Your new website is now online and you want to start attracting new customers to your brand-new website. E-mail marketing is one of the most effective forms of digital marketing. However, there are several challenges you need to master to achieve the desired success with your e-mail marketing campaigns. In this article, you will find practical tips and important recommendations.
As a quick overview, we will cover how to acquire e-mail addresses, how to design a newsletter, decide what content you should share with your audience, what to consider when distributing your e-mail, and how to monitor your success.
1. Step one: How to acquire e-mail addresses
When we set up your website we include a contact form, a newsletter sign-up form and a landing page form. The difference is that the contact form is an explicit request to get in touch about a specific topic, the newsletter sign-up form is a request to stay informed about your business until ready to buy and the landing page form is when a customer is either ready to buy, download specific content, or sign up for a specific event. In any case, you will have collected contact information about a person and need to take the following into consideration.
- You will have to obtain clear consent from the recipients in the form of "double opt-in" which means the visitor must at some point confirm via email that they wish to stay in contact via email.
- You must inform users of their right to withdrawal and the privacy policy in the course of newsletter registration. This information and relevant links are always included at the bottom of the email you send to your customers.
- Your sign-up page lists the benefits of the newsletter and why your customers should sign up. This is important so that your intent is clear and customers know why you are collecting their personal contact data.
- You only need user full name and the e-mail address as required mandatory field on first contact. You can collect additional contact data via optional fields or during later interactions.
- You do not need to have your sign-up process legally reviewed if you use a third-party e-mail marketing provider as most of these providers are GDPR compliant.
If you have any questions at this point we can always consult you as part of your free 30 day maintenance package or your paid 1 year maintenance package.
2. Step two: How to design a newsletter
- Place the most important content at the top of the e-mail so that it is immediately visible when your customer opens the e-mail.
- You can use either an html based responsive e-mail design so that your mailing is also optimally displayed on mobile devices or simple text.
- Structure your content clearly so that your reader immediately understands the purpose of the e-mail and your intent, i.e. inform about a certain topic, present a new offering, invite to sign-up for an event, etc.
- If possible address your e-mail recipients by their first name and personalise your message.
- As mentioned above, include a link to your privacy policy and imprint in your e-mail so that your recipients are informed about their data rights.
- Most e-mail marketing platforms offer this but just make sure an unsubscribe link is available at the end of the e-mail.
3. Step three: Decide what content you should share with your audience
- Your e-mail should add value for the reader. What you write about or the type of content you share should information that your customers are looking for along their journey.
- Finally add a clear call-to-action in your email.
4. Step four: What to consider when distributing your e-mail
- It is worth checking that your e-mail displays properly and running a few tests if it is the first time you are sending out an e-mail to a broader audience.
- In the beginning your can send your e-mails directly to your list but at some point it is worth looking at e-mail marketing service providers such as mailchimp, ontraport or sendinblue just to name a few.
- Keep in mind that e-mail service providers have sophisticated anti-spam filters so you should avoid writing emails that have the typical characteristics of spam, e.g. click-baity subject lines, missing unsubscribe link, too many spelling errors, etc.
- Ensure that your customers' data is protected from unauthorised access at all times in the best possible way. We recommend using a CRM (customer relationship management) platform and/or E-Mail Marketing provider to store customer contact data.
- Especially in corporate environments when selling business to business, people switch jobs and work emails form time to time, so e-mail addresses become unreachable. It helps if bounced emails are automatically sorted out and managed.
5. Step five: How to monitor your success
- E-Mail marketing is something that you need to keep on optimizing and in order to do that you should monitor your success.
- When you are starting out it could be enough to simply check how many emails you sent out in a month and how many responses you got from your e-mail campaign.
- When you get more advanced and are sending e-mail to a larger list, you can then start looking at key performance indicators such as open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, bounce rate, conversion rate, etc.
- Collect this data in order to measure and optimize the success of your e-mail campaigns.
If you have any questions at this point we can always consult you as part of your free 30 day maintenance package or your paid 1 year maintenance package.
