Despite the emergence of new and improved online and digital marketing strategies, email is still considered to be one of the most efficient out there. Some even argue that it’s the best due to its affordability, ease of use, relevance, and wide audience reach.
The thing is, email marketing isn’t a walk in the park, especially if you’re a solopreneur. You’re likely to have other tasks on your to-do list aside from running email campaigns. In this article, we’ll discuss the strategies you can employ to grow your mailing list, promote products, and track customer interaction without overwhelming your schedule.
1. Use Gmail as your email marketing platform
Veteran email marketers have their choice of platforms running campaigns depending on the features that a service provider offers. While having preferences is great for marketers as it gives them the exact tools they need, it also complicates the whole job.
Not to mention, using a specialized email marketing system can cost a lot. If you’re still new to email marketing, consider starting with the simplest platform — Gmail for business.
2. Ask your Apple-using customers to whitelist their email service app for tracking
Apple products, especially the iPhone, received a major feature in April 2021 that changed the digital marketing world. The iOS14.5 update enhanced device privacy, giving users the option to prevent apps from tracking their personal data for advertising purposes.
This feature was intended to limit the greedy practices of Facebook and Snapchat. But it has also affected email marketing. Send a campaign to your customers and suggest they turn off the “Do Not Track” setting on Gmail, Outlook, and Mail by Apple. Provide a clear and honest explanation as well.
3. A/B test to improve your production time
Once your customers have allowed their phones to let email service providers track their inbox interaction, do an A/B test. Experiment with different email body designs, templates, subject lines, and other campaign approaches.
4. Track metrics
After two or three days, retrieve the results from your A/B testing. Identify which subject line styles, body design, mail templates, and call-to-action types had the highest positive response rates. Next, use those successful versions to inspire your future campaigns.
5. Scrub the contact list
When you’re done identifying the best email campaign elements to boost your results, pick out the contacts on your mailing list that haven’t interacted with your messages in a long time. Pay special attention to users with “unsuccessful delivery” tags. They can cause your sender score to drop. Play it safe by removing them from your mailing list.
6. Segment recipients
If your email sender’s score is below 80, you need to work on getting it back to 90. One effective strategy would be knowing the exact interests and preferences of your customers. Review the metrics again and analyze their open, click, and purchase behaviors. Send campaigns based on your findings. They’re more likely to open your emails which improves your sending reputation.
7. Automate
Now that you’ve allowed email service apps to track your customers’ data, identified good campaign elements, removed risky contacts, and segmented your customers for personalization, it’s time to automate your email marketing platform.
You can set the system to automatically segment users based on their changing interests, stop sending to specific addresses if they didn’t respond to your message for (n) times, and send categorized campaigns to the customer segments you’re targeting.
At this point, all you have to do is create campaigns whenever needed, upload the file to your email marketing platform, and let the system do the rest. However, check your mailing list regularly to make sure no bots, spam traps, or bad addresses have joined.
8. Hire an email marketer
Honestly, there are plenty of things to do before your email marketing journey becomes easy. And even when you’ve reached the automation stage, you may still have to check in regularly to filter out addresses that would ruin your sending reputation.
The easiest advice we can give to simplify your email marketing efforts? Just pay someone else to do it for you, especially if you have the budget for it.
Email marketing is fun and challenging. In fact, it’s one of the most rewarding to-do’s for startups, seasoned solopreneurs, and people who love to do analytics. You too can learn to love email marketing. Just don’t pressure yourself by rushing to meet self-imposed quotas.
