As long as there have been emails, people used email marketing to help drive traffic to their sites and increase sales and conversions. It’s changed greatly through the years as the needs of consumers adapted to the rapidly advancing technology.
It still has one of the best returns on investment of any digital marketing medium and has the analytics to back up these claims. Businesses use email marketing to bring people who already visited their website back to it and purchase their product or service.
If you must ask yourself, “What is an eblast,” then you need to know some effective techniques to create better emails.
What is an Eblast?
Do you have a major sale coming up or have some information that your customers need to here? If so, then you’ll want to send an eblast. It’s a term used in email marketing for sending out many emails to your subscriber list.
There are many reasons to send emails to customers, but its mostly to inform or to educate your subscriber list about something happening, a change or to provide advice. During busy holiday seasons, businesses can send out multiple eblasts in a single day.
1. Build Your Subscriber List
The lifeblood of email marketing is the subscriber list. These are people that voluntarily provide you with their email address so that can receive emails from your business. You must build your email list from the ground up.
There are places where you can buy email addresses, but they aren’t valuable for email marketing. What makes email marketing successful is the people want to get information from you. If you’re sending emails to people not interested, you’re not going to get a good response and likely sent to spam.
Provide an email sign-up list on your website for people to receive sales emails and news. You can have gated content such as white papers and eBooks that people can download, but first, they need to provide an email address.
2. Encourage Engagement in Emails
What great about using emails is you can receive information from your customers. It’s a direct line unlike traditional advertising such as newspaper ads and radio. If they email you back with questions, then it shows they read your email and was interested in the subject matter.
You use personal language that makes them feel talked to directly. You can create amazing subject lines that grab people’s attention.
3. Avoid the Spam Folder at All Costs
The last place you want your email to end up in the spam folder along with Viagra deals and Nigerian princes looking to unload cash. If the email system flags your email as spam, the recipient will never see it. If they do, it will be on the off chance they check their spam folder and the information will be old news.
Only send emails to people that opted in, don’t use all caps or bad HTML formatting. These are all signs of spam and you’ll end up in email purgatory.
4. Create Dynamic Emails
Emails send to your customers aren’t the same emails sent to your grandma on Christmas. They’re sales emails and newsletters. They need to look professional and in a format that encourages people to read it.
If you entice them with a good email subject lines but lose them because of a poorly created email, then they’ll probably not open another one.
5. Provide Links and Calls to Action
Your email needs to have a small amount of information. It can’t be too lengthy or else they’ll lose interest. You can get around this by providing links and calls to action that get them to your website.
You can include the title of a blog and encourage them to read it on your website. Once they’re on your website, then they are one step closer to finding that perfect product or service that they need. You can have links to products too, so they can buy them directly from the emails.
6. People Read on Cell Phones
One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is creating an email that looks great on desktop, but not on mobile. They’re making the emails on a desktop, but most people read the emails on their phones.
You need to make sure the email looks great on mobile as well as desktop. Don’t send it out until you’ve checked it out on mobile and made sure all the links work, etc.
7. Don’t Fret Over Unsubscribes
It’s going to happen. Every time you send an email, you risk someone unsubscribing from it. It’s a natural phenomenon and you shouldn’t worry about it unless several happen at once.
If you get many unsubscribes from a single email, then something probably didn’t look right. People unsubscribe for many reasons from no longer needing your product to they just subscribed for the free eBook.
8. Test Emails Before They Go Out
People read emails from many different devices, web browsers, and platforms. How your email looks on a Gmail account on mobile Chrome could look completely different on a Yahoo account from desktop Firefox.
Many email marketing programs provide testing services so you can see how it looks on a variety of platforms and browsers. Check and make sure everything looks good before sending it out to the masses.
9. Check Data Analytics and Revise
Sending emails is only one part of email marketing. Once the emails are out and people have the chance to see them, the analytics take over. You want to maximize the number of people that open your emails and end up converting on your site.
You can track how many people open the emails, how many clicked on links, etc. from various email marketing programs. The more in-depth the tracking the better.’
Once you have the information, find out how you can improve your emails to better improve the data.
10. Don’t Annoy Your Customers
We talked earlier about how a business can send out several emails a day during holiday months when sales numbers are high. This should be a rarity. People want to get your information, but they don’t want to be inundated with sales information.
You should send as many as three emails a week during regular business periods. It should be a weekly newsletter and a couple of sales emails. You can even reduce it to once a week if you find people are unsubscribing.
Email Marketing Is a Balancing Act
We’ve gone from “What is an eblast?” to email analytics, so you should be well versed in email marketing basics. It’s a valuable digital marketing tool for your business.
If you want to learn more about email marketing and digital marketing, then please explore our site.