custom campaign tracking so you can see how they’re driving traffic to your landing pages, and how those people behave once they get there. With this marketing information, you can really personalize your messages for people who want it.
Here are some metrics you want to keep track of for your email campaigns and email marketing. Monitor the email deliverability of your emails closely.
- Open rate – Tells you if your emails are landing in the inbox and if your subject lines grab the reader’s attention.
- Click rate – Tells you if the email content provides enough benefit for the reader to take action.
- Unsubscribe rate – If it’s too high, your readers don’t resonate with your message.
- Earning per Subscriber – This tells you how profitable your email campaigns are and how much you can spend to acquire a lead.
- Time of day your emails are opened – Tells you the best time to send your email campaigns to maximize your results.
8. Set Up A New Subscriber Welcome Sequence
There’s one marketing email that gets read much more than any other email – the welcome email. That’s because when someone first signs up to get your lead magnet, they’re at the highest interest level in receiving emails.
But at the same time, they’re still a stranger to your business when it comes to your email marketing campaign. They don’t know much about your brand, so it’s important to build a strong email list and send targeted emails.
The welcome sequence is an excellent opportunity for your email campaign to welcome new subscribers and introduce them to your company through email marketing. It’s like meeting a person for the first time. It’s just polite to introduce yourself, so they get to know you. Use the welcome sequence to bring new subscribers on an email journey where they go from “strangers” to “friends” on your email list.
Email marketing providers enable you to send a series of marketing emails that gets dripped out over time. The idea is to share what your brand is about and what they will get by being on your email list. The welcome sequence will get them up to speed and they will be more receptive when you start sending them regular marketing email broadcasts or newsletters.
9. Increase Your Sender Reputation By Cleaning Your Mailing List Regularly
Most businesses often overlook marketing. They’re focused on growing their list and sending out marketing emails, but not cleaning up the marketing list. Cleaning up the marketing list means getting rid of inactive marketing subscribers.
Email marketing providers like Gmail are actively tracking reader responses to your marketing emails. A low open rate or high bounce rate can negatively impact your reputation as a sender, leading to decreased deliverability. Consequently, email providers may flag more of your active subscribers, resulting in reduced visibility for your marketing emails.
Moreover, retaining inactive subscribers in your database is a waste of marketing money. You’re paying extra to keep them, but they aren’t seeing your emails or interested in hearing from you anymore.
Regular maintenance is crucial for effective marketing. Make sure to regularly review your mailing list and identify subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails in the last 90 days. Send them a re-engagement campaign, and if they still don’t respond, it’s time to bid them farewell.
Removing inactive subscribers from your email marketing list can sound scary. But it’s an important step to keep your sender’s reputation high. It tells the service providers that you respect your readers’ inboxes and are not merely spamming them with irrelevant emails.
The Future of Email Marketing
Even though email marketing is one of the oldest forms of communicating with your target audience, it continues to change and evolve. The root reason to start using email marketing is still the same as it has always been – to get your business out there. But the branches have changed, and now emails play a crucial role in reaching your audience effectively.
It isn’t just about incessantly marketing a product anymore. Today, it’s all about creating an emotional connection and driving engagement through emails. Email marketing is a way to connect with your audience, build trust, and develop a relationship. You do this by showing that your business is willing to provide solutions no other business can through emails.
Create Your Personalized Email Marketing Campaign!
If your small to mid-sized business is looking to help grow through the opportunities that can be found with email marketing, outsourcing to a full-service email marketing agency can fast-track your efforts. Our team at Asset Digital Communications offers full-service email marketing that includes list building, drip campaigns, email nurture campaigns, email analytics, and content creation for B2B. It has constantly been shown that for every $1 invested in email marketing, businesses have seen an average return of $38! Can you afford to leave digital marketing’s biggest ROI on the table?
One last thing… Did you find these tips helpful? Book a call with us today and start generating more leads and increase your sales!
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