Unlocking the potential of email marketing: Effective strategies

An email list is a list of email addresses from users that want to receive brand information and marketing content. You can use this list to promote offerings, offer discounts, and provide updates or other information to interested customers.

The best email lists are filled with users who truly want to be on it, the ones who enjoy your brand’s content and who will become repeat customers. But it’s also one that contains a lot of contacts. The exact number will look different depending on your industry, but it should contain a robust audience and always be growing.

What are the benefits of building an email list?

• It’s inexpensive. While you should allocate enough resources to make your newsletters and other targeted email content shine, email marketing is a relatively inexpensive way to reach your audience.
• It reaches parties who are already interested. Unless you collected their emails without their knowledge (not recommended—or legal), you can feel confident that everyone on your list wants to learn more about your offerings, or at least thinks it’s worth it for whatever you’re offering in return.
• It can help build loyalty. By integrating drip marketing tactics into your email marketing strategy, you can target customer segments with customized campaigns designed to make them repeat customers.
• It’s an owned channel. You own your email list—no social media algorithm or keyword bidding will change who you can target, when you can contact them, or what kind of content you can send them.

Should you buy an email list?

You may be tempted to buy a list with names and emails of members of your target demographic. Please don’t. Here’s why:

• It violates the GDPR’s consent rules. If your company offers services to people living in Europe, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)’s requirements apply. Its consent rules prohibit companies from reaching out to individuals without their expressed consent. Buying and using email lists is a violation of these rules and can result in legal penalties.
• It’s usually a waste of money. Many for-sale email lists are filled with email addresses of people who won’t actually bring in any revenue. You’re much better off attracting people you know are interested in your offerings and willingly provide their emails.
• It’s more likely to annoy your recipients. How would you feel if some company you never heard of started emailing you out of the blue? Personally, I’d wonder how they got my email address and would unsubscribe before giving the email any attention.

Tips for building an engaged email list

• Opt-in is everything: Ensure every subscriber on your email list is acquired through opt-in. This means subscribers explicitly request to be on your list and opt-in to hear from your company. We call this permission-based marketing. Don’t be tempted to buy a list. Reputable email service providers won’t let you send to a purchased list and you won’t get the results you desire. Think of a purchased list as calling people who didn’t give you their number. Stick to opt-in and only send to people who want to hear from you.
• Use signup forms: Using a signup form is the single easiest tactic to grow your email list. You can set it up once, place it on strategic pages of your website, blog, social media channels and it becomes a powerhouse for acquiring new subscribers. Plus, it’s permission-based.
• Collect the right data from the start: Data has increasingly become important to marketers and quality data is considered gold. Many marketers struggle with data because their data may be dirty or incomplete, or they don’t have the data they desire to accomplish their goals. You can overcome these challenges for your email list by collecting the right data from the start in your sign up forms and gated content. Keep your sign up forms short and only collect the information you need. 1-3 pieces of information are optimal as form fills decrease when there are too many fields.
• Strategically gate content: Gating content is an age-old lead gen tactic that most marketers use to collect email addresses and leads. When gating content, it’s paramount to consider what assets you’ll gate at what stage of the funnel and how you’ll use that data to grow your subscriber base and nurture leads to your end-goal.
• Measure email list health: Your email list is your most valuable email marketing asset. To ensure your email list is healthy, keep an eye on your engagement metrics such as open, click-to-open, and conversion rates. These are all key indicators of engagement. Additionally, be aware of where you are acquiring your most engaged subscribers. Do they come from your website sign up form, social media or some other channel?
• Cleanse your list on a regular basis: The key here is that you are focused not just on growing a big list but on a healthy and engaged list that will take action on your messages.

