By John Turner, founder of SeedProd, a popular coming-soon page solution for WordPress used by over 800,000 websites.
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Do you want to learn how to improve your email marketing return on investment and connect with your target audience?
Did you say yes? If so, you’re in the right place!
Email marketing is an extremely powerful tool that can help business leaders grow their brands. Once a visitor joins your email list, you have an opportunity to build rapport and highlight your value proposition. If done correctly, the results speak for themselves. Across all industries, the average ROI is $45 for every $1 spent. If you’re not quite up to this point yet, don’t worry!
Today, I’m going to show you several sustainable and effective ways you can increase your email marketing profits.
Set measurable goals.
The biggest mistake I see new business owners make is not setting measurable goals for their email marketing campaigns. If you have no idea what you hope to achieve with your strategy, you will likely struggle to grow your list and connect with subscribers.
Think of it this way: You can’t improve what you don’t understand.
I suggest coming up with a list of actionable goals and accompanying key performance indicators.
For instance, you may notice that your open rate is below the industry average of 31.50%. In this case, you could develop a list of content ideas that you think will resonate with readers. Since you’re tracking your open rate, you can easily tell if your new content is popular with your subscribers.
Here’s a little bonus tip: Don’t forget to track your progress over time. You don’t want to stop as soon as you create a clickable campaign. You have to continuously track your analytics and fine-tune your campaigns if you hope to boost your ROI.
Don’t forget about smartphone users.
As shocking as this sounds, over 6.2 billion people own smartphones. Many people prefer to check their email with their phone instead of a desktop PC.
If you don’t optimize for mobile devices, you’re not getting your full return on investment. Think about the last email you opened that was clearly designed for a PC instead of a phone. The best-case scenario is everything looked a little off. In the worst scenario, you could not read the message or engage with the brand.
You don’t want to create this same type of negative experience for your loyal subscribers.
Now, let’s look at a few mobile email optimization tips:
• Use a mobile-responsive template.
• Write short, impactful sentences and headlines.
• Choose benefit-driven calls to action.
• Don’t put the purpose of your message on an image (in case subscribers can’t see it on their phone).
• Send email tests to your team so you can test your messages across multiple devices and operating systems.
Personalize your emails.
Personalization is a fantastic way to boost your engagement rate and sales, which is how you improve your ROI.
People love interacting with businesses when they feel like the content, offers and emails are tailor-made to match their needs. Plenty of companies already use this strategy and have seen tremendous success.
The best way to start personalizing your emails is to segment your list into different groups. Each group has unique goals and pain points, which you can use to develop a conversion-worthy personalization strategy.
For example, the marketing team at an online pet store likely has two different campaigns for cat and dog owners. When you think about it, it makes sense. Cat owners have different needs compared to dog owners. Additionally, each group uses a specific type of product. The team likely wouldn’t send a promotion for potty training pads to a cat owner because they don’t need the product.
Experiment with split testing.
Lastly, let’s tie some of the other tips together while we talk about split testing. You’re likely familiar with this term. If not, a split test is an experiment that business owners and marketers run so they can improve conversions and learn about their audience.
A simple example that comes to mind is a call-to-action color change. If you’re currently using a green call-to-action with white text, you may want to consider showing some of your viewers a red or blue CTA so you can figure out which one results in more clicks.
You can run countless split tests, though some options are limited to your industry. I suggest coming up with ideas and running tests one at a time. Otherwise, you won’t know which change produced positive results.
You can experiment with your subject line, offers, images and much more. Feel free to make a few tweaks over time and see if you can turn a good campaign into something extraordinary.
If boosting your email marketing ROI is a top priority, the tips presented today should help you get started. It’s worth remembering that it takes time to grow your list and improve sales. Don’t get discouraged if things don’t go your way right away. Practice patience and persistence; you can do amazing things with your email marketing strategy.