Email marketing campaigns are a vital component of any inbound marketing approach. Your team can leverage these campaigns to connect with potential customers and deepen relationships with current followers, fostering stronger brand awareness and new business opportunities. However, today’s consumers and business leaders are being bombarded with digital messages at every turn—from status updates to advertisements—making it harder than ever to develop emails that compel them to click in and hear you out. Put simply, to run a successful email campaign in 2018, you’ll need a comprehensive marketing strategy that capitalizes on the latest email optimization tools and practices.
At Snap Agency, we aim to bring simplicity to the world of digital marketing. Our team has been developing leading-edge email marketing campaigns for years, empowering our clients with the tools they need to attract new customers and strengthen brand loyalty. Today, we’ll be walking you through the importance of email marketing and what you can do to refine your own email campaigns.
The Benefits of Email Marketing
Email marketing brings a number of important advantages to the table. Your business can harness email campaigns to promote brand awareness and trust among its audiences. By providing relevant and valuable content via emails, your company will stay top-of-mind with its potential customers, encouraging trust and continued business. Email marketing is also highly targetable, allowing you to control exactly which types of people receive your messages (based on specific demographics) and tailor your content to that audience.
One of the greatest perks of email marketing is its cost efficiency. It costs very little to establish email campaigns compared to traditional marketing initiatives—with no print expenses or advertising rates in sight. You can even utilize flexible email templates to minimize staff resources and push new messages out more quickly. And yet for many businesses, email is one of their highest-converting sources for sales. Email marketing delivers massive return on investment too, with the average campaign bringing in $44 for every $1 spent, making it one of the most effective ways to spend your marketing dollars.
Why Email Campaigns Fail
So if email marketing is so effective for companies, then why isn’t your current campaign bearing fruit? Here’s a handful of common email marketing issues affecting modern businesses:
Lack of Staff Resources
Over 35% of companies report that their email marketing team is understaffed. If your enterprise falls under this group, it might struggle to provide the copywriting, strategy, design and coding skills needed to consistently produce high-quality content. That’s one of the reasons why many businesses turn to award-winning agencies like us to manage their email marketing campaigns.
Barring the solution we listed above, you might need to expand your current email marketing team to see optimal results. Enlisting the help of contractors is a cost-effective option for many companies, especially if you’re just looking to develop templates for your full-time staff. These expenses are small prices to pay for strong email marketing campaigns that bring continued business to your doorstep. You can also try altering your email production cycles or splitting responsibilities between multiple employees to speed up content generation.
Failing to Measure Results
It’s almost impossible to assess and improve your email campaigns if you aren’t keeping track of their results appropriately. Campaign analytics allow you to measure success via open rates, click-to-deliver rates and more. It’s important to note the importance of unsubscribe rates here. This metric is easy to measure and can act as an important warning sign that your current efforts aren’t working well. Another negative metric you should carefully consider is hard bounce rate. Keeping on top of this issue by deleting invalid users will ensure that you aren’t penalized by your email service provider through reduced message delivery rates.
Above all else, email campaign metrics are an excellent way to determine which types of content your audience is receptive to—and which types of content you should avoid. As you can imagine, these metrics also play an important part in refining your overall marketing strategy, leading to superior long-term results.
Poor Email Marketing Strategy
Successful email campaigns hinge on smart strategy. Your email efforts are doomed to fail if you aren’t targeting the right people and focusing on content that addresses their unique needs. In many cases, email teams get so caught up in sending consistent messages and promoting certain offerings that they lose sight of their long-term goals. Sure, you can push out additional emails to boost the short-term success of a campaign, but that could be putting you on a slippery slope toward compromising the integrity and quality of your brand.
A robust email marketing strategy sets clear goals and metrics for each campaign, allowing you to assess its performance and make improvements in areas that lag behind. Which target audience should you focus on this month? What types of content should you be producing to compel that audience to engage with your brand? How should you go about reactivating dormant users? These are critical questions your email marketing strategy should address. We recommend defining specific, measurable goals for your campaigns and building your email strategies around them. This will ensure that you don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees when planning out specific campaign tactics.
Perfect Your Email Marketing With Snap
Ready to learn more about the benefits of email marketing and how you can utilize it to position your business for success? Then be sure to contact Snap Agency today. Whether you need help with website and CRM software integration, monthly campaign reporting, A/B testing or template creation, our team is here to help. You can also reach out if you want more information or advice on enhancing your email campaigns. We look forward to hearing from you soon.