EMAIL MARKETING
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| EMAIL MARKETING |
EMAIL MARKETING: 5 STEPS TO CREATE EFFECTIVE EMAILING
Even if some doubt its effectiveness, Emailing remains an essential tool in any good marketing strategy. Emailing allows you to both convert your prospects into customers and retain them. You still need to know how to use it. How to create an effective Emailing? The answer in 5 steps!
Why continue to do Emailing?
Digital marketing is full of tools, each more relevant than the other. Emailing has found itself drowned in the mass and is now far too often neglected.
However, doing Emailing turns out to be the most effective marketing action to win customers.
The figures speak for themselves: according to a report published by Experian Marketing on the challenges of Email Marketing, we see that Emailing remains the communication tool most used by companies (95.3%), ahead of websites (91%) and social networks (73.4%).
The performance of Emailing in France is very interesting: the average opening rate of an Emailing is 41% and the click rate is 5.67%. In other words, if you do an Emailing and send it to 10,000 contacts, on average, 4100 of them will open it and more than 567 will click on one of the links offered.
However, to make an effective Emailing and take advantage of all this potential, it is necessary to respect certain good practices that we will see together.
The performance of your emailings is below these standards? Train yourself!
Why are we talking about Email Marketing?
The answer is simple: to win customers with Emailing, it is essential to build a complete Emailing strategy, just like marketing.
The Definition of Email Marketing
The definition of Email Marketing is simple: Email Marketing is the strategy of creating emailings adapted to the expectations and behaviors of your target.
To do an effective Emailing, it is important to know your target, your personas.
The idea is to send the right message at the right time.
For this, it is essential to fully understand the problems of your target and the questions they are asking. Which naturally brings us to the first step in creating effective emailing.
How to create the perfect Emailing? The 5 keysteps!
The detractors of Email Marketing are usually because of the lack of results.
A few days ago, one of my clients, a B2B company, questioned the strategy that I proposed to him, this one being partly centered around a sustained Emailing campaign over 3 months.
I sought to find out more and my client quickly admitted to me that until last year, he was emailing his prospects every week without ever having obtained the slightest return on investment.
Upon digging in, the reasons for the failure were obvious.
Very often, I meet companies that use Emailing but do not really get any ROI from it. After analyzing their Email Marketing strategy, I often realize that it comes from the fact that they only send mass emailings, without any personalization and contextualization of the message.
VSEs / SMEs do not always have the resources to hire a marketer and apprehend the creation of Emailing in an artisanal way.
To create an effective e-mailing, it is important to respect some good practices here.
1. Determine your objectives and analyze your target
◆ Specific objectives:
The first question to ask yourself is: "Why create an emailing?" ". What do you expect? If your answer boils down to “To sell of course! you are on the wrong track.
Of course, the purpose will often be to develop your turnover. However, it is an end, not an objective. This purpose is made up of multiple objectives, some of which can be achieved via Emailing.
To develop your turnover, you must make yourself more visible, gain new market share, generate more traffic on your website, more quotes, more incoming contacts... Here are examples of specific objectives. It's up to you to define yours.
◆ In-depth knowledge of the target:
Emailing is an opportunity for you to deliver a message. This message must be understood and attractive. To deliver the right message, you must know your target inside out.
What are the needs, expectations and behaviors of your target? What are his concerns, his centers of interest?
You must determine very precisely the typical profile of your target in order to hit the mark. Often, you will determine different profiles. You understand that you will not be able to communicate in the same way with profile A and profile B.
To create an effective e-mailing, it will often be essential to segment your contact database in order to best adapt your message. Only an in-depth study of your target will allow you to segment it optimally.
In addition, it is essential to take into account the maturity of your prospect to send him the perfect Emailing. A buyer who has only just become aware of his need will not have the same communication needs as a buyer who has already compared several solutions.
2. Optimize your opening rate
To create an Emailing that will allow you to achieve your objectives, you must already do everything possible to ensure that it is opened by the recipient!
The opening rate is a key indicator for measuring the performance of Email Marketing.
If no one reads your Emailing, you can be sure that you will not get a quote request or visits to your internal site.
Now that you know your target at your fingertips, you must do everything to make them want to open your Emailing. This involves optimizing various points:
◆ The name of the sender:
Present yourself in your best light. Forget the “Contact” type denominations and prefer a more personal identity such as your first name or “The COMPANY NAME team”;
◆ The subject of your Emailing:
It should be clear and concise. Your title should not be too long to be read in full from a smartphone;
◆ The Preheader:
This is the first line of text in your Emailing. It is this line that appears next to/below your subject in your email box. The Preheader allows you to provide additional information to your object.
Unfortunately, most of the time, we find the famous mention "If you do not view this e-mail correctly...". The Preheader is therefore an opportunity for you to take a small advantage over your competition!
◆ The time of sending:
Another criterion that has a direct influence on the opening rate is the time of sending. There is no typical optimal moment, it varies according to the sectors of activity and the targets. It's up to you to do various tests and analyze the statistics.
3. Provide value in the text
You have convinced the recipient to open your Emailing. It's probably the hardest part, but it's not over. You must now seduce him with your content, interest him to make him want to take action.
◆ Relevant content
Creating effective emailing inevitably involves relevant content. Relevant content is content that meets two imperatives.
