Use 45 different methods to optimize email marketing
By Therese Tullgren | therese.tullgren@ungapped.com
Email marketing continues to dominate as the most successful channel in digital marketing. It is, therefore, essential to continuously improve, develop, and optimize the company’s email marketing through a strategy. Remember, success requires a deep understanding of fundamental principles:
- Your content must be engaging.
- Your tools must be reliable.
- The visual design must be pleasing to the eye.
At the same time, it is equally vital to continuously nurture an email marketing database that expands in scope and refines in quality. In this article, we will explore the core issues of email marketing.
Email Marketing with Subscriber Lists
Is it only through a subscription form on your website that you get your newsletter subscribers? Then you are likely to reach only a fraction of the potential subscribers.
Here are some points to increase subscribers to your newsletter:
- Social Media: Create a clear “Subscribe to our newsletter” button on your various social media platforms.
- Physical Presence: Advertise your newsletter in-store and on printed marketing materials.
- Multimedia Accessibility: Integrate call-to-action buttons on your YouTube videos and include a link in the description to engage your video audience.
- Professional Signature: Include a direct link to the subscription in your email signature.
- Event attendance: Collect contact information from trade shows and events to reach a target group that is actively engaged in the topic.
- E-commerce integration: Add the “Subscribe to our newsletter” option to your online store’s order process for increased visibility.
- Content Linking: Offer email subscription options right after your blog posts to engage interested readers.
- Social Media Marketing: Communicate the value of your newsletter in your social media content to attract interest.
- Google Search Ads: Target Google ads to a page that promotes subscriptions to reach a wider audience.
- Strategic Partnerships: Grow your lists through corporate collaborations in shared events or promotions.
- LinkedIn: Use LinkedIn’s newsletter feature to attract professional contacts.
- Wi-Fi Registration: Offer free Wi-Fi in exchange for registration and subscription to entice users to join your network.
Reflect on the different interactions with your customers and how the opportunity to subscribe to your newsletter can be presented in these situations. For example, for an individual who recently attended an event, you could use the phrase “Get invitations to our upcoming events by subscribing to our newsletter.” On the other hand, for someone who left an abandoned shopping cart, you can entice with the offer “Subscribe to our newsletter and receive a 15% discount coupon as a thank you for your interest.”
Many Paths to Subscribers
Convey the value of your newsletter
The newsletter sometimes needs to be sold to the subscriber: it must be both attractive and credible.
Provide valuable incentives
Offer a free downloadable guide, a white paper, a discount coupon, or other tangible benefits as an incentive to subscribe to your newsletter.
Highlight the best of past newsletters and link to the most prominent content from your past newsletters to demonstrate the value subscribers can expect.
Clear communication about frequency and use
Clearly communicate how often your newsletter will be published and how the subscriber’s information will be used.
Safe termination of the subscription
Inform the subscriber that they can easily unsubscribe at any time and make sure you keep your word when it comes to unsubscribing.
Concrete sales
Engage your sales team in actively offering newsletter subscriptions in different contexts: during discussions, during cold calls, during webinars, and during business meetings. This simple approach allows you to stay in touch even when a formal meeting is not necessary.
Ungapped delivers added value through its newsletter subscription, including an exclusive discount code and a unique experience reserved only for subscribers.
Useful Insights for Subscriber Lists
Activate basic instincts: Humans are deeply social creatures – the success of social media is based on this insight, as is the power of recommendations in marketing. Appeal to subscribers’ natural desire to be part of a community.
Present “insider benefits” exclusively to subscribers: Offer special offers, advance information and exclusive event invitations.
Highlight recommendations: Encourage recommendations, which go beyond simple “tell a friend” and “share on social media” buttons. Immediately when a new subscriber joins, impress them with an automated welcome campaign.
Once trust is established, move on to the next step: ask them to recommend the newsletter to a friend and reward them with a discount coupon or other benefit.
Gathering feedback and approval for publication: Collect opinions and ask permission to share positive comments on your subscription page or form.
To increase credibility, use statistics: “Join our newsletter with over 20,000 subscribers and join the conversation.”
Adaptation and Deepening for Increased Efficiency
…and what was the shape really about?
The majority of subscribers join the list through a website. But surprisingly often the form is hard to find, overly complex or hidden behind multiple clicks. The potential subscribers are lost at every hurdle. The desired form is easy to find and quick to fill out.
Make sure the newsletter subscription option is visible on every page with a simple glance. Try placing it in a top “hello” field in the browser for quick access.
Explore on-page pop-ups: These have received approval from both marketers and users and have proven to be highly effective. Take it a step further by automatically displaying the popup after a specific action, such as after a user has read a blog post, or after a certain period of time on the page. Use exit-intent technology to identify when visitors are about to leave the page.
Avoid losing the form in the crowd: Make sure it doesn’t end up at the top or bottom of the page. A “floating” form that follows as the user scrolls can be a way to keep it visible and accessible.
Perform A/B testing if your newsletter subscribers are important: Consider testing different placements, texts, and even color choices. It’s surprising how much these factors can affect the number of subscribers you attract.
Not just quantity, but also quality – maximizing the benefits of existing newsletter subscribers. Do you only use your email lists to distribute monthly newsletters? Then it’s high time to broaden your horizons.
Encourage Engagement and Conversion
- Communicate to the right people at the right time with the right content. To be successful with this, you need to know the recipients.
- Offer versatile ways to sign up as a subscriber, or create custom UTM tags to track the source of subscribers and deliver relevant content.
- Take advantage of analytics tools to track visitor behavior through “newsletter” and “email marketing” UTM tags on your website.
- Integrate the email marketing tool with your website, CRM, loyalty program or event management system to optimize customer interactions.
- Continuously discover opinions, ideas and suggestions for improvement by actively soliciting feedback. Use the insights to build networks and increased visibility on social media.
Gain insights All audiences are unique: Understand what resonates with your recipients and in your industry. Use personalization to delight your customers with customized offers on their birthday or membership anniversary.
Customize individual newsletters based on customer data: Build segments and send different types of newsletters to different segments. Sign the newsletter with a person’s name, with face and personal details, instead of the company name
Automate your most basic messages: This way you will save time and at the same time serve your customers better.
Inform your readers about different ways of contacting your company: Include links to social media.
Emphasize – ensure each letter contains a smooth transition from subscriber to prospect:
- Include contact details for the sales team, current offers, etc.
- Use marketing automation to convert a subscriber into a potential customer.
- Develop subscriptions to recommendations through social media.
- Invite subscribers to upcoming events.
Large subscriber lists can be impressive, but it’s far more important that your subscribers are actually engaged with the content you offer. Ensure that invalid email addresses are automatically removed from lists.
Conduct regular purges of your lists: if you can’t engage passive readers, say goodbye to them. Ask for reasons for dropouts and learn from them.
Your Next Step…
Thinking of using a platform for your email marketing?
Hopefully, you have gained valuable tips from this article for building and optimizing your lists. Feel free to explore Ungapped’s newsletter service and don’t hesitate to contact our experts at sales@ungapped.com for a deeper discussion on how to improve your email marketing.
Try our Email Marketing tool for 30 days. Click here.