How to Make Email Marketing Work for Your Online Store

No one factor can accurately predict the success of an email marketing campaign. However, utilizing a few tried and tested tactics can significantly boost your odds of engaging with your audience and converting them into paying customers.

Focus On User Experience

Designing a good user experience for your email marketing campaigns is very critical. After all, you’re essentially competing for attention with other marketing messages and commercial product announcements.

According to HubSpot, consumers spend an average of three and a half hours a day engaging with digital content, primarily via emails, social media, and mobile apps.

When people are spending more time than ever before consuming content online, you need to make sure that your emails are of good quality and that the design is aesthetically pleasing.

Make It Easy

If you want to get people to engage with your emails, you need to make it easy for them to do so. You can utilize several tactics to achieve this including;

  • Easy to understand language
  • Short, snappy subject lines
  • A transparent and honest approach
  • Personalized, interesting content
  • An offer that’ll grab their attention
  • An unsubscribe link
  • Highly responsive email server

Avoid Distractions

Even if your email marketing is of good quality, you won’t get the full effect of it if the user experience is bad. To avoid distraction, you need to cut out everything around the message except for what’s important to keep the focus on your campaign.

To make sure that visitors aren’t distracted, you can utilize several tactics including;

  • Cutting out all distracting text and images
  • Reducing your CTA (call-to-action) to the simplest form possible
  • Keeping the design simple and clean
  • Featuring a prominent call to action button
  • Avoiding flash graphics and design distractions

Measure The Results

How you measure the results of your email marketing campaign can vary but basically, you need to track the actions that lead to a sale. Aside from the email message itself, you can measure the performance of your website, social media channels, and other digital advertising vehicles.

Tracking the success of your email marketing efforts provides you with vital data that you can use to optimize the performance of future campaigns. You can also use the metrics to determine the effectiveness of your inbound marketing efforts as a whole.

Use The Data

Even if you’ve had a stellar user experience and followed all the right procedures to send a successful email campaign, you’ll still miss out on revenue if you don’t measure up the results.

You can start by looking at the open rates of your emails. According to MailChimp, customers who receive lots of engagement with their mailbox tend to have higher open rates. If you want to see the success of your campaign, measure the open rates of your emails and look for the trends.

You can also use these metrics to determine the optimal content of your future campaigns. Looking at your open rates, you can determine which pieces of content perform best and which ones could be improved upon.

Personalize, Customize, And Automate

There’s a lot more that you can do with email marketing than send out a bland message to a group of people. Why? Because you can individually personalize, customize, and automate each email that you send out.

You can use a tool like HubSpot to put together a welcome series of emails, for example, where you can personalize the welcome letter based on the recipient’s name, email address, or social media platforms. You can also add a custom photo or design to the letterhead, and send it off to your customers with a few clicks of a button.

Personalizing the content of your email opens up a new world of possibilities. Not only can you make each email more effective, but you can also segment your audience based on what they might want or need. Sending out a different email to each of your customers can help you grow your business while keeping them interested and engaged.

Use Video, Audio, And Social Media

You can use several tactics to increase the effectiveness of your email marketing including;

  • Video footages of your product
  • Voice-over
  • Images
  • Bold text
  • CTA (Call to Action)

Adding these extra elements to your email marketing can increase the chances of your audience engaging with your message and subsequently purchasing your product or service. You can utilize platforms like;

  • YouTube
  • Vimeo
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Instagram

to promote your online store and gain a following.

Use Landing Pages And Callbacks

You don’t necessarily need a landing page to use the Callback feature on Twitter. However, having a dedicated page where you can collect people’s contact details and send them a series of follow-up emails is a great way to keep in touch with customers, and follow up with offers that will hopefully convert them into customers.

You can utilize several platforms like HubSpot to build out the landing page for your callback offer, and you can use MailChimp to create follow-up emails that can be personal or automated depending on the preferences of your customer.

Having a landing page for your callback offers also means you can track the results of your email marketing campaign. According to HubSpot, having a landing page in place increases your conversion rates by 43% and your average order value by 115%.

Use Web Analytics And Optimization Software

One of the crucial elements to keeping a good user experience is measuring and optimizing the results of your campaign. You can do this with the help of web analytics and optimization software. These tools will help you track the effectiveness of your email, social media, and your website.

Web analytics tools, like Google Analytics, will give you a glimpse into the behavior of your site’s visitors. For example, you can use the tool to look at the time spent on each page, how many pageviews each piece of content gets, and much more.

With web analytics in place, you can view the results of your campaign in real time. As soon as you see the first numbers, you can start to optimize your content to increase the effectiveness of your campaign. You can use tools like A/B testing where you can try out different versions of an email, or a button, or even the wording of a sales pitch to see which one performs best.

Using these tools is not only about increasing your conversion rates and getting more people to engage with your content but it can also help you understand what’s working and what’s not. As you make changes to improve the appearance and performance of your email marketing, you can use the data to track the results of your efforts.

Use Inbound Marketing Tactics

Inbound marketing is all about attracting, engaging, and delighting people to grow a business. To achieve this, you can utilize several marketing tactics including email marketing, content marketing, and social media.

You can follow the guidelines above to make sure that you use a minimal amount of effort to get a solid return on investment from your email marketing campaign. Remember to test different versions of your email to find the one that performs best.