ENTREPRENEUR STAFF
Former Senior Correspondent, Entrepreneur India
How often do we get emails on our inbox about a company or a product and we are even lured to know more about it? Well, quite often. Welcome to the genre of email marketing.
Your product is ready and is out there in the market. But how do you get your audience to know more about your product? Marketing is an essential element of your business that you can’t ignore. While there are various levels to marketing, one of the important aspects is email marketing campaigns.
Entrepreneur India takes a look at how you can create maximum impact with emails and what are the do’s and don’ts of email campaigns.
What You Should Do
There are a lot of things to keep in mind while designing your email campaign. Remember that you want your user to take some time out to read this email so it has to be drafted carefully. Experts believe that email marketing is one of the essentials of technology that provides a high rate of ROI.
Rohan Ayyar, Regional Marketing Manager India, SEMrush said that the idea is to make your subscribers feel special. So, it is important to offer more content or deals that aren’t available through any of your other marketing channels. “Also, get your timing right. Timing critically affects open rates. No use sending business emails on a Sunday,” he said.
Analysing the success or failure of previous email campaign is necessary step towards a productive one, believes Abhishek Agarwal, co-founder, Globepanda. He said that this can be done using A/B testing process. Also, keep a track on the bounce rate. “Having a segmented list of audience is necessary to let email reach to prospective users,” he added.
Meanwhile, both the experts said that it’s important to have a call-to-action in your email. Agarwal also pointed out that an opt out option should be there in an email marketing campaign.
What You Shouldn’t Do
While an email campaign can do wonders for your sales, a wrong move could also mean a blunder which could cost you customers. Ayyar is direct when he has to talk about wrong email campaigns. He said never send unsolicited emails. “Cold calls are bad. Cold emails are worse. They are called SPAM. Also, don’t send too many emails. Don’t be a bore,” he said.
Meanwhile, content is one thing you should definitely not go wrong with. It’s your product, so it’s important that you send the right message across. Agarwal said that one thing that people often go wrong with is not giving enough concern to the importance of Content. “It is a well-known fact that, ‘Content is King’, that has the capacity to nurture product or a service to an unexpected height,” he added.
Agarwal also said that focusing mainly on desktop or laptop emails except for mobile also should not be done. “Sending e-mails without testing their design, content, overall display, working links or any typo error is something which is not acceptable,” he said.
How to Create Maximum Impact
Build the maximum impact for your brand through emails. Creating a good impact of an email marketing campaign is by way of working out on don’ts and continue with the do’s.
“We should be more focussed towards targeted audience generated content and design first to catch their attention,” said Agarwal. He added that the results should be tracked at regular intervals in order to make certain changes in overall theme of the campaign.
Personalization is the best way forward when you are working on an email campaign. Ayyar points out that one should use the recipient’s name and refer to the last interaction they had with you before you take the conversation further. “There are email automation tools that integrate with your CRM and enable you to pinpoint the stage of the sales funnel at which every subscriber stands. Gather data on their intent and readiness to buy, and craft your copy in a way that expedites conversion,” he said.