It seems like it was yesterday when we started using email marketing. Unlike other marketing strategies, this one simply doesn’t stop trending. If nothing else, it grows in popularity. Even after so many years, email marketing remains one of the most effective, least expensive ways to reach customers and prospects.
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If done right, email marketing can do wonders for a brand’s online presence. An estimated 99% of customers and prospects of a brand check their inbox daily. The reach of social media alone is truly unbelievable today thanks to ad campaigns, but email reach still keeps the first spot.
With these numbers, you can get 6 times higher reach with your emails compared to the reach you get with your tweets. Further proving why traffic from email marketing is important.
We constantly hear how amazing email marketing can be because of the low investment and high return. Still, email marketing doesn’t work for everyone. It works only if it’s done right. You can send email after email to every address you find and not attract anyone to your website.
If you want to achieve that 122% return on investment and the $40 for every dollar spent on email marketing, you need to take this seriously and make it great.
Let’s see how you can create more traffic from email marketing!
Incorporate Newsletter Content in Your Messages
Newsletters are a great way to promote just about everything – from your latest blog post to your newest product. Brands use them to keep in touch with their audience, share information about the brand, spread the word about promotions and special deals, and much more.
Many customers forget about a brand after they make the first purchase. Newsletters are a great way to remind them and pique their interest again. They are also a good opportunity to share info about your promotions and provide exclusive content to subscribers.
Still, these require some work and need to look amazing if you want them to appeal to the audience. To make sure that your newsletters are well-designed, you can source inspiration from newsletter examples or customize templates to create them.
The customization process is very simple. If you want to know how it’s done, you can learn more at Flodesk, the top-rated tool for investment newsletters template.
Another great thing about newsletters is that they can be repurposed and enrich your website content. Just as you can repurpose your social content into emails, you can turn your email newsletters into engaging blogs and posts.
Once you use an email template and create an attractive newsletter, you can repurpose the information in a blog post or on an infographic that you’ll share on your website.
If you decide to do so, make sure to send the content to your subscribers first. Some of your newsletter content should be exclusive to subscribers, considering that these people are your most loyal followers.
Segment your email list
Don’t you hate it when someone sends you those generic, repetitive emails with nothing specific to attract your attention? If you decide to speak to everyone all at once, your email strategy will soon become a failure.
If you already have an email list then it is important that you verify and validate the list so you get a lower bounce rate. There are many free as well as paid tools that can help you do that. Here’s a great list of email validation services that you can check out.
Segmenting your email list is a must in a successful marketing strategy. It’s a process where you categorize your email list according to their interests, previous purchases, behaviors, and more. Once you segment, you can create unique content to appeal to the segmented audience and meet their specific needs.
A segmented email list speaks more personally and directly to the customers. It gives them the information they need in the way they need it and when they need it. If you do it right, the payoff can be tremendous. According to MailChimp, a user-segmented email list based on job title and location data can boost click-through rates by 22% and open rates by 19%.
So, how do you segment an email list to boost your traffic?
There are three main steps to this:
Step 1: Define data points
Segments cannot exist without data. This is the most important thing to a brand that wants to make a sale and attract more traffic. Before you start segmenting, you need to define what data will help you attract more people to your brand.
When you’re considering this, think about the following:
- What type of data are you already collecting as a brand?
- What type of data can you start collecting for better segmentation?
- What information/ data do you need to obtain directly from the users?
Step 2: Create buyer personas
Anyone who doesn’t know their audience is doomed to fail in his efforts. The best brands go in-depth and create buyer personas to meet the expectations of the customers.
This is the most important step of list segmentation. In it, you need to determine the answers to the following questions:
- Do I have demographic data of my customers/ followers?
- What are the pain points of my buyer persona?
- What kind of budget do these people have?
- What do they want to accomplish?
- What appeals to them?
- When do they open their emails?
- What social media channels do they use?
This list can go on and on and will depend on your brand’s purpose, your online presence, as well as your goals.
Some tools can make this easier for you, such as Hubspot’s templates. If you want to know how to create a detailed persona by using a template, you can learn more here.
Step 3: Choose your segments
When you arrive at this step, you should already have some idea of who you are aiming to attract to your business. You should also have your segmentation data. At this point, all that’s left to do is figure out how to split different buyer personas into different segments.
