Ever wondered why email marketing is so popular? The simple answer is because it works. Research published in 2019 revealed that, globally, 293 billion emails are sent daily — and that number has almost certainly grown in the last two years. The trend to continue using email as a communication medium isn’t slowing down. So, how do you get involved and ensure that your email marketing campaign is delivering the best results possible? That’s what we’re here to answer.

Before Launching Your Email Marketing Campaign

The first step is to build your email database. There are a few simple ways to do that.

1. Gather emails from customers
2. Install a newsletter sign up on your website
3. Encourage members to request permission to include people they interact with at networking events, trade shows, etc

After you’ve compiled all these good records into one email database, it’s time for a few considerations. By keeping the following in mind, you can save yourself a lot of time — and even more headaches.

1. Do not rent or buy lists. These practices tend to generate very few responses, and it can damage your sender reputation with internet service providers (ISP).
2. Use a reputable email service provider (ESP) to deploy your emails. Trying to send an email to many recipients from your company’s email server can cause an unnecessary load on the server, potentially resulting in costly downtime. Additionally, ESPs provide access to all the data needed to measure the success of your campaigns.
3. Make sure all your email campaigns follow the latest CAN-SPAMregulations and personal data protections laws. The GDPRcame into effect in 2018, and it established stricter rules for businesses handling customers’ data.
4. Embrace the philosophy of testing. Email life span is short, and to get the best of your campaigns, you are going to have to learn what your audience responds to best. Create a hypothesis to test, analyze the results, make optimizations based on the analysis, and then test again.

Refine Your Email Marketing Process

Email marketing provides a significant amount of data after a campaign deploys. The data received contains great information to establish testing opportunities. As part of your plan, consider testing many elements of your email marketing strategy.

• Subject line
• Preheader text
• Calls to action as text
• Calls to action as buttons
• Tone of the email
• Length of the email
• Colors
• Imagery
• Message hierarchy
• Time of deployment
• Day of deployment

After a few deployments, you’ll have enough data to measure engagement and prove if your hypotheses are correct, or if more testing is still needed.

Email marketing offers many possibilities, and its success can be measured on how users interact with the communication. Always look for ways to optimize your next campaign. The items listed here can be applied to any type of business, so keep your audience in mind and make email marketing work for you.