Worldwide, we send and receive an average of more than 300 billion emails every day, and that number will only increase. This means numerous brands just like yours are fighting to get your audience's attention when they check their inboxes.
With so much competition, it's crucial that your subscribers pay attention to your content to increase your conversions and prolong engagement. Here's why you should be using email marketing for your business as well as four ways to improve your email marketing campaign and boost engagement.
Why use email marketing?
There are several reasons why your business needs email marketing to reach its goals and continue growing.
1. Increase conversions.
You can create email campaigns that promote your products, improve engagement and increase conversions. Offers and fresh content that go straight to your subscribers' inboxes will familiarize them with your brand until they feel ready to purchase.
2. Offer convenience and accessibility.
It's convenient to spread your marketing messages with email marketing software, and it's easy for subscribers to receive that information. They can access their inbox through the device of their choice with little effort, making email an excellent marketing tool. Consumers can keep their favorite content and offers from your brand in one place while keeping up with your latest updates.
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3. Provide personalization.
Building an email list lets you collect user data to learn more about your subscribers and pay attention to their behavior. It also helps you create future email marketing campaigns that will improve user engagement. The more information you have, the easier it is for your brand to tend to customers' needs and drive sales.
4. Reach mobile users.
Email makes it easy for those on any device to connect with your business. When people are on the go, they can still take advantage of your offers and receive your marketing messages. The easier it is to reach subscribers, the quicker you can solve their pain points and move them through the sales funnel to conversion.
How to improve engagement through email marketing
Let's take a closer look at a few ways you can improve user engagement through email marketing:
- Create and focus on a few specific goals for your campaign.
- Research your target market and create buyer personas.
- Segment your email list to create personalized campaigns.
- Track your campaign's performance and analyze the results.
1. Solidify your goals.
It's essential to set clear goals that streamline your focus to a few aspects of your campaign at a time. Keeping a couple of objectives at the forefront of your campaign forces you to concentrate on a specific area to improve results.
Stick to one or two goals so that your campaign's progress is easier to measure. From there, you can move on to other goals for your next campaign.
These are some common goals for email marketing campaigns:
- Improving engagement
- Driving traffic to your website
- Increasing your campaign's open rate
- Nurturing subscribers
- Growing your email list
2. Know your audience.
Before you start sending out campaigns, you need to assess how well you truly know your target market and tend to their needs. It's easier to send optimized emails when you know your target audience, as you'll have the information you need to solve their pain points and cater to their interests.
How well do you know your audience? If you don't know them well, you need to gather user data, collect feedback and research your competitors to get ahead of the game. Here are a few tips for getting to know your customers:
- Use customer surveys. Survey data is essential in small business marketing. Surveys are a great way to ask your customers personalized questions to receive the most helpful feedback. You can ask exactly what you want and let users add their own answers so they can be as honest as possible. When reaching out to your audience, keep the questions short, simple and straightforward. You risk a low completion rate if you ask too much or don't ask relevant questions.
- Use website analytics. Study your website analytics to get to know your visitors better. Pay attention to the content they spend the most and least time on, which webpages are most popular, and where users drop off. You'll likely notice a disturbance in the user experience or another issue that turns away visitors regularly.
- Create buyer personas. Take the information you've gathered and turn it into buyer personas, which are profiles of your customers. Buyer personas give you details about your customers in one place, including their demographics, buying behaviors and pain points.
3. Segment your list.
People sign up for your email list for different reasons, and each person has a different need that your brand helps them address. That's why it's crucial to segment your email list before sending out campaigns.
Here are a few upsides to email list segmentation:
- Deliver tailored content. When you segment your list, you can create and deliver emails tailored to that group's needs and interests. Segmented campaigns have the power to increase revenue by 760% because they personalize the experience your brand gives consumers. Sending only relevant emails saves you from a high unsubscribe rate, low engagement and annoyed subscribers.
- Build stronger customer relationships. When you listen to customer needs and concerns, you build the foundation for strong customer relationships with your brand. People want to feel like more than a number when they engage with your business, and providing relevant content to them is a great way to show them they matter to you.
- Sell more. Consumers who make purchases through an email campaign spend more than those without email offers.
You can segment your list by many customer factors, depending on your campaign's goals. Here are some of the most common:
- Age
- Gender
- Buying behavior
- Past purchases
- Industry
- Lead magnet
4. Monitor your campaign.
How proactive are you about measuring your campaign's performance? You need to track, monitor and collect data about your email campaign to measure its results accurately. You can improve your future campaigns by analyzing your data and noting what worked well and what didn't resonate with subscribers.
The process of monitoring your campaign's analytics will depend largely on the email marketing service you use to send your campaigns. The best email marketing services help you consistently track a campaign's performance and recognize any significant changes in conversions.
How, when and why to measure email marketing metrics
A few specific metrics are worth monitoring throughout your email campaigns.
- Open rate: The open rate is the number of subscribers who opened your email. You get this metric by dividing the number of emails sent by the number of emails opened. With this percentage, you'll be able to determine which email factors, such as the subject line, are resonating with your audience. When you improve your open rate, you're better able to build a connection with your subscribers.
- Click-through rate: This percentage is based on how many users clicked on the links provided within your email. The click-through rate is measured by dividing the total clicks by the number of emails delivered. You can use this metric to determine how to position your links within the email body to entice clicks, as well as to inform design decisions.
- Bounce rate: The bounce rate is the percentage of emails that were not delivered to recipients. This metric can mean a few things, such as a receiving server has blocked your emails or the recipient used a invalid email address when signing up. For a successful campaign, the bounce rate should be under 2%. If it's higher, you can reduce the bounce rate by cleaning up your email addresses or ensuring that your emails don't appear as spam to email servers.
- Unsubscribe rate: The unsubscribe rate is the number of users who unsubscribed from your email list. You can calculate this number by dividing the number of those who unsubscribed by the number of emails sent in your campaign. There are multiple reasons why a recipient would unsubscribe from your list; however, this number can help you figure out what isn't resonating with your subscribers, such as if you're sending emails too often.
Why monitoring an email campaign's metrics is important
Launching an email campaign without following its metrics is like throwing darts without aiming at the target. You won't know if you're affecting your audience or seeing any return on your campaign if you miss this crucial step. Following the metrics will allow you to curate email content your subscribers want to read and monitor what entices them to open your emails.
One of the benefits of metrics is that you can see the performance throughout each step of your email campaign and make tweaks. If you see a poor open rate for one email campaign, for example, try changing the email subject line the next time or creating a more personalized offer.
There's no doubt that email marketing is crucial to a business's growth and success. Through email, your business can communicate with subscribers, collect feedback and nurture leads until they turn into loyal, paying customers. How will you refine your next email marketing campaign to improve user engagement?
Sean Peek contributed to the writing and research in this article.