How to add value to your email marketing campaigns

You don't know the reasons why your emails don't get opened, or if they do, why your senders don't click. You don't understand why many of your subscribers have unsubscribed. You don't think your content is the problem. So how can you connect with your contacts, how can you generate value?

What are the steps of a value campaign?

There are TWO that you must follow, and we are not talking about the fact that you should only keep in mind two steps, but that you must remember the acronym TWO every time you are going to run a new campaign. Acronyms that correspond to debugging, targeting and segmentation.

Think also that you should measure the results, although it would not need to be mentioned, because the analysis is should be intrinsic to any action or strategy that you execute in marketing. In addition, you must consider an extra that is the automation and that will depend on how complex your campaign is and the volume of contacts in your database.

Analysis is a very important part of your marketing strategy.

1. Clean up your contact list.

There are contacts in your database who are obsolete. Contacts who never open your emails, who don’t interact with your website, and who don’t care about the content you post on your social networks. So why are you wasting your time lamenting their loss? Why don’t you invest it in building loyalty with the contacts who do care?

The loyalty of your contacts is a key factor in the success of your business.

The loyalty of your customers should be rewarded. Work on bringing value to these contacts with your email marketing campaigns. So clean your CRM of contacts that don’t interact with the content in your different channels. If one day they decide to come back, you can start a new conversion process with them. Now, focus on your most active contacts.

Focus on your most active contacts.

2. Determine the objective of your campaign

We have already discussed this on other occasions: you can’t send an email without a target. Sending an email for the sake of sending something to your contacts once in a while doesn’t keep their interest piqued. To get good results, results that are measured in conversions, your email marketing campaigns have to be able to add value to your readers as well as be effective.

And for an email marketing campaign to be effective, it has to add value to your readers.

And for a campaign to be effective it must always have a goal: Why are you going to run this campaign? What do you want your recipients to do after reading the email? As always think of SMART goals: that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and have a deadline.

3. Segment the right audience

Segmenting allows you to send content in a more targeted way at the most appropriate time. That is, dividing your contact database into groups based on certain criteria or needs allows you to create and send the right content, a content of value.

With the information you get from your contacts based on the actions they perform on your website (what pages they view, what forms they fill out, what ebooks they download, etc.), you can find out what stage of their life cycle as consumers they are in. In other words, you can analyze what type of information is necessary and send it only to that segment of your contacts that will benefit from it. Because with segmentation you can send the right content at the most suitable time in your contact’s life cycle.

4. Automate if necessary

The automation of your emails is important to ‘nurture’ the interest and trust of your contacts. Creating campaigns that you can automate will allow you to perform email marketing in a more efficient way and with greater control of specific tasks: generate automatic responses to new leads, inform or send content, create notifications for your team, etc.

Automate if necessary

In addition, these automations will make it possible for your team to work towards the same goals. By generating workflows (workflows) you can not only schedule content delivery to segmented lists, but also send notifications and alerts to the teams to monitor and analyze the results.

5. Analyze the results.

No control or analysis.

Without monitoring and analysis, you will not be able to detect the failures in your email marketing campaign, but neither will you be able to detect the successes. Only analysis allows you to assess whether your campaign has been effective, what you should improve and what you should repeat. Consider

  • Deliverability: Of the emails delivered, what is the total number of emails sent? That is, of those that did reach the recipients’ inbox. Above 95% is ideal, but difficult to achieve if you’re buying your lists. (And you shouldn’t be buying lists in the first place.)
  • The open rate or open rate: How many people opened your email out of the total number of emails sent to a list? An open rate of 20% would mean that out of every 10 emails delivered, 2 were opened.
  • The click-through rate or click-through rate: How many people clicked on a link or call-to-action in your email out of the total number of emails opened?

Examples of email marketing campaigns that provide value

There are companies that we could consider an example, companies that implement creative, practical and most importantly, effective email marketing campaigns. And don’t think that their effectiveness is the result of chance. These companies know their audience very well and have worked on crafting valuable emails. So what should you do?

What should you do?

1. Take into account your transactional emails

The transactional emails, are those emails to which many companies do not usually pay too much attention. And the truth is that their importance should not be underestimated. What do they consist of? These are the automated emails that your contacts receive after performing an action: downloading an ebook after filling out a form, confirming the purchase of one of your products, etc. These emails can be very simple, but they can also generate greater engagement with contacts if you take it a step further.

charity-water-email-example

For example, charity: water, a nonprofit that provides clean water to developing countries, used its transactional emails to inform its donors of the positive impact of their donation. If you think about it, some NGOs don’t report the destination of their donations and this can make some potential donors skeptical or fail to connect with the company. To combat this, charity: water used email marketing as a tool to engage its contacts.

2. Remember that short is as good as short is twice as good

An email is only as relevant as its content. And it doesn’t have to be long. Obviously, it all depends on the purpose of your email, but you should think that your contacts don’t want to waste time. For that reason, if possible, the more visual the content of your emails is, the more you will make it easier for your contacts to read it. They will thank you for it, and will return the favor with a good open rate.

uber-email-campaign

This is the case with Uber whose emails are all about simplicity. And by simple, it doesn’t mean they haven’t thought about their target audience – quite the opposite. Their subscribers receive offers and promotions with a clear call to action to click on. So what does Uber do to maintain a good click-through rate? It relies on consistent design and a copy tailored to your target’s needs.

3. And don’t forget the subject line, excerpt and alt-text

The subject lines are the ones that have the power to get the attention of your recipients in the first place. These and the preview text. So why not work your copy to capture the interest of your contacts, to arouse their curiosity? In the subject line and preview text you can take a risk. Think about performing A/B tests with to find out what type of content works best.

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buzzfeed email subject line example

And don’t forget the importance of image alt-text. Think that when they are not loaded, the only thing your contacts see is a text and that this can also be creative and attract attention so that they “bother” to download them. If you do not have it clear, look at the creative example of BuzzFeed.

buzzfeed alt-text email example

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