If you’ve been having difficulty getting good returns on your email marketing campaigns, there could be a number of reasons why your efforts are falling short. We can help!
At Watershed9, we’ve taken the time to develop email marketing strategies that we believe will produce measurable results for our clients, taking into consideration each client’s specific needs and blending those with our overall philosophy on email marketing. We’ve found that through this combination of knowledge and customization, our clients receive maximum exposure using a process that is easy to maintain as your business grows.
Linking to your website
The first and most important part of our philosophy on email marketing is that it should always refer interested parties back to your website.
For example, once we post a blog on a client’s site, we’ll put out an email to customers that points to that particular blog, provide a summary, and then offer a link that they can click to read the remainder of the article. That link, of course, brings the interested party to the client’s website where, hopefully, they’ll not only read the blog in question but also browse the rest of the website as well.
Why do we do it this way? There are a few reasons. First, not everyone reads each email they receive on any given day. Many of us are inundated with dozens of messages every time we open our laptop or log onto our phone. However, research shows that people do save emails they’d like to read at a later time.
Here’s a scenario you may relate to. An email arrives and you’re too busy to read it. But, you recognize the company or brand and you simply move on with your day. Several months later, you see another email from the same company, while you’re drinking your coffee, but this time you have bandwidth and you pause – pullover – and click on that email. Not only do you find the article that just arrived in your email inbox, you also discover all those emails you never had time for until today.
And here’s where the magic happens. If we can connect a client or prospect back to “evergreen” blog content on a website (evergreen refers to content that remains pertinent regardless of time passed), we can help them discover a lot about that company once they arrive. Much more then they would have discovered by only reading a single email.
Finally, an email marketing campaign that refers back to your website means that when an email is shared (passed on from the original recipient to people in their social network) your entire website is shared as well because to read the blog or other material referred to in an email, the new reader can now click through to your website. This opens up a world of possibilities, especially if the new interested party stays on your site for a while to see what else your business offers.
Keeping it brief
We’ve also found that another must-do for email marketing campaigns is keeping emails brief and to the point. After all, how many times have you looked at an email in your inbox, observed it’s long length, and then placed it in the trash bin without even reading it? We’re betting that happens a lot and that’s what we’re trying to avoid.
That’s why we’ve learned to keep our marketing emails concise. We use bullet points to stress ideas, products, or tips we believe are important to readers, and we never post full blogs in our emails. Making copy “skimmable” is the name of the game. This way, readers don’t feel bogged down and are more likely to keep reading.
And because statistics show that more than half of all emails are opened on a mobile device, we also keep our subject lines concise so they can be easily read on a mobile device while also keeping them
compelling. Remember, about 30 percent of all readers open – or don’t open – an email based solely on the subject title. So, we make sure it’s appealing and readable and prompts a call to action as well.
Choosing the right email marketing tools
At Watershed9, we’ve chosen Mailchimp as the preferred platform for client email marketing. Mailchimp is a great tool for almost any business and includes plenty of options for formatting, design and analyzing the effectiveness of your published email campaigns.
Mailchimp works for new businesses as well as those who’ve been in business for quite some time. It’s a good tool to use in testing and can even help businesses build an audience before they launch a new product or service.
At Watershed9, we want to help you exceed your email marketing goals. That means clean, crisp emails that stay out of spam folders, that encourage readers to reply or take action, and that can help build your subscriber list. For more information on our effective email marketing strategies, email us or call 604-337-1449.