We’ve all been signed up to a mailing list that we’ve never heard of at some point in our lives. Whether we unintentionally signed up at the checkout, those pesky tick boxes ‘do you want to not sign up to mailing list, check this box if you don’t’(what?!) Or signed up in store and completely forgotten about it. Being spammed with multiple emails from one company every day is extremely annoying.
However, there’s no doubt about it, email marketing is an incredibly effective way of letting your subscribers know about your latest offers, specialist products & latest news and generally has the highest ROI. It’s also worth noting that there are almost three times more email accounts than Facebook and Twitter accounts combined!
We’ve compiled our top tips to help you get the most out of email marketing, so that you can generate some traffic to your website and ultimately increase your sales!
Tip 1 – Make sure people actually want to hear from you.
As I said before, it’s super annoying to get spam emails from companies you’ve never heard of! Now, this is the slightly boring bit, but if you’re planning on starting some email marketing, you need to make sure that you comply with regulations.
You can use a ‘soft opt-in’ option when creating your mailing list if the following conditions are met:
- You’ve obtained the persons details when they’ve bought a product from your website.
- Where your content is marketing similar products
- You give your customers a clear option on your website or check out page to opt in or opt out of marketing mail, and are given a clear option to unsubscribe in future mailings.
You’ll also need to make sure that you provide your contact details on the marketing mail. It may sound simple, but it’s incredibly important to make sure you’re following regulations.
Tip 2 – Segment your data properly for a more targeted approach.
A great way to start boosting those conversion rates is by segmenting your data.
Let’s say you’re running an online pet store, selling products for a variety of animals. You can start off sending out an email campaign, featuring a range of products suitable for all pets. If you’re using an email marketing software such as Campaign Monitor or MailChimp, you can then look at the results of that email campaign, see who clicked on each link and then target them specifically.
So, if you collect the data of all the people that clicked on a link to a product for cats, you can then send them a follow up email, specifically about cat related products or special offers.
Tip 3 – Don’t over complicate things…
When thinking about creating your own email campaigns, simple is always best. You’ll need to try and capture your audience’s attention pretty quickly, so having some high-resolution images and easy to read text are the way forward.
Most people nowadays read their emails as they go on their phone, so it’s also important to make sure that your emails are mobile friendly aswell!
Tip 4 – Get those inbound links working properly!
What’s important is that if you’re going to get tip 2 to work, you of course need to make sure that all your links are working properly. It’s incredibly annoying when you get an email with ‘Take a look at our products’ and you can’t click on the link. More often than not, people won’t bother taking the time to actually find your website on a browser and look through.
When creating your campaigns, make sure that every image and button has a link, either to the relevant product, or your home page.
It’s also a great idea to put links to your social media channels in the footer of your email campaign.
