7 Steps for Email Marketing Success

Email marketing has huge ROI potential – $42 for every $1 spent.^[1] We’ve developed an email marketing philosophy and best practices over the years and have seen significant results for our clients. We interviewed Georgie Wynn and Zoe Menendez from our digital marketing team to learn about the 7 necessary steps for email marketing success.

1. Have a Clean Database. Databases decay on their own accord over time and purchased databases can start off being of a lower quality than an organically built database. A purchased database could include many spam email accounts or accounts no longer in use. It’s important to know where your data comes from and to use 1^st party data when possible.

2. Segment Your Database into Lists. These segmentations could be clients and prospects, or hot leads and cold leads, just to name two. It’s best to set up these lists as soon as possible to stay organized and avoid over sending. It also allows you to send the right emails to the right people. For example, if you have a client-only event coming up, you want to be sure that none of your prospects receive that email, and vice versa.

3. Promote Content. Once you have your database set up and segmented, the next thing is to decide on the content you’d like to promote in your emails. Promoting engaging and relevant content to your lists will keep the audience interested and opening the next email. We send out an eBlast every week with elements like a new blog, a downloadable guide offer, new events and promotions, important law changes, and office updates.

4. Don’t Underestimate the Value of a Good Subject Line and Pre-Text. These are the only words someone sees before they open an email, and therefore are a critical component of whether or not someone decides to open the email. You want to avoid words that may place your email in someone’s spam folder, such as “FREE,” because it’s a red flag for email servers. Words that are trending at the moment are always great to incorporate in a subject line since they will likely capture the attention of the reader right away.

5. Optimize for Mobile. 75% of all emails are opened on smartphones in the U.S..^[2] Some email platforms reformat for mobile, others stack the desktop version from left to right. Know what kind of platforms your database utilizes and see how emails look on a mobile device. It’s also important to make all content in the email as concise as possible, especially for mobile. The fewer words, the better. Last, don’t forget buttons: They should be easy to see, clickable, and accessible when designing for mobile. This means they should be easy for the right thumb to reach, as that’s how most people use their mobile devices. Rather than hiding buttons in the text, they should be in a clearly defined area when in an email.

6. Keep an Eye on Your Deliverability Rate. Once you start emailing your database, note the deliverability rate of every email deployment. This metric tells you how many of your emails are actually getting delivered and can provide insights about the quality of your database. If you’re getting a lot of bounces or suppressions, there could be a number of reasons why. We’ve helped countless advisors diagnose and help repair email deliverability rates.

7. Don’t Over-Send. The average office worker gets about 121 emails a day^[3]. Not all of them are opened, and if someone perceives that they’re getting bombarded by emails from one place, they may unsubscribe. We send a maximum of 2 or 3 emails a week to the same database. This means we may send more emails in total, but not everyone will get every email due to segmentation. For example, you can avoid sending out an email promoting a dinner seminar to clients. Or, you can get more specific and send an email promoting a tax-focused seminar to an audience that has shown prior interest in that subject by downloading a tax tips guide or clicking on a blog about tax minimization strategies.

There’s so much that goes on behind the scenes when it comes to email marketing, from database maintenance to content creation to mobile optimization. When done correctly, email marketing can be highly effective for nurturing prospects and driving engagement. Get in touch to find out how Simplicity Lone Beacon could transform your email marketing!