Email marketing is an important part of any successful digital marketing campaign. Although social media and mobile marketing have received a lot of attention, email marketing still remains one of the cornerstones of digital marketing. Email marketing may also help boost customer loyalty with your brand, drive business to on- and offline channels, integrate multi-marketing channels, and fuel the growth of social networks.

Here are some email marketing tips to help us get started:

Getting subscribers:

Building our customer list is probably one of the most important parts of email marketing

Tips for collecting email addresses:

We can collect emails during our checkout process (in-store or online).
We collect email addresses at events.
We promote online contests – like a free giveaway – through social media and have entrants sign up or submit with their email address.
We add an opt-in form to the homepage of our website or blog.
We add an email signup call-to-action as a custom tab on our social media page.
We partner with a complementary business and have them promote your email newsletter.

One thing to remember: While building our email subscriber list, it is important to make sure that customers/prospects opt in directly to receive communication from our company.

Creating our email content:

We need to always put our customers first by marketing the benefits they will receive from choosing our company’s products or services. We have about three seconds to capture the attention of our readers when they open an email, so it is important to keep our emails short and simple. Our content should deepen the relationship with our audience by providing them valuable information in a timely manner. And we always should use a company-branded email address to send our emails and to establish credibility.

Tips to write effective and engaging emails:

WE need to make sure our brand name is included in the FROM field.
We need to keep our subject lines at 35 characters or less and we need to avoid writing our email header in all caps).
We establish the purpose of our email early as it will set the tone for what our subscribers can expect from the communication (i.e., promoting a sale/product, testimonials, running a contest).
We need to include in all our emails a call-to-action that is clear and enticing.
We use short sentences in our emails and bulleted text.
We personalize our emails when possible.

We need to make sure to always include a link back to our website, social sharing links and/or ‘Forward to a Friend’ options.

Knowing when to send:

Unfortunately, there isn’t a scientific method to determine how often we should send, or what day or time will get us the highest engagement rate. The best way to determine these factors is to simply test.

We can follow these steps to get started:

1. We select a few different customer subsets in our subscriber list.
2. We establish some baseline metrics, such as times, subjects and content we think will work best.
3. We create and schedule our test emails to the identified subsets.
4. We measure and analyze the results to determine which subsets had the highest engagement rate. What times worked? What content produced results?
5. We take our best test results and replicate and send to the rest of our list that didn’t receive our test emails.

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