Email marketing is a valuable tool that more companies need to start taking advantage of. It’s a tool that allows you to get your message across in a widespread manner that is quick and efficient. It’s perfect whether you are sending out a longer-form marketing campaign or just doing a short e-newsletter blast. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to how your business should utilize email marketing. That’s why you need to analyze your audience, your target market, and what messaging you hope to convey. The following guide will teach you everything you need to know to get started with email marketing.
Make It Worth the Reader’s Time
Nobody wants to read long, boring, drawn-out blocks of content. If you present an email that is nothing but rows of wordy text, people will hop off and unsubscribe to your emails. That’s why you always need to make it worth your reader’s time. Before sending anything, ask yourself if they will find value in it? If yes, then you can proceed to the next step which is learning how to get that value across.
Break Up Long Form Emails and Content
Email marketing gives your company the valuable tools to send your message to a variety of different platforms including employees, stakeholders, community leaders, and your target audience. When you have all these different eyes on your messaging, it can be intimidating. You want to make sure that the right messaging is getting to the right person in order to create the most favorable outcome for your business.
Therefore, you need to catch the consumers eye with emails that are easy-to-read and eye-catching. If someone has to wade through blocks of boring content, not only are they unsubscribing but they’ll also look unfavorably on your business. That’s why you need to keep things exciting. Offer contests, giveaways, and share stories from real people which connect to your brand’s mission. To hold the reader’s attention, include lots of visually appealing elements like video, photos, and graphs. Keep your messaging fresh by adhering to seasons, holidays, and industry trends.
Give Something of Value Away
When someone is done reading your email, you’ll want them to have learned or gained something of value. Whenever you’re doing an e-blast, make sure to include something that will leave the reader a little wiser for having read your email. Include a nugget of knowledge, information regarding a giveaway, special promos related to your industry, and more!
You don’t always have to physically give something away when doing email marketing. Sometimes, what you give away is the product itself and therefore, you need to make sure people are seeing your product in that light.
Utilize an External, Internal Newsletter
One easy way to make the most of email marketing is by creating company newsletters. Most companies prefer to have two newsletters that are blasted out quarterly. One should be curated towards stakeholders, industry trendsetters, and consumers. The other newsletter should solely focus on employees and highlighting all of their accomplishments. It’s important to keep these two newsletters separate because these are separate audiences.
Both of these are easy ways where you can get your messaging across to different target groups, just by hitting send. If you want to switch things up more in the future, you can do email marketing and newsletter takeovers where you switch roles with someone else in order to offer new industry insights to new crowds.
Discuss Trends, Offer Insights
Finally, you want to make sure that your email marketing doesn’t fall on deaf ears. You want to make sure that the proper messaging is connecting with the proper people. To do this, you’ll want to curate your content whenever possible. A woman in her late 40’s isn’t going to find the same content valuable that a man in his 20’s. That’s why you can’t blindly send out mass emails, you must do a little bit of research to come up with messaging that matches your brand. When potential consumers see that you really get them, trust is built. Email marketing is here to stay and therefore, that trust will come in handy for years to come.
