While social media marketing has become rampant and commonplace among businesses of all sizes, email marketing is still one of the most effective methods to generate leads and sales. Knowing how to properly craft an email campaign while reaching your intended audience can drastically increase your company's conversion rates while providing you with more opportunities to generate revenue in less time.

Why You're Doing Email Marketing Wrong

Implementing a few email best practices while understanding what you're currently doing wrong with your email marketing is essential to make the most out of your future campaigns.

You're Not Targeting a Specific Audience

Effective email marketing requires more than the ability to compile a generic list of email addresses and sending a message. Targeting a specific audience is essential when you want to boost your email conversion rates, click-throughs, and ultimately, sales.

Consider the audience you want to reach including the age range, gender, and even the location and specific interests of individuals who are likely to have the most genuine interest in your business and brand. Create segmented lists of your newsletter subscribers based on demographics and the type of messaging you intend to share with each segmented group individually.

You Don't Understand the Needs of Your Prospective Customers

What do your prospective customers need from you and the products or services you offer?

What type of lifestyles do they lead? How affordable are your products and services to your intended consumers?

Is there a current demand for the type of product you provide?

How does your preferred audience typically obtain the products and services you have available?

Knowing what your prospective customers need and how they live is essential when developing highly effective and engaging digital marketing campaigns that drive traffic and leads.

You're Not Researching Keywords and Popular Trends Consistently

How often do you research trending keywords and phrases that are most relevant to your business and the industry you represent?

Use third-party services such as Google Trends to keep track of keywords and phrases that are most useful for your business and brand. Learn which words are being searched by your intended audience to seek the products and services you currently sell. Implement well-known and trendy keywords and phrases within headers and subject lines of each email you create to motivate subscribers to open your emails and to read their content.

You're Not Testing Enough

Testing is one of the biggest elements of successful email marketing campaigns. Without testing, there is simply no way to know which method of communication is most effective for your audience and the prospective customers you are trying to reach.

Use email testing services and platforms to ensure your emails are delivered properly with your intended format. Use A/B testing with each email campaign to tweak your CTA (call-to-action) along with your headers and email subject line. Gain valuable insight into the type of language and promotions that work best to appeal to your audience before launching a massive and more wide-scale campaign.

You're Not Taking Advantage of Collected Data and Analytics

Always review data and analytics collected from each email you send. Collected data and analytics provide valuable insight into the effectiveness and success rate of each individual email you have sent to your current subscribers.
Use collected analytics to gauge which type of wording, promotions, and branding work best for your business and the audience you want to reach.

You Haven't Implemented a Remarketing/Retargeting Strategy Yet

Remarketing and retargeting strategies are essential for anyone involved in email marketing. After sending one email and reviewing your collected data and analytics, craft separate emails to send to segmented lists of your current subscribers.

Segment your subscribers into groups based on their activity or inactivity each time you launch a new campaign. Send different emails to users who have taken action and clicked your CTA in the past along with those who have yet to open an email from you altogether.

The more segmented groups you create, the easier it becomes to craft email campaigns that resonate with the wants and needs of your subscribers.

Retargeting and remarketing also go further once you begin generating sales and a virtual checkout process on your website.

Our guest author Ryan Butters is a Salt Lake native and has been advocate and practitioner of email marketing for over 10 years. At Red Olive he has had the chance to work with brands both large and small in extremely diverse industries from land lines (yes they still exist) to women’s health products. In his spare time he dabbles in Conversion Rate Optimization, loving to test everything on websites. His hobbies include diabetes, photography, and F1 motorsports.