Marketers always seek for ways to improve their strategies to maximize conversions while minimizing efforts. Thankfully, we were born in the digital era and millions of messages can be sent with minutes of work. One of the most cost-effective ways to lead a successful marketing campaign is by directly reaching out to your target audience. You guessed it right, we are not talking here about writing a traditional letter to every one of your current and potential customers. We are talking about systematic, targeted, and scalable email marketing campaigns!
How to do it correctly and how to measure the success of your efforts? Well, the answer isn’t as simple as we wish it was, but it’s not as difficult as you may imagine it to be. There are many aspects of leading a successful email campaign. This article will help you achieve just that – success in your next email marketing campaign.
Reaching Out to Your Target Audience
Reaching out to your target audience isn’t as hard as it was a couple of decades ago. Nowadays, there are many tools available, all of which at your fingerprints. Let’s start with the famous, and rightfully so, cherished Amazon SES.
Amazon SES is a service that allows you to send emails. Many emails. A great many emails! And all of this as cheap as it gets. You’ll pay US$3.80 for sending 100,000 (that’s one hundred thousand) emails. So you may think “that’s it, that’s all I need.”
Hold your horses.
To send that many emails you need two things:
#1 Email addresses to whom you can send your fantastic emails.
#2 Tool that will allow you to do so (assuming you have not graduated from MIT and you are unable to speak fluently in all computer languages).
Ok, now that we have the basics covered, let’s go into more details and what you can do to really get yourself all of these sales.
#1 Know Your Audience
First of all, you need to know who is your audience and what preferences do they have. You must be able to determine your target audience correctly. You don’t want to sell socks to beach bar owners, just like you don’t want to be selling air condition systems in Greenland. Once you have a crystal vision of who is your target audience, then you can plan your email content accordingly.
To start off the email marketing campaign right, you must start with collecting emails and building a list of your target audience. It will definitely take some time to build a good number of interested readers. If you’re good, it’s a short time. If you’re not, you should read more guides like this one. We can’t teach you everything here (otherwise we’d have to charge you), but we can assure you that there are more than enough high quality guides on the internet.
Now, the big issue is that not all of these readers subscribed to your list with the same motive. Depending on your approach, someone might end up on your list because you were giving away a freebie (good idea), while others subscribed as they are genuinely interested in your business (awesome people you need to make sure you keep around). It’s crucial that you recognize the difference between your subscribers. Once you go through each subscriber group and assign to a certain segment, you’re on your way to sending the right email to the right people. That’s what we call segmentation (it is the process where you’re grouping customers into different segments based on one or more factors).
#2 Craft the Right Email Content
Once you know your audience and have it grouped in different segments, you’re ready to plan a content strategy. Can you remember your inbox when it was overwhelmed by marketing messages you never opened, aka spam? If majority of your audience don’t open an email, then that’s what they think about your emails. Your conversion rate will be at all time low. To avoid that, you simply need to craft personalized emails for each segment that deliver the message right.
In the times of distractions, you should definitely think of average attention span of internet user. An average reader is focused up to 10 seconds on the same content and do you think writing long text emails will boost your conversion rates? That’s right, unlikely. Readers want to read the main message and marketers should think of the way to deliver to them that message.
Try to experiment with pictures, videos and buttons combined with small amount of text and you should see an improvement. Also, don’t forget to have a strong and visible call-to-action in your email (but don’t use these blinding banners, they are so out of fashion!). If you want to improve your conversion rates, you should definitely tell your audience what you want them to do, and why they want to do it in the first place. Messages that fail in delivering a clear call-to-action will most likely end up in a spam section.
How many of these emails will actually convert and provide you with the desirable outcome? The statistic shows that conversion rate averages around 3% when it comes to email marketing. You should always track your campaigns and experiment with different layouts, times of delivery, subjects, promotions, etc. That’s when we enter the Kingdom of Experimentation!
#3 Analyze Email Campaign Performance
Analyzing the performance of email marketing campaigns is a crucial thing for every marketer. How can you expect to know whether your marketing campaign is effective or not without tracking the performance? Once you segment your audience and crafted a perfect content that have a solid call-to-action, it’s time to monitor the performance, learn, and adjust.
Advanced tools have everything required for analyzing the performance. You can see statistics of how many emails you sent and how many of them are opened. Also, you can analyze the behavior of your subscribers in detail. That way, it’s easy to determine what you do well, where you can improve, and what messages convert.
With the crucial performance data at your disposal, you can easily experiment with different messages for particular segment. The world is ever changing, and so your experiments and monitoring should never stop. With that mindset you’re set for inevitable success!
Oh, wait…
But what about the tools? Yeah, you need to use the right tools to achieve what you thought is unachievable before.
Tools for Successful Email Marketing Campaign
Marketing campaigns are complex and scalable, so Amazon SES introduced a new standard for leading successful email marketing campaigns. Well, as mentioned before, they gave entrepreneurs and marketers like you and us the ability to send countless emails. What they didn’t do, is give us simple humans the way to do it without creating sophisticated tools to run these email campaigns.
IMAGE 5: Pepo screenshot (attached in the email)
Worry not, folks, there are number of tools available that allow us to enjoy cost-effective Amazon SES without breaking the bank on tech staff. For example, Pepo Campaigns – a tool that uses Amazon SES platform. It enables you to send 10,000 emails for free each month. The tool has many useful features that will help you get your email marketing on point. Some of these features include behavior analysis, email open rate, segmentation, designing of eye-catchy email templates and automation tools. All of them easy to use and out-of-the-box.
Call to Action
That’s right, we are preaching about it so we can’t forget it. It’s now your turn, and the right time, to go and implement what you’ve just learned. If that’s too much to take in at once, grab that old good pen and paper, note down a to-do list and off you go!
