We have clients that have been collecting email addresses for years, only for them to sit – for the most part illegally – in databases and on systems. Worse still, for many, these precious email addresses are never used to actually send a client an email.
When we ask why this is, the most common responses are:
- a lack of knowledge on how and where to start email marketing
- uncertainty around what software to use
- a lack of confidence around how to make newsletter content that is engaging.
These and other fears frequently act as blockers to using email marketing as a regular part of marketing campaigns.
We’ll come to the legal bit later, but for now, let’s guide you through email marketing with our chirpy, useful tips and information. It should be enough to get you, or your in-house marketing team, off to a confident start.
Email is a powerful marketing tool that is on the rise again, especially for small business. Research shows that email engagement has increased in the past year. Showing that now is a good time to start using it if you’ve been too scared to before. You definitely haven’t missed the boat. But where to start?
Email marketing tools & software
There are many different tools and bits of software out there which will help you get started to varying degrees, each with their own buckets of functionality. You’ll need to start thinking about your campaign and strategy needs before choosing one.
Some of the most popular are Mailchimp, Sendinblue or Campaign Monitor.
TIP: Ensure you connect your email marketing software to your Google Analytics to see the performance of the campaign on Google Analytics too. Usually, you’ll get the campaign insights directly in your chosen software but it’s also good to see them in Analytics to compare how that channel is performing against organic, paid and the other channels.
Email marketing strategy
Without a strategy, you’re really likely to find yourself throwing together email newsletters with random, hurried content, based on whatever is in the minds of the people you ask at the time you ask them.
With a strategy, you’ll be better able to focus your efforts on achieving a specific goal.
Think what you want to achieve with your email marketing actions, set up a goal and keep it in mind for the following steps.
Typical actions could include:
- get more subscribers
- get people to buy a specific service
- drive more traffic to your website
- increase brand awareness, or simply
- remind people that you’re still there.
When we say a strategy, we don’t usually want you to dream one up on the spot either. Your strategy for email marketing should cascade down from your main marketing strategy, and rise to support your organisation’s overall objectives.
Measurement
Is it too obvious to state that if you don’t have a goal, you’re going to find it very difficult to know if your email campaign has had the desired effect?
It’s surprising, when we’re all being honest, how often “stuff goes out” without any stated objective. This means nothing will get measured apart from maybe the open rate, click through rate and unsubscribe rate.
And whilst generically, it’s no bad thing to get a sense of how popular your email outpourings are, until you’ve set a more specific target, you’re still wasting your time.
Because these things do take time. Bosses are notorious for conflating the amount of time it takes to read your latest email marketing message, with the amount of time it has taken you to plan the messaging, the layout, hunt down the photos, find, meet and interview the person, fiddle with formatting and fix the bugs.
It might take you 10 hours to compile a newsletter that takes five minutes to read. That's a 1:120 reading:making ratio. Is anyone measuring that?
Reporting
Setting up a goal and having a strategy for your email marketing will always allow you to measure success and report it to your boss, because you need to, whether they ask you to or not.
And don’t settle for the software reports alone. Make sure you cross reference the statistics with your campaigns and your overall objectives. Don’t report
Open rate average across the year is 2.5%
Do report that
The email campaigns selling Service A to clients who bought last year have had an open rate 5 times higher than for Service B, and last month out of 20 click throughs to the website, 4 people rebooked for a total value of £20,000
Frequency
Think about the frequency you will want to send your newsletter (daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly…) but remember: don’t saturate your subscribers, because they can unsubscribe from your email list. Fine if they genuinely aren’t interested, but let’s not have them leave us just because they’re feeling overwhelmed with your stuff.
Content
Email marketing is a great channel for building brand as it has the capability of showing your subscribers your tone of voice and brand personality. Simply, if you provide fun and engaging content, subscribers will associate your brand with these adjectives.
Content-wise there are different aspects of the content to keep in mind to create a successful newsletter. Content will make or break a newsletter, which is why it’s crucial to take your time and think about the content you want to include and how it is going to be included.
Below we have summarised the basic types of content that sit well in your newsletter.
- Announcements about products and services, e.g. latest start dates, last dates to apply
- Events, e.g. free webinars and conference or networking attendance
- Promotions, e.g. discounts and incentives
- Company-related information, e.g. anniversaries, or that you’re still open
- Blog posts, summaries and links to longer reads
Segmenting your content
You don’t need to include all the content in the same newsletter. Best to use different newsletters on different occasions. By that logic, promoting a webinar, launching new courses or pushing a competition you are running on social media will all have their own newsletter.
And of course, they don’t all need to go to everyone. Use your previous data insights to guide you as to what goes down well with which audiences.
You can segment your content:
- By product, service, news, event, promotion
- By audience. This allows you to personalise your email strategically and send useful content to those who are interesting in it. For example, if you are an educator, don’t send a course promotion to a person that has already done that course. Instead, you can send the next level or other related courses or information like relevant blog posts or more advanced courses.
- Many CRMs have the emails already segmented, which makes this a bit easier. Check if yours does!
Creating personas for your different target audiences is a MUST and will definitely help when creating the newsletter content. Personalisation is key for a newsletter success and knowing your different audiences’ interests is a massive advantage.
Writing the content
- The subject line is decisive and will define whether your readers will open the email or not. Think about it twice!
- Remember that personalisation is important and subject lines with the readers’ name trend to be more successful.
- Write catchy introductions when linking to content that is hosted elsewhere. It should invite users to read more and drive them to your site.
- Balance useful information with promotion. It is key to provide valuable information to your customers and that’s probably why they subscribed to your newsletter. You don’t want to lose them by being too promotional.
- You can link to other sites apart from yours that are on topic. This will reduce the promotional tone of your email and will invite readers to look at content that is related with your products or services. If you do collaborations with other sites, include them too.
Email design
Over 20% of marketers surveyed say that email design is improving their email engagement.
Most email marketing software provides templates that you can use and repurpose, which is a great advantage. These templates usually are customisable so you can include your logo and brand colour scheme (great for brand recognition in the future).
Remember to use your brand logo, nice imagery, videos, clear designs… everything will help achieving a good on-brand design and better engagement.
Get inspired by looking at newsletters from other brands, but remember to be true to you. Once you know you’re in the same quality ballpark, stop snooping and focus on developing your own unique ways of doing and saying it.
Don’t forget that your email design needs to be mobile friendly. More and more people open newsletters on mobile these days. Don’t take it for granted that your email will open perfectly on a mobile.
TIP: If you can, we recommend using A/B testing to see which content or design works best amongst your subscribers.
Engagement and success
Getting engagement with your newsletter content and high CTRs (Click Through Rates) is fundamental to a successful campaign. The content and design are crucial to making this happen: it has to be quick, interesting and enjoyable to read.
Break up the content including CTAs (calls to action) to break up the text and invite readers to your website.
Other things to keep in mind
- Legal aspects. Review the email marketing legal aspects and review that your newsletter meets them. Read more about the legal requirements of email marketing
- Always offer an unsubscribe option that is easily accessible and visible
- Test, test and test. Test your email before sending it: you can send it to your colleagues and ensure it works on different devices (iPhone, Android), browsers (Chrome, Safari or Internet Explorer) and email platforms (like Outlook or Gmail). Pay particular attention that all links are correctly embedded, that it reads well and there is a good user experience.
Useful Links
- The Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics for 2020 including an interesting report on email marketing
- 7 Tips for Creating More Engaging Newsletters by Sandra Chung
- How to Create an Email Newsletter that Will Impress Your Boss
