Strategies to grow your email marketing success.

Email marketing is a powerful and effective way to connect with your audience. 

Bringing it home, consider your own experiences. How often do you get updates on the things you care about via email? 

From newsletters to the latest election news or COVID-19 vaccine development, promotions and Black Friday sales, to communications with co-workers, colleagues, family, and friends, email is pretty much the go-to for most people on a daily basis, if not multiple times throughout each day.  

Easy, effective, and inexpensive, email marketing lets businesses and organizations reach their targeted audience at the right time and at a far more cost-effective strategy than other forms of traditional direct marketing.

According to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), for every $1 spent, email marketing generates $40 in ROI.

Now, that’s a number I can get behind. 

But what about social media marketing; doesn’t it out-do email?

The short answer, in my opinion, is “no.” 

Don’t get me wrong. I love social media. And, while Social media has a number of advantages over email marketing, it also has plenty of disadvantages. 

For example, if you say the wrong thing at the wrong time, it can have a devastating effect on your business. 

Social media marketing can also get pretty pricey when you add in the costs of management tools like Later, Buffer, Hootsuite, and the like, and paid advertising which is really a must if you want your audience to see your posts given today’s algorithms. In reality, every year social media marketing is becoming more expensive and less effective. 

And finally, I think it’s important to keep in mind that you own your email contact list. Once given permission to do so, you can always reach out to those folks, until you’re asked not to by them unsubscribing or opting-out.  

If Facebook or Twitter goes away (I know, I know; not likely. Still; bear with me), so goes your social contacts. 

Here are 3 ways to increase your email marketing success. 

Be Authentic in your email messages.

Authenticity is a concept that can help you connect with your audience on a more fundamental level, but it’s not as easy as it may sound.

Marketing authentically presents a few challenges: 

• You should be prepared to tailor your marketing messages to your core audience without dismissing potential engagement from others outside that core. 
• Balance sincerity while also meeting lead generation or sales goals. 
• Be true to your company’s culture and voice, while keeping your ride mainstream enough to resonate with people from all walks of life.

Most of the brands we love aren’t all that different from the others out there. Being authentic doesn’t mean being different. To gain that loyalty, connection, and trust, we simply need to be true to ourselves.

Delivering authenticity in your email content will complement all of your content marketing efforts, make your organization shine, and show your core audience exactly who you are. 

Offer Value to your email marketing audience.

You know how you get fifteen emails a day from that clothing brand store and each and every one contains almost an exact replica of a discount sale as the last? Those go right into your trash file, don’t they?

If you’re going to email your audience on a regular basis, be sure to send them something of value. 

Yes, you certainly can (and should!)  share promotions! 

And, give them a little something extra. Share a few posts (if they are valuable, relevant, and useful) from your blog. Talk about what’s happening in your company. Teach them something about how to use your products or services. You get the picture: give them a reason to open your emails every time they hit their inbox. 

Address your email recipients personally.

A study by Experian found that personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates!

Personalizing your emails is a great step toward targeting your customer more effectively. 

Email personalization means targeting your email campaigns to specific subscribers by using the data and information you have about them.

Here are x ways to personalize your email marketing campaigns:

• Address your subscriber by name in the subject line
• Include content in the email that is based on a subscriber’s gender, location, or other things you know about them such as their birth date.
• Segment your emails and use that information to create custom content to send to those smaller, more intimate lists. For example, one property management company that I worked with here in Costa Rica segmented their audience by Spanish and English speakers and we sent our email campaigns and promotions accordingly. 

Effective, powerful, personal, and affordable, your organization can’t afford not to be doing email marketing. For more tips on content marketing and SEO, join our mailing list and get those right in your inbox!