No, email marketing is not dead. Done well, this content strategy can pay off big. Truth be told, newsletters produce very good ROI: email has the highest conversion rate (66%) for purchases made after receiving a marketing message. Neglecting email marketing would rob your business of high returns that are easy to achieve.

Interested? 

We will see 4 determining factors for the success of email marketing and guide you in the choice of your audience, your planning, your content creation and the optimization of your campaigns.

Address the Right Audience

People/users don’t give out their personal email addresses to just anyone. They generally share them with those they have chosen to trust. This is why even before talking about newsletters per se, we believe it is important to talk about the audience.

So, you will need a strategy to get the email addresses of your prospects or customers. Several companies exchange value-added content for the contact details of prospects. For your customers, you can request their email when they are ordering online.

Segmentation

Once you have a contact list, what do you do with it? Do you send the same email to all your contacts? Your answer should be no.

Segmentation is simply dividing your mailing list into different parts or segments. Then you can tailor/draft unique messages to each individual segment. Marketers who use segmented email campaigns see up to 760% increase in revenue. So you would be crazy not to do it!

You can segment your contacts according to past purchases, content visited, how you got their emails, their stage in the purchase journey, their interests, their location, etc. Some even ask when an Internet user subscribes to a newsletter the category or categories of content that interests him.

By doing this, you will be able to deliver more relevant content and offers for better conversion rates.

Customization

Depending on the data you collect on your prospects, you can easily personalize your emails. By doing your segmentation, you can deliver personalized content that matches the needs and interests of your recipients. Contrary to popular belief, personalization in an email goes beyond simply using the recipient’s first name.

You can also use dynamic content, that is, content that adapts according to conditions. For example, you could send an email featuring complementary or similar products to a recent purchase. The products seen by the customer would be different depending on their purchase.

Personalization isn’t just about using your customers’ data. You can personalize your brand. Instead of sending the email through the company, you can send it from an employee.

This personalization can add a level of human connection between you and your customer. You can try changing several aspects such as conversational tone, pronouns like “we” and “I” to make your emails appear to be from a real human.

Have a Strategy Behind Your Newsletters

Only sending a newsletter will not be profitable for you. You need to strategize based on what you hope to accomplish. Emails intended to nurture prospects should be treated differently from emails used to increase engagement and conversions.

Questions to ask yourself

• Who are your recipients?
• What is the reason for your emails?
• What types of emails will you send?
• What will be the structure and layout of your emails?
• How often will you send them?

Goals

Why did you plan to send this type of email? A welcome email, an announcement of new products, a relaunch of an abandoned cart, a request for an opinion on the product purchased do not have the same objectives.

Do you want to inform or educate prospects, drive more traffic to your website, nurture a relationship, generate sales, or retain your customers? When your goals are measurable, well-defined as well as time-bound, you can keep tabs on your campaign’s performance and make adjustments to your strategy as needed.

Produce content

Here we are now at the heart of email marketing: content! By having a strategy, you’ll know exactly what kind of content you need to produce . Depending on your knowledge of your audience, you can adapt the brand’s voice and the tone used.

Design

Designs should be made for all devices on which users can read their email – desktop, tablet, and mobile. You will also have to think about the structure of a newsletter, since it is important for the reader to be able to understand the message even if he is reading diagonally.

It’s up to you to determine what works best for your industry, but a design doesn’t always have to be complex. Some companies send text-only emails and they perform very well! This strategy works especially well when you personalize your text to make it look like one of your employees sent this email.

Writing

The email subject line, the text preview, and the call to action are all important to achieving goals. It’s about using the right words to attract and convince readers. We advise you to keep it succinct and to address only one subject by email with a clear direction of intention for the continuation.

Remember, there is no point in pushing a product down a consumer’s throat. Above all, you must justify the relevance of your communications and let the consumer choose. 

Listen to the data

To be successful in the long run, you need to analyze the performance of your email sending. This allows you to identify your potential strengths and weaknesses and optimize your newsletters. Are there more convenient times to send your emails? Which email subjects get better open rates?

The data to analyze

• Open rate: the percentage of subscribers who opened the newsletter.
• Click rate: the percentage of recipients who clicked on at least one link (Call to actions).
• Conversions: the percentage of readers who took the desired action after clicking on the target page (purchase, download, read the blog post, etc.).

A / B test

A / B testing is a method that can help you improve your conversions of your email submissions. This involves comparing two variants of an email in order to validate which one performs the best in terms of conversions or clicks. Variations A and B will be exposed randomly to users, so some of your recipients will receive variation A and others will receive variation B.

What you can test in your newsletters:

• Securities
• Call to actions
• Texts
• Forms
• Pictures
• Colors
• Structure of the newsletter
• Navigation

Email marketing is therefore a long-term job that requires several skills: writing, design, segmentation, content marketing and data analysis. The performance of emails sent depends on many factors: you have to know your audience well, set realistic goals, create relevant content and optimize its content according to performance indicators. If you don’t have the time for all this, you can hire a digital marketing company to improve your conversions.