The term creativity is no longer for designers or agencies. It has extended its reach towards marketing success even before internet came about. Today, Email Marketing is about adopting the creative aspect of marketing and a smart marketer is one who is able to quickly implement them in the latest technologies available in the market. There is plenty of data to back up the benefits of email marketing. When done right, email marketing is one of the best ways to reconnect with prospects and clients.
The journey of becoming a successful email marketer is not a simple one. You need to develop the right strategies at the right time, plus learn to use the ever-evolving technologies available in the market.
Email marketing has an average conversion rate of 65%; it is vital for an email marketing manager to have his or her eye on emerging marketing trends and decide how to make the most that can convert.
Here we have 8 necessary skills that every email marketing manager needs to succeed:
1. Deliverability:
It is one of the main aspects to measure the success of your email marketing campaign. When you spend hours planning over every detail of an email, from crafting a perfect copy, agonizing over fonts, spacing & colors, modifying templates, implementing the best design and development, all you want is to make it into the inbox of the right audience.
So, how do you ensure that your email gets delivered? Here are 3 primary factors that you should be aware of, by which email deliverability is affected.
Identification: This protocol is a must to reveal your identity to your target audience when you send an email. It is essential that your audience know who you are so they don’t disregard you as spam. Know what Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) mean in email marketing.
Reputation: In email marketing, every organization who sends an email is assigned with a score by Internet Service Provider (ISP), higher the score, higher will be the deliverability rate. This score is often determined based on how many emails you send, your subscriber’s behavior, soft and hard bounces, open, click and reply rates, how many subscribers mark your mail as SPAM and many other aspects.
Content: When you have worked on your protocols in the identification and are fundamentally aware of your reputation, content becomes the whole. It is something preeminent in class. It’s predominantly everything, so implementing the right culture of content will undoubtedly voice your brand better and betters the deliverability.
2. Keep Up Your Integrity:
It is crucial for you want to remain trustworthy and ethical under the eyes of your email subscribers. It’s not just an impression that influences your campaign but also influences your customer’s behaviour on your brand. As a marketer, it necessary for you to follow what you promised when they subscribed. If you said, you would engage with them once a week follow your words. Sending emails more frequently than you initially promised will be number one reason why people decide to unsubscribe from a newsletter.
While you wish to retain your customer from unsubscribing, it is also essential for your brand to respect your customer’s wishes. This way you will not stand a chance to end up in their spam boxes at the same time adhere to the rules of email marketing.
3. Build Your Email List:
Email marketing is known to have high impact and low-cost way of delivering your marketing message to your audience. And this is true for you if you have a great email list that can help you connect with your prospects at the right time. Building an email list is of course, a time-consuming job, but it is critical for your marketing success in the digital age. It provides a direct line of converting your leads into sales.
So as a marketer it is your responsibility to add fresh contacts to your marketing campaign to keep your numbers up.
There are lot many ways to build your email list, you could put up signup sheet on your website, leverage your business cards, try telemarketing, host an event, organise your website opt-ins, create online community, engage through social media, build a blog or even buy an email list from trustworthy vendor.
4. Integrate Social Media:
Though social media is different from email marketing, integrating social media with email marketing has its benefits. There is more power when these tactics are merged and used together. In fact, many successful brands have a holistic approach as social media is helping marketers achieve their goals.
5. Implement Search Engine Marketing:
Though this is not directly related to email marketing. This strategy can be a severe booster for the success of your brand and in turn your marketing campaign. While search engine rankings can’t directly impact emails and vice versa, they surely can enhance your email marketing initiatives.
6. Designing The Right Email Marketing Strategies:
This includes everything to start from analyzing data, developing technological tools and integrating them in your campaign, content creation, marketing distribution, promotions in the form of newsletters, white papers, PR and many others.
7.Knowledge Of Segmentation And Targeting:
These are some of the essential and fundamental tools a marketer must be aware of. Not all customers are the same, and hence one size may not fit all. As a B2B business, you know that you don’t cater to just one type of customer.
If you have an extensive list of email, it is ideal that you segment them based on several parameters like geographic segmentation, demographic segmentation, psychographic segmentation, behavioral segmentation based on your business type. Once you work out on integrating the parameters as mentioned earlier that next step is to target. It is so beneficial that there is indeed no reason not to use this as a strategy. After deploying targeted email campaigns, make sure to use various real-time campaign engagement tools like HubSpot, Constant contacts, MailChimp, that analyze things like delivery rate, click rate, open rate, and conversion rate.
8.Attribution:
Many companies today are struggling to know the impact that an email campaign has made. As a result, email’s consistency is often failed to measure. One of the ideal ways to showcase and understand the benefits that a campaign has made is by measuring the effects of an email regarding open, click or as a halo effect which is termed to be neither clicked nor opened.
Email attribution has been the hardest part and is never a straight line. It is rare for any companies to have seen the interactions happening from A-to-B-to-C. We are living in a digital age and consumers are smarter than ever, and they will remain so. Today a consumer behaviour is based on the number of times they get to see and hear about and their belief system. More often, when they first receive an email, they google it research about the product or service, watches an ad yet not ready to buy the product. They see an email again, remembers and goes into the shop to purchase or shop online.
You never know how the sales funnel works and it’s hard to track and is going to be messier shortly. However, it is vital to keep attribution in mind and continue making decisions by analysing reports and developing strategies.
Summary:
Email marketing is a big deal when it comes to having a successful marketing campaign. And it’s success is in the hands of the marketing manager. He plays a crucial role in setting up the objectives of email marketing campaign.
On the other hand, It’s not about becoming an expert in all the above-mentioned areas, well some email marketing managers will emerge as experts in some of the areas that they think are vital for the success of their marketing campaign. So identify what could do better for you and work on those skills that can enhance their value in your marketing efforts.
