If you already have a mailing list and an email marketing strategy in place but aren’t seeing the results you’ve been hoping for… there is a good chance you are simply doing it all wrong. Yes, at its core the concept of email marketing is quite simple — you start a mailing list, collect subscribers and mail out to them whenever you have something meaningful or important to say. However, just because something is easy, it doesn’t mean you are doing it correctly.
This can easily be seen in the world of content creation, SEO and ranking in Google. You will only find 5-10 organic listings ranking on the main page for any given term, yet there are over a billion active sites on the internet all fighting for those same spots. Why do some sites get ranked high, when others don’t? Again, this comes down to how their content creation and marketing plan is broken down and knowing how to provide the best content for their audience. The same holds true for email marketing… but instead of having a billion active email websites to compete against, you have billions of emails being sent around the internet daily. Some will get triggered by spam filters, others will have headlines that get ignored, and many others will simply be deleted or never get read in the first place.
The good news is that email marketing is something that can easily be tracked, improved upon and measured over time. By examining the many different components of your email campaign you can determine which are working for you and which might be working against you. Better yet, let us help you by breaking down some of the most important factors when running a successful email marketing campaign on the internet today.
10 Ingredients to Help You Find Success with Email Marketing
To help with this process, we can take a look at the “10 Ingredients for Successful Email Marketing” infographic from Mailify below. In addition to displaying the infographic, we’ve also broken down each of these ten ingredients and provided some additional resources, case studies, and guides to follow as examples.
- The PreHeader
When someone visits your website or blog content, you need to make a great first impression. Timing is of the essence and if your opening text isn’t grabbing the interest of your audience, you are killing your chances for keeping them around for the meat of your content and your also ultimate call to action. - Logo Design and Placement
When using a logo design or branding within your email, make sure it’s seen immediately by your audience so they know and trust where the email is coming from. Branding is something you’ve likely spent a lot of time and money on, so make sure to put it to use in your next email. - Quick Contact Information
One of the most common complaints about email marketing is the confusion that many brands will offer when it comes to replies and contact information. Don’t make it hard for your subscribers to contact you. In most cases, if a user clicks “reply” they have something important to say and want to hear from someone directly. If not, you will likely lose them as both an email subscriber and customer. - Have a Catchy Looking Header
As mentioned earlier, making a great first impression is key. More emails are now sent out with fancy HTML, images or custom fonts and colors than ever before. This is now a perfect opportunity to create a custom looking header for your email subscribers. Not only will this look great and more professional, it can instantly help with engagement and conversions once your emails are viewed by your subscribers. - Create a Call to Action
The “call to action” is the ultimate reason you are sending out an email in the first place, yet so many brands still continue to want to avoid it. Without the necessary call to action in place, there is now reason to send out an email in the first place. Give your audience value in reading your email, then an option to proceed with feedback, purchase or social sharing options. - Have the Right Text to Image Ratio
Just because you include images within your email, it doesn’t mean that all personal and business inboxes will load them. If you are sending out mailings with just images, your audience might not be seeing your content, and if there is no text included within these same emails… they might not be seeing anything at all. Be sure to include the right mix of both text and images within all mailings. - Use Personalization Where Possible
Where we are today with technology, demographic targeting, and automated email platforms, it would be a huge mistake to not be personalizing your emails. In a world where hundreds of emails are spamming inboxes daily, stand out from the crowd by personalizing emails to your audience. - Always Have Mobile Optimization in Place
More people are using mobile devices than ever before. Not just for browsing the internet and playing games, but also for checking their email as well. This means you need to make sure your email marketing campaigns are mobile optimizing and also that any sites or call-to-actions you link out to from that email are also mobile optimized. Without this simple implementation in place, you could be missing out on an immediate 30% engagement from your total list size. - Provide an Easy to Find Opt-Out Link
If someone wants to unsubscribe from your mailing list, please make it easy for them. The last thing you want is for your brand to be seen as annoying to work with, or even worse… having a legal complaint or bad reviews come in as a result of getting continued emails from a brand that are no longer requested. - Preview Before Sending to Live List
Last but not least, always test and preview your emails before clicking that “send” button. Once an email is sent out to the thousands of people on your mailing list, there is no going back. Remember, it’s not just a matter of seeing if the ad copy and content is viewed correctly in your email, it’s also about testing where your emails are going, if they are marked as spam and if they are getting triggered by any other filters on other email platforms.
Now that you’ve had the opportunity to discover some of the most important factors that can drastically change or improve the success of your email marketing campaign, it’s time to take a few notes and compare them to your campaigns. Before sending out to your list again, be sure to run through the checklist above and see how many of these items you currently already have in place. Something as simple as playing around with your title copy and adding a new header to your email can easily increase open rates and engagement by several percentage points.
Lastly, if you ever need to increase the amount of subscribers on your mailing list daily, be sure to contact us. We actively provide thousands of new subscribers to our list partners and advertisers daily, all through 100% opt-in technology and advertising. You’ve likely already mastered the art of email marketing, now let us help you scale in size like never before.
