How to Engage Subscribers with an Email Marketing Campaign

Social media never replaced email marketing like some predicted. Instead, the two marketing practices are different enough so that businesses can accomplish separate goals on them. Because of the personal nature of emails, your business can engage subscribers and create more brand awareness than you could on Facebook and Twitter. Here’s how:

Generate Quality Leads

The first and most important goal of email marketing is to generate leads. The idea is to bring subscribers from their email inboxes to your website where they can actually place an order.

Although lead generation is the overall goal of online marketing, it’s especially important in the case of email marketing. According to a recent Entrepreneur article, that’s because emails are so effective at generating quality leads:

“A nurtured lead increases sales 20 percent more than a cold lead. At 33 percent less cost than other lead-generating mechanisms, emails generate 50 percent more sales. In fact, smart email marketing is one of the single most effective ways to build relationships with customers.”

Quality lead generation is the reason why email marketing has the best return on investment in online marketing. Stick to it and you’ll eventually see an increase in sales.

Share Your Content With Subscribers

In addition to generating leads, creating brand awareness is a crucial aspect of email marketing. Even if you can’t increase sales or your site traffic, you can at least inform subscribers about your brand.

You probably already create content for other purposes in your online marketing strategy. If that’s the case, then just include your blogs and articles in your emails. If not, then you should start practicing content creation as soon as possible to enhance your search engine optimization (SEO) and establish thought leadership.

Test for Spam

Spam is the one unfortunate aspect of email marketing. You can create great emails, but your efforts won’t amount to anything if they land in the spam folder.

There are a few things you can do to avoid this. First, you should check to see if your ESP provides any statistics related to spam. Then you can change your emails to avoid looking suspicious.

Not all businesses have access to such statistics, though. According to a recent Marketing Profs article, however, that’s not a problem, since you can test your emails for spam with multiple accounts:

“If you don’t have that information available through your ESP, consider doing homemade tests. You’ll need to create email addresses from various major providers—Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.—and use various email clients to access them. Add those addresses to your email marketing list. When you send out your campaigns, log into each address to determine whether the message was delivered.”

Align Your Newsletter With Your Brand

Matching your emails with your brand identity is an underrated aspect of email marketing. Sure, the content you send is important, but if it doesn’t fit with your company’s mission, it’s just going to confuse subscribers.

The easiest way align your newsletter with your brand is to pick a consistent format and theme. Everything from the color scheme to the font should match your other online marketing efforts, particularly your website.

Moreover, the content in your emails should be relevant to your company and your industry. If you have content that’s only somewhat related to your industry, then you should save it for social media where it can lead to a discussion.

Email marketing can be very effective when done right. If you try to disguise social media posts as marketing emails, however, then you’re not going to have much success. In your email campaign, you should stick to the things that work on the platform, like lead generation and content sharing. To talk more about email marketing, or anything else, contact us today.