Looking for a new way to engage your target audience? It’s time to elevate your business’ email marketing campaigns. 92% of online adults use email, and nearly all of them check their inboxes every day, making email an increasingly popular digital marketing tactic for both B2B and B2C businesses.
Unfortunately, email marketing takes more than just writing up some email copy and an ability to hit send. Simply sending out a basic newsletter and ignoring best practices won’t drive your audience wild. A basic attempt will only yield basic results, so let’s break down your email options and how you can maximize your marketing efforts.
Different Types of Email Marketing
From super subject lines to eye-catching email templates, there are plenty of ways that you can make your products or services stand out in your emails. Different types of email marketing efforts will help you meet different goals, so it’s important to make sure you have all the tools ready to do some great work. Let’s break down some different examples of email marketing that you should consider for your business.
Email newsletters
While newsletters aren’t your only email marketing option, they are useful. Newsletters are a go-to tool if you want to showcase multiple pieces of content in a variety of ways, including:
- Content roundups
- Quarterly showcases
- Company updates
- Outside resources
Whether you send a newsletter out once a week or once a year, these emails are a great way to provide your audience with a variety of information on a regular schedule. Newsletters usually contain multiple links, calls-to-action, and other actions to help you drive users to your site, drive conversions, or achieve other goals.
Single article emails
Want to focus on a single piece of content instead of a collection? The very appropriately named single article emails are a great email marketing tool if you want your contacts to take one specific action.
Having too many options can be a bad thing. For example, you don’t want to give users five different actions to take if you really want them to download your latest ebook. A single article email helps you eliminate all those distractions and focus on a very specific goal, whether that’s to read a post, showcase a new product, or something else that will support your marketing efforts or desired action
Plain text emails
Sometimes you need to scale back to make the right impression. Plain text emails allow you to make your emails look a lot more personal while still automating your messages. These emails strip out your company’s branding, including your logo, style templates, and other snazzy design features.
The benefit of unbranding is simple – these plain messages look like they’re coming from an actual person rather than from a mass campaign. These communications are great for targeting people further down the digital marketing funnel, such as sending someone an interesting case study or following up to book a call with a salesperson. You can even add plain text emails to the end of automations to add a “personal” touch when someone is getting close to taking an action.
Automations
Speaking of automations, automated emails are a great tool for engaging your audience and delivering the right message at the right time. In general, automated emails are used to follow up with people after they fill out a form for any of the following actions:
- Sign up for a newsletter
- Become a member
- Download a guide
Once a user has given you their email, automations allow you to schedule out a series of emails to stay connected with them. Welcome emails and other follow-up automations allow you to set expectations for your audience and keep them engaged with planned messages over time. In short, you keep in touch with potential customers without having to manually send out a bunch of emails.
Other Important Email Marketing Best Practices
As you may have guessed by now, email is an incredibly useful tool for digital marketing. However, it’s not quite as easy as opening up Outlook and sending messages on a whim.
There are a lot of technical aspects that go into email marketing. These attributes play a major role in improving the deliverability of your emails, which help ensure that your messages actually land in your contact’s inboxes and don’t get marked as spam. There are a lot of best practices that play a role in your email marketing success, including the three following foundational factors.
Email records
If you’re doing email marketing, you’re going to need to have your email records in order. Any email service provider – Gmail, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. – uses email records to determine whether your messages are legitimate or some form of spam. In general, there are three records that are used to identify if your emails are kosher:
- SPF (Sender Policy Framework)
- DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail)
- DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance)
Given that you want your audience to see your emails, these records are very essential. If you have a marketing automation platform, the platform will normally provide the SPF and DKIM records for you, while you or a digital marketing vendor will need to set up DMARC.
Email list hygiene
A clean list is a good list. Over time, some email addresses may become inactive or uninterested in your services. Proper list hygiene allows you to remove any unengaged, fake, or otherwise bad emails so that you’re sending your messages to the people who really matter – potential customers.
Privacy/permission laws
If someone doesn’t want your emails, it’s best to listen to them. Depending on where your contacts live, you may be subject to a variety of location-specific marketing laws, including CAN-SPAM, GDPR, CASL, and other scary acronyms. Simply put, it’s essential that you allow users to decide what they do and don’t want to see and hear from you, so give them the ability to opt out of your emails.
Good Emails, Great Results
A little know-how and a lot of elbow grease go a long way. By expanding your email marketing efforts and following best practices, you can start to see the positive engagement and conversions your heart desires.
Of course, sometimes you might need a bit of help to make sure that your email campaigns are set for success. Not sure how to craft quality emails or tackle those technical details? Aztek's email marketing specialists can help! Contact us today to talk to our team about how we can support your business’ digital marketing efforts.
