Over the past few years, there has been a huge shift towards focusing marketing efforts on social media. Traditional strategies – like email marketing – have seemingly become old-fashioned. However, although email marketing seems less exciting than social media, it is still very much alive and at times can even be more effective than its social media counterparts.
New technologies and social media channels appear every day, but email marketing is still one the best ways to increase sales, generate leads, and build brand awareness. While you may be venturing into new marketing strategies, it is important to keep your email skills sharp. This includes knowing how to leverage drip campaigns and bolstering your email reputation.
Building a Reputation
Your email sender reputation, which is a score that an internet service provider assigns to an organization that sends emails, can make or break your email campaign. Having a history of sending engaging and informative emails will boost your reputation while sending spam-like emails will likely irritate your audience and have a negative impact. Email sender reputation is not only important for audience engagement but also factors into who email service
providers will let you reach. Email service providers can evaluate your domain and email history before allowing you to send an email to a new set of people, so it is important to keep your reputation in good standing if you want to grow your reach!
There are plenty of factors that can affect your reputation, including:
- Email list quality and quantity: You want to send emails to people who WANT to read them, or else your emails may get flagged as spam and hurt your reputation. Sending emails to nonexistent users will also increase your bounce rate. Make sure to email relevant content to users and update your email list regularly!
- Email frequency and volume: If you send multiple emails daily, it could be flagged as spam by email service providers. Develop a set schedule and volume for sending emails and stick to it!
- Open rates: If your customers are constantly deleting your emails before opening and reading them, this will negatively impact your email sender reputation. Improving your subject lines and mastering your timing can help improve your open rates.
- Buyers expect more than an email blast: Monthly newsletters and large email blasts are outdated email marketing tactics. Buyers expect more sophisticated campaigns that target the challenges they face and how your brand can solve them.
Leveraging Drip Emails
When done correctly, drip email campaigns are hugely successful at increasing conversion rates. These campaigns use automated, personalized, and targeted emails to build relationships with audiences. As an email sender, you want to know as much information about your audience members as possible so you can better personalize emails to their needs. For example, if an audience member is a student, they will have vastly different interests and needs than an older audience member. The more you know about your audience, the better. If you can successfully target specific demographics with
relevant and personalized content, you will surely increase your brand engagement.
Drip marketing is a crucial strategy for targeting different points on the sales funnel. These points could include someone who has signed up for an email list but hasn’t yet made a purchase, a person who has added something to their shopping cart but hasn’t yet finished the checkout process, or a customer who purchased in the past but hasn’t made a new one for a while. Depending on where the customer is at in the sales process, companies will send personalized, targeted emails in an attempt to produce a specific action from the audience. Since more than 90% of consumers say they’re more likely to buy from companies who remember them, it is time to think about incorporating drip campaigns into your marketing strategy if you haven’t already!
Since drip emails are automated, they’re inexpensive and relatively easy to execute; however, there is still a learning curve to executing them effectively. If done correctly, drip emails have a huge ROI, so here are some things to consider when crafting your first campaign:
- Target the right audience: Oftentimes marketers create generic content hoping to appeal to a wide demographic of people, but this rarely works out. It is better to alienate a certain group and send them relevant, personalized content.
- Don’t get caught in spam filters: Since drip emails are automated, it can be hard to gauge how many emails your audience is receiving a day. Sending emails too frequently, using specific trigger words, or poor formatting could get your emails flagged as spam.
- Create compelling subject lines: If you have a boring subject line, nobody will read the rest of the content in your email. Work on writing subject lines that are concise, unique, and inviting.
Email is Still King
Emails are here to stay! Although other marketing mediums have increased in popularity over the last decade, email marketing continues to shine. In fact, it was the best-performing channel in 2021. Learning how to develop sophisticated email marketing campaigns is an inexpensive way to increase brand engagement, so keep it in mind as you plan out your 2022 marketing strategy!
