So why are businesses increasing their investment in email marketing? The answer is simple - to stay engaged with their customers and prospects. Gleanster estimates that 90% of website visitors aren't ready to buy when they first come to your website. Email marketing lets you nurture those early-stage leads with relevant information as they progress through their buying process. HubSpot's Will Kavanagh describes it this way, "Email marketing should be part of a larger, holistic view of your entire marketing strategy. This is our means of staying in touch with our customers and keeping them engaged with our brand over time." In order to keep you customers engaged, you need to provide value to them in your email marketing. HubSpot's Mark Kilens says that by providing value in your email marketing, "you build a community of loyal followers. It's all about building lasting relationships."
Here is a graphical depiction of how email marketing fits into an integrated marketing campaign.
Let's take the example of a janitorial supplies company (it could be any industry, this is just an example). They decide to conduct a marketing campaign based around introducing a green (sustainable) cleaning system for businesses. The first part of this campaign is to create an eBook titled, "How To Implement A Sustainable Cleaning System For Your Business."
They then create blog posts around the topic and promote them on their social media accounts. In their blog posts, they include a call-to-action to download the eBook. Interested website visitors provide contact information in exchange for the eBook via a landing page.
This is where email marketing comes in. Remember, 90% of the visitors coming to the website aren't yet ready to buy. Email marketing provides useful information to educate leads and to help them progress through their buying process.
The best email marketing is personal and contextual. This is where creating segemented lists for your contacts allows you to provide that contextual information. The lists can be segmented by a variety of factors - industry, geography, job title, etc.
In this case, an email created specifically for contacts in the healthcare industry will resonate well with recipients. This email includes a call-to-action offering an invitation to a webinar titled, "Best Practices For Medical Waste Disposal."
Once the company has created segmented lists, they can continue to provide emails that resonate with their different vertical markets and geographic territories.
Some consider the subject line the most important part of the email - it's what causes the recipient to decide whether or not to open your email. Here are some best practices to writing subject lines that resonate with your audience.
It's very important to be clear about what your offering in your subject line. If you don't fulfill the subject line promise in the body of your email, you won't create an audience of dedicated followers. Email service provider MailChimp identified the following as the 10 most effective words in getting emails opened when used in the subject line: posts, jobs, survey, week's, newsletter, issue, digest, bulletin, edition and giveaway. Be clear about your offer in the subject line and fulfill your promise in the email.
Personalize your emails by using the recipient's name or company in the subject line. HubSpot finds that emails with the recipient's first name in the subject line are opened 13.3% more frequently than those that don't.
Salesy subject lines not only won't get opened, they risk being labelled as spam and damaging your sender reputation. MailChimp finds that words like confirm, features, upgrade, magic, raffle, requested and rewards result in low open rates.
Test different subject lines and analyze results to optimize your email marketing success. Most email service providers like Constant Contact, Mail Chimp and HubSpot provide analytic packages that let you optimize your email marketing.
Will Kavanagh and Mark Kilens of HubSpot recently shared 12 best practices for email marketing.
I want to thank Mark Kilens and Will Kavanagh for their help both with this blog post and my own email marketing. I can personally attest that their tactics work. Since adopting their advice, I've seen a notable improvement in my open rates and click-throughs in my email marketing. HubSpot not only offers a great all-in-one internet software marketing platform, but they also offer world-class educational opportunities for their customers taught by some of the best marketers in the business.