How to make email marketing effective

A well-planned, carefully targeted campaign containing the right sort of content can be highly effective in generating website traffic and converting leads into customers.  

For marketers using email as part of a campaign, it is always important to have the potential customers in mind. This is a simple principle and you don't have to be the best digital marketing agency in the UK to understand and implement it; all you need to do is focus on a few basic but crucial questions you should ask at the outset: 

• First and foremost, will they be happy to receive your communications?
• Are you sending to people who fit the buyer persona of your target market?
• How often do you want to contact them, bearing in mind that too many contacts could put them off?
• Most importantly of all, what content should be included?

The best way to make sure you contact the right people is to use an email marketing tool, which will be designed to enable marketers to send out large numbers of emails while still targeting specific people.

They do this through a segmentation system that enables people to list only the people they wish to contact. When marketers establish that one individual is a 'qualified lead' - which means someone in the target market who should be contacted again - they segment the list by including them to be contacted, while removing unqualified people from the list.

In addition, if a recipient asks to be removed from the list, never responds, or their inbox is blocking the emails, they should also be removed. The same applies to cases of death or mistaken identity.

There are several other powerful email marketing tools available. These include Mailchimp, Hubspot, Constant Contact, Get Response, MailGet and Platformly.

What should your emails contain? 

The content of the emails should focus on four areas:

• Surveys
• newsletters
• Regular emails with promotions, offers and discounts,
• Auto-response or auto-confirmation emails, which tell a customer their response or action has been noted.   

Regular emails can be sent to qualified leads and existing customers alike, with the second group being those who have made it to the fourth and final stage of the buyer journey. Having first become aware of your services, then considered and finally made a purchase, they can be retained with attractive offers to reward their loyalty.

Newsletters and surveys are also likely to be sent to both qualified leads and existing customers. The lists to send these to will be created by the customer having previously ticked the opt-in box on a previous email, or signed up via a call-to-action button on your website.

Using any of the above-mentioned software tools, you can make sure these only go to your intended recipients. There are multiple segmentation options, which means each contact can be included in some lists and not others.

Even so, it is vital before a marketing campaign starts that you test it carefully. Once an email is sent, it is sent, so the only time to avoid an error is beforehand.

How can you avoid sending the things you shouldn't?

It should also be noted what would not be included in an email marketing strategy.

• This is not the platform for full blogs, which can be viewed on your website - maybe via clickable links highlighted in a newsletter.

• Instead, you should be providing short and succinct messages that tell the story of what you do and why, but in a simple and easily digestible way.
• The key point to remember is those reading their emails generally have neither the time or desire to spend a long time on each one.

By using an email marketing tool to carefully select your audiences and target the right people, your email campaign can be effective and lead to plenty of contacts progressing through the buyer journey.

How BeUniqueness can help

At BeUniqueness, we have great experience of putting together email marketing campaigns. We know the importance of making your email distribution efficient and ensuring the messages themselves are professional and attractive. With our help, you can impress and attract both existing and potential customers with an efficient and well-directed campaign.