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The fundamentals of email marketing

As a trusted partner in sophisticated email marketing, we focus on helping ambitious brands achieve breakthrough results. For this reason, we wanted to share with you some helpful tips on how to make sure that your email marketing strategy is all in place for you to achieve email sophistication.

We recently published our five key trends for 2017. One of the five trends was to focus on the fundamentals of email marketing. Let’s take a look at why it is important to ensure your these basics are running like clockwork.

Ensuring your email marketing basics are running like clockwork

There are many fundamentals of email marketing. However, the three main areas we believe that marketers should focus their efforts on now are:

• The need to always keep your end goal in mind
• The importance of building quality lists/data
• The necessity of automating your campaigns

These may seem like the very basics of email marketing, but it is surprising how many brands are out there who do not even have these basics in place.

Keep your end goal in mind

All too often, we’ve all received email campaigns with no clear call to action. When a brand is encouraging you to; purchase, update your preferences, recommend a friend and follow them on Instagram all in one email - it’s easy to identify that they probably don’t have a clear goal for the email. What’s important is that goals are S.M.A.R.T. and look to support the Vision, Objective and Strategy that the business has set out to achieve. Some smart goals may include:

• Campaign: Welcome Email – S.M.A.R.T. goal: 50% of all subscribers to update preferences within the first day of receiving an email
• Data Capture: Event Invite – S.M.A.R.T. goal: 20% to RSVP to event invite by deadline
• Campaign: Weekly Marketing Email – S.M.A.R.T. goal: £50,000 online sales within March

Build a quality list and data structure

Holding relevant and up to date data about your customers can transform an email marketing programme. To ensure this is possible it is important to have the following:

• A clear sign-up process
• A transparent unsubscribe process

Brands should not be afraid of the subscription confirmation emails, or emails that ask the audience if they would like to unsubscribe. When you combine these types of emails with your data on recipient engagement, these campaigns can be used to cleanse data. Although ultimately you will end up with the smaller list, it’s all about quality not quantity. If you have a smaller, but more engaged list then your campaign stats will be better. Remember, it’s all about achieving the best results for your business.

Automate your campaigns

Automated campaigns such as; welcome campaigns, birthday campaigns, and transactional messages… all of these are the basis of automated campaigns. After an initial investment of resource and you have set-up these campaigns, they can be left to run themselves. Yet so many email marketers do not see the value of these campaigns, and either fail to set them up or do not update them, so they become dated. Instead, they tend to focus on other campaigns such as the weekly newsletter, which does not work as hard, have as long a lifecycle or as high an engagement rate. You must always consider where is best to spend your time (and make you money) and shift the focus if needed.

The long and short of it

These three fundamentals may seem obvious, but the reality is that there are so many brands out there that do not focus on the basics and their email marketing campaigns suffer as a result. The other trends that were predicted for 2017 included; adding creativity to your emails, how the GDPR update will affect email marketing and using personalisation in your emails. To catch up on any of these visit our blogs to get up to speed. As always, if you have any questions please get in touch, we’re always happy to help.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Communicator .