The 5 Practices Highly Successful Email Marketers Follow

With email still considered one of the most popular, effective marketing tools despite the sudden boom of social media in recent years, developing an email marketing campaign is a sure-fire method of generating customer interest and increasing sales for your business.

But, because emails are easily accessible and, in principle, quick to write and send, many marketers fall into the trap of thinking email marketing is simple. And this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Creating and launching a successful email campaign requires much more than simply having an email address and quickly writing some copy. In-depth tools, tricks and processes are needed to make an email campaign as effective as possible.Without them, you run the risk of wasting both time and money on a campaign that simply won’t achieve anything.

So, if you’re looking to improve the success of your existing emails or simply starting your first ever email campaign, here’s two vital practices all of today’s most successful email marketers make—without question.

Getting People to Sign Up

Whilst an incredibly obvious aspect of email marketing, getting people to sign-up to emails is a process many marketers underestimate.

Generating new email addresses for your list is perhaps the most important practice of all that you need to get right. After all, if your list isn’t fully focused and filled with addresses of your exact target audience, blindly sending a bunch of emails to an unorganised list will generate absolutely nothing.

Luckily, there’s many imaginative methods for getting people to sign up to emails—many today’s top email marketers consistently use to generate the best possible list.

Put yourself in the shoes of your target customer. If they’re suddenly presented with a page asking for their email address, why should they give it away? What’s in it for them?

By providing an obvious benefit they’re guaranteed to receive should they give their email address, you’re automatically giving an incentive for them to reveal this information.

A freebie, promotional offer or a personalised discount code are all great ways of achieving this quickly and easily.

In today’s day and age, everyone wants something for nothing. And, as simply providing an email address is seen as doing virtually nothing in your customer’s eyes (even though for you it’s a crucial piece of information to receive!), they’ll feel as though they’ve hit the jackpot once they take advantage of what you’ve offered in exchange for their address.

An extension of our ‘offer something in return’ point, creating urgency for this is almost guaranteed to increase the amount of email sign-ups you receive.  See what AdidasOutdoor did here:

Particularly appealing to those who frequently visit your website, offering to send automatic updates and news about your products/services in exchange for an email address is a hugely successful method of obtaining a targeted list.

Typically, people will be visiting your site to not only make purchases, but check if there’s been any updates or new additions since the last time they visited.

This takes time and effort. So, if you offer to provide this information automatically via email without the user having to waste time finding it themselves, this is likely to be a huge incentive for people to happily provide you with their addresses.

Follow Audience Behaviour & Competitors

The key to any form of marketing, not just email, is to identify what your target audience desire and provide it to them—it’s really quite simple.

But when it comes to email campaigns, it’s essential to track your metrics to get a better understanding of your audience’s behaviour. How they’re responding to your emails is crucial to identify something that’s simply not working.

Whilst perhaps not the nicest of statistics to look at, your unsubscribe rate is an essential metric to keep track of.

In addition to giving you the bare facts of how many list members have opted-out of receiving emails from you, regularly analysing this rate can also shed light on precisely what’s working and what isn’t.

Whilst some people may unsubscribe for personal, unrelated reasons (and this should be taken into account), it’s important to recognise whether your own email practices could be contributing.

If your unsubscribe rate has become unusually high in recent weeks, take a look at the emails you’ve been sending during that time. Are they particularly wordy? Are you offering distinct benefits to your audience? Have you unintentionally sent something that could offend or insult people?

By analysing the content of your emails in line with your unsubscribe rate and other metrics such as open rate, spam rate and conversion rate, you’re able to make changes accordingly – personalisation being a worthwhile change if you’re not using it already!

It’s almost guaranteed your email list isn’t just receiving emails from you—they’re likely receiving a huge bunch of emails from your competitors too.

So, in addition to analysing your audience’s behaviour, it’s crucial to figure out what your competitors are doing too. Whatever their emails include, make sure your email content is better. It’s as simple as that.

Offer greater benefits to your audience, and ensure your emails are eye-catching and more visually pleasing. Standing out from the crowd is vital to make your campaigns as successful as possible, and tailoring your strategy to beat the competition is the only way you’ll achieve this.