2022 Email Marketing Strategies For Small Businesses
Read on to learn the latest 2022 email marketing strategies that will help scale your business.
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Guest post by Téa Liarokapi
At this stage, I’m pretty sure you’ve already decided on the course of action you’re going to follow as a marketer when it comes to your marketing plan. And for sure, that includes current email marketing strategies to boost your efforts.
Of course, when we’re talking about a marketing strategies, we’re talking about everything it could entail. From PPCs to paid ads on social media and from a successful competitor analysis to SEO, you cannot omit the power that an email marketing strategy holds. And here’s why:
Email marketing is the most cost-effective and fruitful channel. But in an era when consumers are a little too suspicious of marketing messages, how can you make your email marketing strategies work?
Set Your Goals First
Assuming that you know your audience and how to reach out to them, the first thing you need to do would be to set your goals.
Your email marketing goals should be SMART, as in
So, how are you going to create goals that will help you grow your business through 2022 email marketing strategies?
First of all, have a specific and attainable target in mind, and always go for something you can measure. After all, marketers can’t know exactly what they need to do to succeed without a specific target in mind.
So, set up specific targets for your email marketing strategy and start creating marketing actions around that. Target specific leads for your email list, use email marketing templates that will do your goals justice, and measure after each marketing action.
If, for example, you want to increase your eCommerce store’s sales, you would need to break this goal down into more specific actions that can benefit your business. Aiming for a better CLTV is as much of an increase in sales as a higher percentage in one-time sales.
So, it would help if you were very clear and concise in terms of goals and what growth means to your business and your product specifically.
Generally speaking, your goals are not supposed to have a financial impact – not a direct one, at least. Email open rates, for example, are essential. However, they are not a direct indicator of financial growth.
The main point when setting your goals is for you to understand what makes sense for your brand and your customers and how to create email content that will make sense to you and your customers.
So, what led you to use email marketing in the first place? And how do your recipients interact with marketing messages delivered straight in their inbox? Are your leads enough to help you grow your business, or do you need to invest in tactics that can help you increase your leads first?
Answering these questions will help you pinpoint your goals and make great use of your email design. Not to mention how easy it will be to customize your email marketing messages down the line after that.
Personalize and Segment
To ensure you know who you’re emailing, you should invest in tools that can help you group your audience into segments and then personalize your marketing message.
It would be great if your first step were to study your audience and your competitors’ audience and understand its buying behavior. What makes them purchase a product that is similar or identical to yours? What are their goals? In the end, how can you be of more use than a competitor?
See how your audience interacts with your brand and your competitors, and take a good look at your data to make educated guesses. After that, segment your audience into smaller groups. Utilize a tool that uses AI and machine learning and could distinguish patterns that a human couldn’t.
That way, you can take even the smaller patterns into advantage and craft a message that will boost your 2022 email marketing strategies and will minimize the possibility of human error.
After that, start personalizing. Here’s why:
Since customers are more likely to invest in a brand that not only knows them by name but recognizes their buying habits and can offer them just the experience they were going for, personalization seems like the way to go. In this case, you can use data and dynamic content to make spot-on suggestions. But more on that in a tick.
Establish Your Content
Email marketing is nothing without a solid content strategy. And while it’s too tempting for brands to go with a very simplistic or an overly artistic design, you need to find out what works for you before deciding on the template that serves your 2022 email marketing strategies.
Your content should be unanimous and reflect your brand’s values. Your tone of voice should be unique and memorable, and it should be evident across all of your email marketing messages.
However, remember that not all mediums serve the same purpose. A unanimous brand tone doesn’t mean unchanging. Adapt your message to the platform you’re using, and create content accordingly.
If you find yourself in a creative rut, don’t hesitate to repurpose some content. You can create newsletters based on long-form blog posts or create sequences that will be promoting what’s new and what’s up and coming on your website.
If you’re unsure of what your content should entail, don’t hesitate to create surveys that will help you understand your audience’s preferences better.
At this stage, let me tell you a thing or two about dynamic content. You can use dynamic content to create a marketing message that will be spot on and unique to each opener. By default, dynamic content can change according to the recipient, offering specific experiences and suggestions to each individual.
Use custom fields and change one key component for each recipient. It could be anything from their location to their age. Then, make targeted suggestions with just one email.
And something else to consider: Don’t skip the power of mobile optimization:
This should be a given by now, and you need to make great use of the impulsive nature of a sale. This means that your audience won’t feel too good with broken elements in your emails. And they’ll probably forget to open it from a desktop device down the line.
Also, never forget the power of video in your email marketing content. This may be a little trickier since not all email clients support video, but it’s worth it down the line. Explainer videos, “How-To” s, and video testimonials could add a more personal and engaging tone to your email marketing strategies.
The Essential Metrics
Once you’ve established the type of content you’d like to produce and the segments that will receive each type of email, it’s time to ensure you’ve got the metrics you want to track sorted out.
Let’s see what those are.
Email Opens
Your open rate could be considered a vanity metric. However, this is not the case. Your email opens show how many subscribers opened your email campaign.
While this metric is not directly tied to your sales conversion rate, as it’s a top-of-funnel performance metric, it can show you how strong your brand is, how you perform in terms of brand loyalty, and the elements you could improve.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
This is the number of subscribers who clicked on a link in your email, which means that they spent time scanning through your content and were convinced by your CTAs.
Improving your email body copy and your visuals can improve your CTR as well. Make sure to use actionable verbs and A/B test if you’re not certain about the elements that would perform better.
Pro Tip: Don’t A/B test many things all at once. If you want to know how your email gathered a good CTR, make sure to change one key component at a time.
Email Conversion Rate
This is the metric most marketers focus on. It’s indicative of how many subscribers proceeded with a purchase after receiving your email. Of course, this metric isn’t about standalone numbers but about the evolution of your rate.
In this case, asking for feedback from people who purchased through your emails would be pretty important, mainly to help you understand why the numbers change.
You can send out a questionnaire to your previous customers and gather data that can be examined in tandem with your analytics. This will help you make informed decisions down the line, especially when it comes to the elements you’d like to change about your email marketing strategies.
Email Unsubscribe Rate
Ideally, you would want this rate to be less than 1%, but that is not entirely possible.
Ensure that the rate with which users opt out of your list is lower than that of your subscribers, as you need to make up for the loss of leads. Of course, this doesn’t mean that people who hit the unsubscribe button can stay on your email list. It also doesn’t mean that it’s their fault. There are plenty of reasons a user will unsubscribe from an email list, and one of them is the rate at which a brand’s emails end up in the spam folder.
Again, analyze your data and take a good look at your content. Maybe you use spam trigger words, or maybe there are just too many broken elements in your design.
The Takeaway
A good email marketing strategy is not easy to achieve, but it’s not impossible either.
Just make sure to create content that is targeted and can elicit an emotional response, and invest in tools that will boost your segmentation and personalization efforts.
Author Bio:
Téa Liarokapi is a Senior Content Writer for Moosend, an email marketing and marketing automation platform, and an obsessive writer in general. In her free time, she tries to find new ways to stuff more books in her bookcase and content ideas – and cats – to play with.
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