Ask any email marketing agency in Sonoma County “Is email marketing dead?” and you’ll hear a similar response. No! In fact, the volume of emails sent is increasing exponentially year over year. Direct messaging, phone calls, and social media are all great methods for establishing open lines of communication with your clients and building brand connections.
However, email marketing is undeniably one of the best communication assets your business can leverage. Utilize these best practices to create powerful, meaningful connections with your current and future customers.
Send the Right Content
Sending the right content means delivering valuable, relevant, and timely information to your audience. Some great examples of this include: blogs, industry news or developments, requests for surveys, and so much more.
Creating content buckets will help you define the various types of information you want to provide to your readers. This sets expectations from the very beginning about what the client can expect to consistently receive from your business. Analyzing your email campaign performance is a great way to determine what is and is not working to help optimize your campaigns.
Build a Clean List
Quality over quantity is key. Buying lists from third parties will only increase your bounce rates, lower recipient open rates, and diminish the quality of your survey feedback. Not to mention you risk having your domain blacklisted if you get reported for spam too much.
The good news? Building an organic list simply requires a bit of consistency and patience. The main task is to just ask! Leverage your social media presence by posting a preview of your blog and prompt followers to subscribe if they want to learn more. When you send any welcome letters or account updates, be sure to have call to action (CTA) buttons easily visible so clients can subscribe to your newsletters and blog updates.
Optimize
Optimizing your emails for effective user experience is one of the most important factors for successfully establishing and maintaining communication with your clients and partners. There are a few things to consider when optimizing your emails. Consistency in your branding format and how frequently emails are sent out can build brand recognition.
Keeping your subject line short and to the point, typically six words or less, helps prevent your email being from being flagged as spam. Lastly, and more importantly, ensure the email is optimally formatted for desktop and mobile presentation. You should always test this by sending the email to yourself first and viewing it on both desktop and mobile.
Track and Measure
You cannot track what you do not measure. One of the biggest challenges business owners face with email marketing is finding the right formula that works for your specific audience. You can use A/B testing to help determine what style of content resonates best with your customers.
A/B testing can be used to test long and short formats, subject lines, from name, and much more. Once you have established an appropriate tracking method and your key metrics, you can see where you need to make adjustments in your strategy or delivery.
Utilizing these best practices will help you make the most of your communication efforts with clients while continuing to improve the quality of your digital marketing campaigns. If you don’t have the time to create a methodical, strategic email marketing strategy, you can always partner with an email marketing agency in Sonoma County.
Have questions? The experts at WSI Smart Marketing are experienced with email marketing and a wide variety of other digital marketing services to help you create an effective, well-rounded strategy for your business. Call us at (707) 843-3714 to discuss your business’s needs.
