Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to drive brand awareness and sales for your business, whether you are B2B or B2C. The absolute nirvana is when people open and interact with every email you send out. If that is happening, you’re doing your email marketing well, but how do you get there? Here’s what is involved…
Before you even press send
People within your target audience can only open your email campaigns if they are delivered to their inbox (or at least their junk folder, initially). For that to happen, you need to prove you are trustworthy to the email receivers. They need to believe that you are really you.
DMARC, DKIM & SPF
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) is an email protocol that identifies you as being definitely you. It uses Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to prevent phishing and domain spoofing. This protects both you and your target audience. You can find out more about these here.
Authentication
Your email marketing platforms will all expect you to authenticate your domain and sending email addresses. This improves your deliverability rate, prevents misuse of your domain and makes you an authentic email sender. Your preferred platform will guide you through this, and is likely to keep reminding you until you get it done!
Validate your list
If you are setting up your email marketing for the first time, using a list that you have gathered over the last few years, validating your data is something we really recommend. We use ZeroBounce to identify the email addresses that are still valid, which are no longer in use and even whether there are spam traps.
The quality of your list is another part of your deliverability score (lots of bounces count against you), so the more you can do before you press send, the better.
What are you sending?
This section and the next one can be swapped around. It doesn’t really matter which order, as long as you do both.
If you want to get to the point where people open your email campaigns because they trust you, what you send them really matters. There’s a “simple” way to work out what to send – it has to be useful to them.
If every email you send is trying to sell to them, let’s be blunt, you’re going to upset (insert whatever word you want here) them.
Useful content helps them and they start getting used to getting useful content from you. The more they trust you, the more likely they will open and click your emails.
Who are you sending to?
This can go in front of the previous section.
You can work out who you’re sending to and then work out what will be useful to them, or
You can decide what to send and then determine who that will be useful to.
In almost every case, you will not be sending to your entire mailing list. For example:
- If you are sending sales email campaigns, only send to the people who aren’t already buying that product
- If you want someone to buy something again, make sure they have bought it before
- Content that is only relevant in one country should only go to people based in or operating in that country.
Strong Subject lines are vital
In the early days, this is true. Before your target audience really trusts you, they will open or delete your email based on your subject line. Does it excite them or generate interest? If not, they are likely to skip past or press delete.
Content that matches the subject line
One of the quickest ways to get people to unsubscribe is for the email’s content to be completely different to the subject line. If your subject line promises help with an issue, and your content just tries to sell something, they will click unsubscribe and not your Call to Action.
A name
Next to the subject line is From. If that just says “Your Company Name”, you’re missing a trick. The old adage people buy from people is still true. Having a person’s name there will generate higher open rates, whether the name is yours, your Sales Manager’s or whoever, people begin to recognise the name and start opening because of the name. The first step is strong brand recognition.
Consistency
Any company can produce a great email campaign with useful content. Far fewer can do it regularly. Whatever frequency you can commit to, keep sending to that frequency. People get to expecting an email from you every week/fortnight/month. They may not start drooling when your brand name appears in their inbox, but there is definitely something Pavlovian when you’re consistently producing good email campaigns with useful content.
Why do this?
When people are opening your email campaigns because they recognise and trust the brand, who are they going to go to when they have a need you can help them with? If your brand becomes synonymous with a service, a product or an end result, the people who trust your brand come to you to buy. That a good enough reason?
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