Email marketing is one of the most successful ways you can advertise your business, and is a great tool to have in your marketing arsenal.

It is often thought of as one of the most cost effective and worthwhile tools to communicate with your customers.  Litmus shows that for every $1 spent, you’ll get a $36 return.

Whether you use email marketing to send offers, give customers information or try to generate leads. The end goal is the same: to drive customers to your website.

We can’t ignore the statistics – 99% of people check their emails every-time and it is their preferred way to receive updates from brands.

This is why, it is important to develop a strong email marketing strategy that can boost online sales and enhance your brand reputation.

Understand Your Audience

Whatever the goal is of your email, we must make sure we are sending it to people who are genuinely interested in your content. Knowing more about who you are sending emails too, means that you can send useful and relevant content to the right people.

Users who click through from these emails are likely to spend time on your sight, which is a signal to search engines that your website is offering valuable content and can increase your authority and help increase your ranking.

Add Personalisation

Personalised emails have better click-through and open rates than emails without. For example, which email is likely to get more attention, “Michael, do you want an extra 10% off your next order?” or “Dear Customer”.

Segmentation goes one step further than just adding a name to the subject line. Segmentation allows you to break up your audience into different groups based on certain criteria. Examples include

• Whether they have opened certain campaigns
• Which link they have clicked
• The location they are in
• Products or Services that they have shown an interest in

Using segmentation allows you send even more targeted and relevant content that is more likely to get clicks. Not only does this make customers happy, but marketers say they notice a 20% increase in sales after launching personalised email campaigns.

If you don’t use segmentation and go with a one shoe fits all approach, you may find that users aren’t always interested in your content.  And you run the risk of them becoming annoyed with your brand and unsubscribe.

The objective may be to get your audience to open the email, but even if they don’t, your brand is visible and in their mind, just by landing in their inbox.

Testing

It’s important to test the content you serve your audience to determine what gets the best results.

Example of content you can test

• Your subject line message
• Calls to action
• The day and time that you send out the email
• Main body content

The great thing about testing your email content is you can find out exactly what works, and what doesn’t. If there are certain terms or calls to action that generate a good ROI you can incorporate this into your other digital marketing avenues to help drive traffic to your site.

To get the best results, it’s important to monitor the metrics of your email marketing campaign regularly. There are lots of metrics such as click-through rates, engagements, bounce rates, which can be used to improve future campaigns.

Reviews

You can tell your audience how good you are, but that doesn’t mean they will believe you! Having reviews from previous customers can help add credibility to your brand.

People trust online reviews, having these reviews can help influence them when it comes to making a decision.

When you email asking for a review, send the email when it is fresh in the customers mind. Keep it simple, and include links to the review platforms to make it easy for them to be able to leave you a review.

Brand Awareness

Emails don’t have to be used just a selling opportunity, they can help consolidate your brand in your customers mind.

When you engage with your audience regularly, they will naturally become more aware of your brand and your products or services.  When you share useful information about your company or industry, you establish a reputation as a valuable resource, which helps to build trust with audience.  Your brand will be in the back of their mind, as well as in their inbox.

In this day and age, everything is digital, you audience have everything they need at the their finger tips, and if you aren’t using email marketing it is a missed opportunity.