There’s no rule as to how many groups or segments you should have. The more you have, the more personalized will your strategy be. However, more segments require more work since you’ll be creating content to meet their expectations specifically.
Personalize your email content
The reason why you’ve segmented your email list is to enable you to create custom personalized content that appeals to different customers. Nowadays, there are many ways to add personalization to your emails.
You could use the name of customers that have bought from you in the past, refer to products they’ve purchased and send personalized recommendations to boost your relationship with them.
Creating and sending these emails can be time-consuming and tedious, but it’s a sure way to build some rapport with your audience. This way, you’ll be sending high-quality content that fits the exact needs of those who receive your emails, boosting your chances of getting more traffic and recognition significantly.
Include social media links in your messages
If you incorporate some social media links to your email messages, this might prompt them to go to your profiles. This is another opportunity to convince them to make a purchase, and it also comes with an extra perk- they’ll end up on your site to do that anyways.
In other words, if you convince people to click on the links and go to social channels, you will potentially get traffic both on your site and your social profiles.
This is a win-win strategy since you’d be boosting your social media presence as well as the chances of getting more site traffic. UNUM has some great tips if you want to learn how to grow organically on social media.
Now that social media is used more often than ever, you should aim to add some links to every email you are sending out. They don’t take much space but can make a lot of difference. Here is a nice example by Sony. In it, you can find many symbols for sharing the content on social media or going to the business’s social pages.
Optimize your site’s landing pages
Let’s say that you’ve invested a lot of money and effort in your email marketing campaign. It already shows results. More people are following through and getting to your profiles or your website, but now you’re facing a different problem – they aren’t staying there!
Unless you’ve optimized your landing pages, all your email marketing efforts will go in vain. Those people that you’ll lose because your site didn’t look fantastic are very unlikely to come back regardless of how amazing your emails are.
A highly optimized website goes head to head with an effective email marketing campaign. Don’t allow yourself to lose high-value customers that you convinced to visit your site just because your landing page is not presentable enough.
Make your emails easily scannable
People have a low average attention span of around 8 seconds. This doesn’t give you much time to impress them and convince them to read your entire email. Chances are, most of the people that receive it won’t get to its end.
Hopefully, they’ll follow the links and go to your site soon after opening the message and boost the traffic.
But, how do you make sure that recipients understand the message in your email even if they don’t read it thoroughly? The answer lies in short, concise, and easily scannable content.
Consistency in email quality is the key to your marketing strategy. Whenever you’re creating an email to send out, you need to make sure it is clear, easy to scan, unique, and engaging enough to convince people to take some action.
Here’s is a good example of an easily scannable email:
Maintain an engaged email list
It’s not as much about the size of your email list – it’s about the engagement in your list. It might be tempting to send your emails to just about everyone you know, but that’s not really a good move.
For starters, it will yield inaccurate results when you test your email marketing strategy. If you have too many inaccurate addresses, non-active recipients, and people who are not in your target audience, you won’t get great results when you test your strategy.
Since you’ll be personalizing the content and segmenting your list to get more traffic, use this opportunity to reduce it to the people you should be contacting. Low email open rates are never good and, unless you keep a clean email list, this is what you’ll get.
Do some testing of keywords for your content
Figuring out what keywords to use is not only something for the content you create for your website. Even your email marketing strategy requires the right use of keywords. This is how you get more open rates, better SEO ranking, and can better appeal to the audience.
To decide on the SEO keywords you’ll use in your emails, conduct keyword research and A/B tests. Compare different email versions to see which type of content appeals best to your audience and which keyword gets more open rates in your subject lines.
Make your subject lines highly engaging
The subject line will be the first thing that appears on the screen of those who receive your emails. Every day, people receive a couple of dozen emails. Most of them have generic, common, dull subject lines that hardly pique the interest of many.
The success of your email depends tremendously on the quality of the subject line. That being said, here are a few things that you should do to optimize this:
- Create short and catchy email subject lines of only a few words
- Don’t add too many emojis and other symbols to your subject lines
- Add your main keyword to the subject line
- Don’t capitalize everything in your subject line
- Test subject lines before you send your emails out
Ready to get traffic for email marketing? Get started now!
Well-planned and executed email marketing strategies can bring a tremendous amount of traffic to a brand. Email marketing is, to this day, one of the cheapest ways to get more traffic and promote your brand. It would be a shame not to use this opportunity, right?