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Email marketing isn’t anything new, but it is still one of the most effective types of marketing that a business can do today. If your business isn’t focused on building your email marketing base, it is time to make a change.

Don’t get me wrong, social media strategy and advertising are still important to focus your efforts on as a marketer, but don’t let email slip by the wayside.

Building Up Your Email List

If you currently don’t have an email marketing list, what are you waiting for? It doesn’t matter what type of business you own, one of the most effective ways to market to your customers or clients is through email marketing.

On your website, you should set up a form to capture new emails. I recommend using MailChimp for your email marketing services because it is cost effective and also intuitive. MailChimp also integrates with popular services such as Facebook, WordPress, Shopify, and Eventbrite and is also free (up to 2,000 subscribers, 12,000 emails).

Complement Email Marketing With Your Social Strategy

Social media should always remain a major focus in your strategy to attract and retain new customers. However, if you want to expand your current reach, here’s where email marketing comes into place.

Unlike social media, where you have to worry about the different algorithms for each platform, email marketing lets you go straight to the source. Plus, if you are already using social media advertising, such as Facebook ads, you can build a targeted list on Facebook with your email marketing data. This allows you to target your active customers who are already engaged with your brand to make sure they see your new products or offers.

You’ll want your email marketing to be a central part of your overall digital marketing strategy which will complement your efforts on SEO, social media advertising, and content marketing.

Making The Most With Your Email Marketing Strategy

Fortunately, email marketing platforms come with built in email tracking tools which allow you to monitor the success of your campaigns such as open rates, click-throughs, unsubscribes, etc. It’s now easy to see the data on how many of your emails were opened, clicked on, and how many people on your list unsubscribed to better tweak your strategy for future campaigns.

Going along with the rich data that email provides, most of the email marketing software that is available today also has built-in responsiveness across all platforms such as desktop, tablet, and mobile. That is great news because mobile open rates are as high as 54%, and that stat is only going to grow.

Like your social media strategy, your email marketing will depend on what type of business that you run if it is B2B or B2C. For example, if you are a B2B company you would focus more of your email strategy on informative emails with links to white papers, webinars, and more analytic research.

If your company is focused on direct to consumer, depending on your audience your emails can be more personalized and tailored to each customer.

However, no matter what type of business you run you should always keep these four points in mind:

1. Consistency Is Key - Before you start your email marketing strategy, make sure you start with a schedule of when you’ll send out your emails and stick to it. For example, I send out my email newsletter every other Friday so that my clients now can expect to receive a new email from me that day. This creates an incentive for my readers to check their emails on Friday to read a new piece of content that I sent. No matter what your schedule looks like, don’t plan on sending more than one email per week. This is a sure way to end in your customer’s junk mail and most likely have them unsubscribe. The key is to be frequent with your emails, but not overbearing.

2. Quality Always Wins - Just like in your social strategy, content reigns supreme. No matter what schedule you set out, if your emails aren’t good, no one will open or read them. The idea here is to make sure your emails are engaging and not too lengthy in the copy. Create engaging emails with the use of visual content such as images, infographics, videos, etc. Keep in mind with each email that you send out, what value are you presenting your client or customer. If it isn’t an email you probably wouldn’t want to open or read, then neither would your customers.

3. Segment Your Subscribers - When you segment your email marketing campaigns, your emails become much more targeted to your audience. According to Hubspot, when you segment your emails, you get better open rates, revenue, leads, transactions, and more customers. Your segmentations can be based on interests, demographics, buying history, etc.

4. Test & Test Again - Testing your email marketing campaigns allows you to use your data to improve your overall campaign performance. What types of elements should you routinely test? According to Kissmestrics, your subject line, messaging, call-to-action, design, personalization, and more should be routinely tested.

MarketingExperiments found that they were able to increase their click-through rate by 125.9% just by testing their subject lines. If you’re using Mailchimp or most other email marketing software, they have a built-in A/B subject line testing option that will allow you to send emails with one or two different subject lines to a percentage of your list.

Email Marketing Isn’t Going Anywhere

Even with the growth of social media, email marketing is here to stay. This is why it is important to make it a part of your overall digital strategy, because of the ability to better target and reach your customers directly. Don’t stunt your marketing efforts by not utilizing one of the most effective marketing strategies available today.

If you don’t know where to start, send me an email and let’s start creating an effective email marketing strategy for your business today.

Max Pete aka One Hand Wonder Man is a freelance website designer and digital marketer. Max Pete also specializes in social media management, email marketing, content creation, and paid advertising. You can check out his work and get in touch with him via his portfolio www.maxpete.co.