Email marketing has gotten a bad rep over the last several years. What started as an innocent attempt at advertising transformed into endless spam messages and driving customers in the opposite direction. Business owners and marketers eventually took the wrong approach to email marketing, making customers groan in frustration whenever a new sales pitch enters their inbox.
Customers are overloaded with information today, and email can be yet another annoyance to add to the list. Old school email marketing tactics won’t get you very far at all with your customers, and you’ll need to take a new approach in 2018 to make the strategy work.
Why is Email Marketing so Hard to Master?
Email marketing is a tough gig because there is a fine line between being helpful and being spammy. The truth of the matter is that you can’t please everyone with your email marketing techniques, and there is always the chance that someone will hit that unsubscribe button no matter how genuine of an attempt that you make.
Email marketing is also hard to master because many business owners don’t know how to use the strategy effectively. They haphazardly fire off e-mails to their customers as an attempt to make a sale—there’s no consistent schedule and no incentive for your customers to open your message at all.
The good news is that email marketing isn’t dead. Email marketing has evolved over the years, and these are a few techniques that actually work in 2018.
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Send Highly-Targeted Messages
When you’re focusing on email marketing in 2018, things need to get personal. It’s simply not enough to blast off an email and expect it to cater to everyone on your subscription list. While you may not be able to make a connection to everyone on your e-mail list, you can get a lot closer when you target your e-mail messages.
But what exactly does this mean? First, it means that you must be highly in-tune with your buyer personas and the sales funnel process. Understand that not every e-mail should have the initial goal of making a sale—you’ll need to build trust, and you can do so by speaking to your audience as if they are people and not just a sales number.
Your targeted messages should address customers’ problems and answer their questions. How can you enhance their lives and make their jobs easier? These are a few ways that you can target your messages to your email subscription list, as you’ll be identifying pain points and offering solutions on how you can solve them.
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Offer a Short E-mail Education Course
Remember how we said that customers need you to answer questions and solve problems? Another way to establish a connection with your customers is through education. E-mail courses are becoming an increasingly popular way to not only build your email subscription list but also a great way to build trust with helpful information.
Email courses can be offered for all kinds of different things across numerous industries. For example, a digital marketing company can offer an email education course on how to build a following on social media. The idea is to offer your customers bite-size pieces and allow them to absorb the information a little bit at a time. It gives your customers something to look forward to every week when you send out the next chapter, and it also keeps your company’s name inside of their heads.
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Adjust Your Email Publishing Schedule to Late Evening
According to Buffer, the best time to send out an email to your customers is between 8:00 pm and midnight. Why? Generally, a lot of companies opt to e-mail their customers during normal business hours. The problem with this is that your customers are being bombarded with emails during the portion of the workday, and they don’t have time to keep up as their inbox is overflowing.
You can take advantage of the relatively slow time for email and schedule messages to be sent later in the evening. While your customers are at home watching TV or playing games on Facebook, they might be more relaxed and open to read what your email has to say.
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Optimize Your Email Messages For Mobile
The appearance of your email on mobile can literally make or break a sale. According to Exact Target, 63% of people will delete an email if it doesn’t look appealing on their mobile device. Make sure that your email messages are catered to mobile with correctly sized images, fonts, and more.
How Are You Working to Build Your Business?
No matter what method you use to build your business in 2018, it pays to know how your business is performing online. Bigfoot Media can help customers easily find your website in the search engines and build trust with your brand through social media marketing and more.
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