As the economy takes its toll on business owners, it is a profitable goal to make the most of your marketing efforts. When done well, email marketing is a highly effective tool to increase sales and to establish customer loyalty.
Here are five suggestions on how to improve the results you get in your email marketing campaigns:
1. Clean Up Your Email List
Maintaining a clean list is a challenge for businesses of all sizes, especially small business owners who often don’t have dedicated staff to handle such tasks. In order to improve your email marketing performance, reputation and deliverability rates, start fresh by scrubbing your list before sending your next campaign. Start by checking that your unsubscribe requests are up-to-date.
2. Analyze What Worked and What Didn’t
Take a close look at your email marketing successes and failures from last year so that you can repeat the winning campaigns and scrap the under-performers. Refresh this year’s campaigns by combining elements of successful email marketing tactics from the past to see better results.
3. Plan a 2013 Email Marketing Campaign
Many of us leave email marketing campaigns to the last minute, but a great way to increase effectiveness is to look at the calendar through the eyes of your customers and plan them in advance.
First, determine what business and seasonal cycles are most relevant to your target market, and then create an email campaign calendar plotted to those cycles. Planning your top campaigns for the year in advance will ensure that your campaigns are relevant and timely.
4. Utilize Customer Data
Most businesses use CRM systems that are filled with rich customer data which you can integrate with your email marketing service to effectively improve campaign results. In addition, you can build more targeted and segmented lists based on customer data.
You can still segment your email lists based on purchasing data, reputation, and deliverability rates. Also, polls can be conducted quickly through your email marketing service to gather additional information from your customers that should help you improve the targeting, relevance and timeliness of your campaigns.
5. Try Something New
Challenge yourself in 2012 by trying something different in your email marketing campaigns. For instance, embed a video or podcast that will make your campaign unique and engaging as well as differentiate your business from the competition. Using A/B testing to gauge response to your campaigns is another great way to learn about your audience which improves results and drive sales.
Automated trigger campaigns can also improve the timeliness and relevance of your email marketing campaigns. It may sound a bit complicated and time intensive, but a good email marketing service should have the tools and technologies to make it simple for you.