Living in the twenty first century, it can seem like we’re going back in time when we’re talking about email marketing. The truth is, when executed correctly, email marketing could very well be part of a healthy digital marketing strategy. The key: making sure your emails aren’t seen as spammy, annoying, or useless. Here are some tried and true tips to make email marketing another avenue for your digital marketing!
Using A Proper Email Channel
Before you think you can just go and start emailing everyone, you have to start at the beginning. First: have you cultivated a healthy email list? These are people who have already subscribed and agreed to receive updates from you. Want more email subscribers? Make sure you have a call to action on your site, preferably on your homepage, with a subscription box so people can type in their email address. When it comes to email, you have to have permission. Sending emails to people who have not opted in or subscribed to your content is not only spammy, but it could put you in jail.
When choosing an email client, it’s important to know how many subscribers you have on your list. Many email clients start out free, but the more people end up on your email list, the more you may have to pay down the road. Quality emails have to be sent out via email channels, rather than your personal email. Even if you’re bcc’ing people, this is not a good tactic, and will make you come across as spammy, guaranteed. Stick to email clients like Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor for getting your message across the right way. Once you’ve picked your ideal email channel or client for email marketing, it’s time to think about segmentation. Do you want every email that you’re sending out to go to the same master list? Probably not. Segmentation can be extremely helpful if you’re looking to target particular groups or sets that are inside of your master list.
Catchy Copy
When writing effective emails, sometimes it feels like you just want to put all of the words in one email. If you want to be smart about your email marketing, this is a tactic to avoid. Instead, focus on creating catchy copy that makes people want to read further. This could be the case with blogs you’ve already written, or just blurbs about what is going on with your business. The tone that you’re striking is especially key here. Don’t be cold or hard to understand. Break things down as much as you can, so that everything you’re writing about makes sense, and is clear and concise. When in doubt, assume that your readers don’t know what you’re talking about, and may need a little bit of extra guidance. Remember to be friendly and sound neutral; this is not the time to be pushy, because that could translate into readers avoiding your emails or just marking them as spam.
Link Back To Your Blogs
If you really want to make email marketing work for you, it’s a great idea to link back to blog posts that you’ve written in your emails. If it’s pertinent information, this is the perfect opportunity to drive a little bit of extra traffic to your site. After all, blogs don’t do much good if nobody new is reading them, right? Did you write a blog post that performed extremely well and generated a lot of engagement? If you want to keep generating engagement, adding it into an email campaign can be helpful! If you’re sending emails on a monthly basis, this is a nice spot to keep your followers up to date by linking to blogs that you’ve posted in the last month. Sponsoring an event that’s time sensitive that you wrote a blog about? Promote it in your emails! There’s no right or wrong way to use blog content, since you produced it, so make the most of it.
Tracking With UTM Tags
This is a trickier tip, but it can make a big difference when it comes to looking at your Google Analytics. Yes, you should be tracking email marketing campaigns as well as your other digital marketing forays. If you’re not, this is something you should be doing. With UTM tags, you’re able to track every link on your email campaign. Blog link? Track it. Podcast link? Track that too. Any and every link in your email campaign can be tracked, and can give you valuable insights into how your content is performing, and if it is garnering you conversions (form fill outs, or goal completion on your website). So how do UTM tags work?
It may look a little bit daunting, but the idea is that you fill in pertinent fields that will help you differentiate where clicks are coming from. So, you fill in the full website URL, the campaign source (email will work), and the name of your email campaign. After filling in the boxes, a custom trackable URL will be generated. This URL can be used throughout the email, so Google Analytics can help you see which of your emails are the most popular, get the most clicks, and opens. UTM tagging may seem pesky at first, but the data that you get out of it makes it well worth it!
Social Linking
With email marketing, linking back to your website is always important. But engagement with your social media profiles is equally important, so make sure your emails include direct links to your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn pages. You never know who could see your email and be inspired to check you out further on social media, so just set up an email template and have all of your social profiles linked up and ready to go. This will also make your emails seem more organized, and less about solicitation.
Have additional questions about how to kick start your email marketing campaigns? Here at Portland Website Co. we’re happy to help you strategize and come up with a digital marketing plan that showcases the best parts of your business! Fill out the form below or give us a call when you’re ready to be an email genius!
