Email marketing may seem like something from the past with the rise of social media dominating the digital marketing world, but email marketing still gets some of the greatest return on investment (ROI) of any digital channel. In this blog, we take a look at Neil Patel’s guide to successful email marketing and show you how you can make email marketing work for your business.
How to set up email marketing
There are a variety of email platforms you can use for your business. From MailChimp to DotDigital, there are plenty of different features, so look out for one that you can blend easily with how you work. This could be taking note if the platform fits with your CRM or even if it could offer your business a combination of both CRM and email.
How to create an email list
You have your email platform set up so how do you start building a mail list? You’ve most likely subscribed to a number of email newsletters and this process is what creates a mail list. Users input their details into a registration form that was set up via your email platform.
Neil Patel suggests that to begin building your list you should be offering an incentive. This incentive could be offering something for free or a regular newsletter to subscribe to with news from your business. This incentive could be shared on social media or you could create a pop-up for users to sign up when they visit your website. Whatever you choose, take the time to consider what it is your customers would be most interested in to have. As Neil puts it, “You’re a guest in their inbox”, so pay attention to your customers' needs throughout the process.
What content should you include in your emails
As Neil comments in his post, most email platforms offer an automatic response when people subscribe to a mail list. Here is where you can begin to set up expectations and provide a schedule of when to expect new content. Maintaining expectations and keeping to your schedule are what Neil suggests as separators from good and great emails. Both of these keep your business regularly in your subscribers’ inboxes and are more focused on updates rather than selling which can quickly turn your subscribers into unsubscribers.
An easy option for content is to share things from your business that your subscribers might not have caught elsewhere. These could be any successful organic social media posts you’ve shared, but rather than linking to the social site you can link back to your website. This will not only strengthen your organic social media strategy by reinforcing your content but also add to the traffic driven to your website. You can find some tips on setting up an organic social media strategy that involves using a .au website here.
What to look for after you send your emails
Neil sets out some key metrics to look for when reporting on your email campaigns:
- Open rate
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Unsubscribes
These are important to look for as they follow a subscriber’s journey through the email process. Open rate provides insight into how effective your subject line is, CTR demonstrates how interested your subscribers are in the content of the email, and Unsubscribes shows if they have been totally turned off by your offering. Using this information, you can then start to see where you can improve and also see if changing something to your website would benefit the whole process.
By taking the time to properly set up your email marketing you’ll begin to see a more complete picture of your customers’ journey online with your business. This journey is all centred around having a great website that establishes your brand and keeps your customers coming back!