Subscribers can be segmented under the following categories: 

• Demographics: Demographic segments use customer information such as age, gender, marital status, and job title. You should collect this data when new subscribers sign up to receive your email marketing. The more information you gather during the early stage of your relationship, the more advanced you can make your segments.
• Geographical: Targeting customers based on their location has a massive influence on purchase decisions. Especially if you’re driving shoppers to brick-and-mortar stores or providing delivery updates, customer location is essential data to have. Modern shoppers love convenience. By targeting geographical segments you can drive customers into making spontaneous decisions.
• Marketing preferences: You should always be collecting marketing preferences, especially during the welcome series and re-engagement programs. This is data such as the departments, newsletters, or topics they’re interested in and the frequency with which they would like to hear from you. Driving customers to update preferences will help you ensure engagement levels are high for each segment.
• Email engagement: Email engagement metrics such as open rate and click-through rate are automatically tracked. That means it’s easy and straight-forward to segment users based on how they interact with your email marketing. Whether it’s non-openers or readers who’ve clicked specific links, targeting these segments will have a huge impact on your results.
• Behavioral: Behavioral segmentation is the most advanced email segmentation tactic. It’s based on customer behavior on your other channels such as your website. Specific page hits, frequency of visits, and recent activity are just a couple of the segments possible that help gives your email marketing a hyper-personalized feel. You can also use data like purchase history and average order value to create behavioral audience segments.

How can you personalize emails effectively?

To leverage the power of personalized emails, businesses need to implement effective strategies and utilize appropriate tools. Here are some key methods for personalizing emails:

• Segmentation and Targeting
  Segmentation plays a vital role in personalization. By dividing your subscriber list into different groups based on factors such as demographics, past purchases, or engagement levels, you can create highly targeted email campaigns. This allows you to deliver relevant content to specific segments, increasing the chances of engagement and conversions.
• Dynamic Content
  Dynamic content refers to elements within an email that change based on recipient data. By using dynamic content blocks, businesses can show different product recommendations, images, or text based on the recipient’s preferences or behavior. This customization creates a more personalized experience and increases the relevance of the email.
  It’s important to note that dynamic capabilities come from having an email marketing solution that allows for it to happen. Generally seen in the form of merge tags, dynamic capabilities have the benefit of being automated and allowing every person receiving your email to feel that it was written specifically for them.

• Personalized Subject Lines
  The subject line is the first thing recipients see when they receive an email. Crafting personalized subject lines that grab attention and spark curiosity can significantly improve open rates. By using the recipient’s name, referencing their recent activity, or including personalized offers, businesses can create a sense of urgency and relevance.

Tools to help;

To implement effective personalized email campaigns, businesses can leverage various tools and technologies. Email service providers (ESPs) offer features and functionalities that enable segmentation, dynamic content, and personalization.

Glue Up’s email marketing module gives you the power to completely customize the look and feel of emails, include relevant emails, and use personalization technology to make your emails convert at a much higher rate.

Why Should You Analyze Email Campaigns?

Analyzing your email campaigns is essential so you can gain an understanding of what you are doing right and what needs revisiting and revising. These analytics can provide you with valuable insights into the performance of your email campaigns and help you determine success rates.

Without such analysis, you’ll be less likely to adequately determine how your email campaign does and where exactly you need to focus more attention to improve the performance of future campaigns.

Email Metrics You Should Know

While there are several metrics available to track and analyze, the following five are ones you should know and consider utilizing in your next campaign.

• Deliverability rate
  Deliverability rate informs you of the number of emails that actually reach your subscribers’ inboxes in comparison with the full amount of emails sent out. Sending an email doesn’t necessarily mean it reaches the intended subscribers, unfortunately, and this rate will show you if this is the case. Several variables can affect email deliverability, including:
  • Incorrect email addresses.
  • Subscribers’ inboxes are already full.
  • Email content filters.
  • Blocking on subscribers’ servers of IP addresses (resulting from complaints or too much source traffic).

  A lot of rules surround email delivery, including email infrastructure, individual mailbox provider rules, and IP reputation management. Understanding these and how to navigate them will be crucial to the success of your email campaigns.