The content must above all be clearly related to the subject of your Emailing. The subject of your Emailing is a promise made to the recipient. The content must be up to par.
If you have been too flirtatious with your subject and the content does not follow, your Emailing will immediately end up in the trash and you risk being permanently grilled by your target.
◆ Visual content (but not too much!)
Emails are increasingly viewed on tablets and smartphones. To create the perfect email, you need to think very carefully about its design.
A good emailing contains relevant images that perfectly illustrate the text. Let's face it, the vast majority of Emailings are not read in their entirety. Very often, it is the design that persuades the reader to click.
Be careful, too many images will have a negative impact on your deliverability rate. Concretely, an Emailing with too many images will be considered as SPAM and will not even reach the inbox of your target. You must therefore pay attention to the image/text ratio of your Emailing.
Tip: to add some text to your Emailing, you can add a footer and include your legal notices or a quick description of your product/service!
◆ Content neither too short nor too long!
As we saw in the previous point, the image/text ratio must clearly turn in favor of the text. It must therefore be of a minimum length.
However, the content of your Emailing should not be too long. Above all, you must try not to multiply the messages. Think about the objective of your Emailing and the expectations of your target to stay focused!
By multiplying the messages, you run the risk of dispersing the reader's attention or creating confusion in his mind.
4. Encourage the reader to take action
“On a misunderstanding, it can work! – Famous line of French cinema, this one has no place in Email Marketing.
Let's recap, at this point, your target has received your Emailing, they have opened it and read it. OK, and she closes it and goes on with her life? No, that's not your goal!
You must now "close" by convincing your target to take action. For this, you must work on two key points: the Call-To-Action and the Landing Page.
Because yes, to generate return on investment with Email Marketing, the quality of it is not enough. You must also ensure that the conversion tunnel to which your Emailing refers is optimized.
◆ Call-To-Action:
Call-To-Action are call-to-action buttons. The most traditional are: "buy now", "add to cart" or "register".
◆ The Landing Page:
The objective of your Emailing campaign is probably not just a click. Behind, you must convert this click and this inevitably goes through an optimal Landing Page.
A Landing Page is a landing page. Clearly, it is the page on which lands the person who clicked on the button of your Emailing. For a maximum conversion rate, it must be thought out down to the smallest detail.
Let's continue with our example above. The promise is a price drop on the Pulse OX activity sensor. I am athletic and practice running 3 times a week (it's my life!) and am looking for this type of connected object. I want to know more and I click on “Discover”
5. Analyze and optimize your campaigns
To create the perfect Emailing, it is essential to analyze each of your campaigns. You won't create the perfect email the first time. As you have seen from reading the first 4 steps, an emailing is made up of different ingredients, each as important as the next.
To analyze your Emailing campaign, you must determine the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) allowing you to gauge the level of achievement of your initial objective.
Here are the main indicators to follow in an Emailing campaign:
- The deliverability rate: it allows you to measure the quality of your email address database. It is the number of Emails delivered divided by the number of Emails sent.
- The opening rate: it is the number of Emails opened divided by the number of Emails delivered. Here you measure your reputation as an advertiser. If your open rate is low, it means that your contacts perceive you as an uninteresting advertiser or even worse, a spammer!
- The click-through rate: this is a number of clicks divided by the number of emails delivered.
- The responsiveness rate: for me, this is the most relevant indicator. The responsiveness rate allows you to concretely measure the interest of your campaign and the relevance of your message. The responsiveness rate is the number of clicks divided by the number of emails opened.
- The unsubscribe rate: it speaks for itself. This is the number of unsubscribes divided by the number of Emails sent.
◆ A/B Testing:
As its name may suggest, A/B Testing consists of testing two variations of your Emailing to determine the optimal recipe. Ok, but how is it going?
A/B Testing is simple:
You create a version A and a version B of your Emailing;
You select two samples from your contact database and send version A to one and version B to the other;
You analyze the statistics of these two Emailings;
You send the most efficient Emailing to the rest of your base;
A/B Testing allows you to optimize the results of your Emailing campaign. Carried out over the campaigns, A/B Testing will bring you ever closer to the perfect Emailing.
With A/B Testing, you can test all the elements presented in the previous 4 steps.
Attention, it is recommended to test only one element per Emailing. If you create an Emailing B totally different from Emailing A, you will have trouble determining the most effective elements: is it the time of sending that played? The contents ? The Call-To-Action or the object?
Conclusion: do an Emailing yes, but with a strategy
As you have seen from reading this article, doing Emailing cannot be improvised if you want to generate a return on investment.
Creating an effective Emailing is above all creating an Email Marketing strategy adapted to the expectations and behaviors of your targets.
In order to send the right message at the right time, you must first of all clearly define the questions that your target asks itself throughout its purchase journey and the problems that it encounters to contextualize the message of your Emailing.
The second thing to do to do Emailing effectively is to properly segment your contact base. You will be able to create a personalized Emailing and optimize your conversion rate.
Finally, creating an effective emailing also means creating an optimal conversion tunnel. In other words, you must integrate into your Emailing a visible and incentive call-to-action button that will send the clicker to a landing page optimized for conversion.
After sending your Emailing, do not forget to analyze its performance. It is this analysis that will allow you to refine your emailing campaigns over time and improve your return on investment.