Email may seem old-fashioned compared to Facebook, Twitter, and all the new social media platforms that pop up. But old-fashioned or not, email’s ROI is more than 4 times higher than social media.
A good email campaign can do wonders for your bottom line. Let’s look at some email marketing campaign ideas you can use in your business.
Create Habits for Your Readers
One of the most important steps to improving engagement with your email subscribers is to be consistent with your email. Send them on a set schedule so your readers get used to seeing them on a particular day of the week. If you send email haphazardly and wait too long between messages, they may “forget” who you are and why they should even open your messages.
Your goal should be to create a habit of reading your email and taking particular actions. Don’t assume they’ll know what you want them to do, tell your reader what action to take. Don’t just drop a link in the middle of your message and hope they click it, tell them to click the link.
Think about the emails you read most often and look forward to seeing in your inbox. Reverse engineer what makes you enjoy them so much and use some of those email ideas in your own campaign.
Use Stories Effectively
People enjoy reading entertaining stories so use them in your messages. The best email campaigns don’t try to sell something in every message, they provide useful information or good entertainment.
Give your email campaign a story arc, like a good TV program. Reveal the story gradually, with liberal use of cliffhangers and big reveals. If you’ve ever watched a show like Breaking Bad or Lost, you know how much you want to find out what’s going to happen at the end of each episode.
Make your readers feel the same way when they read your email.
You can even do this within the same message. Start the message with a story but don’t reveal the end until later in your message. These “open loops” will keep your subscriber reading.
Create Short-Term Special Offers
You don’t want to make every email you send about selling something to your readers but that doesn’t mean you can’t do some selling. If you’re doing your job, your readers will know you’re running a business. They’ll understand when you actually try to do business with them in some messages.
Find reasons to run short-term special offers for your audience. It could be as simple as “Hey, it’s the weekend” or it could be based around something more specific, like a holiday or some kind of pop-culture event.
Create a series of emails to send over the course of a few days. You can start by teasing the upcoming special offer and transition into launching it, reminding your readers about it, and warning them that it’s about to come to an end.
If you’re using a good email marketing service, you’ll be able to set this up ahead of time so it’s completely automated. You don’t have to be sitting in front of your computer to send each email manually.
Some potential reasons to run these short-term offers include:
- Weekend deals
- Holidays (Christmas, Veterans’ Day, Independence Day, etc.)
- You’re overstocked on a particular product
- You’ve got new products arriving and want to clear out of the current stock
You can be as creative as you want, so have some fun with this idea.
Curate Good Content
Another great idea for an effective email campaign is to curate other people’s content. Find articles, videos, podcasts, or any other type of content that would be of interest to your readers and compile them into a single email. You can include short highlights from that content in your email along with a link to the original.
If you pick content that is useful and interesting, your readers will love it. You’ll be saving them time because they don’t have to go looking for the good stuff – you’re doing the hard work for them. It’s like a personalized social media feed, with none of the unimportant posts that most people would see on a site like Twitter or Facebook.
Segment Your Email List
One of the most effective ways to make your email campaigns more effective is to segment your email list. In other words, break it into smaller sub-lists, each focused on particular interests or subscribers who have (or have not) taken particular actions.
For example, you should always have a sub-list for people who have bought something from you. Those are your most valuable subscribers because you already know they have money to spend and are interested in what you have to offer. You can send them special deals, freebies, or anything else you can come up with to show your appreciation.
Another important segment you should track is people who have clicked on an order link or added something to their shopping cart but ended up abandoning the sale. That way you can send them emails to push them to complete the sale or an invitation to let you know why they didn’t follow through. That kind of information can be invaluable for improving your checkout process.
If you offer a recurring subscription of some sort, you can send “stick” emails shortly before people’s renewal date to tease what’s coming soon. If they’re on the fence about whether to cancel their subscription, this can help keep them signed up.
Your Inbox is Full of Email Marketing Campaign Ideas
If you’re ever stuck for ideas, look no further than your own inbox. Don’t just read the messages, think about what kind of techniques those marketers are using on you. When you start reading your email from this perspective, you’ll have a never-ending supply of marketing campaign ideas.
If you see the same techniques used over and over, especially by several companies, you can be certain it’s successful. Those are the ideal campaigns to test for yourself. Put your own spin on them but try the same strategy. If it works, keep doing it. If not, add it to your “been there, done that” list and move on to the next test.
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