Is your email marketing strategy working?

Featured Article by Calvin Paige, Independent Technology Author

Love them or hate them, emails are still one of the best marketing channels available. Whilst the way that marketers use email has changed significantly over the last decade, today’s access to technology such as smart phones, means that a person is pretty much constantly online. You can now read your emails whilst having your lunch, sitting on the train or wherever else you are in the world.

The potential to reach an audience is bigger and better than it has ever been before but as a business owner, you still need to stay as current as possible because if you are missing out on a marketing opportunity then your competitors could be taking advantage of this. This is why it is so important that you keep on top of your email marketing strategy to keep it on trend with best practice.

If you’re not sure what the current trends are for email marketing, then do a bit of research. Dedicating time to this will actually save you time in the long run. If you don’t do your research and start blindly sending out emails that aren’t successful in terms of ROI, then you are wasting time. Instead of sending out numerous email campaigns to work out what is working for you, let the marketing industry provide you with a head start.

Find some websites where marketing experts publish articles and sign up for newsletters. Websites like Forbes have regular updates about what is working or changing in the marketing industry. If you can keep yourself up to date with the industry, you don’t have to waste time creating campaigns that are destined to fail before you even press ‘send’.

Having said that, you do have to do some of the work yourself. Monitoring the success of your email campaigns is hugely important in developing a strategy that works for your specific business. Marketing experts can give you all the advice that they have in terms of generic marketing techniques but there will be a lot of work still to be done in terms of translating how that works for your business.

Analyze your campaigns and work out what is going well. Ask yourself if you need to change tact. Maybe you are using email segmentation but you’re not quite getting the content of your email correct. Does the title of the email compel people to open it? Does it have a strong Call to Action that leads to conversions? You should be able to answer these questions from analyzing your past campaigns and develop the future ones based on your findings.

Data is a massive part of being able to develop a good segmentation strategy. Do you have enough data to be able to hit your target audience with content that appeals specifically to them? You have to get very personal when you’re targeting the audience; age, gender, location, job – all of this data can be used to build personalized content for a more effective email campaign.