Five Critical Components to Successful Email Marketing
Email marketing can be a powerful way for a business to promote itself and boost sales, the Direct Marketing Association estimates that email marketing results in roughly $40 of sales for every $1 spent. However, like any marketing endeavor, there are both right and wrong ways to undertake an email marketing campaign. Here we discuss five critical components that can help bolster your email marketing campaign.
1. Focus on both narrative and personality
Narrative is an important component of email marketing and provides the email recipient with the essential facts they need to make a decision: what is being sold, for how much, where can the consumer get the product, etc. Yet, passive recipients of email marketing are less likely to purchase the advertised product and will often need to be sold on the purchase. That is where personality comes in. Integrating personality into an email marketing campaign provides a personal connection and makes the email content more accessible. Personality can take the form of an insider’s perspective, personal anecdotes, or the telling of stories. Narrative alone is not likely to result in a sale from an email, but combining narrative with personality will greatly increase the likelihood of a successful email marketing campaign.
2. Use compelling media to support the main message of the email
Imagery, both photography and video, is a powerful marketing tool. Consider for a moment the power of YouTube. YouTube has more than 1 billion users, over 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and the number of hours people that are watching YouTube each month increases 50% year over year. Similarly, Facebook users upload over 350 million photos each day. The Flickr Creative Commons library is an excellent source for freely available photographs.
3. Connect with social media
If it wasn’t obvious from the preceding paragraph, let’s reiterate: social media is incredibly important to email marketing! According to multiple studies, social media can help develop the marketing brand, generate revenue, create networking opportunities with potential customers and bolster a company’s search-engine discoverability. Additionally, social media can help turn email recipients into active participants by giving them power to network with a community that shares a similar interest. You can share your email campaign instantly using AdSocial. . .
4. Give the people something useful
We all love free stuff and providing customers with free internet goodies, in the form of useful tools or information, can be a powerful tactic for email marketing. Including links to helpful articles or tools in a marketing email helps turn passive recipients into active consumers. Use the email partly as an educational tool to help engage the reader and demonstrate the utility of the product and service you are marketing.
5. Consider using an email marketing service
There are a number of email marketing services that can support an email marketing campaign and help make it successful. Services like Admail consolidate many of the critical email marketing components into a single service by providing the user with easy-to-use email templates, a user-friendly interface to incorporate images and videos, slick template designs, and tools for improving email management.