• Click-through rate
  Click-through rate (CTR) provides you with the percentage of your email recipients who click on at least one link contained in a particular email. This rate is a valuable engagement measure, allowing you to quickly calculate the performance of every email you send out.
  CTR is a crucial metric to track because it provides insight into the number of people engaging with the content and showing interest in exploring your offer or learning about your brand. To improve CTR, try the following:
  • Make email formatting for different devices a priority.
  • Add personalization.
  • Incorporate better design elements to capture the eye.
  • Create segmented contact lists.
  • Include enticing and effective call-to-actions (CTAs).
  • Utilize A/B testing for optimizing clickable elements.
  • Discover best times to send emails so they have a better chance of being opened. Schedule accordingly.
  • Make your email interactive.

  To further help improve CTR, look to your content marketing strategy, which should already identify your targeted audiences and buyer personas. With this information, you know better what type of educational, inspirational, informative, or entertaining content will work best, leading to more interaction with your brand.

• Open rate
  The open rate is the percentage of your email recipients who actually open a given email and is another important measure of engagement. However, emails are only considered “opened” if the email recipient receives all the images embedded in the original content.
  Those recipients who have image-blocking enabled may open your email, but they won’t be counted as part of your open rate. Because of this, use open rate as a comparative metric. That is, you can compare open rates of emails sent to the same list but a week or more apart. Factors that can positively affect open rates include the following:
  • Adding fully-optimized and engaging or catchy subject lines.
  • Using spam trigger avoidance tactics (in subject lines and body of the email).
  • Utilizing segmented email lists.
  • Ensuring you are working from an updated email list.
  • Incorporating personalization.
  • Optimizing for mobile devices.
  • Making sure you send emails at the optimal day and time.
• Unsubscribe rate
  The unsubscribe rate provides you with the percentage of recipients who, after opening a given email, unsubscribe from your list.This rate includes the different ways viewers can unsubscribe, including through the email’s footer link and the inbox’s unsubscribe function. Results may not provide an accurate picture as many recipients tend to avoid the formal unsubscribing process and just not open or read your emails. To increase your chances of subscribers voluntarily staying on your list, consider the following tactics.
  • Avoid sending too many emails (each industry differs when it comes to this).
  • Include list segmentation in your strategy so you can provide more personalization.
  • Select to send emails only when you have something valuable, important, or compelling to share.

  Closely monitor your unsubscribe rate and when it increases, take the time to review the quality of your content and also how often you are sending out emails. Most email marketing tool accounts will send you a warning if this rate exceeds 5%.

• List growth rate
  The list growth rate is a metric showing you at what rate your email list is growing. Naturally, you want to grow your email list so you can extend your brand’s reach and build a bigger audience. To improve this rate, consider the following:
  • Add display ads, such as interactive banners, to entice people to sign-up and become email subscribers.
  • Optimize your social media marketing to appeal to more users.
  • Use popups for visitors to your blog or website.
  • Provide convenient access to subscription forms on your website.
  • Validate email addresses at the source.

  The five metrics included above can benefit any email campaign and add value to your email marketing strategy.

  Other beneficial metrics you may want to consider tracking and analyzing include:

  • Conversion rate
  • Bounce rate
  • Email sharing/forwarding rate
  • Spam rate
  • ROI

Tools Available to Help Track Email Analytics

• Email Marketing Software
  The easiest way to track, analyze, and monitor the performance of email marketing campaigns is with the analytical tools provided with email marketing software.The majority of these email marketing software tools will automatically provide you with the metrics you need. Examples of such beneficial software include Mailchimp, iContact, Constant Contact, and Mailmodo.
• Google Analytics
  Google Analytics can serve your marketing needs in a variety of ways, including in the tracking of email campaigns. Once set up, you can track particular metrics, such as click-through rate, and gain insights into how much of your website traffic opts into your list and where most of them are converting on the site.You can also easily connect your email software with Google Analytics. For example, if you have Mailchimp, you simply go to its Integrations page and locate the option to authorize Google Analytics. After adding this authorization, whenever you set up email campaigns, you can check a box, and tracking will be included.