Up your email marketing game with these 4 approaches

Are the customers and leads on your company mailing list actually reading your emails?

Email marketing is an essential part of any inbound marketing strategy, but it can take a little fine-tuning to make it work.

This post is designed to give you some ideas for what to do if your email marketing campaigns are falling a little flat. Here are four steps you can take if your email marketing efforts don't seem to be working:

1. Broaden your audience

The first and most important step in improving your email marketing game is making sure you are reaching as wide an audience as possible. Make sure the process for signing up for your newsletter is quick, easy, and prominently displayed on your site.

Also, devote some time to adding people potentially interested in your product or services to your mailing list. As long as you provide an easy opt-out button for those who do not want to receive regular communications, you won't lose any good will and you are likely to snag a bunch more leads this way.

By understanding your audience, as well as email performance standards in your industry,
you'll be able to score more points with your email marketing campaign. 

2. Know what you're aiming for

When it comes to click-through rates and conversions, email marketing statistics vary broadly by industry, company size, and other factors. According to numbers from the email marketing platform MailChimp, campaigns from religious organizations or photo and video companies, for example, can expect much higher open rates on average (26.24 and 26.63 percent, respectively) than daily deals and e-coupon companies (13.73 percent). To understand where your numbers should be, you have to take a look at how the competition is doing.

3. Write strong subject lines

MailChimp's first recommendation when it comes to improving open rates is working your subject line. Take a look at their article comparing the open rates of different types of subject lines. While there does not seem to be a general rule, spammy and gimmicky headers like "Valentine's Day Salon and Spa Specials!" tend not to succeed.

The subject line is often the key to whether or not your readers will open your email. 

One takeaway from the MailChimp numbers is that almost all of the successful subject lines included the company name. Additionally, they tend to paint the email as more informational (many of them include the word "newsletter"). But the bottom line, or "secret formula," according to Mail Chimp is use the subject line to "describe the subject of your email." Tell, don't sell, the article concludes.

4. Test, test, test

Beyond subject lines, there are many variables that determine whether your email campaigns are successful, including send time, sender name, and content. Sometimes it can be hard to tell exactly what is keeping your campaigns from working, so the best thing to do is gather your own data on the subject.

Many email marketing platforms provide easy ways to send an A and a B campaign, with a simple difference between the two (a different subject line, for example). Mail Chimp also provides a useful guide to get you started on A/B testing.

It's important step to invest in email marketing. Sometimes it just takes a little extra work to help your campaigns live up to their full potential. If you want to get a few more quick tips on writing successful emails, check out our blog post, "7 innovative marketing email secrets exposed."

Email marketing plays a central role in any inbound marketing strategy. To learn more about developing a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, get your free copy of our eGuide, the B2B Guide to Inbound Marketing. 

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