Most online marketers use email. It can be very effective. Email Marketing: Beyond the Basics shows how to do it right.

Email marketing has staying power. Even with the rise of social media and other digital marketing channels, email marketing is still the most effective marketing tool when used well.

But you can’t just stick with the basics. You need to stay on the cutting edge to keep growing your list and offering relevant content.

Here are 3 ways to take your email marketing ‘beyond the basics’.

They are a small sample of what you will find in the new course from ContentSparks.

Keep your email list clean

Your list needs to consist primarily of active, engaged subscribers who find your content and offers relevant.

Over time, your audience will shift and evolve. You need to keep up with the changes. If not, you’ll experience a high bounce rate and low conversions, which will hinder your email marketing efforts.

What you should look for when cleaning your list:
• duplicate emails,
• unsubscribed addresses,
• emails with typos, and
• ones that look spammy.

Spammy emails are those that consist of random letters or numbers, or names that are too common.

Use your list to get feedback

Most marketers use their list to broadcast useful content and send out offers. But you’re missing out if you don’t also use it to gather feedback.

Feedback is important because it tells you what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. Your active subscribers will be more than happy to tell you.

An easy way to get feedback is to send surveys or polls through your autoresponder. For example, ask what content people found most helpful.

You can also reach out personally to your most vocal subscribers.

Make it minimal

The trend in email marketing is to make messages increasingly simple, clean, and minimal.

Don’t clutter emails with images and features that aren’t necessary. Stay focused on the message you want subscribers to receive.

Give your email marketing the attention it deserves – go beyond the basics.

You will have better email success if you do more than the bare minimum. Get this new training: Email Marketing: Beyond the Basics.

Are you ready to start your first ‘beyond the basics’ email marketing campaign?
Email marketing is a highly personal outreach method because you send targeted content and offers directly to the email inboxes of your list.

But remember that if you launch a campaign without the proper planning and strategy in place, it could backfire and deliver zero results.

Here are 3 questions to ask yourself before initiating your email campaign.

Am I using the right metrics to measure success?

Tracking is essential to determine whether or not you’re making progress so you should choose a few key metrics that will measure the performance of your email campaigns.

Three important metrics to monitor are:
■ Open rate,
■ Click-through rate, and
■ Conversion rate.

You should also track negative indicators like bounce rate and unsubscribe rate. These can show you where you’re not connecting with people so you can make improvements.

Where is my customer in their journey?

For email marketing to work, you need to understand your customer. Particularly important is knowing where they are in the customer journey.

This is the customer’s journey from first being aware of your product or service until they have bought and then you have delivered on the promise made about what the product can do for them.

You need to know where each email you send fits in this journey.

Identify what stage of the customer lifecycle your subscriber is in when they join your list. You can then decide on the best content and offers to send them.

Will your emails provide value?

Each email you send should provide value to your subscribers. If you don’t consistently provide value, people will unsubscribe.

Value means giving the subscriber something they can use. Get to know their problems and concerns, and offer help for them.

If you do this consistently, you’ll have an actively engaged list that will listen to you and buy from you.

Harness the power of email marketing with your first Email Marketing: Beyond the Basics campaign

Don’t Make These Email Marketing Mistakes

The key to email marketing success is to get the subscriber’s attention. A powerful way to do this is by adding images to your messages.

Images help, but you need to use them the right way. Here is what you don’t do with images…

DON’T forget to design for mobile devices.

People increasingly read emails on mobile devices. If your images aren’t mobile optimized, they’ll look strange and will destroy the user experience.

DON’T use huge images.

Loading time is a major factor in email response rate. If it takes forever for an image to load, people won’t wait.

Always reduce your image sizes and test to make sure they load quickly. This will also help with making your emails mobile-friendly.

DON’T attach images. Embed them

When you attach images to an email, this can make them look spammy. It could also get your emails thrown into users’ spam folders.

Instead, embed them into your email body. Also be careful about images in your email signature, as they could also be marked as spam.

DON’T use the same image for every subscriber.

Your subscribers aren’t all the same. For email marketing to succeed, it needs to be personalized. A great first step is segmenting your list.

Choose a variety of images depending on the subscribers’ gender, location, age group, preferences, and other relevant factors.

Finally, make sure your images are consistent with your brand.

This means that the images should look and feel like they belong to your brand. There shouldn’t be anything jarring that could create a disconnect.

Spend time choosing images that are relevant to your brand so you don’t confuse your subscribers.

Then, put your images to the test. Split test your emails and let your subscribers tell you what they prefer.

Add the right images and watch your conversion rate soar.

All the tips provide a taste of what you will discover in Email Marketing: Beyond the Basics.

As with most ContentSparks resources, this new course is designed for you to not only learn from it, but also for you to teach it to others if you wish. You get presentation slides, handouts, and lead generation materials that will guide you through the teaching process if you want to go that route. One online class could more than cover all the costs involved in this course.

You can get the course tomorrow, but at the regular price ($297). Today only, it’s $97, here: Email Marketing: Beyond the Basics.

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